Despite the importance of the J14 movement’s demand for social justice, by calling for the restoration of the welfare state while ignoring the mechanisms of Israel’s ethno-national colonial regime that fosters occupation, activists are actually propagating the status quo, rather than undermining it.
By Noa Shaindlinger
Some have been arguing that the J14 movement has radicalized and matured since last year’s protests. But an examination of the “social protest” discourse and goals reveals this is not the case, and that it actually works in tandem with the current regime and political order.
I am writing this as the streets of central and north Tel Aviv are packed with protesters carrying banners of all colors and slogans, followed and surrounded by a staggering number of riot police, Border Police officers and regular police forces. I am sitting at home instead of joining some of my friends who are out there. As they did last summer, thousands of people are marching down Ibn Gvirol Street chanting, “The people demand social justice” and “We are the majority,” calling to reinstitute a welfare state. While calls for social justice, public housing and equal access to state resources are just in and of themselves, one should examine the context in which these demands are articulated.
From its inception, the J14 movement created straw men – the “tycoons” in bed with the government and ostensibly responsible for ongoing processes of privatization and accumulation of capital in the hands of the few. However, this focus on the neoliberal economy as the reason democracy went awry obfuscates the colonial nature of the state, which enables this neoliberal order.
Zionist colonialism in Palestine strove to concentrate wealth and resources in Jewish hands. Its most valuable resource remains land. This process peaked first in 1948 and then in 1967, with the completion of the occupation of mandatory Palestine. The colonial state created several different mechanisms and systems to cement Ashkenazi Jewish control of political, economic and cultural resources. For Palestinians, whether citizens of Israel or subjects of the military rule in 1967 territories, the Israeli state has never successfully postured as a democracy.
But we mustn’t overlook other groups that are also colonized and that have been subordinated by the elites to varying extents: the working and underclasses, many of them Mizrahim; queers; non-Jewish asylum seekers; and labor migrants. The colonized status of some groups is sometimes expressed through complicity with the political order – hence, most Jews (Mizrahi or not) serve in the army and (actively or not) support the state. The psychology of this complicity is a topic for another post.
Public housing, welfare and democracy are all worthy causes, but when they are demanded in the name of “all of us,” they mask existing power relations and illusions that they produce – namely, the absence of the Palestinians (whether citizens or subjects of Israeli military rule) from the equation. In the Galilee, for instance, J14’s demands for public housing means more land confiscation from Palestinian villages and towns. In the West Bank, the welfare of Jewish settlers and the sale of spacious villas and modern apartments are the result of an ongoing land grab from nearby Palestinian communities.
No “social justice” movement leader ever implied that reclaiming public space is made possible only because that space was already colonized and ethnically cleansed of its owners, who became refugees living in overpopulated and under-developed camps. When Tel Aviv residents marched through the city center, no one mentioned they were marching through what was once the orchards and fields of what was once the village of Sumail. I have yet to hear Daphni Leef or Stav Shaffir acknowledge the impending demolitions in Susya, or link the plight of al-Arakib to demands for social justice.
I am also writing this text after participating in another Friday demonstration in Nabi Saleh, which brings me to my final point. Protesters in Tel Aviv complained this week about police brutality against unarmed civilians and mass arrests. Not a word was uttered about the fact that Israeli security forces use extreme violence on a daily basis against protesters in the West Bank, not to mention the shelling of terrified residents trapped in the Gaza Strip. Under military rule, no protest is legal, and Palestinians who take to the streets or fields of Ni’lin, Hebron, or Qalandia are met with a barrage of tear gas, rubber (and sometimes live) bullets, skunk water and brutal arrests. Detainees are often denied medical care, legal assistance, food and drink, and are routinely physically and mentally abused and even tortured.
None of the Israeli Jews arrested in the streets of Tel Aviv can expect a fraction of this treatment, as they are entitled to certain rights by law, rights that are denied from the subjects of Israel’s military rule. Many or even most protesters who swarm the streets of Tel Aviv have served in the army, and perhaps even took part in acts of “pacification,” interrogation or abuse of Palestinians at checkpoints.
