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By Dubi Kanengisser, on September 3rd, 2010
I’ve returned from a trip with my family to the southern shores of Georgian Bay. If you want a tip on some excellent restaurants in the Owen Sound/Meaford area, let me know!
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Completely unrelated: Here’s a segment from a book I’ve read recently, The Emergence of Binational Israel, edited by Ilan Peleg and Ofira Seliktar. The segment is from the concluding chapter, by Ilan Peleg, titled “Epilogue: The Future of Binational Israel – Beyond the Winter of Discontent.”
If Israel remains a binational society without becoming a binational polity its future could be put in jeopardy. Inevitably there will be growing tension between a fastly shrinking Jewish majority and an equally fastly growing Arab minority, tension accompanied by ocassional terrorist attacks, flare-ups along the borders, and severe criticism of Israel from the world public opinion. The binational reality would likely turn Israel into an increasingly conflict-ridden society, less liberal, tolerant and democratic.
Above all, binationalism could strengthen Israeli psychological complexes – along with Arab complexes – making a peaceful resolution of the conflict even less likely. Since continued Israeli control over the territories will necessarily result in harsh criticism from the rest of the world, it will reinforce the sense of many Israelis that Israel is once again alone in a hostile world… The particularist camp in Israel would be strengthened if the occupation continues. Coercive binationalism is a Gordian knot which ought to be cut in a painful operation; if the knot is not severed, it will become increasingly tight until it may choke everyone involved.
A future, Israeli binationalist state will probably be characterized by increasingly severe waves of internally generated violence, a protracted civil war of a sort with lows and ebbs … a low-intensity conflict where the front is nowhere and everywhere… On the one side of the uncertain fence in this internal conflict will be a popular army, the IDF … now with an increasingly controversial role. In a future, protracted conflict with the civilian population on the West Bank and Gaza Strip soldiers and officers of the IDF will have more intense moral doubts, feelings that must filter into the Israeli society as a whole…
If the Israeli political leadership will be determined to keep the control over the territories at any cost, it will have to adopt Draconian means. The [Shin Bet]… will have to intensify its actions… it may be decided to use heavily the Border Police… Yet, even [this] is unlikely, in the long run, to shield the Israeli population from the events in the territories.
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Many Israelis and Israel’s supporters will tend to deny the internal nature of the evolving conflict; as a psychological mechanism, the term “civil war” will remain unacceptable. In frustration, accusations will be aimed at the PLO, the internal and international media, and above all the “world” who refuses to understand the security imperatives imposed on Israel. These accusations would be accompanied by harsher measures, mostly measures designed to impose collective punishment on the restive Palestinian population.
…those in Israel determined to maintain control over the territories at any price are likely to find numerous explanations, excuses, and rationales in order to convince others that the conflict is easily treatable. The growing violence would be described as “passing wave” … committed by masses who have been incited by religious preachers or outside manipulators … assisted or even manufactured by internal traitors (the press, the “leftists”, PLOnicks or Ashafists), and made possible by the incompetence of the leadership…
The book was published in 1989.
(Originally published on my Hebrew Blog on September 2, 2010).
By Dubi Kanengisser, on August 26th, 2010
Originally published on July 27, 2009
Israel is currently experiencing a rush of new bills that either passed or are close to passing, that have raised the ire of quite a few Israeli bloggers, but hardly much beyond that. While the media is obsessing over a law that stipulated state-owned land that has been leased to individuals for 98 years actually becomes the property of the people who built their homes on it, at least three other laws have largely been ignored by mainstream news sources.
One is designed to create a database of biometric data – fingerprints and face scans – of all Israeli citizens and residents (by pain of one year imprisonment to those who refuse). It’s an important piece of legislation to oppose, but largely uninteresting to the outside world, unless you’re into mocking those who are stuck in such backwards countries as ours.
The other two are more relevant for this blog: first is the recently passed bill allowing the Ministry of Finance to withhold funding from any organization or institution that commemorates the Nakba – the Palestinian view of Israeli independence as a “disaster”. This is a “softer” version of the original law that included imprisonment for those who deign to refer to Israeli independence as anything but a joyous event. Even the jaded Israeli mind could not stand for such policing of thought, and the law was amended to its current form. Have no doubt: it is an abomination that this law is part of our legislation code, and I cannot but hope that it never be used. But even this is not the law of which I wish to speak.
The last of these controversial bills is the refugee bill, sometimes referred to as the “infiltrator bill”. That the two apply to the same bill by itself is a foreboding sign.
Israel has never passed a bill to organize its handling of refugees – it was never much of an issue, really, excepting, of course, Palestinian refugees – although it has signed the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees (with some reservations). But in the past few years, the issue has become more relevant, with thousands of refugees, primarily from Eritrea and Sudan, attempting to cross the border between Israel and Egypt every year.
This seems to make sense: Israel prides itself on being the only democracy in the Middle East, a country conceded to by the world in large part in light of the horrors of the Holocaust. Surely, if anyone in the vicinity would be sympathetic to the plight of these asylum seekers, it would be Israel, right? And they’re not completely wrong. Some 15,000 refugees have been granted some form of asylum in Israel in the past few years, and while the state offered them little in the way of assistance beyond allowing them to stay, it has been the shining moment of Israeli civil society, which organized to aid these people in a variety of ways.
But for some time now the orders to the border police are to prevent “infiltrators” from getting into Israel, sometimes by shooting at them. Infiltrators who passed the border have often been returned to the other side – to Egypt, which either deals with them in its own way, or simply “repatriates” them, sending them to what is quite certainly their death. Now, the Israeli legislature wants to turn these orders into law, granting any low-ranking officer the authority to deport anyone they deem to have infiltrated into Israel in the past 72 hours. No judge, no appeal process, no compassion. Those who will escape this fate will find themselves, as many already have, imprisoned. The official reason is that these asylum seekers come from “enemy states”. In those prisons, families are divided and only in special cases are they allowed to see each other. The UNHCR commends Israel for not preventing access to these prisoners, but that’s about the only good thing they can say of this practice. The proposed bill even stipulates that those who aid infiltrators in any way, including providing them with aid after they have already entered Israel, are also subject to arrest and criminal charges, with a maximum sentence of 20 years in some cases.
Not that the government is waiting for legislation to pass. Earlier this month the infamous “immigration police” has been redeployed in an effort to remove all “illegal residents” from Israel. The revamped force is also enforcing the order that asylum seekers are not to travel north of Gedera and south of Hadera – in essence, they are prevented from entering Israel’s central areas, where most jobs and services are available. Needless to say, this area includes both the Tel-Aviv metropolitan area and Jerusalem. Hundreds have already been arrested, and these efforts will only be increased next month.
Several human rights organizations, as well as quite a few individuals, have been leading a struggle against these actions and in favour of the asylum seekers’ basic human rights. But the majority of Israelis don’t see a problem. The infiltrators do, indeed, come from “enemy states”, and are overwhelmingly Muslim. This alone is reason enough to want them out of the country for many. Others will point to their black skin as cause of fear. Others still would eschew racism and merely point out that Israel has enough financial problems of its own and can’t accept the many tens of thousands who will likely make their way to the promised land if its gates are opened.
This last one is certainly a valid point. Europe and North America can certainly pledge some help in favour of a project to house such refugees, both in terms of the funding needed for this project and in terms of accepting certain numbers of refugees for into their own borders after they arrive in Israel.
