The beauty and blindness of Israel’s popular uprising
JVL Introduction
Peter Beinart sees great hope in the current demonstrations in Israel, despite being fully aware of and openly critical of their limitations.
As he puts it:
“If this is what Israeli Jews can do on their own and were able now it seems like just to push back Netanyahu’s egregious, illiberal fascist attempts, imagine what these people could do alongside Palestinians. Imagine what Palestinians and Israeli Jews could do together in a struggle for genuine liberal democracy everywhere, from Gaza to the West Bank to East Jerusalem to Israel proper.
“It would be the most inspiring thing the world has seen perhaps since the end of apartheid, since the overthrow of the Soviet Empire in 1989.”
Thanks to Peter Beinart for permission to repost
This article was originally published by the Beinart Notebook on Mon 27 Mar 2023. Read the original here.
The Beauty and Blindness of Israel’s Popular Uprising
Loading article text…
I don’t agree with Beinart on the desirability of Palestinians joining the protests by Israelis against their power-grabbing, extremist government. Any Palestinian involvement would muddle the issues (the fight to protect Israeli civil liberties against a government that wants untrammelled power) and advantage Netanyahu.
Beinart has also discounted the amount of time most people need to adjust their thinking and prejudices. Currently, Israelis are outraged by the Netanyahu government’s willingness to sell their freedoms in the hope of staying in power. It’s likely to take at least a few months of “hot crisis” before many Israelis would begin to view their government as inherently flawed. How probable is it that Netanyahu would fail to calm months of “hot crisis”, given that persistent unrest on this scale risks bringing down his government even faster than him losing the support of his extreme and religious right collaborators?
You’ve forgotten what happened when similar street demos occurred in Egypt whem M— was overthrown and an estimated 400 were shot dead on the streets so that Sisi could beome President?
Let’s see if those Jews in Israel protesting against the extreme right wingers in the government threatening political control over the judiciary come to the aid of Palestinians being attacked even more viciously and uncontrolled by those same extreme rightwingers. Will they show themselves to be true and reliable partners of the Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories? I fear the vast majority of them don’t see it, and won’t do it.
Beinart’s article reminds me of the words of John Lennon’s Imagine.
Many of the protesters chatter about protecting Israeli democracy. This is to deny that Israel is not a democracy but an apartheid declared state of the Jewish people ( but as historian Shlomo Sands observes the Jews are not a people)
It is an amazing demonstration of dissent, but only in defence of their own well-being. So far. There is no sign as far as can be seen from a distance that those on the street are thinking about any form of defence of the Palestinians or their basic situation of desperate nothingness.
Benjamin Netanyahu was voted into power, along with many others of ‘his gang’ of thugs, by the people of Israel. Strange how history will repeat itself.
Look at the positive aspect, at least it is a start. Without protest now, the position can only worsen. Protest and struggle is the school for people to learn and develop. To see the logic in combining with other progressive groups for a better future for all.
Re the comment ‘The Jews are not a people.’ Yes, they are because they share a common identity, just as, say, the English or the Americans do. They do not have to have a common ancestry, they do not have to share a world-view on common, they do not have to actually have a country in common, as many nations have diasporas of their own, including the English and the Americans. Each and every Jew know themselves to be Jews along with every other Jew: that makes them a people by any definition. The difficulty which Zionism tries to solve is that before Israel, Jews were in effect the only nation without a nation, a people with a mythical rather than a physical state to identify with. The central dispute is all round the question, do Jews need a physical state to identify with? The Zionists say yes, while non-Zionists say not necessarily. That all sounds very reasonable, until it’s realised that a powerful section of the Zionist school of thought believes that the Jews must have a state and that there is no cost too high to get one, so long as it is not Jews who pay the cost, but the unfortunate people who happen to be in the way of their achieving it. But now we see there is a cost to Jews, as they now become pawns in the game they think they have been playing; now they are being played. That is what this is all about right now. No-one can expect the Israeli Jews to give their immediate support to the Palestinians; they have only just realised that they are being threatened with a subservience they never thought possible. It will take time and work to persuade Israelis that they and the Palestinians are now being faced with a common cause. Whether it happens or not, time will tell; but the opportunity Israeli Jews have been presented with to realise their commonalty with the Palestinians has never been greater. They can still be Jews in a state shared with non-Jews: we diaspora Jews know that already.
It is a real conundrum that Israelis are prepared to make such effort to protest about justice affecting themselves yet that justice they are defending hands out summary injustice to Palestinians. This isn’t the first time Israeli demonstrators have protested parochial issues but have remained resolutely blind to the injustices Palestinians suffer daily.