J14, despite calls for social justice and the participation of a few well-intentioned activists, works in tandem with the current colonial regime rather than undermining it. Flying the Zionist flag in the name of “the people” during protests for social justice and democracy renders these demands meaningless, and points to the tacit intention of organizers: keeping the political status quo while slightly improving the socio-economic position of those who already benefit from it.
Noa Shaindlinger is a PhD student at the University of Toronto, a human rights activist and citizen journalist.
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Eyal
I’ll write a response to your final point. Yes, the J14 protesters don’t encounter a fraction of the treatment that a protester in Nabi Saleh encounters. But the J14 protests represent a first awareness in many people of the fact that such brutality exists in Israel. It allows them to understand what it means that these things are done to protesters in Nabi Saleh by presenting them with first-hand experience, albeit of a lesser nature. It encourages the possibility of solidarity between various groups, including people who would never consider going to Nabi Saleh and those who do.
Your article ignores all this and more. It belittles and minimizes all the many positive aspects of J14, and misrepresents the feelings and ideologies of the people who participate it.
And if you ask me, you do this because it doesn’t suit your ideology. I can understand it- if it were possible for the J14 protests to address these things and remain as widespread, I would be thrilled, too. But the fact that J14 doesn’t fit my needs entirely doesn’t mean that I’m going to attack it mean-spiritedly the way you do.
Richard Witty
I think J14 should go the opposite direction to your prescription Noa, in the sense that I think it should be less radical (strident) and more grass-roots as in mutual aid efforts.
That the posing of positions is made as color-blind as its been in a very long time in Israel, is the revolution already. Anything “more radical” is in fact less radical, less truthful, less beneficial.
The insistence that the J14 address the occupation either as prerequisite to other issues, or exclusively, is frankly whining.
There are other formations of issues than the political scope and framing that you endorse.
I am hopeful that so long as the color-blind aspiration of J14 is preserved, that the occupation will be seen as absurd, and as unnecessary.
But, the insistence of radicalism in effect kills that effort, in that the argument declaring that the occupation is unnecessary (not only harmful), gets lost. The polemic itself demonstrates that the occupation may be necessary, that the hatred of Israel and Israelis remains.
Is a food or energy or housing cooperative of all the residents of an otherwise segregated town, more progressive or less progressive than a large demonstration in opposition to the wall?
I say more progressive. It is NOT waiting to initiate new relations. It is doing it, and not pretentiously.
Ami Kaufman
What Eyal said.
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Plus, what I wrote last week: http://972mag.com/why-j14-movement-should-keep-occupation-off-the-agenda/49659/
Kolumn9
That’s so cute. Noa hates J14 because they aren’t protesting for the destruction of Israel. According to Noa, if the J14 people really wanted social justice they would be marching to the airport demanding free flights out of Israel for all Jews so as to not offend any Arabs by marching on land where one Arab or another may have once parked a camel.
Kolumn9
Ami, your article isn’t relevant. She couldn’t care less about the occupation you are obsessed with. Her concern is the simple fact that people in the J14 movement might actually march with Israeli flags on land she believes is Palestine – Tel Aviv.
Noa Shaindlinger
Eyal,
I marched with J14 last year in the hope that the few of us, progressives, will be able to influence the hegemonic discourse of the movement. Nothing has changed. So it’s not about J14 not ‘suiting’ my ideology or about being ‘mean spirited.’ I propose a radical framework of analysis here that most are unwilling or unable to engage in, exactly because of their own complicity in the status quo.
On a personal level, I have come to acknowledge a certain line I will not cross, namely being coopted in the name of social justice to promote and perpetuate the existing political order. I don’t think I have to apologize or explain anything that I do or refrain from doing.
Noa Shaindlinger
Richard,
The liberal notion of ‘color blindedness’ is completely divorced from any real power relations that exist on the ground. My framework is colonial (or anticolonial really) which means taking into account the differential positions that people inhabit while considering the intersections between class, gender, race and ethnicity, among other things. The fact is that by insisting on a liberal – and therefore meaningless – framework by speaking FOR ‘everyone’ the movement completely elides those absences I pointed to and in fact cements inequalities rather than addresses them.
susy
Touché: a very poignant article. The comments of KOLUMN9 represent a further evidence of it
Richard Witty
Noa,
I think you miss many constituencies that are also critical relations.