But Israel has never shown any interest in helping the refugees. Our great moral obligation, repeated over and over, to prevent genocide, summarized so neatly in those two words: Never Again! No, wait, I am mistaken. Once, Israel was lead by people with more moral fibre. In the late 70′s, Prime Minister Menachem Begin – the man who created Netanyahu’s Likud - greeted into Israel several dozens of Vietnamese refugees, and granted them full citizenship rights. Those few dozens were followed by several hundreds more. Begin explicitly attributed this decision to Israel’s moral obligation to aid the stateless, given the history of the Jewish people.
But gone are the days of such brave, idealist leadership. Today’s leaders never give a second thought to sending men, women and children to prison for having fled the fields of carnage – or, worse yet, sending them back.
Notes:
By Dubi Kanengisser, on August 22nd, 2010
Sadly, we have decided to shut down IsraLeft due to lack of activity – some of us opened our independent English blogs (e.g.), while others simply didn’t feel like writing for a very long time (a more formal announcement will be posted on the blog itself soon). I myself wrote five posts over the half-year between IsraLeft’s opening in July 2009 and January 2010, and stopped contributing until June 2010, when I cross-posted a couple of posts from here. I’m not sure what it says about me that I am so selfish that I cannot consistently contribute to a blog that isn’t just mine. In my defense, I wasn’t the only one who lost interest. Since December 2009 collectively we didn’t produce even an average of one post per month. And since nobody wrote, nobody else wrote. Maybe I shouldn’t overthink this – blogs die every day. I have more that a few corpses scattered across the internet of blogs that didn’t survive more than a couple of posts. Some of them didn’t make it through the design phase. I can’t even promise that this blog will survive for as long as a year. And yet we blog.
At any rate, I’m starting a salvage project to move my old posts, as well as posts of other authors on IsraLeft who would so wish, to here, in chronological order. This is my first post there, an introduction to Israeli politics for the uninitiated reader. The title, “…and who is left” was my original suggestion for the title of the blog. I have a penchant for crappy titles. Anyway, here it is.
As the resident Political Scientist on the blog, I thought it might be prudent to write my first post on an issue that might confuse non-Israeli readers of a blog that features the word “left” so prominently in its title.
Throughout the civilized world, the word “left” means something on the continuum between social-democrats and communists. The US, for example, is known to not actually have a left-wing party – they have a conservative party (right) and a liberal party (centre-right) (and even then the two can’t stay in place for more than a few decades). Generally speaking, “politics” in the democratic world is normally understood as “economic policies”. It’s the economy, stupid, said the famous banner in Clinton’s campaign headquarters, and many a theory predict elections results based primarily on the economic well-being of the state. Campaign promises revolve around taxes, investments, social security, health care, privatization or nationalization. The politics of identity is always relegated to the fringes – the extremist nationalist parties on the one hand, and civil society organizations on the other.
But in Israel, the economy rarely figures in political debates and electoral campaigns. The left-right dimension in Israel is defined strictly based on attitudes on the Israeli-Arab conflict. Thus, ultra-neoliberal Shinui had no problem being a part of the left-wing Meretz between 1992 and 1999; Israel’s main right-wing party, the Likud, has no problem depicting itself at times as a “social” party (one off-shoot of the party, Gesher, was unwittingly labeled by its creator leumit-hevratit – “national-socialist”). Not only is the economy not the main dimension in Israeli politics, it’s not even the second most important one. The second dimension of political classification is religiosity, ranging from secularist parties such as Meretz (and the now defunct Shinui) to ultra-orthodox parties Shas and Yahadut HaTorah. Avraham Diskin found in one of his studies that when Israelis are asked to define themselves as “on the left” or “or the right” regarding issues of economy or church-and-state, they tended to define themselves according to the left-right position of their party, based on the security issue (i.e., Labour voters would define themselves as left-wing, while Likud voters as right-wing), but when asked about concrete policy options in those fields, there was no correlation whatsoever between their self-definition as left or right, and their opinions.
What, then, defines this primary dimension of politics that we Israelis refer to as “left-right”? Sometimes it is defined as dovish vs. hawkish: the left seeks a peaceful resolution to the conflict based on a (usually) geographical compromise, whereas the right emphasizes the importance of maintaining a position of power to prevent or limit hostilities from the other side. One might note that these are, strictly speaking, policy options, not really ideologies. It is the construction of the left-right dimension based on policy options that enables us to look at Israeli-Palestinian nationalist parties such as Balad and position them on the left of the political map: if the right agrees to cede no land, and the Jewish left agrees to cede some land, the “extreme left” demands Israel should cede all land and cease to exist.
This works for most Israelis. Much like Converse found for the American public, most Israelis don’t really have much in the way of an ideology. They have opinions on practically everything – oh boy do we have opinions! – but when you really put them to the test, there’s nothing coherent there. But, like in the US, that the systems of belief of the masses are incoherent does not mean that the more “sophisticated” voters and political elites have no ideology either. In fact, the reason the “unsophisticated” voter can afford to not really have an ideology is because the political elite does. As cognitive misers, the average citizen doesn’t have the time and, frankly, the will to develop a coherent view of politics. It’s much easier just picking somebody based on the most salient of topics, and then conforming the rest of one’s “ideology” to whatever that person says.
The ideology behind the dovish-hawkish dimension is much closer to the ideology behind the socialist-capitalist dimension in Western democracies than the two dimensions would seem to be on their own. This shared continuum can be described as universalism-particularism, or liberal-republican. The left seeks as much equality as possible for all, the right seeks as much privilege to those most deserving (however you define “deserving”). When looked at in this light, Israel doesn’t have much more of a left-wing than the US does. Particularism abounds. It is telling that the phrase “a state of all its citizens” is considered a code word for the destruction of the state of Israel by the majority of Israelis, including many self-described left-wing Israelis — much like words such as “socialism” and “welfare” are frowned on, to say the least, in American politics.
A left-winger, then, would eschew the privileges of the Jewish population in Israel in favour of a truly equal citizenship. This is easier said than done, of course, even with the best of intentions. The long conflict in the region has eroded any and all shreds of trust and goodwill between the two nations that occupy the land between the Jordan river and the sea. Every step taken by the Jewish population further away from sharing the state of Israel with its Arab citizens, is reciprocated by another step taken by the Arab citizens towards a fuller identification with their brethren across the Green Line, in the occupied territories and the Palestinian Authority. And every such step merely justifies Jews in distrusting their Arab compatriots.
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This is the situation we are in now. This is the tangle that we, as left-wing Israelis, are trying to straighten out. This is anything but a simple task, just like the situation we are in is anything but a simple situation. This is why I (and, I believe, we) feel it is important to share with readers outside Israel our dilemmas, our views, our ideas. This is why it is crucial for the world to realize that these debates exist within Israeli society; that there is an alternative to the vehement nationalist discourse on both sides of the conflict; but at the same time that even if nationalism was quelled completely on both sides, the resolution of the conflict requires still more investment in building trust between two peoples who have raised two generations of hatred and distrust already, and are now bringing up a third.
I am writing this not in defense of my country, nor to attack it. I am writing this because my country needs your help, and because I think that it should be the wish and desire of all peace-loving people that this bloody conflict should end. I am writing this because I fear without the assistance of those who share the left-wing ideology throughout the world, Israel, the country I know and love, would fade away – not into black, but into thick, stinking red.
