Bernard Spiegal

The ground is shifting, the habitual reference points obscured.  What seemed entrenched, is now dislodged.

Israel is in flux, somehow lost to itself, as countervailing forces and tendencies rise to the surface to vie with each other. Things are falling apart, there is at present no centre to hold.  

The spark that lit the flames of dissension and awakening, is the formation of a profoundly right-wing, racist, misogynistic and homophobic government that is purposively embedding itself within the constitutional framework of the Israeli state, the better to control it.  Such control will and is enabling the intensification, and completion, of Israel’s colonising project the issue of which is ramped-up violence towards, and dispossession of, Palestinians, their homes, land and livelihoods. Indeed, against their very lives, be they child or adult. 

Against this backdrop of perpetual violence perpetrated by Israel in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, Israeli Jews – in effect, the self-designated exclusive owners of Israel – are, in their different ways, confronting the sour fruits of their state-building labours.  

‘We are the owners of Jerusalem and the entire Land of Israel’

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, July 2023

The Israeli dreamscape – a rude awakening

Secular Israelis have for decades felt secure within their self-defined liberal bubble. The Occupation, and the daily violent colonising of swathes of the OPT was and is barely acknowledged. It’s as if the Occupation had nothing to do with them.

But now, with the election of the current government, the fragility of the liberal bubble becomes only too apparent.  The Netanyahu-led government, anchored as it is to a militant, demanding ethno-religious bloc, is committed to another form of colonisation – colonising Israel’s secular spaces and life-styles. 

The Israeli liberal dreamscape is now more threatened than ever. Quiescence is no longer an option if this intra-Israeli colonising impetus is to be countered. This has resulted in the – as yet partial – awakening that prompts the massive, pro-democracy demonstrations. Thus far, however, demonstrators have not felt that the Occupation should be central to their concerns, still less to question the fundamental constitutional, legal and attitudinal pillars of the Jewish state.

Movement, flux

But, even here, there is movement, flux. As Ha’aretz reports, whereas initially the demonstrators were primarily from the older generation:

Anyone who has taken part in a demonstration during the past month will have taken note of the sharp drop in the average age. Now the young are in the streets…in the forefront of the marches. But not only there. Between the demonstrations, an extensive infrastructure is developing of activists… Within the void left by the mainstream youth movements…a new leadership is taking shape.

And it emerges with a critique that is potentially quite profound:

All of them talked about that penny that dropped…they were furious at the systematic anesthetization and depoliticization they underwent in school and in the youth movements…Ethnic identity, by contrast, is of absolutely no interest to them.

This younger cohort come from different places and backgrounds, but all have one thing in common: Their goals extend far beyond putting a halt to the judicial overhaul.

One of the young women featured in the article, Ayala Dahan, 22, was clear that ‘We will no longer be silent about things’, and made a point that may auger a potentially radical approach to the nature of Israel. Commenting on the 2018 National State Basic Law that declared that national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people and which demoted Arabic from its former status as an official language she said that the law:

…would not have passed quietly in a period like this. From now on, things will not slip by under the radar.

It’s too early to say where this particular awakening will lead, what its ultimate aims will be, the degree to which it represents, or can come to represent, a radical re-alignment of Israeli political thought and action. 

Others are stirring saying what needs to be said

Some 1,500 academics and public figures from Israel/Palestine and abroad have issued an open letter to North American Jewry  to call attention to the direct link between Israel’s recent attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of millions of Palestinians in the OPT.

The letter is entitled ‘The elephant in the room’: ‘American Jews…have paid insufficient attention to the elephant in the room: Israel’s long-standing occupation that, we repeat, has yielded a regime of apartheid’.

The statement punctures the illusion that Israel can be democratic ‘as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid.’

Meaning and ambiguity

In this article, I want only to comment on two of the letter’s four demands, though all four are significant. The entire letter, short and to the point, can be found here

What intrigues me, is what I take to be the inherent bifurcation of view encapsulated in the letter, the way it fuses in one text both a limited demand, and something potentially more expansive.

On the one hand, it focuses on the elephant – the Occupation. However, the Occupation could end tomorrow, but this would not alter the fundamentals of Israel’s constitution, its legal and ethical foundations. It would still be an ethnoreligious state entrenching Jewish supremacism.  Indeed, this for some is the attraction of the ill-named two-state solution.

Yet within the same letter, the first demand is that there should be:

Support [for] the Israeli protest movement, yet call on it to embrace equality for Jews and Palestinians within the Green Line and in the OPT. 

The significance here is the demand for equality, not only within the Green Line (Israel’s notional international border), but also within the OPT.  This could be interpreted in a number of ways, as the letter points out:

‘Without equal rights for all, whether in one state, two states, or in some other political framework, there is always a danger of dictatorship.’

The letter hedges its bets as to which alternative constitutional and political framework should be pursued. The significant point, however, is that all the options offered negate the current dispensation. Current political and constitutional structures cannot accommodate the letter’s key demands.

Despite hedging its bets, the letter punctures the shibboleth that nothing may be said of the Israeli state that does not, whether implicitly or explicitly, endorse Jewish supremacy and the exclusive right of Jews to self-determination in the ‘Land of Israel’. This is significant in itself, given the letter’s wide range of signatories. Whether this portends, or at least contributes to, an opening-up of what it is permissible to think and say in the public domain remains to be seen.  

The second intriguing demand, is that there should be an ‘overhaul [of] educational norms and curricula for Jewish children and youth in order to provide a more honest appraisal of Israel’s past and present’.

That is to say, taken at its fullest, the demand is that Israel should dismantle its creation mythology and all that flows from it, not least the indoctrination of its youth into an ethos, implied or overt, of Jewish supremacism.

The call for an overhaul of educational norms and curricula is a brave, far-reaching demand, that if pursued would radically affect how Israel understands itself.  There is a link here to one of the points made by one of the young people discussed above. They  were furious:

‘at the systematic anesthetization and depoliticization they underwent in school and in the youth movements… Ethnic identity, by contrast, is of absolutely no interest to them.’

The Israel we have known, seems to be falling apart. Even on the basis of what has been said above, one can almost hear the tectonic plates of Israel’s vying forces stretch and strain. They have yet to reach a new, settled place.