yesh t'guva

Gilad Is Free

We welcome his return and hope his path to good health and normality is smooth and swift.

‘Any man’s death diminishes me, for I am a part of mankind’ and deaths in terror attacks diminish our soul and the soul of the nation of Israel and the House of Israel. The terrorists being released are a source of deep anguish especially to those who lost loved ones because of their heinous crimes. There is no ‘but’ here. We cannot put ourselves into the shoes of the surviving families to know the depths of their pain and despair. We equally cannot imagine the constant emotional roller coaster that the Shalit family have been and are still on.

We are at the same time very anxious about the way some of those survivors of terror attacks have reacted and behaved with the news of the releases – in the lead up to past exchanges, verbal or physically violent reactions were not common.

We also learn that this deal is one that could have been struck before. In addition since 2009, the Shamgar blueprint is in place for how exchanges could and should be handled, but that was ignored.

Finally if we want to lessen the chances of this terrible story recurring and if we want a different future for the people of Israel and the people of Palestine, we have to recognise that it will necessitate negotiation in which many more prisoners will be released, but that a formal cessation, with the enduring mutually vested interests, will be the pay off. We will remain blighted for generations with terrorists. We are able to neutralise some -not all- of the causes of their terrorism, but only if we want a new future and not the corrosive status quo which is not so gently eating away at the foundations of the state of Israel, its democracy, its laws, its cohesion, bit by bit each day from within.

Once upon a time there was a newspaper called the Jewish Chronicle, known as ‘the organ of Anglo-Jewry’, dismissed by younger generations as too reflective of their parents’ views, but a solid Jewish communal institution that provided sober and often prize-winning journalism, an essential and independent lodestar of communal opinion, as well as a channel for the necessary social data exchanges any community thrives upon.

Whether as a response to the digital age or the perceived need to dumb-down to gain a wider readership and compete with a rival that is often no better than a US supermarket freebee, the JC has become a very red top organ, shrill and sensational in its headlines and conjecture. Here’s a current example: “Government in chaos over Alan Duncan’s ‘land grab’ video”.

Now, just pause, as the government has been doing during the summer recess. David Cameron has been back and forth from his well-earned summer break, for the riots and for Libya. There was no headline about him returning from Cornwall for this ‘chaos’. The Deputy PM and the Foreign Secretary have also had other matters to contend with and what Alan Duncan said on a video wasn’t grave enough for them to comment on. And let’s face it, the JC got it right on one count – what Duncan said reflects government policy. The fact that what he said uses similar language to that employed by the Palestinians doesn’t change that. And saying it, hasn’t caused Her Majesty’s Government anything like chaos.

What this is more about is not so hidden in the JC’s article – the “fury” Duncan’s remarks sparked from community leaders and the Israeli Embassy. Sadly the identity of precisely who amongst our illustrious communal leaders were so exercised about, isn’t revealed and not even the Deputy Israel Ambassador or the Minister Plenipotentiary are quoted, merely an anonymous Embassy spokesman.

Mr Duncan, the JC reveals, is that rare bird, within otherwise closed Israel Right Or Wrong (IROW) Tory ranks, he’s “pro-Palestinian”. Heaven forfend! A Tory minister, no less, espousing pro-Palestinian sentiments? Does that mean there are in fact Palestinians and that they merit support from Tories. Does that make Mr Duncan instantly an anti-Semite, and/or an anti-Zionist? Is it because he spoke against the now notorious land grab that has been an integral and widely acknowledged part of the construction of the West Bank security barrier.

There are some, and the JC is seeking to pander to them, despite the editor’s on-the-record opposition to the occupation, who want their cake and eat it too. The barrier has undoubtedly vastly reduced the levels of cross Green Line terror attacks against Israeli civilians, but it has also gobbled up Palestinian land along the way. Security is no excuse for more thefts of Palestinian owned land, even if the word ‘expropriation’ is preferred. And as to water – it’s another one of those facts the IROW crowd love to ignore, but the evidence is there for anyone to see, if they wanted to. The water table that serves much of the occupied West Bank settlements, Jerusalem and other Israeli towns sits under the Palestinian hills surrounding Ramallah.