(Originally posted July 23, 2009)
Notes:
By Dubi Kanengisser, on August 9th, 2010
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is an on-going campaign by some Palestinian and pro-Palestinian groups, calling for – well – boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel to nudge it towards the end of occupation and discrimination of Palestinians both within and beyond the green line. It has garnered some support internationally, and even among Israeli Jews there are those who promote it within the radical left. I, however, oppose it. There are two routes by which I arrived at opposing it. One has to do with my own identity as an Israeli, and thus doesn’t strictly reject the notion of BDS, but only the support of BDS by Israelis. The other, however, rejects it in-toto, not so much because it is inherently wrong, but because it is advocated for wrong reasons and all to often displays the makings of a nationalist argument flimsily disguised by liberal rhetoric.
But we’ll start with the first route, which is much simpler. BDS argues, quite plainly, that Israel is an apartheid state, and therefore the best way to get it to change is repeat what was so successful with the more iconic apartheid state – South Africa. BDS, then, is simply the outsider’s best means for influencing what they thing is a problem situation. In a democracy, one influences politics by voting and other acts of citizenship. But foreigners don’t get to participate, so they have to resort to the power of the market – it would be highly undemocratic of them to exercise voice where they don’t legitimately have one, but exit – i.e., not buying stuff – is certainly within their rights. But one cannot exercise both at the same time. One cannot legitimately exercise their right to voice internally, while attempting to amplify their voice by generating external pressure via exit. In other words, if you’re going to support boycott of Israel, you have to exit it yourself first. You can’t support it from within. Similarly, I think it is intellectually dishonest for a professor to work in an Israeli university and, at the same time, call for its boycott by others. Certainly, it is most dishonest when those doing the calling hope that this will somehow save them from the boycott, but even when they are willing to bear the burden of possible results, as long as they stay within the comfy confines of their tenured position, they cannot honestly call for boycott of that same institution.
This route, again, still leaves it legitimate for foreigners (and Palestinian Israelis) to support BDS. But I argue the movement, as it currently stands, is still intellectually tainted, and should not be supported unless it seriously revises its stated goals and its rhetoric.
The “Call for BDS” asks the international community to boycott Israel until Israel meets its demands of
1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;
2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.
The first hurdle appears in the first demand. “Ending occupation and colonization of all Arab lands”. I asked Ali Abunimah how can I read that other than “Jews go home”. He answered by sending me to two texts, one by Omar Barghouti, the other by himself. I’m not quite sure how the latter answers my question, so I’ll focus on the first. It offers a wonderful notion of “ethical de-colonization”, which I gladly subscribe to. It should be noted, however, that the call doesn’t ask for “ethical de-colonization” but to the end of “colonization”, without qualifications. The very fact the Barghouti needed a qualifier in his term shows that the unqualified term means something else. Abunimah himself said that this refers to the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan heights. Again, I can’t see how this can be clearly read from the document, which speaks of “Arab lands”. I know of no reasonable interpretation that sees just the occupied territories as “Arab lands”. Either the whole of Palestine is, or none of it is. Isn’t this the argument made by two-state proponents that object to compromises? That the compromise is that 80% of the territory is given to the Jews, so there’s no sense it demanding even more is “compromised”?
Of course, Barghouti’s article doesn’t end in that beautiful vision. It dives from there into a diatribe thinly veiled by legalistic language that in essence argues that the Jews gave no right to self-determination, and that the most Israeli Jews can hope for is that they be allowed to live their lives as equal citizens within an essentially Palestinian state, with full individual rights but not collective or national rights — as opposed to the Palestinians, who do have a right to self-determination. Basically, Barghouti is offering to the Jews – most magnanimously, as he notes himself – the same life that right-wing liberals in Israel are willing to afford Palestinians: individual rights without national rights, and living within a state that defines itself nationally as the state of another people.
This is depressing, because this is exactly what opponents of the binational vision say the binational state would be like (at best, with a goodly chance that this will quickly deteriorate into a non-democratic, possibly theocratic state – so, basically, where we are now, only upside down). This hardly gives me a good feeling about the whole endeavor. I say, if we give up national rights, we give them up for everybody. If we can’t, as I, unfortunately, suspect is the case, then both sides must have national rights in a binational state. No talk about how the Jews are settler-colonizers will change the fact that the Jews have no homeland to return to. They are not emissaries of foreign powers that have decided to stick around cause the like the weather. They are in Israel because they see it as their homeland, they have good reason to see it as their homeland, and they should have a right of self-determination just like any other people. Now, I’m not a huge fan of the so-called right of self-determination. I think this right was basically stillborn, never really amounted to much and never did a single good thing for anybody. The right for democratic rule seems much more relevant to me. But if you argue for the right of self-determination for one people, no amount of intellectual acrobatics will save you from granting the same right to every other people. That, after all, is exactly the downfall of this right.
But one man’s opinion hardly means I should object to the entire project, right? Of course. The opinions of the BDS movement as expressed in their FAQ section, however, do.
Is explaining why BDS should be supported even though some supporters of the Palestinian plight within Israel object to it, they explain:
Although the views of Israeli supporters regarding methods of struggle should be taken into consideration, Palestinians have the ultimate right to decide on the best method for attaining freedom from an illegal occupation and systematically oppressive regime. Supporters of the Palestinian struggle within the international community and within Israel itself have to stop attempting to dictate the terms of the struggle but support the Palestinian right to resist an illegal occupation.
This is what I mean when I talk of nationalist arguments poorly disguised in liberal rhetoric. Israelis “have to stop attempting to dictate the terms of struggle”. We are the victims, say the Palestinians. Therefore, we get to decide what is to be done. Notice, of course, that nobody is dictating anything to the BDS movement. Quite the contrary, in this brilliant example of passive-aggressive writing, it is exactly the Palestinians who are dictating to the rest of the world how they must act in order to support Palestinian freedom. If you don’t support us in exactly the way we say you should, well, then the terroristsZionists have already won. For another example of how this logic unfolds, see this criticism of a group that dares employ a different means to achieving this goal, and gets derided for it, as if because these organizations called for BDS, this is now The Law.
Finally, as has been noted on this blog before, the true liberal puts no right ahead of another. There is no prioritizing of rights, and rights must be given to everyone – even to those who wish to deny them to others – while at the same time the liberal acts to ensure that these wishes are not granted. It’s tough to be a liberal. But that’s why it’s easy to spot those who make false claims to the ideals that liberals uphold. Like the people who wrote this in response to the question “does academic boycott infringe on academic freedom?”
It may; but who’s Academic Freedom is being referred to within this context? That of Israeli academics. Are we to regard only the academic freedom of Israelis as worthy? Plus, the privileging of academic freedom as a super-value above all other freedoms is in principle antithetical to the very foundation of human rights. The fact that Palestinians are denied basic rights as well as academic freedom under Israel’s military occupation is ignored. The fact that, with the exception of a tiny yet crucial minority, Israeli academics are largely supportive of their state’s oppression or are acquiescently silent about it is ignored. The fact that Israeli academic institutions have been and continue to be entirely complicit in the continuing aggressions against Palestinian society is ignored. The fact that Israeli academic institutions are themselves directly engaged in violations of Palestinian human rights and international law is ignored.
