As we all know, Israel is experiencing massive protests over the scheme by its most right-wing government ever to kneecap the independent judiciary. Police had to use water cannons to disperse pro-democracy protesters who flooded a Tel Aviv highway, while the high tech businesses that have helped give Israelis a high standard of living are threatening to leave the country because of Netanyahu’s plans.
American Zionists have thrown themselves into solidarity with the protesters. Endangering Israel’s “shared values” with the United States will “imperil the future of the Jewish homeland,” Mike Bloomberg warns Netanyahu in the New York Times. While centrist and liberal Zionist groups separately urge the Biden administration to keep Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich from visiting the U.S. because he made genocidal statements about a Palestinian village that has resisted occupation.
These American protesters assert their love of Israel. We are “American Jews committed to Israel’s future as a secure, Jewish, and democratic state,” say the centrist Zionists who want Smotrich to go away. “We will not let the hope of a peaceful and democratic homeland for the Jewish people be engulfed in the flames of extremists like Smotrich,” say the liberal American Zionists who want Smotrich to go away.
But that’s the problem. So long as Israel is a “Jewish democratic state,” half the population will be disenfranchised and/or excluded from governing coalitions, and they will inevitably resist. So long as Israel is a “Jewish democracy,” Smotrich and his like will never go away. Because fascistic right-wingers will be needed to enforce systematic racial privilege in this day and age—in fact, over 80 percent of Israeli Jewish parliament members are rightwing occupation supporters, and young privileged Jews turned to Smotrich to crush the Palestinian resistance to their rightslessness.
Apartheid is the fruit of Zionism, and the Israeli “left” will never be able to save their democracy nor the country’s international reputation until they overturn the fundamental inequality of their society and build a coalition with the natural base of the left, Palestinians who are poor and oppressed.
Americans will never be able to save Israel from its crisis until they recognize the problem. “The occupied territories is worse than apartheid. I’ve never called it apartheid because it’s worse than apartheid,” the luminary leader Noam Chomsky said this week.
Zionists still can’t hear that. Tom Friedman couldn’t even mention apartheid in a long discussion of the crisis this week with Americans for Peace Now.
We keep awaiting the American awakening.
Please compare Gideon Levy’s writing to Phil Weiss’s. Phil Weiss: Nothing to see here. These people are not on the right side. Gideon Levy: This awakening is historic. We will see where it might lead. (Yes, where were they until now. But forward march. This is useful.) Phil Weiss’s ignorance of Israeli society blinds him to the potential here. Better to read former Zionists like Gideon Levy to the ignoramuses like Weiss.
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-03-05/ty-article/.premium/threats-to-jewish-democracy-woke-up-israels-center-left-its-better-late-than-never/00000186-aebd-de2a-a1ee-aebfad3b0000
One can’t help but be impressed by the protest movement. It’s powerful, effective, restrained, creative, sweeping. Kudos to the organizers and the protesters. By the way, it exposed an unknown truth, hitherto kept under wraps: It turns out that the center-left can do it. It turns out that the slander directed against it and its lifestyle was unjust. It turns out that it cares about more than the pleasures and trifles of the material world. We made a big mistake about this bloc.
When it wants to, it can lead masses to take to the streets. When it’s furious, it can even take brave and unprecedented protest action, and not content itself with a sing-along in the city square, preferably in nice weather. Suddenly it turns out that this camp can boycott, strike, obstruct, rebel, and head off into exile. It knows how to resist and even how to rage. Who would have believed it? The tenacity of the protests, which show no sign of abating, is encouraging.
At the same time, it raises doleful questions about the priorities of the political camp behind the protests, about what it sees as critical and what it’s willing to fight for. Put simply and sharply: It is willing to fight only for democracy for Jews. Anything else, it views as marginal, or even scary; in any event, not important or relevant enough. The facts speak for themselves.
The fact is that only an attempt to change the regime in a way that would harm Jews shook this camp out of its complacency. No war and no occupation drove it to action the way this has. It didn’t really care about the apartheid. There is no other way to explain the indifference of this powerful political bloc, which for decades didn’t lift a finger, even though now it turns out it can lift a whole hand.
Continuation of Gideon Levy:We thought it couldn’t do it, but we have learned that our society is far more vibrant than we believed, that it has more influence than we thought. The problem is only with what arouses it to action. The true regime of the country is not one of those things. Yes, the apartheid defines the regime in Israel more than anything else. This leads to only one possible conclusion: This bloc wanted the apartheid, whether due to self-interest and convenience, or due to blindness. The protesters on Kaplan Street really think that the makeup of the Judicial Appointments Committee, the majority needed for the override clause, the abolition of the separation of powers and the weakening of the justice system are the most crucial issues of the regime which is called a democracy here.
The fact is that only for these issues are so many good people taking to the streets, only for these issues are citizens willing to take measures thus far considered illegitimate, such as conscientious objection – the gravest sin in militaristic Israel.
Take Lt. Col., Dr. Yuval Horwitz, a reserve medical officer and director of the nephrology department at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. He said that for years he served in the reserves under right-wing governments, committing illegal actions in their names in the West Bank. “We did not object, we did not refuse to obey orders, because we understood that this is a democratic country.” Now he discovers that “something basic has gone completely wrong here… if this no longer my liberal country, then I cannot be part of it.” Therefore, he decided to object.
And what happened here before, Dr. Horwitz? Was it only right-wing governments that sent you to commit crimes? You said that you knew “very well” what you were doing. One or the other must be true: Either you looked the other way, or you thought that war crimes and apartheid are not so terrible after all. Thousands of new objectors have discovered the darkness, or perhaps the light of conscientious objection. They should be saluted, but why only now? Did you really think that when you tyrannize another people and brutally crush it under your boots, democracy isn’t fundamentally compromised?
We can take comfort in “better late than never,” in the opportunity this protest has opened to other struggles, and yet it is difficult, actually impossible, not to ask: Where the hell have you been?
“So long as Israel is a “Jewish democratic state,” half the population will be disenfranchised and/or excluded from governing coalitions, and they will inevitably resist….We keep awaiting the American awakening.”
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Hopefully the political upheaval in Israel will encourage political awakening among Palestinians. Arab citizens campaigning for civil and political equality would be game changing. Certainly, that form of resistance would awaken many Israelis and Americans.
Israel has never been defined as “Jewish democratic” but as “Jewish and democratic”. There’s a difference. Jewish and democratic means that it’s a nation-state, like dozens of nation-states all over the world, while maintaining democratic values. Tricky, but not impossible. Like Sweden is the nation-state of the Swedish people and also a democracy. The obvious response is : “but Sweden doesn’t maintain an occupation over millions of non-Swedes”. So, yes, the ongoing occupation has poisoned Israeli democracy, aside from its impact on the occupied Palestinians.
These days, there’s a huge battle going on over the “democratic ” part of the equation, an historic event which Mondoweiss reporters and editors have pretty much ignored or belittled.
And Happy Purim to all those celebrating!