Joseph Dana and I have a cover story for The Nation this week on the Israeli activists who takes part in the unarmed protest in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We discuss the history of the joint struggle, its political significance and the challenges lying ahead.
Though we say it in the text several times, it’s important to remember that this is a Palestinian struggle, and the Israelis who take part in it are neither its leaders nor its leading strategists. Jonathan Pollak, whom we interviewed just before he started serving his prison sentence, made sure we understand that:
“The participation of Israelis in demonstrations, unfortunately, does make a difference,” says Jonathan Pollak, one of the first activists to take part in the demonstrations and now media coordinator of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, a Palestinian umbrella organization of local. “It makes a difference because of the racist nature of our situation. Open-fire regulations, for instance, are a lot more stringent, officially, when Israelis are present. It is, however, important to remember that we are not much more than a side note in the movement, and that it is the Palestinians who are at its center.
“People are often fascinated by the fact that a handful of Israelis cross the lines this way. But currently this is what we really are, a handful, and the real question, in my opinion, is, How come only so few do so? The sad answer is that most Israelis simply don’t care; to most Israelis, Palestinians simply don’t really exist.”
Still, I think that even those handful of activists, as Jonathan rightly refers to them, are important. The Israeli left is going through an ideological and generational revolution. The older generation – you can call it the Peace Now generation – is in decline, and new forces, ideas and tactics are emerging. In a very generalizing way, one could say that the new left is less committed to the Two-States Solution, more critical of Zionism and believes in direct action and cooperation with Palestinians and international activists. The new left is not represented in the Knesset; it mobilizes support through social networks and has reasonably good connections to human rights groups and none-governmental organizations.
The formative years of the older generation were the seventies. Back then, only few would dare discuss the idea of a Palestinian state or a full withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967. The big peace rallies came a decade later, with the Lebanon war and the Intifada, and leading activists from those days entered the Knesset in the nineties. The greatest political achievement of this generation was Oslo; that was also the beginning of its decline. In the next decade or two, the same process could happen with the new left.
It is interesting to hear what Avrum Burg, an old Peace Now activist and former Knesset speaker, has to say on those issues (that’s from the article at The Nation as well):
“In fact, the Israeli left never recovered from Rabin’s assassination (…) Later, Ehud Barak came and presented his personal failure in Camp David [in 2000] as the failure of the entire way. When the head of the peace camp declared that there was no partner on the other side, it opened the door for unilateralism (…) There was something unilateral in Zionism from the start, but it became the only way after Camp David… We built the fence unilaterally, and we left Gaza unilaterally. Barak brought us back to the days of Golda Meir, who denied there is such a thing as a Palestinian people.”
[…]
“The meaning of Zionism in Israel today is to be Jewish and not Arab,” says former Speaker Burg, who attends the protest in Sheikh Jarrah regularly… In that context, the left cannot go on calling itself Zionist. We should ask ourselves whether Zionist humanism isn’t a contradiction in terms these days. We should go beyond ethnic democracy and toward a real joint society, in which Jews and Arabs are really equal.”
I believe that the activists of Bi’lin and Sheikh Jarrah, isolated and marginal as they look today, would set the political tone for the Jewish left in the years and decades to come. In 15-20 years, we might even find some of them in Parliament.
March 13, 2011
6:44 pm
Sometimes I am forced to agree with the right that people on the Left are naive. While activism fighting the occupation is important, you blind yourself to the fact that the occupation is only a symptom. If you want to call yourself a leftist, first read Marx’s Das Kapital which has much to say in explaining “the situation”
The economic elites in Israel, which include the army’s top brass, use nationalism and the settlement project to blind the exploited in Israel and have them fight each other. How can you hope to change anything if you ignore the suffering of your poor neighbors, Haredim, Israeli Arabs, the Mizrahim in the periphery, the exploited foreign workers etc. and only concern yourself with Palestinians? You want to end occupation and exploitation? Fight for socialism.
March 13, 2011
8:32 pm
This has been discussed before here, but it needs to be pointed out again….this “New Left” being discussed faces insurmountable hurdles in its attempt to become a serious political movement in Israel. This is because the only thing these groups agree on is opposition to the settlements and the settlers. They don’t agree on one-state or two-states, they don’t agree on whether they are pro-capitalist – pro-globalization (Avrum Burg, Bernard Avishai) or anti-capitalist – anti-globalist (Adi Ophir and many others). They don’t agree on whether they are Zionist or non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. Even saying they are for “equality” between Jews and Arabs is undefined and unclear…..does it mean that Israel will get rid of its national anthem? Will it abolish the “right of return” for Jews to Eretz Israel? Does it mean that Arabs will be put at the top leadership of the main political parties and even have a chance to become Prime Minister? Does it mean the education system of the country will be overhauled and a single mixed Arab/Jewish system will be installed? What about the role of Islam in Arab public life?
Don’t forget that by the 1880′s, all Irish people had the vote and full representation in the British Parliament, yet they still couldn’t wait to get rid of the British. Same in Northern Ireland today….all citizens are legally “equal” yet the Catholics still feel immense resentment because they are a minority and they get outvoted by the Protestant majority. It would be the same in a “non-Zionist” Israel with official equality between the two groups. Has the leadership of the “New Left” even begun to thrash out these matters?
March 13, 2011
9:01 pm
Perhaps the distinction is semantic, but I would not call what you are describing as the emergence of a “new” Israeli left, but rather, the reemergence of an old left to the forefront of the Zionist movement. Ber Borochov’s “inverted pyramid” saw Zionism as an expression of the class struggle, bringing Jews and Arabs together, rather than of a nationalist struggle, pitting them against one another. Y.L. Magnes and Martin Buber promoted the idea of Ichud, or a bi-national state, while Yonatan Ratosh, a Revisionist and founder of the Canaanite movement, believed in the emergence of a transcendent nationality combining Jewish immigrants with the indigenous population. Even Zeev Jabotinsky toyed with the idea of two culturally autonomous communities, Jewish and Arab, with a common political meta-structure. In the Labor movement there are indications that Chaim Arlosoroff was also favorable to the idea and that had he not been assassinated, he would have prevented the establishment of an ethnic state by Ben Gurion.
The problem is that these ideas have largely been lost, and the people who advocated for these positions have largely been forgotten, even though, in their time, they represented powerful trends in the nascent Zionist movement. That history took the course it did is largely the result of external factors. Since the rise of Hitler and especially after World War II, for instance, there was a sense of urgency surrounding the need to find a solution to the problem of Jewish refugees. Jewish leaders decided to put the real problems of Palestine on the back burner, though in hindsight they were probably mistaken.
The point is, however, that this is not some new left but rather a reemergence of the old left from the turn of the twentieth century. Presenting it as such could help to ease its acceptance by those Israeli Jews, who are caught up in the dissonance between national identity and a desire to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.
March 13, 2011
9:26 pm
Danny Wool and “AT” both bring out another problem with the New Left. It is very nice to go dig up some dusty book by Borochov or Ratosh (how many Israelis can even identify who they were?) with some different ideas about Zionism, but isn’t this yet another example of the Jews negotiating with themselves about the future of Arabs of the country? What ideas have existed among the Arabs about their relationship with the Jews of the country? Do the Arabs even want what the New Left is offering them?