What makes this sensationalising nonsense so heinous is that it plays into the hands of all those who believe that by persisting in the occupation, by no longer even talking about it, everyone else will actually forget it. That is arrogance taken to a height of sheer blindness. It is, as one UK lawyer has aptly said, sticking your head in the sand, thus revealing your real thinking parts.

Go on then. Keep up the game played best by Bibi Netanyahu. Lie to your best friends, spin the words ‘Two State Solution’ whilst you build more in the settlements justified by ‘natural increase’, preach to the President of the United States, permit your closest allies to demean that President in ways reminiscent of the way you condoned by your silence the vilification of Yitzhak Rabin Z”L, curry favour with fascists like Glenn Beck and the American evangelical right, do nothing when your Foreign Minister takes the meaning of pariah to unknown depths, lose all your friends one by one in the international community, ignore the prophecy of apartheid from one of Israel’s longest standing British Jewish supporters, pretend that you’ve got the muscle to stop the Palestinians in their quest for UN recognition. Keep going.

But what will you and the JC editorial team make of this Haaretz headline: UN rep. Prosor: Israel has no chance of stopping recognition of Palestinian state ? Or this Ynet one: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4115791,00.html

Who in the Board of Deputies, or amongst the lofty circles of the Anglo-Jewish leadership, or in the London Embassy whence the mighty Ron Prosor came, will you quote as being furious? Which government in chaos will you now describe? It can’t be Her Majesty’s Government. They’re one of those who pursue a Two States Solution policy and who are frankly more fed up with the constant barrage of the IROW crowd whining and moaning about “our pain” because neither Mr Cameron nor Mr Hague are prepared to jump to Israel’s defence when so many of its actions defy defence, than they’ll ever be about Alan Duncan’s video clip.

The government of Israel and its supporters have been in sheer chaos ever since the Palestinians came up with this UN wheeze. And that is really inexplicable. Firstly, the Palestinians are weak and divided, between the West Bank sort of governed by Mahmoud Abbas and the Gaza Strip monopolized by Hamas. Separately and together they are no match for the IDF. Sorry to upset those in Conservative Friends of Israel who tried to ban the use of the word ‘disproportionate’, but if the IDF is the regional military power, then measured against what the Palestinians have as armed forces, this is an asymmetrical, uneven conflict in which, since the first IDF post ‘67 scenarios were drafted, the use of massive and Disproportionate Israeli force was inevitable. That is the history of occupation, and we as Jews and Israelis ought to know about it, as we’ve been on the receiving of it often enough in our time.

And there’s something else we ought to know. The longer and harder you suppress the will for national self-determination, the more you are unable to defeat it militarily, and the worse your failure in the process becomes for you.

Secondly what does UN recognition for the Palestinians actually mean? Does it provide, the day after, for a state with recognized borders and all the accoutrements of a modern state? No. It is a world community’s nod in the direction of that statehood, the fine details for which must still be determined in that one arena Bibi Netanyahu has nightmares about – talks.

What seems to be at the heart of Israeli government anxiety is the loss of the blank cheque of psychological advantage, that in fact there are limits to Israel’s power.

By now it is self-evident that the two pronged Netanyahu policy of arrogant prevarication and obfuscation has collapsed. The smartest and most self-serving path any government of Israel could pursue, after its UN Ambassador tells the truth – and wait, he’ll be denied as a Lefty, just like all those ex-generals, one Chief of Staff amongst them, and heads of military and civilian intelligence who have insisted on a return to talks to reach a Two States Solution, or dared to criticize Bibi’s ‘No’ policies – is to be amongst the first to vote for Palestinian recognition. Let’s face it, Israel could do with some pats on the back, some international approval, a new peace dividend maybe, a chance to find peace with itself. You don’t need housing protests and demands for social reform to know that Israel has slipped into an abyss, mostly but not completely of its own devising.

