Is Israel Drifting Toward Civil War?
If it weren't so despicable, it would be laughable: To the outside world, the government of Benyamin Netanyahu is doing a perfect imitation of North Korea in its murderous assault on a flotilla of peace activists bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. The activists aren't all pure, as we'll probably learn soon enough, but Israel's government has just purified them. If the government was bone-headed in barring Noam Chomsky from the West Bank at the Allenby Bridge two weeks ago, now it might as well be taking tips from Pyongyang.
Inside the country, meanwhile, debate is rising toward a boiling point that could start the civil war that almost began with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing orthodox Jew in 1995. Then again, to hear some people tell it, Israel is always heading into a civil war, so what else is new? Although Netanyahu only squeaked into power after the Gaza War, with little more mandate than George W. Bush had in 2000, some undercurrents have been on his side.
Yet something is new. It's cumulative and, let's hope, it will turn the tide.
At the Tel Aviv University, scholars and students who embody the best of everything most of us once admired about Israel are wringing their hands about the rise of anti-Enlightenment orthodox Jews and the virtual takeover of a once-social-democratic country (Israel still has one of the worlds' best and most universal health-care systems) by hundreds of thousands of smart, cynical Russian Jews.
The manipulative contempt with which these two powerful groups are gaming the just, ecumenical society that more noble people I know risked their lives to advance is heart-breaking, and it's the tide that has to be turned.
Netanyahu & Co. are rushing ahead of even the high orthodox birthrates, but mightn't that awaken progressives from their own wishful thinking before it's too late? The government has let the flotilla "drive Israel into a sea of stupidity," writes Gideon Levy, a senior columnist for Haaretz the country's most prominent liberal daily. And this time, it seems, Levy is far from alone.
"We were determined to avoid an honest look at the first Gaza war. Now, in international waters and having opened fire on an international group of humanitarian aid workers and activists, we are fighting and losing the second," writes Bradley Burston, a senior editor at Haaretz. "We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel's Vietnam."
Burston would know: A Los Angeles native and Berkeley graduate, he moved to Israel in the 1970s with some young Americans I knew who settled in Kibbutz Gezer, a progressive outpost between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. If you can recall that in those Vietnam War/Nixon years Israel seemed a lot more noble to many of us than the U.S. did, you'll understand why Burston served in the Israel Defense Forces as a combat medic and studied medicine in Be'er Sheva for two years.
But Burston must also know that his scathing Vietnam analogy has limits: The U.S. could have walked away from Vietnam with no dangerous consequences. In Gaza, by contrast, the influence of Iran and other powers makes the Israeli situation a little more... existential. Israelis also don't have Americans' history of conquering a whole continent and not having to care about it. Their history, too, is more... existential.
But precisely for those reasons, Haaretz reports, Israeli security forces are now on high alert, bracing for protests closer to home, maybe even for a third intifada if it turns out that one of the Palestinian activists on board the flotilla was killed. That only underscores the government's stupidity. And the blinding two days ago of a young American peace demonstrator, a Cooper Union student, on the West Bank by a tear gas canister fired directly at her by Israeli soldiers, underscores its calculated brutality, not least against young American citizens who have joined in peaceful demonstrations.
What kinds of resistance to all this should reasonable Israelis now contemplate? TPM's Bernie Avishai has participated in and described here some non-violent tactics being honed by both Arabs and Jews in East Jerusalem and elsewhere.
But what will unfold among contending factions of Israeli Jews in confrontation with one another, and not just the army and police? Here, again, it is useful to remember Israel's differences from the United States. Precisely because there's universal conscription in Israel, the military isn't as militarizing as you might think. It's an army where no one salutes anyone and civilian norms commingle with military ones.
That prompted Bernhard Henri-Levi, speaking in support of J-Street and progressive Israeli counterparts at the French Embassy here in Tel Aviv yesterday, to observe, "I have never seen such a democratic army, which asks itself so many moral questions. There is something unusually vital about Israeli democracy."
He backtracked a bit a day later, but what he's noticing is that universal service gives Israelis a sense of entitlement to sound off in ways that the American left lost when conservatives, in a master-stroke, converted to a volunteer army. That took the edge off anti-war Americans' solidarity and feelings of unimpeachable right as well as inclination to express outrage at government abuses.
What will come of that sense of entitlement in Israel now, though?
On the one hand, the country does have increasingly powerful -- and, yes, despicable -- enemies, some of whom care not a whit for Palestinians, whom they have oppressed and are using as pawns in a dance of moral posturing. That's a caution for Americans haunted by Vietnam.
On the other hand, there are Israelis, like the many who contribute to Haaretz, who have deepening misgivings and are stirring feelings of outraged dignity among others. They are sensing, as many of us Americans did during the Vietnam and Bush years, that something in their republic is being stolen. This can't go on without a fight. The question is, what kind?
Either be a liberal or not. A Jewish state is not a state for all its citizens.
Do you agree?Peter Beinart concedes democracy is too much to ask.
Democracy or ethnocracy-Pick one. And stop lying.
"The activists aren't all pure," And you pretend be.
That is obscene.
May 31, 2010 10:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
I find the double standard interesting.
No one disputes the idea of ethnic based states in Europe. No one tells the people of Kosovo it is wrong to have a Muslim state based on religion and language. No one tells the Croatians their Constitution that defines their identity as Croat and catholic is wrong and that they cannot be a democracy because they are "ethnic based".
Only the Jews are constantly put on trial for wanting a Jewish State - though no other people has required a state of its own more than the Jews.
Latent anti-Semitism? Double standards for sure.
May 31, 2010 10:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
The title of Mr. Sleeper's post is "Is Israel Drifting Toward Civil War?"
May 31, 2010 11:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
"No one disputes the idea of ethnic based states in Europe"
The French constitution does not recognize a French ethnicity. Germany changes its laws on citizenship only recently and much too late. Do you defend Le Pen?
Do you defend the Nativist right in any country other than Israel?
Israel was founded on a doctrine of racial separatism. Can can such as a state ever be called modern? Can such a state ever be called liberal?
I do not defend the ethnic based states of Europe, I defend the democracies of Europe.
Israel now controls the lives of as many Palestinians as Jews. Most of the Palestinians are not represented by the government that rules their lives through the IDF. Driving the palestinians into Jordan and Syria works no better than driving Mexicans into Guatemala.
Even liberal Israelis want the Palestinians to leave. That is simple racism. Uri Avnery says "the Jews want to live alone"
He sounds like a German. It's disgusting. Jews are not different, They have not earned the right to be racist. You say they have.
May 31, 2010 11:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Amen!
May 31, 2010 3:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
"I do not defend the ethnic based states of Europe..."
But how much time do you spend condemning them and what they do to people? How often do you call them racist...or German?
May 31, 2010 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
"But how much time do you spend condemning them and what they do to people? How often do you call them racist...or German?"
I call ethnic Turks born in Germany "German" just as I would call Jews born in Germany "German."
When Angela Merkel refers to "Christian Europe" I think of Germany 70 years ago and see immigrants to Europe as the replacement for dead Jews. And I say "fuck her"
'Liberals' don't defend Le Pen, the NF or Geert Wilders. And they don't defend anything similar in the melting pot of the US.
But many defend it in Israel. I say to them what I say to Merkel.
June 1, 2010 12:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Uh-huh.
June 1, 2010 5:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's not an answer.
Or give me one or walk away.