The theme of mutual aid is anarchist, just to clarify, though not the smash windows version, the participatory kind.
In adopting the 99% theme, J14 is addressing class, as in working versus owning class.
In adopting a color-blind (at least partially) basis of organizing, J14 is addressing race and ethnicity).
I find the anti-colonial theme to be off frankly, and sadly marries reactionary themes of “you weren’t here in the past, so you don’t have any rights in the present” with aspiration for equal rights of those that aren’t new in a region (however they got there).
The relationship between Israel and Palestine is only insignificantly of the classical colonial form, of exploiting resources and labor. (That is not to say that that doesn’t happen, but that it is insignificant.)
To address a neo-colonial assertion, you would first have to pick which of the many flavors of neo-colonial you are asserting is parallel.
In summary, my sense is that the grassroots (mutual aid) form of J14 is already post-revolutionary, and doesn’t need a lot of doctrinaire noise to realize critical social change and improvement in individual and social welfare.
Richard Witty
I run my criteria of my own political endeavors through the lens of “care” rather than any certified political analysis.
By encouraging the degree and breadth of active and emotional caring for others, activism may be effective.
Ideological based activism is too much of a gamble for me as to actual outcome, and willingness to adopt frankly cruel means (interpersonal condemnation or worse) to accomplish a gambling end.
Kolumn9
Hahaha. Noa wants J14 to march with banners that say ‘Arabs good. Jews bad. Mizrachim good. Ashkenazim bad. Women good. Men bad.’ and all in the interests of promoting equality. What Israel really needs is a movement of Arabs, Mizrachim and women to come together to take on the male Ashkenazim and push them out of the country or is it only until they are on the ground begging for mercy, pleading for their lives while apologizing for the sin of being born who they are and the perceived sins of their grandparents? I just can’t decide which of these goals is more humane.
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So, Noa, at what age did you decide to despise yourself?
max
Noa has a framework when addressing the social issues addressed by J14ers – sounds dogmatic and scary, an answer to each situation…
I’d argue that this reflects an attitude of “I want Justice, not Results, and I am Justice and want it all Now”.
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The only political value I can see with such views is that it makes J14′s calls seem more valid.
PAUL
There is ironically a common naivety among many comments here, including the author. There are winners and losers in politics, its the outcome of “power”, its reality…not all demonstrators on all demonstrations need to be singing from some unified political hymn sheet (to suggest otherwise is mildly odd, nostalgic, collectivist- “Am” – “we the people” slogans blah blah, just rings hollow in London, Paris, Dublin…).. you protest against the brutality of the occupation.. I protest against house prices or vice versa… u convince me, I convince you.. its called politics, persuasion debate…..this Israeli Leftist-Centrist-Rightist angst about having a singular collectivist message… is well, so Parochial Israeli….time to grow up, look around we all have different priorities…you don’t have to join mine..
Rehmat
J14 protests are an extension of mass “tent” protests against Netanyahu’s economic policies last year.
Various studies show it, including the latest ones saying 1.77 million (out of total Jewish population of 4.7 million) Israelis are poor. About 850,000 children live in poverty. As a result, 75% of those affected miss meals, a 21% increase from 2009. Moreover, 83% of poor children lack proper dental care, most getting none. Some beg for money. Others steal to eat.
These figures put Zionist entity worse than the war-torn third world African nation of Somalia – where according to a report by the UN, one in three children in South Somalia suffers from malnutrition. While Somalian are living under western war and sanctions – Israeli Jews receive 46% of total annual USAID plus $3 billion annual military aid.
http://rehmat1.com/2011/07/30/israel-and-the-jewish-spring/
Greg Pollock
Noa,
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Your logic seems rather similar to that of “false consciousness” of old Marxism, insulting to the very people you would help; I see little differnce between it and calls to accept Jesus as the only saving way. If you do turn a handful of minds, the people in the streets will turn their backs on you. And I think you know this quite well. Having lost so often, one is tempted to take a stand under the assumption that all is really helpless. But this misses the social/political measure inherent in the street protests (not knowing if they will indeed reach last year’s size): the present party system has failed in organizational control–how much is as yet indeterminate.