This is where the real chaos is, and it is one we who love Israel have been furious about for some time. It’s just that our fury isn’t worthy of a sensational headline.

Though this comes from the Israeli national anthem, Ha’Tikvah, The Hope, one of the most graphic uses of the line in a political context was when someone on Ehud Barak’s staff held it up, handwritten, as a TV camera panned across the scene of dissolution at his campaign HQ, the night he lost to Ariel Sharon in 2001.

It is a line that speaks to the heart of yearning for a homeland, for the end of Diaspora, for the fulfilment of the Zionist dream, to put into practise the best that the Jewish people learned in our centuries of exclusion and to learn the lessons from the worst that we suffered. There are those who say that as with every ideology, especially one to be realised in national aspiration, little of the former, the best, lasts, whilst much of the worst survives.

In an astonishingly prescient 1937 commentary on the “You shall not wrong a stranger, nor shall you oppress him…” Exodus 22-19, the Hertz Chumash says: “The reason for this constantly repeated exhortation is that those who have been downtrodden repeatedly, frequently prove to be the worst oppressors when they acquire power over anyone.”

You can take ‘anyone’ to be either the Palestinians, or we the Jews of Israel. Power corrupts. And what has happened since we dreamed our dreams and hoped our hopes is that we have become the worst oppressors, mostly of ourselves. And in that process we have lost sight of the values that buttressed our national aspirations. Our Zionism, to be the best, has become corrupted. The result is that we are not ‘like all the others’ – if that was ultimately to be the outcome of being a ‘normal nation’ -but a little less than them. And we weep for our beloved Israel.

As the housing protests have gathered momentum, a slew of band-wagoners have materialised. The Im Tirzu crew and friends turned up to oppose deposing the Prime Minister and to support solving the housing crisis. Amongst them was the odious extreme religious nationalist and ex-con Baruch Marzel of Hebron, who declared that on social issues he was more Left than the Left, denigrating the protestors who reflect a non-partisan cross-section of Israeli society. On his heels came the so-called ‘hilltop youth’, the self-appointed new true Zionists.

And what moved them? They wanted to counter-demonstrate, taking up the cudgels of the coterie of 46 right wing Knesset members who declared that the best way to solve the housing crisis is to build new housing in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. The hilltop youth descended from their illegally occupied hilltops into the centres of tent city housing protests, setting up their own tent camps and repeating the demand of the 46 lawmakers.

Something smells bad here. It isn’t just the smell of tyres on the vehicle of protest, squealing to avoid hitting the Prime Minister caught in the headlights, or the waft of panic to stop the Knesset being called into special session to debate the housing crisis and thus prove that it symbolises parliamentary accountability, or the odour of sweat as the Prime Minister’s office scrambles to get a quick-fix bill passed that ultimately benefits wealthy land-owners. No, it’s the scent of cynicism, a hint of which we had when the Prime Minister dismissed the protestors as ‘populists’. The hilltop youth have been dropped in to confront and divide those suffering from a lack of housing. They will surely try to goad the original protestors into confrontation.

They are the right wing’s street fighting men, and they want a fight, so that the shaken Prime Minister can point a finger and say ‘See. As we thought. Just a bunch of opportunists, ready to cause civil disorder,’ and then order a police crack-down.

There is an indelible link between the housing crisis, the doctors’ strikes and the real inequities and iniquities of the Israeli economy on the one hand and the constant pumping of tax revenues into the settlements on the other. Those who now demonstrate for social equality and welfare, and accountable government, reflect, at last, the real values on which Israel was founded and that seemed to have been eroded in a welter of material acquisition and political corruption.

What many have called Israel’s ‘piggish capitalism’, Bibi Netanyahu defends as free market economics. What he really means is good old-fashioned self-interest, that of his wealthy wheeler-dealer supporters. The result is complacent and weak leadership, good at obfuscation and prevarication, all designed to maintain the status quo, and Netanyahu as Prime Minister, for one more minute, day, or month.

