I’ve fallen far behind in the blog posts I’ve been meaning to write about my Israel trip earlier in the summer – specifically on the second of two of the fantastic museums we visited. I drafted much of this post weeks ago, and am not updating it based on what has happened since. I want to just take the draft, and put it out – my thoughts from that time, that I should have published at that time…
This is by no means a deeply, thoroughly, researched, expert dive into the situation; it is a single person, a layman as far as Israeli politics are concerned, doing a cursory “round-up” of a handful of things they’ve read, at a specific point in time. I hope you will take it, please, in the spirit in which it is offered. Not trying to make a point, not trying to forcefully assert some powerful political assertions. But just summarizing some of what I’ve been reading, and sharing my personal thoughts and emotions. Thank you.
In the time since I’ve been sitting on those drafts, the Knesset (the Israeli national legislature) passed a judicial reform bill that brought huge protests from people calling it a threat to democracy. Pretty much everyone I know opposed this bill, supported the protests, but even so, I feel like every time I comment on Israeli politics on social media, I not only get people calling Israel all the worst things under the sun – colonialist, imperialist, a racist state, apartheid – but I also get progressive Israelis telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about, that things are more complicated, more nuanced, than I realized. And the latter group, they’re not wrong. What do I know? But based on what I’ve read, this reform – and the fact it passed despite such massive protest, despite the White House advising against it, despite the opposition parties boycotting the vote (resulting in zero votes against it passing) after the ruling coalition refused to make certain compromises – seems to signal to me a hard “we’re going to push through our agenda no matter what” approach from what some are outright calling Israel’s most right-wing government ever.
Axios quotes Yair Lapid, head of the opposition coalition, as saying that “It is impossible to reach any understanding that will preserve Israeli democracy with this government … They want to dismantle the state. We have no way of continuing the dialogue with them. This is the most irresponsible government in the history of Israel.” Frightening stuff.
Perhaps I’m seeing things too much through the lens of American politics, or maybe the parallels are real, but I find it scary, and disconcerting, worrying, to wonder where things go from here. According to the Axios article I’ve linked above, “the director of the Israeli Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency … expressed concern that the country could deteriorate into chaos without a consensus around the bill.” What exactly does that mean? What will that look like? We already saw within just the past few days a massive number of people march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in protest against this judicial reform, ending with a protest outside the Knesset which aimed to physically block MKs (members of Knesset, i.e. members of Parliament) from entering the building to make the vote. And yet, it seems this was ineffective.
Will the right-wing government keep pushing through its pro-settler, anti-democracy, agenda? Will people’s fears that this could lead to theocracy, to a severe curtailing of women’s rights, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, and of the freedom to simply live a secular life not dominated by the guardrails of religious mandates, come to pass? Or will this, somehow, whether through protest or labor strikes, lead to a dramatic pendulum swing away from such extremist right-wing politics? For both Israel and the US, there’s a part of me that wants to believe in the possibility that, finally, things will progress too far, that too many lines will be crossed, that society or those in power will have their “at long last, have you no decency?” moment. That much as has happened in numerous places in numerous times across history, a political trend or phenomena reaches its peak, and, like a cresting wave or an expanding bubble, it breaks, it bursts, it collapses. A protest movement becomes a historical turning point, and things change. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was quite a bit before I was even born, but that’s the image I feel we are given of it – that after X years of protest and struggle, eventually it reached some kind of breaking point, and popular sentiment turned, political momentum shifted, and finally, the entire Jim Crow, segregation, status quo fell away. Obviously, racist inequality still exists very much so in the US, and that’s a whole other story. But, with that, as with women’s suffrage, as with the anti-communist fever of the McCarthy era, as with same-sex marriage, as with so many other things, we are taught, retrospectively, that this is what happens in history. That protests can, sometimes, eventually, lead to a turning point, where a given political trend or phenomenon ends, and its opposite becomes the new status quo. That’s what we all hoped the Oslo Accords signed 30 years ago by Yitzhak Rabin might represent, also. Or the talks between Ehud Barak, Yasser Arafat, and Bill Clinton at Camp David some years later, though neither did end up being the turning point we hoped for.
What exactly will this mean for the settlements, and/or for the course of relations with or treatment of the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank? Significant portions of the IDF reservists have called for a strike, and nearly every current or retired head of IDF, Shin Bet, Mossad, have said that pushing this through, going forward with it, means a major threat to national security. The Histadrut, the largest labor union in the country, has very successfully influenced policy in the past by calling for widespread general strikes. Will that be successful this time?
I have spent a lifetime believing, and saying, that Israel is not the horror that left-wing anti-Zionists claim it is. That whatever the situation with the Palestinians may be, it’s not because Israelis are, by their nature, racists, imperialists, violent, horrible, people, or that the Israeli government is intentionally going out of its way to be cruel, to be oppressive. The narrative I was always taught, and which I so strongly want to believe, is that Israel is a good country, a free and democratic country. A country that, like the US, like the UK, like any other free and democratic country on the planet, does not always live up perfectly to its ideals; a country that could certainly afford to do better.
But now, now this new right-wing government seems determined to prove the anti-Zionists right. To make Israel into the monster that these people have always said it is. An extremely frightening and saddening prospect. And yet, at the same time, I feel scared to say anything about it on social media, for fear that saying anything negative about Israel at all only feeds into the anti-Israel sentiment, helping those people to feel they were right all along, while also inviting just the same pushback I’ve always gotten – from both left and right, from both Israelis and anti-Zionists. I’ve seen so many posts in support of the protestors, and calling for more people to speak up and just spread awareness, enhance the pushback against what the government is doing, even if only on social media for whatever that’s worth. But I’ve also seen so many posts saying that non-Israelis, and especially American Jews, shouldn’t pretend they know what they’re talking about, and should shut up and step back. And after weeks of seeing so many social media posts and news stories about the protestors, on July 24-25 I started seeing posts suggesting that perhaps there is a rather significant counter-protesting, i.e. pro-judicial-reform, movement. Which isn’t to say I agree with them, but it does indicate that perhaps this isn’t quite as a black-and-white, one-sided, “I can’t believe the government is moving forward when clearly so many people are opposed to it” sort of story as I thought it was. So, I don’t know.
I hope that strikes by the IDF reservists and Histadrut make an impact. I hope that, somehow, this rightward shift can be turned around. I feel perhaps on shakier ground than ever to say anything about “the Israel I know.” But I am terribly scared and sad for the Israel I thought I knew, the Israel I was raised to believe in.
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