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I would approach the occupation vis a vis J14 (again, if there really is one this summer) this way: as we have been detained, insulted, man handled, know that in the Bank it is much worse. I’d leave it at that, not forcing participants to sign a pledge of greater Palestine. If you can wedge the present structure, something new may emerge, no, not a party to dissolve Israel, but a party which may look at the occupation and its costs in a more critical way. You begin where the protests are in thought, for they are not you, and see what you might learn from them. That this protest has so far been unattached from parties is in my guess quite important, a measure of potential change later.
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The “Zionist flag” is the blue Star of David on white of Israel, recognized by the UN and most States therein. If Israel is to move, it must be by the institutions under that flag. I have long (perhaps sillily) argued that you have, in your founding, tools for change. If you want change, you must find areas with which to stand with your enemies. You would throw all commonality into oblivion.
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Stay in the background, listen to what is said, make points to the most potential force. The Marxists thought they knew what revolution had to be; they were wrong. Don’t make the same mistake. I’m not saying revolution is at hand–I don’t think so–but social change entails listening to the measures of people, not telling the people what they are.
Eyal
Noa,
The J14 movement is barely a movement. There’s no strong direction, and the agenda is amorphous. Sure, there are people and interests trying to co-opt it into preserving the existing hegemony. There are others trying to push towards revolution. So how can it co-opt you? If you were there, you could push J14 in the direction you believe in.
My complaint to you is that you’re engaging in dissuasion. What Israel- what any country, really- needs is more activists, more people pushing in the direction they believe in. Which will include many directions you or I may disagree with. Your analysis will just end up serving as another excuse for people to stay home. Your claim that J14 cements the realities rather than addressing them is absurd and counterproductive.
XYZ
Rehmant-
Aren’t we always being told that “all Muslims are brothers and love one another”? So why are you lamenting Somalia not getting enough American aid? They shouldn’t even need it, because their Muslim/Arab brothers in the oil states should be showering the poor Somalis with their plentiful petrodollars, shouldn’t they?
Noa Shaindlinger
Eyal –
Not at all. I am merely calling to boycott J14′s events, and instead focus on action that is more focused and principled. Personally, I don’t “stay home.” I am, as I have been, engaging in the REAL struggle for social justice – in the West Bank, against the root of the problems here, which are not the ‘tycoons’ but the IOF. In addition, I get involved in more localized struggle, when the politics is much clearer, for instance, specific demos in J’lem against police violence etc.
Ami Kaufman
@noa – There many battles around the world and here in Israel to fight. I would like to dedicate my “battle-time” here to two of the most important ones here, in my opinion: The occupation; and corporate capitalism. Yet you say only one of my battles is “real”. Who gives you the right to belittle my battles?
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And, is it ok for me to fight corporate capitalism here? Why can’t both battles be fought? If they can, maybe you have a suggestion for me as to how to fight corporate capitalism.
Richard Witty
The condition of Palestinians cannot be ignored.
Whether they are in a difficult state due to Israeli decisions and actions, the greater Arab world’s decisions and actions, Palestinian community’s factions decisions and actions, is irrelevant.
A kind nation, a kind individual, would not turn their back on their condition. They would try to improve it.
Rehmat
XYZ – Were you ever told by your Zionist-sponsors that Muslims are also told to help people of Yahud and Nasara in trouble – as they’re also the “People of Book”?
Now, read Jewish history from some objective source to find out how Muslims saved your Serf (slave) ancestors in Jerusalem (638), Spain (711), Palestine (1186) and Europe (1940s) – and compare it to what your generation is doing to Muslims and Christians in occupied Palestine and around the world.