June 6, 2010 8:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Netanyahu regime brutalizing Palestinians, insulting President Obama, and acting like international barbarians in international waters has absolutely nothing to do with protecting Jews against anti-Semitism or the internationally accepted status of Israel as a Jewish state within the pre-1967 boundaries or some reasonable and properly negotiated variant thereof. This is complete settler-propaganda nonsense unworthy of being echoed or tolerated by sentient beings possessing an open mind.
May 31, 2010 12:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
So quick with the anti-Semitism accusations!
May 31, 2010 12:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, good point, Roger, since everyone in America is constantly bombarded with politicians telling us how we share so many common values with the Balkans.
If Israel wishes to be judged by the same standards as a lot of other ethnic states which discriminate against minorities inside their own borders and run an apartheid regime in territory that they've conquered, that's fine with me. Or for that matter if people insist on comparing American values with Israel's, just be clear that we're comparing our land theft and ethnic cleansing with theirs.
May 31, 2010 12:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
"If Israel wishes to be judged by the same standards as a lot of other ethnic states which discriminate against minorities inside their own borders and run an apartheid regime in territory that they've conquered, that's fine with me."
So what is this about? "Standards" and what you call different states--or what happens to people? Is it just that Israel has the temerity to call itself a democracy when it isn't one? That strikes me as a pretty small crime.
Read about those Kurdish villages Turkey--the new good guy--bombed last week in Iraq? 50 war planes or so. 60 miles from the Turkish border.
May 31, 2010 6:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
It may have escaped your notice, but most politicians in the US are kneejerk Israel supporters. Many of us are tired of this. That's what this is about in the US. In other parts of the world Israel is seen the way South Africa used to be--a last vestige of European colonialism.
As for Turkey, a lot of people who criticize Israel also criticize the US and Turkey and other places. Reading Chomsky is where I read about Turkey's bombardment of the Kurds in its own borders back in the 90's (using weapons that the US supplied). Chomsky in turn was quoting Human Rights Watch, which is constantly being criticized by the pro-Israel crowd. Jonathan Randal wrote a book about the Kurds which was very critical of Turkey--he also wrote a book about Lebanon which was very critical of Israel. And usually when Turkey is in the news involved in some human rights controversy, it's either about their denial of the Armenian genocide or about their own violations.
May 31, 2010 7:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
DJ: It may have escaped your notice, but most politicians in the US are kneejerk Israel supporters. Many of us are tired of this. That's what this is about in the US. In other parts of the world Israel is seen the way South Africa used to be--a last vestige of European colonialism.
TT: You mean, if we stop the aid as the principal thing, then we can all go back to sleep as we do with, say, Turkey?
DJ: As for Turkey, a lot of people who criticize Israel also criticize the US and Turkey and other places.
TT: Yes, but no one really gets exercised about Turkey the way they get exercised about Israel. Outside of a few intellectuals. I mean Israel just killed 10 people and it's called a "massacre." Turkey sent 50 warplanes to bomb Kurdish villages in Iraq and only "specialists" notice (mostly). Right now, Turkey is kinda sorta a hero on the left and this operation only bolsters their human rights cred.
June 1, 2010 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
The issue is not the idea of ethnic state, but the discrimination against a minority or minorities.
For example, most of the land in Israel is controlled by a quasigovernmental organization that allows Arabs to lease only in carefully selected spots, thus assuring vastly unequal access to real estate and segregation. Property rights dating before 1948 are invalid in the case of Arabs, but valid for Jews. I know no other state with such explicit legal discrimination.
There are many other forms of discrimination, like very unequal funding for education, employment discrimination etc.
Some bizarre forms of discrimination are semi-theocratic, like the right to marry only within recognized religious communities, with non-religious people not allowed to marry at all. Recall infamous miscegenation laws?
Add a policy of evicting the victims of "real estate discrimination", attacks on the Arab minority by major parties within the ruling coalition, the picture is definitely not pretty.
May 31, 2010 2:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well Serbia wanted a Serb state, didn't it? And we fucked them over pretty good, didn't we?
June 1, 2010 1:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
The issue was not one of self-determination for Serbs, it was that the ruling dictatorship in Belgrade wanted ITS "Serb state" to include the "promised land" of Kosovo, ethnically cleansed of the 90% Albanian population that has been there for many decades. But, there has never been any 'American Serbian Public Affairs Committee' browbeating a craven US Congress into eternally kissing Milosovec's ass, so Serbia is no longer building "settlements" in Kosovo, harassing Kosovars, and blockading them.
June 1, 2010 4:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
"it was that the ruling dictatorship in Belgrade wanted ITS "Serb state" to include the "promised land" of Kosovo, ethnically cleansed of the 90% Albanian population that has been there for many decades."
Sounds like you inadvertently actually pinpointed something of an analogy with Israel there. Israel wouldn't either be lambasted the way it is, if it didn't rule over occupied territories. If it didn't insist on ruling "promised lands" stretching from East-Jerusalem to areas across the West Bank, with Israeli settlers dispossessing and chasing out Palestinians from villages they lived in for many decades. If it didn't have Israeli forces browbeating local Palestinians, and native Palestinians being treated as second-rank humans. And these are actually, according to any international legal definition, occupied territories, whereas Kosovo was within Serbia proper.
June 1, 2010 9:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
I was trying to ADVERTENT. But to highlight a further important DIFFERENCE, Israel is not ethnically cleansing the West Bank and forcing all Arabs to march with their belongings on their backs to refugees camps in Jordan. My main point remains: the talk of a Jewish state is a misleading distraction. 95% of the world has recognized Israel as a Jewish state for decades. This is simply NOT the issue at stake.
June 1, 2010 10:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
trying to BE advertent (of course :))
June 1, 2010 10:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
you are of course 100% correct except that there is nothing I can see that is latent about their stance which strikes me as unequivocally racist...
Saudi Arabia which is really a successful cult and not a nation-state is based on a fusion of pathologies involving deep-seated issues of race-purity-shame-honor-violence and a violent denial of anything outside of the cult punishable by torture or death or excommunication...
America's sordid relationship with this utterly barbaric cult draws scant attention generally and no attention specifically as doing so would expose any number of hypocrisies both here amid the vortex of would-be lynch-mobs and internationally...
the politically incestuous relationships between oil and the military and the intelligence services and banking/insurance/stock and in turn their influence on campaign contributions and unions can not be examined without the entire system suffering a nervous breakdown...
so...
it is far easier to wave the bloody shirt and let the mob howl about the Jews...
which if it is examined and contextualized is revealed to be an old senile meme...
it goes back forever and a day and hasn't really ever changed...
after all...can you imagine the UN calling for an independent investigation into the treatment of slave labor in Saudi Arabia...
and ironically the very people here who scream the loudest about the deplorable treatment of the Palestinians never say a word about how they are treated in Saudi Arabia or the other Gulf cults...
they only scream about the Jews...
and thus...
sound...
like...
bigots...
spouting double standards...
as bigots...
always do...
June 1, 2010 9:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Key insight from Burson's article:
"Yet another problem with refraining from talks with Hamas and Iran: They know us so much better than we know ourselves."
May 31, 2010 11:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
what exactly does this phrase mean "The activists aren't all pure"? i really can't wait for the answer.
May 31, 2010 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
The attacked ship was flying a Turkish flag. It was sailing in international waters bringing humanitarian supplies to non-Israeli territory. The Turkish government explicitly directed Israel not to attack the flotilla. Turkey is a NATO ally.