Inadvertently the housing protests have been a gift for Netanyahu, always looking for ways to deflect focus on substantive issues like ending the occupation and negotiating with the Palestinians for peace. Any canard will do. One of his favourites since his sessions with President Obama is the 1967 lines controversy, another unintended distraction. It’s worth spending 90 seconds watching Yaakov Peri, former head of the Shin Bet on this – gratis Yachad – http://vimeo.com/27142965

It’s easy for the genuine ‘populists’, that volatile mix of one party, one state and one G-d advocates to plug their discriminatory and chauvinistic slogans into the vacuum of political leadership Israel currently suffers under Netanyahu. As if the raft of anti-democratic legislation wasn’t enough, we now have a new idea from the authors of the malodorous Boycott Bill – to make democratic rule subservient to their idea of the state’s definition as ‘ the national home for the Jewish people.’ And along the way they seek to downgrade Arabic as a recognised language. The true flavour of the Netanyahu regime has even attracted support from the embarrassing remnants of Israel’s Labour party who support this proposal.

In the parlous state of democracy into which Israel has been driven, there is an ugly truth to be confronted. ‘To be a free people in our land’ is another line from Ha’Tikvah, and underpinning that is the need to be responsible citizens, recognising that that is part of the price for our freedom. Perhaps until we are true to those responsibilities and maintain a viable democracy, we cannot properly point fingers at the Palestinians and criticise their attempts to be free of us and build their own institutions and deny them a role as our partners in peace. We need to clean house in order to be their partners.

We should not lose our hope, rekindled by those using democratic means to raise their voices. We should not let that hope be extinguished by others who pretend to care about a safe and secure future for Israel but in fact fuel their leadership by spreading paranoia and division.

We must not lose our hope, because without it we lose ourselves.

That Israel has been the only democracy in an unwelcoming sea of petty despots and dictators is undoubted. But it is not just a matter of saying we are a democracy, it is crucial that we behave as one. The boycott law raises serious question marks about the fundamental pillars of our democracy, and one of those is freedom of speech. Democracy, imperfect though it is, is strong when minority opinions are given as much respect as majority ones. That is one of the tests of democracy and we fail it with the boycott law.
Our democracy is envied especially by other peoples in the region, who recently have expressed their desire to have democratic frameworks that are identical to ours – free speech, free elections and the creation of institutions that provide the checks and balances – the means of accountability – to their democratic aspirations.
The democratic principles we have sought to enshrine in our country are threatened by a law designed to shut up minority dissenting views. It is unbelievable to imagine that the very essence, the key to our very survival as a people and then as a democratic state – our right and our skilful ability to question – has been removed from some voices that others do not like or do not wish to hear. What kind of Jewish people have we become, with a law disabling that crucial part of our historical discourse? What now sets us apart from those tyrannies that have surrounded us? Such a law is a major step on the path to being just like them. We need look no further than at Syria to see the kind of reflection of what awaits us, where challenges to authority are met with violence and bloodshed.
Most important of all is that in passing this law, we deny the very fulfilment of our own dreams and aspirations to ‘be a free people in our own land’.
So I oppose the boycott bill and call for a Boycott of ALL Settlement Produce.
(**The 1st version of this was an e-mail to a Member of Knesset and to a Minister. This is a shorter and more focused version.)

I am very worried about Israel’s reputation amongst her friends and I am sure that as a working Chaverat Knesset you appreciate more than most how important perception is.

That Israel has been the only democracy in an unwelcoming sea of petty despots and dictators is undoubted. But it is not just a matter of saying we are democracy, it is crucial that we behave as one. The boycott law raises serious question marks about the fundamental pillars of our democracy, and one of those is freedom of speech. Democracy, imperfect though it is, is strong when minority opinions are given as much respect as majority ones. That is one of the tests of democracy and we would surely fail it if the boycott law is adopted.