“Who cares?!” would be a good summary of the above paragraph. They’re just Israelis! Most of them are Zionists! Their rights can be trampled upon in the name of fighting for our rights. Just like the rights of women can be put on hold in the name of The Fight – after all, they’re Jewish Israeli women, the oppressors. You can justify a whole lot with this type of argument, but it doesn’t bode well for those of us that will end up living in that country that the BDS movement envisions, a country that will most certainly continue to use this wildcard of the rights of the victims over their oppressors long after the oppressors are no longer that.
Barghouti talks of a long process of ethical de-colonization. I fully support the need for such a long process. But I don’t see a willingness on the side of the BDS movement for this sort of process. I don’t see a commitment to true equality. I see vindictiveness – not that we haven’t earned it, of course, but still, not something I would like to promote when I’m at the business end of the vengeance.
A true liberal will tell the BDS movement that they support the cause of ending occupation and oppression of the Palestinians, but not at the expense of the Jews. And while I appreciate Ali Abunimah’s writing in favour of the one-state solution, I cannot condone his constant hate-mongering against Israelis in general. The process of ethical de-colonization cannot start after we have reached a settlement. It must start now, and it starts by taking the hands of those who reach out, not by pointing fingers.
Notes:
By Dubi Kanengisser, on August 9th, 2010
I am glad to host this guest post by Hanna Beit Halachmi
I walked up this week into the painful knowledge that nothing has really changed in the Israeli anti-occupation activism in the last 28 years of my involvement. As in the past, now as before, women’s human rights are secondary to the Palestinians rights. As before, it appears that sexual harassment, rape and sexual violence against women are part of the anti-occupation female-activists daily reality, mostly by Palestinians who harass foreign peace activists and Israeli demonstrators in fairly large numbers, according to the Israeli demonstrators’ reports.
In my view, there are two serious issues to attend in this context:
- This horrendous phenomenon was being kept undisclosed from the public, until discovered by the right-wing news paper “Makor Rishon”.
- The semi official approach of the activists was: “We cannot bother ourselves with such marginal issues when our Palestinian brothers and sisters are living under occupation”.
Probably in order to cope with the frequent sexual harassment incidents, the organizers of the demonstrations published a request to all Israeli female-demonstrators to cover themselves while attending the East Jerusalem Sheikh-Jarrah neighborhood weekly activity. The request was signed by a group of men and women who wrote that they are doing this in response to a request conveyed by Palestinian women, who allegedly find themselves avoiding the demonstrations due to the Israeli’s fairly exposed summer-wear – as if having women undersigning a non-feminist and very much gender-discriminating request, would make it “kosher”.
The request stirred up the Israeli blogosphere. Women and men posted furious texts, which was the beginning of revealing the ‘top-secret’ of sexual harassments. That’s how I learned about the American peace activist that was raped and was convinced to withdraw her complaint in order “not to hurt the fight for peace”, and an Israeli activist that was sexually attacked and did the same.
One of the male activists wrote in my Hebrew blog that “more Palestinian women are suffering from the occupation than Israeli activists from sexual harassment and rape”, so it is not in their priority to attend to it more than they already did. The women should handle and prioritize this issue by themselves, he said, and not “run back like chickens to Tel Aviv”. Moreover, he declared his opinion on those women who protested against the sexual harassments, as not being “real feminists”, because “a real feminist”, to his opinion, “would know how to respond and how to prioritize her actions against harassment and against the occupation”. I wouldn’t have mention his answer were it not in the spirit of other organizers’ talkbacks in the web – some, I must say, were written by women.
And there is more to it:
Indymedia, which covers, documents and organizes most of the anarchists’ activities in the occupied territories, offered women a workshop called “coping with sexual harassment while taking part in direct action against occupation“. In their flier, that was off-lined immediately after the publication in “Makor Rishon”, they wrote:
“Women, men and transgenders from Israel are going every weekend to protest with their mates against the occupation and show solidarity with the Palestinians. In this field of solidarity and endangerment, a phenomenon of sexual harassment takes place towards women and transgender activists. In addition to other phenomena of breaking borders and breaching privacy, there is also a rude expression of power-based humiliating oppression, typical to sexual harassment. It reflects, in the field of direct protest against occupation, a reversal of power relations between women occupiers and occupied men transforming to a male controlling and a female being controlled. This phenomena itself may enhance the paralyzing effect that sometimes prevents women from responding. The target of the workshop is to share experiences and provide tools that will enable women to cope actively with sexual harassment connected to protests against the occupation”.
The issues that emerge from this text have nothing to do with the occupation – it has everything to do with the Israeli demonstrators being in some sense the occupiers. With such an approach to women’s human dignity and rights, it seems as if the protesters are part of the social and political system that created and sustains the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
The activists’ responses and the workshop’s flier show a clear agenda of occupation, this time genderized-colonialism in its nature, and as disgusting as the occupation they fight against.
The good news is that the outbreak of this information raised a vibrant and deep discussion among Israeli left-wing activists, showing that there are still many men and women who will not accept the attitude reflected in those activists’ words and actions. There is a growing voice supporting a firm action against harassers, full transparency of information on what’s going on in these demonstrations and a full and active support of women demonstrators – by no way priorities with any other anti-occupation agenda.
To summarize it from the point of view of a mother – I will never allow my daughter to go and demonstrate where the alleged ideology of the demonstrators is used against her.
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The author considers herself a feminist cyber-activist, demonstrating against violations of human rights of all kinds through her keyboard, and in her Hebrew blog.
By Dubi Kanengisser, on August 1st, 2010
A new study published by Project Information Literacy argues that professors aren’t cognizant enough of the needs of the digital-native generation, and provide the wrong kind of information in assignment handouts. The argument, as I understand it from skimming the full paper (pdf), is that professors demand too much in the way of independent information gathering skills (because “most students lack a seminal understanding about what conducting research means as a form of intellectual inquiry and discovery”), but at the same time, as one of the researchers said in the interview with CHE, professors
may underestimate students’ ability to process information, given their familiarity with the Internet. “Things have changed so much, but assignments haven’t,” she said. “Digital natives are different, and teaching them is different.”
But how can these two conclusions co-exist? If students are so adept at navigating the web – a huge pool of information – how come they have such poor information gathering skills?
The truth is, as another recent study found, and any net-dwelling professor or TA who sat down with a student knows from experience, students aren’t nearly as web-savvy as we think they are. It’s easy to look at those kids who are connected to the web almost constantly, whose fingers fly on keyboards big and small typing at dizzying speeds, and assume that they know what they’re doing. But most of them simply don’t. They know how to operate the most basic mechanics of the computer, but they rarely know how to make use of the more powerful functions of the software they use, or utilize search engines in a more goal-oriented way. The fact that students are often stumped when they come face to face with a search engine that isn’t Google is telling – they are used to the very lenient mechanism of Google that can not only deal with the occasional misspelling, but even knows to search for synonyms, plural/singular forms and other context-driven sub-queries; when they come across a search engine that can’t do any of that, they simply don’t know how to proceed. I had a student that wanted to write a paper about the civil war in Bosnia. He went to Google and keyed in “Bosnia War”. He quickly got a bunch of sources. What he didn’t notice is that Google automatically recoded his query to “Bosnian war”. When he went to the library catalog website and used the same search term, he got nothing, and couldn’t think how to proceed from there. The age-old responses of broadening your search terms (e.g., “Bosnia”) or trying out synonyms, or even of breaking the single term into several boolean terms (“Bosnia AND war”) – all of which things that Google does automatically but most catalog search engines don’t – never occurred to him.