Let's see how the cowardly Obama tries to weasel out of this one. Right now he's probably hiding in his bathroom in Chicago, begging his staff not to make him come out and deal with another crisis.
Did Washington green-light this attack? Or did Israel act contrary to US recommendations?
May 31, 2010 12:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bold words from someone who's probably never run anything bigger than his mouth.
Obama's hands are tied by the huge pro-Israel faction in the US Congress, which he can't alienate if he wants to get anything done at all. If you want bold action on Israel, get its blindest supporters out of Congress. The US President isn't a god, or even a prime minister. He doesn't have the power to bypass Congress or even to significantly offend it if he wants to govern effectively.
But getting the puppets out of Congress would take work, and rhetoric is so much more satisfying....
May 31, 2010 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
*Sounds* like you think the US President is just a figurehead, like the British Queen.
But in fact you know better, and just want to deflect blame (and attention) away from Obama.
May 31, 2010 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's funny -- Obama has probably been the most critical of Israel of any president. And you know my never-been-to-synagogue Jewish relatives who say they are democrats voted for McCain because of Obama's so-called anti-Israel stance. (The fact that McCain had the full endorsements of a anti-semitic preacher didn't bother them in the least. Obama's African American preacher did, though.)
I can be a bit knee-jerk in my defense of Obama, but I think it is because I know far too many people who are knee-jerk in wanting to be offended by him.
May 31, 2010 3:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe Obama should call Rahm Emanuel, who was in Israel as late as Sunday and is likely still there, and ask Rahm what is going on?
May 31, 2010 5:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, we know he got called an anti-semite by Itamar Ben-Gvir, as well as meeting with Netanyahu to extend to him a surprise invite for the White House visit, now cancelled. More here.
I know I would like to have been a little bird in the room when he learned of the ship raids.
May 31, 2010 6:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
my second link corrected here.
May 31, 2010 6:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Do you suppose that his Hebrew is as colorful as his English is reputed to be?
May 31, 2010 8:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
And how exactly would you deal with this "crisis," tough guy?
June 1, 2010 12:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Sleeper's post offers a useful analysis of the developing situation in Israel, but the headline is a rather absurd exaggeration. Where are any meaningful street demonstrations in Tel Aviv? Where is any measurable political movement in favor of removing at least the outpost settlements on the West Bank and recognizing a Palestinian state (e.g. in principle pending final negotiations)? Has the word "Peace Now" appeared even once in the New York Times in the 3rd Millenium? Where even are disgusted Israeli voters who overwhelmingly threw Playboy-hawk Netanyahu out of power in 1999?
The American Civil War broke out in 1861. Israel is not yet reached equivalent of the debate surrounding the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
May 31, 2010 12:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
If there is a civil war, the most likely outcome would be a right-wing dictatorship followed by the complete expulsion of all Arabs, pre-1967 boundary Arabs as well as occupied territory Arabs and/or their sequestration in apartheid-type "homelands" to provide cheap labor. Basically an intensified version of what already exists, minus Israeli dissent and opposition parties.
In which case, the US would lose any justification whatever for supporting Israel in any way, shape, or form.
May 31, 2010 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Israeli right is making the existence of Israel more and more untenable with each outragous act. How long must America suffer for the ongoing lawlessness of our client state Israel?
May 31, 2010 12:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just how "pure" do you have to be to deliver aid to starving children?
May 31, 2010 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think pure in this context means submissive.
May 31, 2010 10:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let's examine this... existential feeling; yes, many Israelis and Jews may feel this way, indeed its understandable, given the amount of propaganda they have been force fed in order to elicit this emotion. Yet, is it any more than generations of Us, who grew up with the spectre of Soviet nukes as a daily threat presence?
I think its simply not honest to ride the Vietnam straw horse, and ignore the very real... existential situation the Cold War posed to the US populace.
To put it another way, the validation of the... existential feeling is emotional, not logical. Israel has a large array of nuclear weapons (enough to offer a few spares to Praetoria, back in '75), as well as second strike capability. So, given that we have all coercively accepted the Mutually Assured Destruction principle, why should Israel be exempt from its logic?
May 31, 2010 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your logic, Dave. Unfortunately, what goes for logic in this article (as in so many about Israel), is not logic, but a self-referenced set of justifications.
May 31, 2010 3:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
This all reminds me of CP members clinging desperately to the hope that the Soviet Union might still survive.
Revolutionary idealism lives on even today.
May 31, 2010 12:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/dignity/
May 31, 2010 1:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
Lord, Almighty, must we obsess about Israel even on red, white, and, blue wave that American flag patriotic American holidays.
Sorry, just returned from a visit to honor Dad and the rest at the cemetary - nice little red, white and blue flag by the grave.
Then I drove back listening to Peter, Paul and Mary and Bruce singing "This land is your land".. hint that would be AMERICA they were singing about (not the same tune, like the song, have on the Ipod more than once) then I had little more Bruce:
BORN IN THE USA!!
May 31, 2010 3:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Civil War has been one of the great false political-cultural memes in Israel for decades...ever since Ben Gurion gave the order to fire on the ship carrying weapons for the Jabos...and no civil war broke out...
as to the other issues...
The Isralie Foreign Ministry has been tone deaf for so long it's hard to know where to start...
if nothing else someone there might want to consider just what their man in Ankara is doing because if they couldn't see that the Turks were setting them up to deal with their own (Turkish) internal politics than what is the point of having an embassy in Turkey...
...as in where the hell were the eyes and ears...what is the Mossad doing...what are the cultural attaches doing...what is the Ambassador doing...and if the Turks and the IDF were working on joint military exercises someone high up on the food chain might want to ask the military coordinators for those now canceled exercises just what was being discussed over tea...they might actually learn something by listening...
this should have been headed off weeks ago...
a full court diplomatic press should have been pushed weeks ago...
and the absolute last resort should have been sending the dogs to bite...
and having sent them...
where the hell was the pre-mission intel on who was on the ships and what they had with them...
a diplomatic failure...
a foreign policy failure...
and a set of questions for the IDF...as in how the hell do you screw up something like this...(and yeah not sinking the ships and not killing a lot of people is better than the alternative but that's not the point...the point is while everyone makes mistakes...this whole thing is a cock-up from top to bottom and side to side)...
and worst of all...
it is a failure of imagination...
May 31, 2010 3:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's a little hard to read this. As an American Jew who has spent time in Israel I want to cry. Every good thing you note about Israel is for Jews-only -- Palestinians have to pay higher taxes in Jerusalem, but basically cannot own property (due to a true Kafkaesque legal process built to thwart them), have to worry about houses they live in being bulldozed without any warning, have to pay for water (and are not allowed to collect it -- even in buckets). Redlining against non-Jews is a common occurrence. Any talk of an enlightened Israeli society died for me when I visited the place.
As a Jew, I find Israel to be one of the most anti-Jewish places I know. It's not the Palestinians who are anti-Jewish. No, those who violate the Torah are the Jewish people themselves. They began their bombing of Gaza on Sabbath, as if holding up a fist to G-d.
May 31, 2010 3:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
the mossad had satellite intelligence that hitler was on board one of the ships.
May 31, 2010 4:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
All Susan Rice need do is ABSTAIN or perhaps simply threaten to
May 31, 2010 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'll just ignore the silly headline. OK, headlines are allowed to be silly, although this one is admittedly on the outer bound. I'll analyze what strikes me most in you article, referring to you in third person out of habit. I hope you won't call that vitriol, although i don't expect you to like it.