We are acknowledged as the regional military power and one of our strengths is that that power reflects our open society. It is part of the inherent dynamic that makes us what we are and how we are perceived. Our democracy is envied especially by other peoples in the region, who recently have expressed their desire to have democratic frameworks that are identical to ours – free speech, free elections and the creation of institutions that provide the checks and balances – the means of accountability – to their democratic aspirations.

The democratic principles we have sought to enshrine in our country are threatened by a law designed to shut up minority dissenting views. It is unbelievable to imagine that the very essence, the key to our very survival as a people and then as a democratic state – our right and our skilful ability to question – will be removed from some voices that others do not like or do not wish to hear. What kind of Jewish people do we become, if a law disabling that crucial part of our historical discourse is passed? What would set us apart from those tyrannies that have surrounded us? Such a law would be a major step on the path to being just like them. We need look no further than at Syria to see the kind of reflection of what awaits us, where challenges to authority are met with violence and bloodshed.

Most important of all is that in passing such a law, we would be denying the very fulfilment of our own dreams and aspirations to ‘be a free people in our own land’.

Alon Idan has written an exceptionally insightful piece in Haaretz http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/why-there-is-no-national-consensus-on-gilad-shalit-1.370410
He gets to the heart of the complete lack of public discourse on most issues challenging our state – except of course when it comes to cottage cheese. We can, with justification, heap blame on the Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu for homing in our most latent fears and encouraging them into the light. We can, whether we are erstwhile close friends of Bibi, or his serious detractors, publicly harangue him for a complete lack of policy, of any forward thinking process, of any initiative which will ensure our endurance as a state. Such effort would restate and reflect what we have had ingrained into us since David Ben Gurion said: “Every Jewish mother should know that she has placed the fate of her sons into the hands of commanders who deserve this trust,” and by extension, in our leaders hands, and so Gilad will be freed. As Ron Lauder, the erstwhile close friend of Bibi, so rightly says, the international community doesn’t give a damn about Bibi’s domestic political problems, and frankly when it comes to freeing Gilad Shalit, neither should we the voters who put Bibi back in power. Why did those who voted for him think that Bibi had changed? Because he said so? Well to borrow from West Wing, letting Bibi be Bibi has produced a repeat of his last cadence as prime minister, only this time the damage to us is reaching irreparable proportions. To change this, all of it, and especially to free Gilad Shalit, we the people of Israel, its citizens and voters, need to free ourselves from the dungeon Bibi and his friends have locked us into, the one with the word FEAR on the door. We are the strongest regional power aren’t we? We are not victims any more, are we? We have a state where once we were dispersed. That takes great courage. That courage is enough for a sense of national confidence to do the things that a nation can and should do. So first, we must free ourselves from fear and victimhood and then we must free ourselves of those who perpetuate fear and victimhood as a means of shutting us all up and keeping themselves in power. One proof that we are freeing ourselves is to stand up and shout Free Gilad Shalit! Not as an event or a show, a transient emotional experience, but because unless Gilad is free, we are prisoners.