The Zionist-controlled media will never tell you that while the German Jews and Zionist terrorist groups (Stern, Lehi, etc.) collaborated with Nazis – more than 100,000 Jews were saved by Turkish and Iranian diplomats in France. Several Muslims in France, Albania and other European countries risked their lives by giving refuge to Jews in their homes. Furthermore, over 300,000 African Muslim soldiers of the Free French Army fought Nazi occupation forces to liberate France.
http://rehmat1.com/2012/06/04/iranian-diplomat-saved-2000-jews-from-the-nazis/
XYZ
Other Muslims collaborated with the Nazis such as the Mufti, the Bosnian SS units, etc. Sadat and other future “Free Officers” were member of a pro-Nazi underground group in the Egyptian Army during the war. There were pro-Nazi massacres of Jews in Baghdad in 1941 and in Libya as well.
PAUL
NOA
The Knesset (unlike no other parliament in the “west”) has the most divisive Political Party system, reflecting real societal divisions Race/Religion/Ideology etc…YET Israel (like no Country I know) has the most potent constructed SYMBOLIC PUBLIC displays of national unity(flag/holidays/sirens/ceremonies). One contradicts the other… its that CONTRADICTION that the demonstrators dont understand. They are (naively) trying to replicate a kind of NATIONAL UNITY On the street (A UNITY that they have bought into from childhood, as secular(Askenazi) Jews). This constructed national Unity narrative (devoid of Real Loosers/Winners)is False, the Knesset(divisions) reflecting real power divisions are the TRUTH
JCSM
No Zionist success has been greater than the manipulation and the looting of the US and world economy since the 1980s with concomitant creation of a new triumphalist Jewish Zionist and Zionism-based plutocratic elite.
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Revisionist (Jabotinskian) economic thought worked out the program in the 1920s and 1930s. Eran Kaplan writes on pp. 59-60 in The Jewish Radical Right, Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy:
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For the Revisionists the nation was the only social factor that could provide a complete economic framework that would benefit all its members. As Abba Achimeir put it, only the nation and its different organs were responsible for the economic well-being of its members. And, according to Achimeir, the most efficient way to run a national economy was to use protective tariffs to encourage local production while refraining from any intervention in internal economic and social relations.
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Achimeir thus invoked the familiar dichotomy between the socioeconomic infrastructure, which should be free from intervention from above, and the political and legal superstructures, which the state should control because it is responsible for setting the goals and guidelines of the national economy.
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In a 1933 article Abba Achimeir analyzed the causes of the international financial crisis that followed the 1929 stock market crash. He argued that neither the Great War nor any other international conflict had caused the crisis, as most economists had claimed. The crisis was the logical outcome of the demise of liberal and free-market economics. It marked the collapse of the international system, which suppressed the needs of nations in favor of abstract concepts that people could not relate to.
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People, Achimeir claimed, were national, not economic, beings. Human society therefore should not be analyzed and constructed according to some abstract economic rationale. An economic model that was developed according to purely economic considerations led inevitably to an international system, whereas a nationalist approach, Achimeir maintained, always led to an active economic reality, where the nation found itself in a constant state of war (to protect its own market and overtake other markets).
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In describing the organizational principles of the Revisionist youth movement Beitar, Ze’ev Jabotinsky stated, “The structure of Beitar and its sense of discipline are a successful and healthy combination between freedom on the one hand and a monistic harmony on the other.” The Revisionist economic model similarly combined the freedom of capitalist private ownership with the discipline of active state involvement in the operation of the national market.
JCSM
The Jabotinskian approach to economics was compatible with traditional Jewish economic behavior. Even though Labor Zionists had rejected such economic practices as a result of E. European class conflict, such behavior quickly reestablished itself among Yiddish Jews as their children moved from the working to professional class.
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When Begin took office in Israel, the Jabotinskians finally obtained state-power in Israel at approximately the same moment that American ethnic Ashkenazim, who were generally Jabotinskians, were taking over from the German American Jewish elite within the organized Jewish community, within Israel Lobby organizations, and throughout American business, society, and politics.
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By 1980 the State of Israel was receiving at least $2 billion of unaccounted US foreign aid per year and could experiment with the type of ethnonational financial warfare of which Jabotinsky and his followers dreamed in the pre-State period.