I graduated from Tel Aviv University. I don't know if that earns me Sleeper's admiration. I hope not, because this admiration, unearned by anything other than birth, is a bit too colored with racism for me to enjoy it. This "insight" is the tip of an iceberg of a racist social hierarchy which manifests itself also as a racialized informal social theory of Israeli society, one which unfortunately Sleeper bought into, despite his alleged materialistic commitments. So let's have some real material analysis.
What is this sociology? My first question: are "scholars and students of Tel Aviv" a social group all by themselves, or a synecdoche of a larger social group? If the first, why contrast it with Russians and Orthodox? It is odd to divide society into, on the one hand, an ethnicity/group of origin, on the other hand, a religious tendency, and on the third hand, not even a professional identity but one limited to a single institution. It reminds me of one of those classificatory schemes invented by Borges when he was really bored. It assumes, for example, that Russians don't frequent Tel Aviv University. That is not exactly true, as in some faculties in the hard sciences classes have been occasionally held in Russian. Furthermore, the reasons why some Russians do not study or teach at TAU are not always voluntary, as there are street sweepers in Tel Aviv with advanced degrees in medicine and engineering and accomplished pianists who work as nurse aides. They happen to be Russians. On the other hand, why only TAU? Why not Bar Ilan which has quite many orthodox students, and would spoil the neat distinction between orthodoxy and university education?
Furthermore, "smart, cynical Russians" is one of those phrases that should ring alarm bells in the ear of a US listener, especially a Jewish listener. It just has that bad odor. How would the paragraph read with "sensual, devious African Americans"? Or "educated, cunning Jews"? Not to mention that the concern with the Birth rate of a social group is kind of iffy in polite society, and that it is not iffy in Israeli society should ring the same bells. Remember Exodus 1:9-10?
Let me propose an interpretative framework. Sleeper is referring obliquely to the general way in which Israel is divided into social sectors: Secular Ashkenazi veterans (from Eastern European origins primarily); conservative Jews (mostly from Arab countries by Origins); Ultra Orthodox Jews; Arabs. TAU, as everyone familiar with Israeli nomencalture would recognize, is a synecdoche of Secular Ashkenazi Veteran culture.
This division broadly expresses the type of "sectarian" parties one finds in Israel. But it is interesting to note three things. First, that two of the groups are not even mentioned. I'll leave that point out as food for thought.
Second, that one of the groups is represented obliquely, through TAU, as if in denial about its sectoral nature. This I suggest is linked to the fact that the social group that most dominates TAU, Secular Ashkenazi Veterans, indeed do not like to be represented as "a sector" or a social group. Like WASPs who just think themselves as Americans without hyphenation, Secular Ashkenazi Veterans think of themselves as simply "Israelis" and sort of hyphenate the other social groups (Arab-Israelis, Mizrahi Israelis, Russian Israelis, etc.)
Third, that one social group is valued as "all we admired." And another is devalued as "cynical." I won't repeat myself too much if I'd call this racialized measure of people bunk and morally outrageous. I just have to say it again and again.
The social classification we have here is one that is typical (cf. Oren Yftahel) of settler societies. In such societies the social order is based on the distinction between three groups: settlers, natives and immigrants. In Israel, the natives are the Palestinians, called "Israeli Arabs," and heavily discriminated against. The "settlers" are the social group that established the settler society by colonizing the land and driving out or overcoming the natives. In Israel, that group is made mostly of the Eastern European Jews who came to Israel before 1948, almost all secular, and their descendants. The "immigrants" consist of all those who joined the settlers' order later on the basis of some affinity (affinities such as white skin in the US, Jewishness in Israel, and foreign origins in South Africa). In settler societies, natives are permanently excluded and kept at the bottom of the social order, while immigrants are invited to assimilate into the settler order and allowed some social mobility, but in return for accepting prolonged racialized exclusion and subservience. In the US, the "native" category includes Native-Americans and Blacks, and the "immigrant" category includes Irish, Italians and Jews. In South Africa, the "immigrants" were the "colored" category. In Israel it consists of Jews from Arab countries, Russians and Orthodox Jews.
What Sleeper's evokes is therefore the "existential" fears of Secular Ashkenazi Jews, the elite of Israeli society which sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called Akhusalim (cf. http://www.haaretz.com/culture/books/wiped-out-1.70743 , but I'll just call SAJ). To put these "existential" fears in perspective, remember that the median income of this social group is about 30% above the national average, and about twice as high compared to the Arab and Orthodox sector.
Furthermore, following unconsciously the distinction between natives and immigrants, Sleeper deals with the fear from Palestinians as an "exterior" threat, metonymically represented, as it is indeed by the ideology of Israel, by external enemies (which miraculously fits the Israeli tendency to refers to the native Palestinians as foreigners, immigrants, "resident aliens" etc., denying their right to the land). In contrast, he deals with the threat coming from the "immigrants" as an interior threat of corruption from within.
Of course, to say that TAU students and professors, that is SAJs, are everything most of us once admired, means to say that we admired ethnic cleansing, the establishment of the military rule, the theft of 90% of the land, the establishment of a regime based on racial discrimination of the native people of the land, etc. I guess some people admired that.
But Sleeper's refusal for any materialistic analysis leaves out almost everything. What destroyed Israel's welfare state was not Russian immigration nor the pressure from Orthodox Jews. It was a complex process of neoliberal privatization, but one thread in this process was the defense of social power of SAJs. The onset of privatization was in the early nineties, after two racially charged elections involving the rise of Mizrahi and Ultra-orthodox parties, primarily Shas. The result of privatization was that the economic power of the state was hollowed out and transferred to private hands exactly at the moment when public power finally slipped from the SAJs hands. The Knesset is a lot more racially diverse than any corporate boardroom or university cafeteria in Israel. That is, SAJs were the greatest beneficiaries from the destruction of Israel's welfare state. SAJs own property in most of the places where real estate has skyrocketed. SAJs own most shares in the privatized Kibbutzim that were allowed to take massive amounts of (stolen) public land and to privatize it for development for free! SAJs are most of the lawyers, professors, professionals, and corporate executives whose income soured as a result of neo-liberalism. They drive corporate cars, subsidized by taxpayers, leaving the public transport to the Orthodox and the rest. Etc. Etc.
I do not know why Sleeper finds the "existential" fears of SAJs so easy to identify with. I'd just suggest that identification here is barrier for intelligent analysis. The idea that the best in a society is its current upper class is something a French speaker my call "ancient regimist."
May 31, 2010 6:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
thank you for the deconstructing sleeper.
May 31, 2010 7:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
ED, this is an interesting set of analyses and parallels, and I am not about to question any aspect of the sociology of Tel Aviv University, but I think it essentially misses Sleeper's main point. American fears of "something" in Israel "being stolen", along rather similar lines, were being expressed already when Menachem Begin came to power over three decades ago. The "something" at risk then, was also closely linked to Ashkenazi Jews, but to their immaterial rather than material interests. New York Jews were not denouncing Begin and Likud in the Village Voice because the "Greater Israel" concept threatened their Christopher Street brownstone walkups. The "existential threat" then, and I daresay now, was to salient forms of European idealism, including the socialist idealism of the leading socialist Jew whose bust adorns your posts. There is no reason why a society of Zionist kibbutzim, or even one of international high tech entrepreneurs living off the labor of an Arabic working and servant class, has to oppressively and intransigently occupy the West Bank six years after the death of Yasir Arafat -in whom in did not have a "negotiating partner"- or blow up hundreds of children in Gaza in order to stop rocket attacks, or respond to civil disobedience by recklessly killing activists from around the world in international waters.