“We Took It” – “We Never Left It” ( A shorter version of this appeared in The Jewish News 22/09/10)
In the gap between “we took it” and “we never left it” is a reality that Israelis and many Jews are either unable or unwilling to confront, echoing the “Ain Breira”- “No Choice” attitude in the years before Israel stepped into the limelight after June 1967. These phrases are shorthand definitions of Jewish history and the Jewish people’s relationship with Eretz – the Land. Part of that Land is regarded by both the international community and the Palestinians as territory illegally occupied by Israel.
The former, many believe, has nothing to tell us. We were the butt end of everyone else’s history, and suffered the consequences of it. Only our own moral code provided us the key to survival. With it were we able to rise above the exigencies of our endless ‘guesthood’, believing that we were the equals of the majorities amongst whom we lived, and aspiring to be better than them, should our oppression ever end. Herzl dreamed of removing us from the path of the eternally rushing train of anti-Semitism, and his successors set the bar with “a light unto the nations.” Whether that train has finally reached its terminus and we have crossed the bar are moot points.
Of the latter, the Palestinians, we have few if any positive or amicable thoughts. For some they are Amalek and deserve the fate of that tribe. For others their existence is conveniently hidden away by a separation fence that must have cost the citizens of Israel as much as the Bar-Lev line along the Suez canal.
“We took it” summarises how the West Bank was occupied. Whether unwittingly as Shlomo Gazit suggests in “Trapped Fools” (Frank Cass 2003) or accidentally in Gershom Gorenberg’s “The Accidental Empire” (Times Books 2006), is not moot but fact.
“We never left it,” reflects what has been in our hearts and souls. But the very code by which we have survived, reminds us of the reality behind that quintessence.
There are a couple of familiar signposts. The first is the Mitzvah we read in shul on Yom Kippur – “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” In one sermon our Rabbi reminded us of the inherent reciprocity in this Mitzvah and she went to the heart of it when describing it as the fulfilment of the highest of our values.
The second I stumbled across one Shabbat a few years ago. It is from the Soncino Humash notes for Exodus 22.20: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” We learn that the Talmud says the precept “to love, or not to oppress the stranger,” occurs 36 times in the Torah. The commentary concludes: “The reason for this constantly repeated exhortation is that those who have been downtrodden frequently, prove to be the worst oppressors when they acquire power over anyone.”
Israel has become the regional power. But there are limits to that power and for a people that has rightfully been greedy for freedom, accepting limits is hard indeed. We resent questions, especially when we know the answers. We cannot be told that the occupation is morally corrosive even if we know that it is. We pretend not to notice how we and it have become pejoratively synonymous abroad.
We have forgotten the “light unto the nations” message and the minority experience from which it was born. We seem intent on ignoring any limits, even those set by whatever or whoever we believe is our Jewish moral arbiter. The Mitzvot and exhortations are just a nuisance.
Those who insist on us having our cake and eating it too, who simultaneously seek to blur the green line and pretend the separation fence they built isn’t there, are in danger of creating a divide as destructive as between Judah and Israel. They undermine the moral values the state of Israel is supposed to represent and call into question whether Israel as an occupying power is capable of being the guiding spirit for the House of Israel.
We owe it to ourselves not just to extend the settlement freeze but to use it as a statement of our sincere desire for an end to occupation and for peace. Not doing so says the opposite of what we believe and what we want to be.

Paul Usiskin is an Israel-UK citizen, a former serving IDF officer in the West Bank and chair of Peace Now UK

That Israel is a thriving democracy is reflected in the dynamic discourse of the day. The Im Tirtzu phenomenon is a reflection of that dynamism.Its name is from the Herzl quote “Im Tirtzu, Ain Zoh Agadah” – “If you will it, it is no legend.” It describes itself as a “the leadership and advancement of a second Zionist revolution in the Israeli public discourse.” It’s a private and not a public revolution. This subtle but crucial differentiation makes its demonizing of the President of the New Israel Fund acceptable. Any suggestion that Im Tirtzu is a kind of thought police is frankly anti-patriotic. Isn’t it?

The Education Minister gave the key-note address at the Im Tirtzu public event in March. But that doesn’t translate into official sanction. Does it?
The Education Ministry has now begun rewriting “Being Citizens in Israel”, the country’s main civics text book. This is because of the sentence: “since its establishment, the State of Israel has engaged in a policy of discrimination against its Arab citizens.” The chair of the Ministry’s pedagogical secretariat contends that “the textbook dwells too much on criticism of the state.” Of course if the book’s message is reflected in this sentence it must be expunged. The chair should also employ a hi-tech process – the kind in which Israel excels in creating – to erase all trace of the offending sentence from the minds of all students who may have read it and from all teachers who may have taught it. It’s a scandal to suggest that the Arabs of Israel faced any discrimination, either during the security-driven years they were rightly under military administration, or since, when they so obviously enjoy the freedom and equality our democracy guarantees them. Don’t they?