The PIL study admonishes professors for sticking with the “traditional” research paper, and hardly even turning to other types of assignments such as collaborative work, oral presentations or “multimedia” works, whatever that means. It also complains that professors put an emphasis on actually visiting the library rather than explaining that students can use on-line sources. Both of these misguided complaints derive from the same “digital-native” myth – that students today are somehow different from older students – different in the sense of “better” – and therefore require new types of assignments. But the truth is students are different in a bad way. Not because they’re dependent on the internet, but because they falsely believe they have a good grasp of how to use the internet.
The first recommendation, that of using non-traditional types of assignment are usually just a waste of time – for the students, for the professor or for both. Collaborative work is often a joke, and rarely good for anything other than a real-life example of the tragedy of the commons or at the very least the logic of collective action. It leads to a huge waste of time by the students and other than cutting down the time the prof/TA spend grading the results (because there are fewer of them), the time/quality ratio is takes a serious hit. Oral presentations are certainly very beneficial, but only in very small classes – otherwise they waste far too much class time – and usually, only if they accompany a written paper. An oral presentation is too often just an excuse for a very short paper, while given undue benefit to the more charismatic/dramatic of students at the expense of actual academic merit. Finally, multimedia projects seem to me to be the kind of project that puts most of the emphasis on a student’s technical abilities and visual creativity rather than on her intellectual-academic creativity. All of these take phenomenon that have become more prominent (but by no means more common) through the internet, such as youtube clips or podcasts, and assume that “this is what kids today like”. Well, surprise, most kids never uploaded anything to youtube more creative that a mobile-cam clip of their buddies getting shitfaced drunk at a party, and probably never listened to a podcast in their life.
The second recommendation, that of focusing on web-based methods of finding information (because, presumably, that comes more naturally to students) seems to contradict the whole premise of the “diginal-native” – if they’re so good at web-research, why do they need help with it? In fact, if I had to guess why profs had to refer their students specifically to the library shelves it is exactly because, as experience shows, they never bother going there. Students aren’t familiar with the most basic tricks of the trade – like looking at the shelves surrounding a book you found through a catalog search, because they contain more books on the same subject. As noted in the study, most of these assignment handouts are built over the years, with young professors including very little in the way of instructions, while veteran ones handing out pages and pages of them. Since this is the process assignment handouts are built, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that what is included in them is what profs find is missing from students’ papers. Most commonly – actual books. Even with rudimentary searching skills most students will be able to locate a couple of half-reasonable academic texts on most topics, so professors aren’t likely to feel this needs to be mentioned. But it’s much easier to notice that students often just don’t use books at all, and therefore send them to the library.
What seems astounding to me is that the clearest recommendation that needs to be derived from the data in this study is never even alluded to. Professors spend an inordinate amount of time teaching their students the basic skills of information gathering and essay writing. Time and time again professors find it necessary to include in their handouts instructions on what it means to write a research paper, or devote time in class to bring in a librarian to teach the students about finding relevant sources. As a TA I was instructed in some cases to spend about half of my tutorial time simply taking students step by step through the process of writing a paper (in one extreme case, the remainder of tutorial time was dedicated strictly to student oral presentations, meaning we never got to discuss the course material in tutorial!). Many professors complained that they cannot trust their students to know the first thing about writing a research paper. And yet, somehow, even after this experience, students need to be told this information again the next time they’re required to write a paper.
Am I the only one who feels something is amiss here? Doesn’t this indicate that there’s a serious flaw in the education provided to students? Why should professors waste their class time on teaching students who to write papers? Why isn’t this being taught in a dedicated required course by a professor skilled in teaching this particular and most critical skill for academic life? We all know high-schools are not providing this skill to students. Colleges must pick up the slack, but not haphazardly by demanding that professors use up their own class time to teach this to students. Colleges must see this as a requisite part of an undergraduate’s education. Don’t blame some mythical “digital-native” for the failings of college students. It’s not that the professors are simply not keeping up with the times and must change their ways. It is simply that students are never taught how to do what students were always expected to do. Rather than change our expectations of our students, we should re-emphasize the most basic of expectations from out colleges and universities: teach them.
By Dubi Kanengisser, on July 24th, 2010
Activists organizing the Israeli part of the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah recently published a call to their friends in this important battle to come to the demos in modest clothing. The activists, well aware of how problematic this request is, not only clarified right away that “nobody is asking women to don a hijab”, but even proposed this as important for the promotion of the feminist struggle: “many of our female Palestinian partners, as well as our male Palestinian partners, expressed discomfort at revealing clothing. Some women are explicitly avoiding the demos because of this issue [...] the presence of Palestinian women activists in the demos is something we are not willing to give up.” I.e., the demand is coming from the Palestinian women (and, therefore, does not constitute oppression of women), and the goal is to promote the political participation of Palestinian women, so it justifies the limitations placed on the freedoms of Jewish women.
This is common enough in left-wing struggles: it’s hard to fight for all the just causes at the same time, and it’s hard to promote equality for all at the same time. The result got the nickname “left-wing cannibalism” – the struggle for one left-wing goal is carried out at the expense of another, at times downright humiliating another group. The most extreme example is PETA, the animal-rights organization whose sole means of getting attention is the objectification of women and the use of soft pornography. The “ethical” and green American Apparel often uses similar tactics. But the feminists aren’t always on the losing side: feminism itself was often accused of similar behaviour. Thus, for example, the liberal feminism of the second wave was accused of caring only for the rights of white upper-middle class women, whose freedom was won at the expense of non-white, lower class women. The feud between different branches of feminist in recent decades often revolves around this very question of how women’s equality can be promoted when there is no agreement among them of what such an equality means, since what some see as humiliation and oppression (or “false consciousness”), others see as part of the core of their beliefs, their culture or their self-definition as women.
Now the activists of Sheikh Jarrah are at this very fault-line, trying to navigate their way safely, but I’ll be very surprised if they’ll emerge unscathed from this. The question is whether it is possible not to choose – is it possible to act both to promote the interests of the Palestinians (some of whom do not accept the liberal demand for full freedom for women) as well as for the promotion and preservation of women’s rights? Or must we choose? And if we must choose, how?
Currently, the activists chose to limit (if only partially) the freedom of Jewish women coming to demonstrate for the shared goal. The original message, meticulously phrased, didn’t say it outright, but it didn’t take long for the comments threat to arrive at the basic argument that you can’t possibly compare the substantial oppression of the Palestinians with the seemingly superficial and insignificant oppression of women implicit in this demand. “The right of Jerusalem’s Arabs to equality before the law, and to not be evacuated from their homes, seems far more important to me than my right to wear shorts,” wrote Shira, for example. But while Shira presents it as if the harm is only to herself (and therefore it is her right to waive her rights in this instance), Menny hit on the critical point: “we have to choose the important struggle now. And the struggle against the settlement in Sheikh Jarrah is higher on the agenda in my view than the concern for the rights of women within Palestinian society.” Menny is correct – the capitulation here means giving up on the struggle for women’s equality within Palestinian society, not just a momentary inconvenience for Jewish women. And he’s willing to give that up too. And how can we not bring in the C word? “the perception that we came to help or that our dress or behaviour is more enlightened or more right is wholly colonialist. I am not here to educate,” wrote Alona. The very idea that feminist notions can be made part of the struggle is “colonialist”, because women’s equality is a Western principle, one that is foreign to the local population. And since we live in a relativist world, we presumably no longer see western liberal principles as superior to traditional ones. And here you have the whole logical progression: there is no harm done to feminism; feminism can wait; feminism should butt the fuck out.