The values of the Israeli settlers in the occupied territories are not the values on which Israel was founded. It is a pity that it takes atrocities (though still a far cry from a "civil war") for pro-Israel American Jews to finally, after years of deafening silence, wake up to the reality (well understood by the Village Voice of the late 1970s but long forgotten since) that they need to choose between a civilized Israel of the western enlightenment, and an Israel wagged by barbarian settlers (as it mostly has been since 2000). But THAT is the wake-up that is going on. This is not the ruling elites fearing the masses. It is a quietly intimidated intellectual elite starting to realize that much of its erstwhile overseas allied elite, and their self-appointed local spokespersons, have been systematically raping it. No civil war is needed. Just stronger protections against bad apples spoiling the good ones.
May 31, 2010 8:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
I beg to differ that what I said misses the main point. Indeed, you say that " There is no reason why a society of Zionist kibbutzim, or even one of international high tech entrepreneurs living off the labor of an Arabic working and servant class, has to oppressively and intransigently occupy the West Bank six years after the death of Yasir Arafat."
Now is there no reason? That is the question. Usually when things happen, we look for reasons. We don't declare in advance that there is no reason. If Sleeper came out of his idealist mode of analysis, quite a few reasons might appear. So let me suggest first that the relation, the full set of relation between Kibutzim and settlements in the West Bank has to be analyzed, instead of it being simply assumed that never the two shall meet.
One could ask why, for example, the Kibutz leadership has just recently announced a new push for settling the Jordan Valley, and why the specifically target the operation to young Jews in Tel Aviv: http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/kibbutz-movement-urging-ex-soldiers-to-settle-in-west-bank-1.288291?localLinksEnabled=false
Can a society built on stealing, settling and building the land, a society whose all institutions are based on the distinction between native, settler and immigrant, a society in which one is materially rewarded at the highest level for participating in the colonization process, whose political class in its entirety is made of veterans of the struggle for the theft of the land, and whose cultural forms, poetry, literature, poplar music, etc., are in their majority expressing the ethos and the preference for settlers over natives and immigrant, can such a society say "stop! We had enough!"?
The answer is of course yes. That is possible. But the answer is also of course that it would be very hard, and require a huge and prolonged battle to have any chance of success. The question is, can this battle be lead by the very same social group that lead the colonization process? And furthermore, can this struggle be lead with the same banners, the same ethos, the same "ideals" as those that propelled the colonization process?" It seems to be a totally insane expectation. Was the battle for civil rights in the US lead by WASPs? No, it was lead by blacks, and people from the "immigrant" category, notably Jews, played an important role. Was the battle against Apartheid in South Africa led by Afrikaners under the banner of Afrikaner values? No, it was lead by natives with a good deal of help from those in the "immigrant" category. Why doesn't Sleeper go to Sakhnin to look for potential leadership and an ethos that can transform Israel? Why is he fixated on Tel aviv? My only answer is that what passes as leftist analysis is no more than romanticizing "people like him", in a way that seeks to prevent and delay the democratization. But people like him (and like me) are going to be the last to join a revolution in Israel.
June 1, 2010 9:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are playing games with words, ED. When I said "no reason", I meant it in the usual sense of "no GOOD reason." Your "reasons" strike me as valid but highly incomplete and I certainly disagree that some kind of utopian social revolution is needed to get Israel out of the West Bank. If AIPAC were removed from the Congress, America could easily force Israel out very quickly. No one could stop us, and 80% of the world would be heave a huge sigh of relief if not actively assist. This is a difficult approach, but not at all utopian. Pressure from the US worked on South Africa. A key difference though is that there was no American South African Public Affairs Committee.
June 1, 2010 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course one could take Israel out of the West Bank by purely external forces. The question is why it is there in the first place, and you seems to think that there are no GOOD reasons for that. I don't know what a "good" reason is for a historical account, except a reason that is grounded in the analysis of the structures and forces that are operative in that society. If you can't find a reason, you are either arguing that history is beyond analysis, or that you don't like the analysis.
So I'm not playing with words, I'm pointing out that the reasons some people think the occupation fell from the sky is because they refuse to analyze the history of Israel objectively, without assuming the natural goodness of its social, economic and political elite.
June 1, 2010 11:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't have time for your longer comment in the post below, ED, but on the occupation:
It could be gone in not much more than a year or so, if Israel could reject the settlers (which are 5% of the population and economy and contribute nothing to its security or well-being, indeed they are highly negative to both). They could accept Res. 242, the Arab League, the Geneva Plan, the policies of the UN, EU and US, e.g. Common Sense, and negotiate a lasting two-state deal with Fayyad. Hamas would have to adjust and adapt or be relegated to a disloyal opposition status. The Israelis could then run any kind of mixed socialist-capitalist-corporatist-libertarian-orthodox-ecotopian economy they pleased. (And, at a lower level of prosperity of course, so could the Palestinians). There is no GOOD reason for the Israelis NOT doing this. The BAD reason it is not done is (in short) that the settlers wag the Knesset and AIPAC, and AIPAC wags the US Congress, and the US Congress constrains Obama, and the world can't do jacksh-- on this without the US president leading.
June 1, 2010 11:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
There is no GOOD reason for the Israelis NOT doing this. The BAD reason it is not done is (in short) that the settlers wag the Knesset and AIPAC, and AIPAC wags the US Congress, and the US Congress constrains Obama, and the world can't do jacksh-- on this without the US president leading.
And I disagree. You basically argue that a group that couldn't even pass the barrier for entering the Knesset on its own is holding the whole world at ransom. This is a conspiracy theory, not an analysis of Israeli society.
June 1, 2010 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
In the short form that I expressed it might sound like a conspiracy theory, but it is not. It is a theory of special interest politics. No conspiracies are required to explain politicians pandering to special interests.
Most Israelis are indifferent to what goes on with the West Bank settlements, so Likud benefits by pandering to the settlers and their most diehard supporters. Most Americans are indifferent to US Mideast policy as long as they can fill their gas tanks without too much hassle, so the US Congress panders to a small minority of one-issue extremists taking the view that Israel deserves full support always and no matter what its government does. This is more than a theory. Most of Congress signed on to AIPAC's letter criticizing Obama and backing Netanyahu on the dispute (during Biden's visit to Israel earlier this year) over new construction to expand settlements in the occupied territories. A recent example of dozens over the past several years.
June 1, 2010 4:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't want to go into a discussion of US politics, in relation to which I am partially in agreement, although the special interests supporting Israel are more important than just AIPAC. Count the Pentagon and the oil industry as well. But that is another discussion.
Regarding Israel, this is simply wrong. Israel's general policy towards the occupation matters deeply to most Israelis. Likud doesn't pander to settlers, but expressed deep cultural attitudes and convictions of a plurality of the public, and these have in turn been shaped by the cultural and political institutions of the state, including the national education system, the mainstream media, etc. over the long term.
trying to dissociate the occupation from Israel just doesn't make sense. It is wishful thinking.
That doesn't mean the occupation cannot be ended as you want, by external pressure, but the pressure will have to be much bigger than you imagine, and the resulting upheaval would be dramatic, not just the end of a "special interest" but the end of Israel as we know it.