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The activities of new but traditional American Jewish networks of trust in combination with modern corrupt social networking dovetailed precisely with the implementation of the Jabotinskian program because the presence of Jewish Zionists in the US financial and media industries in combination with Israeli government support of strategic industries made it possible for Zionists to control all sides in a major financial transactions including the press coverage.
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In effect the active state mentioned in the last sentence of last paragraph of the quote is not Israel or the United States but has become the Zionist virtual colonial motherland, which is squeezing the economic systems of subordinate states just as Polish magnates and Jewish estate managers squeezed the peasants and serfs of the Polish arenda system of the 17th century.
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Suddenly in the 1990s, IPOs were taking place without the traditional four quarters of profitability, the process of seeking venture capital funding included vetting with regard to attitudes toward Zionism or the State of Israel, and an immensely powerful class of politically mobilized Zionist billionaires was created while the US economy was bled through a series of booms and busts from which Zionist oligarchs and their intelligentsia profited.
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Because President Obama has put some of main members of the corrupt Jewish social networks in charge of undoing the disaster that corrupt Jewish social networking has created, there really is no discernible end to the perpetual world-wide financial nakba that is now tracking the perpetual Palestinian nakba that the Zionist state continues to exacerbate right before our eyes.
JCSM
Thus I might argue Shaindlinger’s point slightly different.
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The Jabotinskian economic aggression that the State of Israel has waged as a policy since Begin took power encourages the concentration of wealth in a tiny plutocratic class within Israel and within an international Jewish Zionist political economic oligarchy outside Israel.
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In the Jabotinksian viewpoint, the Jewish masses should be content with economic crumbs and Zionist symbols.
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For the most part Jabotinsky has been correct, but economic disparity has become large enough within Israel that the Jewish masses are demanding a slice of the pie, but the vast majority of Jews so carefully indoctrinated in Zionist principles would never think of sharing that slice with the remnants of the native population, which was plundered in 1947-1950 to provide the foundation of Zionist wealth.
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There simply is no possibility that J14 could ever be transformed into a genuine movement for social justice because the Zionist colonial invader population will never accept — except under the gun — the truth that Zionism was and remains a criminal movement based in traditional Jewish exploitation of non-Jews and extraction of non-Jewish wealth into the pockets of the Jewish elite.
Richard Witty
Not publishing under your own name anymore Joachim?
Alan
I read on Facebook that Joachim’s wife left him– apparently he was too much of a pig. Glad that 972 can provide an anti-Semite with a forum for blowing off some of his anger.
Kolumn9
Why is this obvious to me while everybody else seems to want to read into Noa’s ideology their own? Perhaps it is because I am looking at this from very much outside your particular ideological current..
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Noa’s ideology has no place for a state of Israel and her ‘struggle’ is in that direction. She says so explicitly in other posts that she is ‘aligned’ with the PFLP, is for a one-state solution, is for the influx of Arabs into Israel and against all symbols of the state of Israel, presumably including the name. She boycotts J14 because it isn’t a movement dedicated to the ‘struggle’ for the elimination of Israel as a country. What possible advantage do any of the actual people struggling for a better lifestyle and an end of an occupation in the interests of the people of the state of Israel have in begging people like that in joining their movement? Do you honestly believe that there is any semblance of unity of purpose with people like Noa? More importantly do you really believe that being seen as associated with people like Noa is likely to bring support from the Israeli mainstream? This isn’t a tactical difference people, it is a strategic difference in goals and it has always been a problem for the left in papering over obvious differences with monsters in the interests of a supposed ‘common struggle’.
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Good luck and be happy that Noa is boycotting J14. The participation of people like her can only lead to making any social movement in Israel a completely marginal one.. By that I mean even more so than it is already primarily due to the lack of any semblance of a unity of message, even in cases where some parts of the movement have ABSOLUTELY legitimate gripes about the current economic and political situation of the state of Israel.
Greg Pollock
Paul’s Tuesday comment, above, seems very good.