But why shouldn’t we be there to educate? The left tries to educate everyone all the time – why should the Palestinians be exempt? After all, these traditionalist Palestinians are now in the best possible position to recognize the justice in left-wing ideals. If we wait until the goal is achieved and only then turn around to lecture the Palestinians on gender equality, it will be too late – the freedom attained through the struggle will flow wholesale to the arms of the men, and the women will remain voiceless to fight for their own rights. It is exactly situations like the current one that create rare opportunities to equalize rights of men and women. Throughout history, times of struggle were times when women were allowed to obtain power that was denied them in more peaceful times. If they let those moments slip by without cementing their new place in society, they soon lost it. So it was that the first World War allowed women, who were called to aid in the war effort in the factories, to obtain political and social rights in many places, rights that stayed with them after the war ended (maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that the last democracy to enfranchise women was Switzerland…).
Now is a time that we can come to the Palestinians with a clear message: We are here, at your side, because we wish to end your oppression. We believe it is an evil that must cease. But we will not agree for you to maintain an oppressed minority within a minority. If you wish to grab the current opportunity to obtain your freedom, you must extend such freedom to your women as well. One cannot truly fight one oppression by the strengthening of another. The left’s opposition to oppression comes from a complete world-view, in which everything is tied to everything else. One cannot use liberal language to condemn the oppression of the Palestinian people, but avoid it when describing the oppression of the Palestinian woman (or the Jewish one, for that matter – let us no pretend the feminist struggle among Israel’s Jews has already been concluded).
How some people, like the above-cited Alona, can so strongly oppose the oppression of the Palestinian people on the one hand, but fail to see the problem in the continued oppression of women in one society or another, I can never fathom. I cannot understand what coherent worldview can generate such an odd combination. The only thought process I can conceive of that might lead to this, is political activism aimed solely at keeping one’s conscience clear, by those who have managed to convince themselves that the occupation is the source of all evil, and no other evil exists.
But spit-shining one’s conscience is not an ideology. The fight against occupation and oppression must be derived from an analysis of reality combined with a coherent worldview. As things stand, and despite the truly important work the Sheikh Jarrah activists are carrying out at no small personal cost, their decision to require modest dress from their fellow activists implies both these factors are faulty in their operation.
Originally published on my Hebrew Blog, July 22, 2010.
By Dubi Kanengisser, on July 17th, 2010
One of the debates raging currently in Israel has to do with a new bill dealing with the question of conversion into Judaism and its recognition by the state. One of the aspects of the bill is that Reform Judaism conversion will not longer be accepted by the state for the purposes of the Law of Return. One text dealing with this debate, written by, of all things, a civics education high-school teacher, called Ohad Shaked, was published recently by Israeli newspaper Maariv (Hebrew). In it, Mr. Shaked explains why he thinks Reform Jews aren’t Jews at all. The text is so replete with errors and baseless assertions that I find it quite disturbing that this man actually teaches high-school kids how to be citizens of Israel. Let’s go over the text point by point.
When I am asked who can decide who is a Muslim, I suppose that the Muslim clergy, the Sharia court, is the one who may decide the definitions and rules for defining someone as a Muslim. The same goes for the Catholic or the Protestant church.
There’s more than a dozen kinds and types of Islam that differ on many things, sometimes on what some of them see as the very core of their beliefs. What everyone agrees on, however, is that Islam has no hierarchy. Islam, in its various guises, works on the basis of a combination of the Jewish “make thyself a Rabbi” and the Protestant principle according to which the priest is not a link between the Lord and the individual, but rather each individual communicates with his God directly, while the priest is mainly a guide on the way. That’s why the Protestants translated the bible into the different vernaculars while the Catholics stuck for the longest time to the Latin version only.
The claim that there is, somewhere, a Sharia court that decides who is a Muslim is almost as ungrounded as the claim that there is somewhere a global Jewish court that decides who is a Jew. There is no such thing. It’s an invention of the State of Israel. Before the Chief Rabbinate was created by the state, the main means of telling who was a Jew was the testimony of other Jews – a network of Jewish communities recognizing eachother was used to mutually identify their members. Thus, if a certain community’s rabbi decided to convert someone, then that person became a Jew by virtue of that rabbi’s decision, and there was no superior body that would discredit such a conversion. And how do we know that rabbi is true to the Torah? Simple, lots of Jews made him their rabbi. What more evidence do we need?
The Reforms are, despite common perception, not like the Christians’ Protestants. The Protestants didn’t invent a whole new religion while wiping out the entire previous religion and leaving nothing but the culture, rather they base their religion on the Catholic religion and believe in the same principles of belief, practice the same Christian practices.
Ah, like transubstantiation? Oh, no. So like the confession? Oh, wait. Belief in the Pope? Hold on…
The Protestant religion (which itself, of course, is made of a large number of branches, some of which are mutually contradictory) is based on the same text of the New Testament, but is substantially different from the Catholic religion. Just like Reform Judaism. They didn’t “invent a whole new religion while wiping out the entire previous religion and leaving nothing but the culture.” Such a description of Reform Judaism can only be the result of ignorance, or hate, or both. Not too surprising coming from a man who seems to know nothing about religions other than his own.
The problem with Judaism is that, for some reason, people who have nothing to do with Judaism, no relationship to the religion or the religious history – decide they know who is a Jew and try to force this on everyone.
Despite what Mr. Shaked is implying here, Reform Judaism is not a bunch of Christians who decided it would be neat to be Jewish, but didn’t feel like going through the whole conversion process, so they came up with something else. Reform Judaism started in the 19th century as a result of the Haskala movement – the Jewish Enlightenment – and tried throughout the years to form a middle-way between orthodoxy and secularization. That is, exactly in opposition to what Mr. Shaked says, the Reform movement tried to prevent a division in Judaism, not create it. Reform Rabbis also won quite a bit of support from Jewish communities is some areas. Most of the Reform Jews in the US, for example, are the descendants of Orthodox Jews, and not of some hodge-podge of gentiles who got an easy conversion (because being a Jew, I guess, is cool).
Whoever was converted in a Reform conversion is not a Jew. Period.
Nothing more convincing than an argument that, instead of providing an explanation, just says “period”. Period.
The problem with giving a marriage license [to Reform converts] in Israel is not a civic problem, but a religious one. [...] The problem is not whether or not you are married according to religion. The problem is your child’s Jewishness is placed in doubt, because one’s best proof of one’s Jewishness is his parents’ marriage certificate. [...] The problem starts in the third generation, when it is most likely that this certificate is no longer kept, because you don’t really care about being Jewish. But your grandchild might want to get married as a Jew and return to his roots, like happens to many today, with the help of God, but then he’ll find out he’s not Jewish. He will live like a Jew, have an Israeli citizenship, learn in a Jewish school, celebrate Jewish holidays (in a secular manner, of course), but he will not be a Jew. Totally not a Jew. To become a Jew he will have to undergo full conversion.