June 1, 2010 5:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
You probably know about the specifics of Israeli politics than I do, ED, but did you read Avishai's piece about traffic congestion in Israel? Do you really think "Israel's general policy towards the occupation matters deeply" to the drivers he describes? Or the software entrepreneurs for that matter? Did the general Israeli public really care much when Sharon evicted the settlers from Gaza? Or were they embarrassed to be sharing citizenship with those kooks and happy when their crybabying was finally off the front pages? A basic solution to the settlements problem was largely worked out 7 years ago in the Geneva plan. Minor land-swap adjustments to the 1948 border would enable Israel to legally annex most settlements. The rest would be abandoned like Gaza. A few controversial spots are tougher, like East Jerusalem, but from what I've read most secular Israelis aren't all that fond of Jerusalem settlers either, and would be willing to share the city with a Palestinian state as part of a real comprehensive peace deal. Where is the "deep caring" about the occupied territories in all this? What have I missed in the New York Times, Economist and Haaretz over recent decades? What is so hard for you to accept about the swing power of the extreme in Israeli Knesset coalition politics that is analyzed and discussed in great detail every time there is an Israeli election?
June 1, 2010 5:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
What you miss is that all you practically read in English is written from the perspective of secular Israelis, that is SAJ. This includes Avishai. And they only talk to themselves. And they only make 30% of Israeli Jews at most, by most accounts closer to 20-25%.
And even the majority of them, while they don't feel much attachment to Hebron, are convinced most Arabs want to throw them into the sea, and are therefore easily swayed by the silliest argument when it is framed in terms of security, so that, for example, 95% of Israeli Jews, which mean at least 75% of SAJ, supported extending the massacre of Gaza in January 2007. So in order to get even a chance to level with them you'd have to defeat Israel's military establishment, not only the hardcore settlers.
So I'm not saying it can't be done, but you grossly underestimate the task.
June 1, 2010 5:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, maybe the "task" is slightly closer to Sleeper's civil war than I thought, at least viewed from a purely Israeli point of view. If your percentages and classifications are correct, however, how do you account for what happened to the voters who gave Barak a landslide victory against Netanyahu in 1999? Have half of them become brainwashed somehow by the Rabin-was-a-tool-of-the-Oslo-Nazis school of historical fantasy-deception? How then did Sharon clear Gaza of settlers so easily? Were they they simply viewed as the runts of the Greater Israel settler family, forced to march to their bigger brothers' dictated tactical retreat, or what?
At any rate, this reinforces my long-held view that it is primarily up to the much larger number of Jews in America to break the tail-wagging at their end, and sever AIPAC's ridiculous stranglehold on Congressional Mideast policy. Non-Jews in America are not up to the job (a) because few give a hoot about Israel or the Mideast to begin with (indeed most have little interest in foreign policy at all) and (b) why go to the trouble of being branded an anti-Semite and viciously slandered and blackballed if American Jews themselves don't care enough to get involved?
The problem here with I-don't-want-to-get- involved American Jews, it seems to me, is not their Jewishness but their Americanness. They wait until disaster strikes, and then they rise to the occasion (until the next more exciting message hits the Blackberry). A holiday weekend, and the headline reads Israeli Commandos Kill Peace Activists and there is sudden need to be Very Concerned About The Tragedy (for a while).
June 1, 2010 6:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
So you put a hypothesis, American Jewish identification with SAJs (Secular Ashkenazi Jews, also veteran and of Eastern European origins, self defined as "socialist") was based and still based on the threat to their "socialist and Marxist" ideals.
I think that is simply, objectively wrong. But before I propose an alternative analysis, let me make explicit some assumptions that underlie the analysis
1. SAJ's are socialist in some important sense.
2. American Jews who identify with SAJs are socialist in some important sense.
3. The rise of Menachem Begin was a defeat to socialism in some sense.
Now, SAJs, voting historically to a party called "labor" have in the past self-identify as socialists. So one cannot deny that at some level you are right about 1. The question is the importance of that "level." I would like to point out just a few facts that suggest that this is a lot less important than you suggest.
a. Kibutzim, the basis of 'socialism' in Israel, are mostly exclusively Ashkenazi, formally rejecting Arab participation, and informally discouraging oriental Jewish participation. Now, the historical principle of my avatar was, if you remember, "workers of the world unite," not "workers of my race unite." That's a pretty big difference.
b. Most of the land owned by Kibbutz members was taken violently from the indigenous people. I know Marx supported violence and expropriation, but I don't remember him supporting expropriation of subsistence farmers. In Marx's theory of history, this kind of expropriation belongs to the process of establishing a Bourgeois order (primitive accumulation), not its dissolution in a workers' revolution. So Marx in fact can be used pretty well to explain why privatization was not resisted by the Kibbutz movement.
c. When Ben Gurion violently repressed the sailors' strike in 1950, did the Kibbutz movement mobilize in solidarity? When Jews from Arab countries were hurdled four family in a single apartment while Kibutzim held the largest reserves of land, did kibbutz members step up to combat discrimination, or where they at the forefront of demanding and justifying unequal distribution in their own favor? Did they support for example the eruption of Mizrahi anger at their condition in Wadi Saleeb, the Musrarra Black Pathers uprising? Did the Kibbutz movement, after 1967, oppose or participate in the colonization of the West Bank? These are all rhetorical questions. That is why I am not answering them.
The alternative interpretation is that the Kibbutz movement was a nationalist settler movement committed to colonization in both practice and thought based on racialized settler concepts of hierarchy, with a veneer of "socialist" practices that were mostly applied to the relations between members but with close to no attempt to extend them as universal principles for the organization of society, which is what socialism is. Because the role of socialism was so negligible, the kibbutz movement was both unable and unwilling to put up any resistance to the neo-liberal transformation of Israel into one of the most unequal societies in the world. I cannot establish this here, but the information is out there.
2. Are American Jews who identify with SAJ angst since 1977 socialists? I'll leave that to your superior knowledge. But except in the degraded meaning of the term that allows it to be apply to Obama, I fail to see how the "left Zionists" like the owner of this blog can be described as "socialist".
Again, where were these "socialists" when the Israeli government repressed even Jewish workers? Why have they never rallied to support working class opposition to the government, whether Arab or Jewish? Why have they never shown any interest in socialist and communist movements that are bi-national or internationalist? Matzpen, the Black Panthers, ISO, the Communist party, etc? How come there was never a rallying of American Jews for supporting these organizations?
We have here an identification between a section (Jewish) of the affluent classes in American society and the (Jewish) upper class of Israeli society, in the name of supposedly "socialist" ideals, but always without ever supporting ANY equal rights or working class movement within Israel UNLESS it is committed to maintaining SAJ social and political domination (that is, unless it is not in fact a movement for equality). There is no denial that these ideals matter to the way people understand themselves, but as objective explanation of their actions, it seems seriously lacking.
3. The rise of Likud was based on an alliance between a section of the SAJ, led by Begin (a Polish settler), that was politically marginalized by Ben Gurion, and masses of the excluded Jews from the "immigrants" category, mostly born in Arab countries. Someone with Sleeper's fabled "negative capabilities" would have recognized in this development a dialectic between a demand for social justice from below and an attempt to capture that demand in the service of the elites through national chauvinism that separated the "immigrants" from the "natives" and prevents their joint struggle (as for example was advocated by Mazpen and the Black Panthers at the time).
Thus, what made Bagin acceptable to the Israeli settler establishment was precisely his "Greater Israel" concept (shared by the way by Ben Gurion and all the leadership of the Labor party, all of whom were active in sponsoring the early settlements across the Green Line). What made him odious to them was primarily that he provided political expression to demands for more equality for lower class Jews and even more so for less intolerance towards Arab Jewish culture.