The refusal of 36 actors to perform in the spanking new culture hall in Ariel, a West Bank settlement town, divides Israeli society, according to the Culture Minister. Obviously this ‘boycott’ undermines our democratic foundations and is, as the Minister later declared, a totalitarian act. The Prime Minister deserves applause for finding time from his heavy schedule preparing for peace talks to announce that the companies employing these anti-democratic performers should have their state-funding cut, if the refusal is continued. It’s so obvious. Israel’s continued occupation is not a divisive matter, and those actors must be against us; they can’t possibly be for us. Sad?

In a democracy as vital as Israel’s, freedom of movement is as crucial a right as freedom of thought and speech. And of course no democracy can thrive without the profit motive and we have some fine examples of ‘knowing your market.’ One is the CEO of the new Jerusalem light rail company. A goodly percentage of his passengers will be orthodox. So he’s absolutely right to offer them ‘mehadrin’ coaches – every third or fourth coach of his trains will be ones in which orthodox men and women will be separated. The high court wasted valuable time and not a little money in producing a ruling forbidding further segregation on public transport, after the largest of Israel’s bus companies offered segregated buses on intercity and inner Jerusalem routes. The court had no appreciation of the need for profits from a light rail system as essential to the capital as this one. And the company was completely warranted in surveying Jerusalemites on whether having Palestinians as fellow passengers would bother them. Perhaps the CEO should install a fifth ‘Palestinians only’ coach. Just a suggestion?

The right to demonstrate is also an inalienable right in a democracy. But sometimes there is a worry that that can lead to Jews and Arabs associating. The Jerusalem magistrates’ court has opined that demonstrations in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood where orthodox Jews have employed Mandate documents to prove that Palestinians shouldn’t reside there, are legal. But concerned police and their efficient border police colleagues have zealously guarded against Jews and Arabs co-demonstrating, anxious over the consequences of dangerous fraternization. 24 hours before one demonstration, access roads to the neighborhood were closed and vehicles held at checkpoints. I was told by a policeman at a checkpoint nearby that I could go as far as the American Colony Hotel and could cross the intersection to get there. But his colleague, a dutiful and persistent policewoman decided that her consent was also necessary, equality of the sexes being essential to democracy too, so she urged me to reverse to the check point where I waited for another fifteen minutes before she felt it was safe for me to proceed. Thanks?