And how is this at all different from anywhere else in the world? In other words, why is this a problem “in Israel”? Answer: because in Israel there is not “religious problem that is not a civic problem”, because the state gave itself to the hands of the religious establishment. The religious establishment is the only one who may issue marriage licenses and divorce certificates, and has a near monopoly on burial. If my grandson wishes to “return” to Judaism and finds out he can’t, I’ll be ecstatic, and how he’ll figure out for himself that he doesn’t want to be a member of a club that wouldn’t have him. I never can understand why religious people think this argument should convince seculars – what if one day your grandchild would want to become religious?! they always ask in amazement. And I don’t understand why I should be sad if those religious people will so kindly prevent my grandson from making the worst mistake of his life. “And what if your son decides to secularize?” I respond – why don’t you provide them the secular education that will prepare them for life as seculars? Because that is not an option, and why the hell should they help their child go against their beliefs? Good question.
(Note, by the way, that the grandson of the Reform Jews celebrates the Jewish holidays “in a secular manner, of course”, because there’s no different between secular Jews and Reform Jews, and even if there was, there’s no chance the grandson of a Reform Jew will be anything but a complete secular.)
The problem is that very quickly we’ll end up in a situation of one state for two people – Jews who live according to Halacha, and those who are not Jews.
And I should worry about that? You religious people worry about it. You’re the one rejecting everyone who isn’t like you. I’m fully prepared to accept you as perfect equals.
The Orthodox sector (which comprises some 35% of Israel’s Jewish citizens) will issue a religious ruling that one must not marry anyone whose Jewish credentials are 100% certain. This is a terrible hassle for your grandchildren, who will discover that from all sorts of aspects, they are not Jews.
Oh, no! My grandchild will be hassled when he tries to make the biggest mistake of his life! And who are you kidding, Mr. Shaked? No Orthodox Jew will let his daughter marry my grandson. Which is fine by me. Maybe, with a little luck, my grandkid will convince his girlfriend to switch over to his side. Why not?
(I’m skipping over the burial issue, which is basically more of the same.)
Even when the traditionalist Jews talk against the rabbinate, everyone knows they’ll go to get married there of their own free will, not because they have to.
Really? So what’s the problem? Give them free choice. If we are such an insignificant minority, if virtually everyone will go get married at the rabbinate anyway, then what’s the problem? The traditionalist Jew will come with his beloved to the rabbinate, discover she is not Jewish, and he will immediately lose all affection to this evil temptress and get rid of her, since they “understand the importance of maintaining Jewish traditions. And whoever does not marry in the rabbinate will not be a Jew. They, unlike many of the opponents of the bill, want to stay Jewish.” So far Reform converts could immigrate to Israel. I saw no deluge of blue-eyed former Christians. So where’s the big threat? What’s the source of this threat if – note – nothing will change (because, of course, the people who are offering to change the status quo are the those who proposed the bill, not those who oppose it).
The threat is there because Mr. Shaked and his ilk don’t really believe they can maintain they hegemony, which dwindles away everywhere but in the country that gave them a legal monopoly. The threat is there because they know if they don’t impose themselves on everybody, they will slowly fade away, because the majority of that so-called “Orthodox majority” which is composed, according to Mr. Shaked, of 70% of Israel’s Jews, is only Orthodox when it is convenient. Those who have no problem to drive on a Sabbath so they can watch the game, will also agree to get married in a Reform ceremony if the rabbinate refuse to recognize their partner’s Jewishness.
The Orthodox establishment, then, is afraid the Jews will “make themselves a rabbi”, and that rabbi will be a modern, Reform or Conservative one, not an Orthodox one.
We can only thank the rabbinate for preventing such a situation. Thank it, and shut up.
And this, my friends, is the essence of civic behaviour according to the educator Ohad Shaked. My condolences to his pupils.
–
I should comment that I have no great admiration of Reform Judaism. Every religions is superstition in my view, and I cannot fathom why an educated person should prefer Reform Judaism over abandoning religion altogether. However, I do believe in freedom, including the freedom of religion, and I think every battle against the religious establishment’s death-grip over Israel’s public life is a worthy battle.
(Originally published on my Hebrew blog on July 16, 2010).
Notes:
By Dubi Kanengisser, on June 26th, 2010
I sometimes enjoy tormenting myself by reading the local Hebrew newspaper, Shalom Toronto. Today, while perusing it I ran across an article describing the fund-raising delegation that recently arrived in Canada on behalf of the ironically named The Israel Independence Fund (I guess economic independence isn’t on their agenda). The organization, a sort of “Im Tirtzu” with lesser PR, is very concerned for the future of zionism, and wishes to promote and fund good zionist organizations. What kind of wonderful zionist projects are among their funded cohort? One is the pre-military academy “Arzei Halevanon”, situated in the West Bank and headed by Zeev Sharon, of whose humanistic values I already wrote; another is “Beit Mibereshit”, headed by rabbi Mordechai Elon; also included are somewhat less malignant-appearing organizations, such as the Upper Galilee Legacy Association. Also, however, are two organizations that caught my eye.
One of them, and the one also mentioned in the Shalom Toronto article, is “Hashomer Hekhadash” (The New Guard). The other, “Mishmeret Yesha” (Yesha Guardians – Yesha being the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Sumeria [aka, the West Bank] and Gaza. The website says “Yesh” but the logo clearly reads “Yesha”). Both of these are vigilante organizations: citizens who volunteer for security missions in militia-like fashion, both cases focused on protection from minorities, even though they present themselves are providing protection from criminals in general. In both cases, also, the organizations attribute to themselves also an education agenda – Hashomer‘s website speaks of strengthening Zionist ideals, which the Mishmeret‘s description on the Fund‘s website includes mention of educational activities, “land redemption”, as well as maintaining a legal fund – I’ll leave it to your imagination to think what that is for. I don’t know much about the Mishmeret, so I’ll focus on the New Guard instead.
Modern Zionism appeared on the world scene approximately 150 years ago in order to restore the Jewish people to their ancient homeland—Israel. Threatened with physical extinction whether through persecution, physical annihilation or cultural assimilation, the Zionist mission then and now continues to be the preservation of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.
There’s quite a lot in this short paragraph that appears on the Fund‘s website to describe this organization. It’s hard to actually understand from it what it does, but you can see heaps of hysteria: persecution, annihilation, assimilation, the preservation of the Jewish people. And all this for what? For an organization that was created to protect agricultural lands in the Israeli’s periphery from the Bedouin threat. Both the organization’s website and the Shalom Toronto article mention cooperation with the Ministry of Internal Security (formerly known as the Ministry of Police, renamed to give it a more glamorous image), and I can only wonder how Israel’s sovereignty is strengthened (in accordance with one of the goals of the Guard, when instead of the state’s own authorities doing their job and protecting the farmers from crime, the monopoly over the use of violence is transferred to civilian organizations. This organization, like the Mishmeret, is also active in the educational field, to promote “the values that define our identity: Zionism, Judaism, democracy”.
–
There is a movement in Israeli society of late towards a romanticism of the days of “khalutzim” – the pioneers who settled the land and conquered “Hebrew labour”. Organizations like the Israel Independence Fund and The New Guard, as well as “Im Tirtzu”, are characterized by this longing to a return to the simpler days before the state was founded, when the Jews were the few against the many, the weak against the strong, the good against the evil. Like all romanticist movements, there is a yearning to a past that never really existed, to a purity that is more imagined and marketed than historical and factual. I would like to say that this is the swan’s song of Jewish exclusionary nationalism, that this outburst is a reaction to the oncoming change, and that neo-Zionism will not withstand the rolling waves of history. But I’m hardly that optimistic. Yes, this is reactionray, but it is the reactionism of a hegemonic perception against a weak, marginal enemy, wh0se threat is largely fictional. Even worse – it is a reactionism that reigns in the fears and weakness of the mainstream to pull it to the right, and it is one reactionary movement that is easily successful in achieving its goals.