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And K9′s, above, comment seems right too: if the left is to abjure everything which it is not, are you not self doomed to unending marginalization? By the left’s own logic, understanding the State outflow to the settlements might alter opinions, if there was reason to believe alternative outflows were possible. The J14ers of last year wanted State aid. Must they abjure the State of Israel to get it? The position is self destructive.
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You cannot successfully fight the ideology of occupation by denying the very State of Israel upon which almost the totality of Israeli Jews stand. Their interests are not that. What disturbs in Noa’s piece, for me, is the implicit thesis that there are only two positions: hers and all others. Coalitons are not so made; and if ever you are to end the occupation, you will need coaltions.
Noa Shaindlinger
Greg,
My point is – coalitions with whom? What I am saying (explicitly rather than implicitly) is that J14 and Zionists in general are not worthy political allies in the struggle against occupation and apartheid and that in fact, they work to perpetuate the status quo rather than fight it. Since I reached this conclusion, it also became clear to me who can be potential allies, and not all of them are what you might consider predictable.
max
@Noa, your explanation now makes your whole article senseless… You just explained that J14 does NOT propagate the political status quo, it just isn’t – and never was – connected to it, similar to the TLV bus schedule.
PAUL
Noa comment to Greg
To dismiss “all J14 and Zionists in general”(95% of Israeli Jews) as non-allies in confronting the occupation and “apartheid” is beyond arrogant and frankly a political cul-de-sac.
It smacks of moral absolutism and self righteousness (a not uncommon attribute of an Askenazi leftist elite – ironically the greatest beneficiaries of “Zionist/Apartheid”)- Co-opting local “Allies” on a variety of fronts (economic, social “moral” etc) may be messy, difficult, compromising, but it is both necessary and in my view it is being “serious” about change. Real political progress is built upon both visionary ideals and messy pragmatism, its not built on Ivory Tower absolutes. Having the “right” opinion (progressive left) isn’t good enough..clever persuasion, hard graft, reaching out, its the stuff of political change.
Marco
The Philadelphia Phillies are my favorite baseball team. How can I support J14 as long as they have not incorporated a piece of their platform dedicated to recognition that the team is playing poorly and fans are suffering?
Kolumn9
In the fashion of the ideological extreme left of the 1960s Noa is going to argue that her allies in fighting against the system are those that are working towards making the system completely unsustainable. Of course in Noa’s case ‘the system’ and the ‘status quo’ which she is struggling against is the continued existence of the state of Israel. When she dismisses Zionists as allies she isn’t referring to settlers planting flags on hilltops, she really just means anyone that isn’t an ideological supporter of the elimination of the state of Israel, which includes many people that didn’t even know they were Zionists. Welcome to being Zionists fellows.
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This goal of eliminating Israel for Noa means working towards increasing corruption, undermining the economy, and promoting all aspects of Israeli and Palestinian society that work in the direction of undermining the established order regardless of ideological disagreements, intent or goals. Basically she sees as her ‘potential allies’ anyone and everyone on all sides that is interested in destroying the status quo or is working [ even unintentionally ] towards making it unsustainable according to Noa’s ideological perceptions. The list even potentially includes such interesting bedfellows as Islamic fundamentalists, criminals, and [gasp] even the Israeli extreme right. Obviously all other organizations and countries that are working directly against Israel are included as ‘potential allies’. Close enough Noa?
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I can’t wait for human rights activist Noa’s next installment where she justifies any and all ‘revolutionary violence’ as a tool to undermine the system. Now I just wonder if Noa is just an ideological tourist or an actual ‘revolutionary’. If it is the former she will pursue the ‘struggle’ in some cushy position in academia valiantly typing away her ideological fervor. If it is the latter then 972mag should really be careful about being associated with her. Having a terrorist as a contributing author can be somewhat tainting in the pursuit of public support and in the pursuit of monetary sponsorship from mainstream left-wing organizations and governments. It is always safer from that point of view to publish the ideological supporters of terrorism rather than its actual practitioners.
Charles
Noa’s prescription is a recipe for remaining a tiny minority that feels self righteous while having insignificant impact.
Want to end the occupation? Involve more people in real life struggles that lead to political education and awareness.