*

The Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal has an impressive Wikipedia entry. I listened keenly to him on Israel Radio’s Reshet Bet and learned much. Over a year ago I described myself as a “proud and obsessive supporter of Israel.” Halbertal provided many new – to me – perspectives which go some way to help me understand what’s been happening to erode my pride. (The obsession is too ingrained.)
What I hadn’t appreciated was the change in the character of religious parties in the Knesset. The moderate religious Zionist voice has been replaced by a raucous religious nationalism, much of it orchestrated by orthodoxy. In Halbertal’s view “ the neo-romanticism of the nationalist religious right” has no basis in the Torah of Israel. “They have imported the cesspit of European (nationalist) thought to the very heart of Judaism…the folkism, the idea of the organic linkage between land and people…so that if you are a humanist you must be influenced by alien sources.”
The right and the extreme right have added their strident ‘one-party rules!’ yell. The result is that middle Israel finds itself trapped in an echo chamber between religious and right wing nationalists bouncing their slogans off each other. One consequence is the muting of the secular critics of orthodoxy.
Halbertal commented that any wrongdoing, any crime, can be justified by a Pasuk – a verse from the religious texts; it just depends which Pasuk you choose. And what seems to have happened is that religious nationalism especially has adopted a full range of Pasukim to assuage, indeed wipe away, any need for Israeli accountability, fear or paranoia. Elokanu will take care of you – no worries.
A phenomenon that Halbertal describes as a “deadly combination, the most problematic” is the emergence of ‘Hardalnikim’. For those familiar with Hebrew, this is not a group of religious Israelis clamouring for the hottest mustard – ‘hardal’ in Hebrew. This is ‘Haredim Leumanim Datiim’ – Ultra Orthodox, Nationalist, Religious.
Halbertal links brutality and authenticity. He says that the more brutal you are, this will not bring you closer to the source, to authentic Judaism. That these two thoughts – ‘Hardalnikim’ and brutality and authenticity – are consecutive, is a deft way of issuing a warning. I am drawn to his honesty and skepticism when he admits he doesn’t always produce a positive answer to the question of whether there is a God. So when he says that “Israelis must break the monopoly of orthodoxy on Jewish traditional culture and I want to be part of that,”I want to join him.
Part of such a process must involve a new Israeli honesty. It is of little comfort to hear David Grossman and others saying that Israelis know the truth but are just too frightened to admit it. My own test when discussion descends into angry rhetoric is to ask “what do you see when you look at yourself in the mirror each morning?” And if the response is more anger, I believe that a truth has been revealed and painfully acknowledged. The fact that the revelation is so transient reflects the scale of the need for constant challenge.
Israelis are not in danger of having their state corroded from within. It is an ongoing daily reality. They are saying, even now, “No questions please. We know the answers and don’t need to be reminded of them.” Their greed for freedom, for an unalloyed existence that is not accountable to anyone for whatever acts, is part of that corrosion.
Time flies when you’re having fun – and even when you’re not. In restaurants and on promenades I saw too many unhappy faces. At one Jerusalem restaurant I saw very glum expressions and asked my hosts why that was so predominant, after all, coming to a good place to eat is a pleasure, a relaxation, no? I was told, after a quick glance at a watch, that perhaps those guests had just watched the news.
And when I ask Israelis about the latest peace process there is a shrug of the shoulders and a dismissive shake of the head. David Grossman described this as the first time leaders going to peace talks have talked them down and lowered expectations. They have done little to earn the approval of their constituents. At the heart of this malaise is fear, a fear that Israelis have lived with for so long, the fear of uncertainty; there isn’t long term thinking and planning because life in the Jewish state is day by day, not century by century.
One consequence is that there are two states of Jewish existence, and no longer one Beit Israel – House of Israel. In Israel there is a new struggle between religious nationalists and their nationalist partners and ‘humanists’ – Israelis of conscience – over what should be the values of the Jewish state. As long as the former have the upper hand – and they currently do – then Jews outside Israel have to re-examine what Jewish values are for themselves, no longer dependant on Israel to be their hub, their guiding light.
Lest, dear readers, you leave this with the impression that the two people who are me – Paul and Shaul (there’s a third, Boulos but that’s for another piece) – have combined in despair, take heed. Without question both are subject to their immediate context. They inhabit a body residing in a peculiar corner outside of Israel, in a minority. I know where Shaul would prefer to be – no longer sitting on someone else’s holiday beach, but on his own beach, staring out at his own sea, the only real border his land has that no-one challenges. Here in the minority, the game is to be as much like the majority as possible. To do that, as throughout the history of our dispersion, we have sought to represent the very best of our values, for they have been our secret guide to survival. More often than not we have struggled to prove ourselves better than the majorities amongst whom we have lived and in the worst contexts to prove that we can be better than our oppressors. When it came to Zionist aspirations, those beguiled by them imagined a Jewish state reflecting the best of us and the values by which we survived. What has happened in the Jewish state is that being a minority has too quickly been consigned to history books and TV documentaries. That the memory of the past is too painful to recall is perfectly understandable. But so easily to confine it to the past is an example of what happens when a people pursues the greed of liberty. Without the past there is no future and without the values we hoped to live by, our survival attracts a question mark.
I almost chose a verse from the Dag Nachash septet’s latest CD “6” with which to end. Here’s a taste, from the song Od Ach Ehad – Another Brother: “Life is vital and valuable ( Ba’alei Erech), Murder and killing isn’t the way.”
Yehuda Poliker the Israeli singer has a song entitled On The Other Side Of The Fence. There are many lines that talk about Israel today. One is “A fence for people inside themselves.” The occupation symbolizes, more than any other fact of Israel, the corrosion of this people. Ending the occupation is the first step in ending the process of being consumed from within. It is also the first step in taking back Israel to the values it was created to represent.