In other words, what SAJs hated most about Begin was the "existential" threat to their social position and cultural hegemony. One can call that "socialist ideals." Why American Jews found that attractive I'll leave to those who know them better.
June 1, 2010 11:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
"When Ben Gurion violently repressed the sailors' strike in 1950, did the Kibbutz movement mobilize in solidarity? When Jews from Arab countries were hurdled four family in a single apartment while Kibutzim held the largest reserves of land, did kibbutz members step up to combat discrimination, or where they at the forefront of demanding and justifying unequal distribution in their own favor?"
amazing how "history" can be skewed when you eliminate context...
Israel in 1950...the Middle East and the world in 1950...
clearly by your version of events have nothing at all to do with what Ben Gurion did or did not do so reducto ad absurdum ad infinitum the entire issue is stood on its head and because Zionism took European style Nationalism and infused it with elements of Leftist ideology it is according to you (espousing "pure" "Marxism") nothing more or less than racist and colonizing and fundamentally illegitimate...
And here is the money shot:
"When Jews from Arab countries were hurdled four family in a single apartment while Kibutzim held the largest reserves of land, did kibbutz members step up to combat discrimination"
as if (according to ED) the squalid government housing of (for example) Old Katamoun was built on purpose for the express purpose of brutalizing the Mizrahi...
and as if in 1950 or later Israel had the resources to do much better than they did with an influx of nearly a million refugees...
and while even a cursory look at Israel reveals blatant fault lines running between white-skinned Ashkanzim and dark skinned Spheradim...saying that the treatment of the Mizrahi invalidates Zionism is tantamount to saying Sally Hemmings invalidates the Declaration of Independence...
but by the Marxist ideal...Israel in 1950 was not a colony but a robust fully autonomous state with the ability to act without fear of British French American or Soviet intervention and of course by this version what is redacted is the military and financial imbalance...and any examination of the all-too typical local politics in which bribery political favors blackmail ambition greed stupidity and plain dumb luck all must be factored in so that "Dewy Defeats Truman" is seen not just as a purely American phenomenon but a universal one...i.e. & e.g., how many OTHER factors were at work in Israel in the 1950s or later or today...other than it's all because (the tired leftist meme) of "Zionism is immoral..."
context context context context...
versus...the Marxist view which is Zionism is not pure anti-nationalist Marxism and therefore is colonizing hypocritical and immoral followed by non-contextual headlines that insist without evidence that 90% of the land was stolen...no other factors exist...it was just all stolen...
the Arabs you conveniently forget to mention participated in the perfectly legal and binding United Nations vote to partition the Mandate...
and lost...
and started an illegal war attacked civilians and committed war crimes...
setting in motion any number of political and historical train wrecks...
but that is not mentioned and what we get instead is a Marxist hit parade about the elite of American and Isralie society...
so in a blatantly obvious semantically maneuver dressed up in moral outrage and half-baked leftist dogma the only issue is that the Jews were and remain colonizers advocating a racist ideology...
but of course as long as we are analyzing the dreaded Ashkanazi elite...let's cast our couch a little wider...
many Jews psychologically crippled by the dialectical social wind-sheer of assimilation embrace the strident nihilism of Marx and Trotsky in an effort to realize the pipe dream of Rousseau and establish a post-cultural and post cultural identity utopia in which memory is captured controlled and placed at the service of the state in the name of liberty...
in order to make this brand of fascism stink less the argument is framed in pseudo-scientific terms that insist they are a priori factual and thus irrefutable...and any deviation (which by definition is oppositional) is declared invalid and therefore morally illegitimate...
this entire process of course rests on ED's admission of embracing a situational hypocrisy which ironically puts him in bed politically with the political animals (Ben Gurion and Begin etc) he says he despises; individuals who did not have the luxury of choosing between good and bad but were as most human beings are forced to choose between bad and worse...
it is this sense of the common lot of all people and a reality of endless moral imperfection that the self-annihilating historical determinists of the left can not tolerate as their totalitarian impulses born from their particular pathologies of inadequacy shame guilt and a desire to assert power through either direct violence or through the use of others as tools take control of their actions revealing them to be as close-minded intolerant and authoritarian as those they condemn...
thus ED's argument rests on spurious under-examined rants of moral outrage...
why didn't the Kibutzim fight Ben Gurion...if you're ED it's because...
they are bigots...colonizers...hypocrites...
if you're anyone of any intelligence and honesty and intellectual rigor...
it's because history really does have it's own cunning...
and perhaps because the Kibutzim were paralyzed by other factors...running the gamut from immorality to fear to practicality to political animus to sloth to personal animosity and even to reasoned principled opposition...and a different definition of patriotism...or as is almost certainly the case...by all of the above...
but that would require seeing them as human beings living in a historical vortex that consumes everyone and everything and leaves in its wake a wreckage of good intentions...
but that in turn would mean being intellectually generous...and comfortable in one's own skin...and not a fire and brimstone prophet of moral superiority and condemnation demanding that time be controlled and human impulses contorted to fit proscribed boxes of absolute right and absolute wrong...
well as someone smarter than anyone here phrased it...yes isn't it pretty to think so...
after all it's not just the SAJ's who have psychological issues...
June 1, 2010 1:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Whatever Marlow, whatever. you are too stupid to warrant a reply.
June 1, 2010 1:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
from the illiterate clown who didn't know Darwish that's funny...
June 1, 2010 4:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
The values of the Israeli settlers in the occupied territories are not the values on which Israel was founded.
That is simplistic. There is no doubt that the values of the original settlers included a "socialist" language, professed atheism, a relatively secular outlook and a modest preference for civil rights when they don't interfere with colonization. These values are not widely shared by hardline settlers in the OPT.
But they also included the assumed inferiority of Arab culture, the right to expropriate the natives, the value of Jewish nationalism and putting national solidarity above all other forms of solidarity, the principles of "Jewish labor" (kicking out non-Jews from good employment,) "redemption of the land" (kicking out the indigenous people from their land), and the denial of significant political expression to non-Jews in Israel.
These are exactly the values on which Israel was formed. So there is partial difference and partial equivalence.
What you are effectively saying is that the set of common elements between the settlers inside Israel and the settlers in the OPT are unimportant and carry little explanatory power, whereas the set of differences is all important and explains everything.
What is the basis for that other than you wishing it so be?
June 1, 2010 11:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent analysis. Sleeper's words were grating to me but you superbly explained why.
June 1, 2010 3:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you PTroub, and I think Sylvanen needs to read you and then go and deconstruct himself.
I've written about Israel's go-go, Singapore economy, but even a materialist can acknowledge that culture matters, sometimes decisively. More than two seemingly incompatible things may have validity at the same time, and some of us aerate the ambiguities, while others just cavil at them.
June 1, 2010 5:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
It seems to my humble eyes that what you call "materialism" is the degraded form in which this has been interpreted by Stalinism and used pejoratively by conservatives.
A true material analysis doesn't ignore culture, nor does it sees culture as a pure "expression" of the economy. Rather, it sees culture as intrinsically linked to, both shaping and being shaped by, the economic and political forms in which that culture operates. A materialist analysis refuses the naive ways in which unreflective members of a culture perceive the categories of their own culture as "given" or natural. That is very different from denying or ignoring their existence or importance.
