Israel Loses Its Best\u2014An Analysis (8 June 2020) by Lawrence Davidson<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part I\u2014Emigration<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2012 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz<\/em> reported on a poll suggesting <\/a>that at least one-third of Israelis would consider emigrating abroad if the opportunity presented itself. This was not to be temporary phenomenon. An updated 2018 Newsweek<\/em><\/a> article stated that \u201cIsrael celebrates its 70th birthday in May with the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Yet the country is grappling with an existential crisis. \u2026 Spurred by the high cost of living, low salaries, and political and demographic trends, Israelis are leaving the country in droves.\u201d Given the fact that \u201cIsrael has one of the highest poverty rates and levels of income inequality in the Western world,\u201d you can see why the notion that Israel is \u201cabsolutely essential<\/a> \u2026 to the security of Jews around the world\u201d is up for debate among Jews themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While economics is certainly playing a role in this emigration, it is not the only factor. There is also a question of conscience. Particularly noticeable among those leaving are numbers of intellectuals and academics. And among this group are some of Israel\u2019s most ethical citizens. Here we can again turn to Haaretz<\/em>. On 23 May 2020 the newspaper published a series of interviews<\/a> with some of the activists and scholars despairing of enlightened change and therefore choosing to leave the country. Here are a few examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014\u201cAriella Azoulay, an internationally recognized curator and art theoretician and her partner, philosopher Adi Ophir, who was among the founders of the 21st Year, an anti-occupation organization.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014\u201cAnat Biletzki, a former chairwoman of B\u2019Tselem \u2014 the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014\u201cDana Golan, former executive director of the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence.\u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014\u201cYonatan Shapira, \u2026 who initiated the 2003 letter<\/p>\n\n\n\n of the pilots who refused to participate in attacks in the occupied territories.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014\u201cNeve Gordon, political scientist, who was director of Physicians for Human Rights and active in the Ta\u2019ayush Arab Jewish Partnership.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n And the list goes on for quite a while. According to the article, \u201cthe word that recurs time and again when one speaks with these individuals is \u2018despair.\u2019 Percolating despair, continuing for years.\u201d That is, despair among those people trying to build a society where Israeli Jews and Palestinians could live in harmony as equals. It has gotten to the point where such a humanitarian stance can result in being \u201cforced out of their jobs because of their political beliefs and activities\u201d and\/or the realization that \u201cthey could no longer express their views in Israel without fear.\u201d Those with children expressed concerns about raising them within the political and social climate that now dominates Israel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Part II\u2014Empowered Fanaticism<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is to be expected that each of these expatriates has mixed feelings about leaving Israel. After all, they leave not only a suffocating political and social climate, but also their community and a Hebrew language that many find personally enriching. Unfortunately, empowered fanaticism puts at risk all that is culturally and socially positive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And empowered fanaticism is what you get when nationalism merges with an exclusive tribalism characterized by racism and religious zealotry. Eitan Bronstein, an Israeli activist now living abroad, gives a sense of this when he observes that \u201cThere is something quite insane in Israel.\u201d To grasp it fully an Israeli must learn to see it from the outside\u2014\u201cto look at it from a distance is at least a little saner.\u201d Neve Gordon tells us just how much distance is required to fundamentally change things: \u201cWhat I understood was that the solution cannot be contained in Zionism.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gordon is correct. The source of Israel\u2019s fate, as well as its behavior toward the Palestinians, lies in its founding ideology. Here is an explanatory sequence:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014 Zionism, the ideology underlying the Jewish state, originated in the 19th century as a response to the persecution of Jews, particularly in eastern Europe and Russia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014The 19th century was a prime period of nationalism and the nation-state. It was a logical decision of the early Zionists that the solution to Ashkenazi (northern European) Jewish persecution lay with the founding of their own state. And so began the melding of Judaism and Zionism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014However, in the 19th century the nation-state was also tied to Western chauvinism and imperialism. Peoples outside of Europe and North America were seen as inferiors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014The founding Zionists, mostly Poles, Russians and Germans, were, if you will, just as infected with this chauvinism as their non-Jewish European counterparts. They took the superiority of European culture over that of non-Europeans for granted and therefore believed the Palestinians had few, rights in the face of European imperial expansion. In this way the Zionist Jews identified with and absorbed the role of the aggressor. It was an ironic stance because that same European culture was the source of Jewish persecution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014 Come the early 20th century, the Zionists made an alliance with the British government, which would soon conquer Palestine. The British promised the Zionists a \u201cJewish national home\u201d there. This allowed the Zionists to begin bringing ever larger numbers of European Jews into an Arab land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014 The inevitable Palestinian resistance to this Zionist invasion was used to further justify the racism most Israeli Jews feel toward those they have dispossessed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Part III\u2014\u201cGood Riddance\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This interpretation of events probably raises a negative emotional response in almost all Israeli Jews. This is not because it is inaccurate, but because they have all been raised within a Zionist culture that teaches them that Palestine is rightfully Jewish and now, as a consequence, only Jews can be full citizens of Israel. Somehow that indoctrination ultimately failed to overcome the basic humaneness of those exiles described above. It is their lack of tribal solidarity as defined and demanded by Zionist ideology that renders them renegades in the eyes of many doctrinaire Israelis. A sense of this is given in some of the reader comments<\/a> that followed the Haaretz<\/em> interviews. My responses are in brackets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014They are all \u201cradical leftists\u201d or of the \u201cfar left.\u201d [This assignment of political position is really ad hoc. There is nothing inherently \u201cleft\u201d or \u201cradical\u201d about what in truth is a recognition that Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs share a common humanity, and a common fate.]\n\n\n\n \u2014 These radicals fail to appreciate that Israel is a democracy and their political faction lost. [When it comes to human rights and human decency, a liberal democracy protects the rights of its minorities. In a society where minorities have shrinking rights, or no rights at all, democracy is only a facade.] <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014 The exiles are themselves bigots who fail to respect the points of view of true Zionists. [This is just sophistry. To stand against bigotry cannot make one a bigot. If we have learned anything from history, it is that not all points of view are equal.]\n\n\n\n \u2014 Those who chose exile think they are principled, but then so did Hitler. [Equating those who show compassion toward the Palestinians with the Nazis is a sure sign that Zionism has corrupted the minds of its adherents.]\n\n\n\n \u2014Israel is better off without these people: \u201cMay they meet their destiny among Israel bashers in their new utopias.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n[With the Zionists, it is always \u201cus\u201d against the world.]\n\n\n\n Part IV\u2014Conclusion<\/p>\n\n\n\n The increasing number of empathetic Israelis\u2014peace activists and those who just seek basic human rights for both Palestinians and Israeli Jews\u2014who are being pushed to choose exile is a tragic and telling sign. They are literally being chased out of their own country, much as are the Palestinians, by those Jewish citizens committed to the reactionary, tribal doctrine of Zionism. The state has now been given over to doctrinaire chauvinists and religious extremists. Under such circumstances, is it any wonder that, as one of the few enlightened commenters stated, \u201cEvil is driving out good\u201d and \u201cThis is the price that Israelis of conscience are paying for [their opposition to] the steadfast persistence and growth of bigotry in Israel today.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Israel Loses Its Best\u2014An Analysis (8 June 2020) by Lawrence Davidson Part I\u2014Emigration In 2012 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[73,72],"class_list":["post-4783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-israel","tag-palestinians","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4783"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4784,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions\/4784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tothepointanalyses.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}