This blog is named after the acronym of the definition of the role of governance according to the Canadian constitution: Peace, Order and Good Government. Neo-zionism, although it defines itself as supportive of the state of Israel, actually undermines the state in this definition. It demands that the state give up all hope for peace, or order, or good government, and commit itself entirely to the nation, that emotional creation – it demands that Gilad Shalit be released at all costs, including the release of vicious murderers, but also for the harsh oppression of the civilian population of Gaza; it calls for giving free reign to the security forces on the one hand, and the unleashing of civil militias to “protect” the citizens (those of them belonging to the right nation), on the other; it flaunts its democratic feathers, but at the same time demands that the wrong opinions be silences, that professors with the wrong values be dismissed and that citizenship will be revoked to those who do not fit its standards of “loyalty” to the state.
I see many commentaries recently lamenting the crumbling down of Israeli democracy. One can keep hoping for salvation through the gutters, but right now it feels far more likely that the new Jewish ultra-nationalism is simply going to drown Israel in a river of shit.
(Originally posted on my Hebrew blog on June 24, 2010.)
By Dubi Kanengisser, on June 24th, 2010
I’ve recently read Lene Hansen’s Security As Practice. The book offers a methodological framework for post-structuralist discourse analysis. I must admit the book got me quite excited, in as much as one may use terms like “excitement” when discussing methodology, and I’m now considering revising (slightly) the goals of my thesis so that I may base it on a variation on her method.
At any rate, for the methodology not to be completely disconnected from practicality, the second half of the book is an application of the research design she described to the case of Western discourse surrounding the war in Bosnia in the 90′s. In the concluding chapter, which also reviews the benefits and limitations of the methodology, there was one sentence that I copied down as of particular interest, not because it is relevant to my research, but because I felt it says something substantial about the current situation in Gaza, the flotilla, and the whole discourse and counterdiscourse surrounding the siege.
The Discourse of ‘humanitarian responsibility’ “constituted a ‘civilian victim’ to whom humanitarian responsibility was extended, but this subject was only ethically privileged insofar as it maintained a separation from the realm of political and military agency. ‘Innocence’ in turn was depoliticized and dehistoricized”.
I think one may see a parallel between the situation described by Hansen and the situation in Gaza today, at least with regard to the rejection on the side of Israeli discourse to the idea of humanitarian aid to Gaza. For example, many argued against the flotilla that they don’t really want to bring humanitarian aid, but rather that this is a political act. Again, as in Bosnia, humanitarianism is perceived as relevant only if it is disconnected from politics, and the two cannot co-exist. There cannot be a political act of humanitarian aid, since these are polar opposites.
Similarly, when they addressed the question of the justification of providing humanitarian aid to Gaza’s residents, the objectors raised the argument that the Palestinians in Gaza voted for Hamas (and therefore lost their right for minimal living conditions, if this is what Israel decides is the most expedient way to preserve its interests). The very fact that Palestinians have become political agents denies them the right for basic living conditions. One might see here an almost Hobbesian view of the act of voting – by electing the Hamas, the people of Gaza not only gave their vote to this party in a geographically and temporally bounded elections, but the actually invested their very selves in the hands of Hamas so that every action by their government is for all practical purposes their own action. It is interesting to remember, of course, that Israelis, even those who support the government, don’t attribute such mystical characteristics to their own act of voting — one need only think, in this regard, of the responses to the cancellations of concerts by Elvis Costello, the Pixies and others recently, responses that may sometimes be read as a sort of farce on the criticism against the siege.
(An interesting example of this sort of thinking was recently published (Hebrew) in the right-wing Channel 7 radio station. A rabbi heading a pre-military academy, Rabbi Zeev Sharon, was interviewed saying that a soldier who killed a civilian during war time should not be put on trial, because the civilians of the enemy are themselves the enemy. A similar example was revealed by human rights organization Shovrim Shtika – see the discussion and video on one soldier’s account of getting orders to this effect here.)
My argument here, I should emphasize, is not similar to claims against collective punishment, or those that state the siege makes no distinction between Hamas supporters and their opposition (and one might add that it strengthens the former and weakens the latter) – although I do use such arguments myself often. In this current context, it should be clear that such arguments fall right within the boundaries of this “humanitarian aid” discourse Hansen identified: they deserve humanitarian aid, because they are not all political agents, because they are innocent victims, not part of the political, violent factor.
I have a feeling, which isn’t substantiated in any way in the book so I will leave it with this definition, that there is a link between this discourse of depoliticized humanitarian aid, and the notion of “terror”. The Geneva conventions dealt, primarily, with the question of how one should treat one’s enemy’s soldiers in a humanitarian way. The whole concept of humanitarianism arose from the crazy idea that even soldiers on the battle-field have a right to medical treatment, regardless of the proximity of their own side’s medics. The humanitarian discourse, then, did not start out with this distinction between humanitarianism and politics — who else but the soldier represents the state on the battle-field? But even he deserves medical attention and basic rights once the need arises. If we apply this to Gaza, Israel is fully within its rights to lay a siege on Gaza if it perceives all who are in it as enemy soldiers (and I will beg the question if this perception is justified or not), but it must then supply those “enemy soldiers” with all their basic needs.
The new humanitarian discourse that Hansen identified in Bosnia and I claim exists also in the case of Gaza, rejects the possibility of the two co-existing – a person who is a political agent cannot be eligible for humanitarian aid. I can hypothesize two non-exclusive tracks that led to this change. One, again, is terror. The shift to a-symmetrical war in recent decades has taken the sting from the Geneva conventions – and if one side is not committed to them, naturally the other side cannot be held to them either. If Hamas doesn’t see a need to provide the Red Cross with access to captured soldier Gilad Shalit, then Israel shouldn’t have to provide the Red Cross, or any other humanitarian organization – let alone political ones! – access to Gaza. Any agreement by Israel to transfer humanitarian aid into Gaza, then, is beyond the strict requirements of law, and therefore Israel may set whatever restrictions it damn well pleases on this aid without harming the humanitarian discourse in its new form.
The second track has to do with extending the humanitarian ideal far beyond aiding soldiers in the battle-field. Ironically, extending the humanitarian idea to larger and larger parts of the needy population (as opposed to developing other ideas of aid, for example, such as charity), eventually caused the exclusion of combatants from that very ideal. How, after all, can you include starving children in the same group with fighters armed to the teeth, and demand the same treatment for both?
What conclusions can we draw from this? One of the inherent limitations of Hansen’s framework, which she readily acknowledges (and actually argues that it is derived from the very view of post-structularism, which, as I noted, I have no idea what that is), is that one cannot derive practical conclusions from discourse analysis. It allows us to understand situations, but not to analyze causal chains. Therefore, we cannot develop policy based on such an analysis.
I see myself as less committed to Hansen’s view, and therefore think one can derive policy prescriptions from this analysis – about the best means for challenging this discourse, the best ways to oppose the policies derived from it, and the best alternative policy given the current conditions. I believe such conclusions can be drawn. I just don’t know what they are.
(Originally posted on my Hebrew blog on June 17, 2010. X-posted on IsraLeft.)
Notes:
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