What you are doing instead, is precisely taking the categories of Israeli pop-sociology as given, and then further romanticizing them. That's an ideological operation, just as mine is. I invite readers to note the political opposition between these two ideological choices, and judge them accordingly.
June 1, 2010 10:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
ED writes: "Rather, it sees culture as intrinsically linked to, both shaping and being shaped by, the economic and political forms in which that culture operates."
But isn't this "both shaping and being shaped by" a bit like the night in which all cows are black? Perhaps culture is key and economic and political forms shape and are shaped by it?
How would we know?
June 5, 2010 10:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
we know by studying it in details. and telling complicated stories that captures as much of and with as much honesty, all that can be known.
June 5, 2010 1:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
With all due respect, Mr. Sleeper, 'aerated ambiguities' perfectly describes your writing on this subject of late.
ED, I thank you for your much more trenchant analysis.
June 1, 2010 1:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
The rules:
1) Anyone criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic.
2) Israel loves its apartheid state and will kill any number of civilians to keep it.
There's nothing either surprising or new about any of this.
May 31, 2010 7:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Civil war? Give me a break.
Like in the U.S. - one side has all of the guns, the infrastructure and the body bags. It would be a civil wipeout.
May 31, 2010 7:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems that there is a wide effective national consensus in Israel.
1. Keep Gaza "on diet" until they will release Shalit, remove Hamas from leadership, and write 500 times on the board "I recognize the right of Israel to exists as a Jewish state.
2. Expand settlements in West Bank and East Jerusalem.
3. Foreign policy's chief objective is to label everyone sympathetic to Israel as ... something. Extemist. Terrorist. Anti-semitic. Islamofascist.
Then there are wide spheres of national contention. Like
A. Should one from time to time say something wistful about "peace process", "democracy" etc.? Like Ehud Barak, during a short break between defiance of a court order to dismantle an illegal settlement and congratulating troops for succesfully demolishing illegal privies, chicken coops and other structures erected by cheeky natives of zone C? Or boldly state that Yesha was, is and will be ours?
B. Should one be allowed to enter a parking structure on the Lord's day in His Holy city?
C. Should the State pay individuals to study religion without any time limit? Or it should be like with any other kind of education: with time limit, and according to some survey of employer needs?
D. Should one discriminate against Arabs quietly, or make a political football on that topic?
Actually, only points like B and C are raising some rankor.
Then there is some wee group of people who would like peace, and what not, but it is like with vegans in USA: the steak party is very much in control.
May 31, 2010 10:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems that there is a wide effective national consensus in Israel.
1. Keep Gaza "on diet" until they will release Shalit, remove Hamas from leadership, and write 500 times on the board "I recognize the right of Israel to exists as a Jewish state.
2. Expand settlements in West Bank and East Jerusalem.
3. Foreign policy's chief objective is to label everyone sympathetic to Israel as ... something. Extemist. Terrorist. Anti-semitic. Islamofascist.
Then there are wide spheres of national contention. Like
A. Should one from time to time say something wistful about "peace process", "democracy" etc.? Like Ehud Barak, during a short break between defiance of a court order to dismantle an illegal settlement and congratulating troops for succesfully demolishing illegal privies, chicken coops and other structures erected by cheeky natives of zone C? Or boldly state that Yesha was, is and will be ours?
B. Should one be allowed to enter a parking structure on the Lord's day in His Holy city?
C. Should the State pay individuals to study religion without any time limit? Or it should be like with any other kind of education: with time limit, and according to some survey of employer needs?
D. Should one discriminate against Arabs quietly, or make a political football on that topic?
Actually, only points like B and C are raising some rankor.
Then there is some wee group of people who would like peace, and what not, but it is like with vegans in USA: the steak party is very much in control.
May 31, 2010 10:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is same old familiar crap in the defense of Israel. The standard Israeli propaganda camouflage undertaken on behalf of the Israeli propaganda machine to minimize acts of barbarism routinely made by the IDF. The author throws-in between the lines flowed analogies between Israel and the US to create the usual mutual empathy and understanding, and to try make us believe that the general disgust expressed by an “enlightened” elite versus the rogue “Russian Mafia”, and others, assuredly represents the “normal majority” of the Israeli public, which, nevertheless, never stops shifting to the extreme right and even electing neo-Nazis like Avigdor Lieberman.
Undoubtedly, there are many good Israelis and righteous Jews, who are seeking a peaceful existence with the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors. Nonetheless, the great majority of the Israeli public, whether they are Labor party members, Likud Party members or whatever their other political domination, they are in perfect partnership in wanting to keep an apartheid state system within Israel and the ever increasing expansion of settlements.
Sadly, unless the other millions of Jews living around the world, and in particular in the US, do not raise a united voice in disgust against such merciless and gratuitous violence, Israel will continue to behave in the same manner.
June 1, 2010 12:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
"unless...other millions of Jews living around the world, and in particular in the US...raise a ...voice in disgust against such merciless and gratuitous violence...Israel will continue to behave in the same manner."
Maybe, maybe not, Schmamass. Nobody here has a crystal ball predicting the future. But if your diagnosis proves true, it does not necessarily mean that the "civil war" is already over in Israel, and the good guys have already lost there without hardly "firing a shot."
Israel is far from being a monolith or even a duality. It is more like a kaleidoscope, and within the frequently tumbling and reshifting Knesset coalitions, the extreme pro-settler and religious fanatic parties tend to play a very disproportionately powerful 'swing' role. Special interests in the US (e.g. AIPAC) with their own disproportionate influence on the US Congress, reflect that "tail-wagging" situation in Israel, quite exactly by taking the (so far) predictably consistent position that WHATEVER any Israeli government EVER does, it ALWAYS deserves the US serving as its door mat. (This idiocy is of course well-cloaked by a deeply ingrained and finely-honed, if increasingly shrill, system of systematic trickery and lies, but let's be clear -before any lies start here in this thread- that most special interests rely on deception and general public apathy to conceal their abuse of that public; there is nothing particularly semitic about this).
In my view, this Israeli and US political reality largely explains the dual struggle for liberation American and Israel Jews are now starting to seriously undertake: against the settlers in Israel, and against the settler-lobby in the US.
June 1, 2010 5:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Universal conscription?"
Not for Arab Israelis, a minuscule number of whom serve in the IDF. They are thus deprived them of the networking opportunities and varied work experience provided by the IDF, which has been called the "glue of Israeli society."
All part of the two-caste system.
June 1, 2010 1:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Israelis also don't have Americans' history of conquering a whole continent and not having to care about it."
Could someone explain to me what is meant by this?
June 1, 2010 9:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Israelis also don't have Americans' history of conquering a whole continent and not having to care about it."
Could someone explain to me what is meant by this?
June 1, 2010 9:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you start murdering people, it usually pays to murder a whole lot, like millions. This is the law of diminishing consequences.
June 1, 2010 12:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Which continent did Americans conquer? North America except for Mexico and Canada?
June 1, 2010 1:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's jealousy. It's almost like it's not fair - everybody else got to mistreat others in furtherance of their own version of "Manifest Destiny" (be it my forebears here in N.Am., Serbs creating a "Greater Serbia" or -- dare I say it, in fear of breaking Godwin's law -- zie Deutsche mit der Lebensraum).
Hence, the criticism above that critique of Israel is somehow circumspect if not accompanied in the same breath by vociferous criticism of the colonialist, apartheidist and ethnic-cleansing policies of other, non-Jewish nations, past, present and future. In other words, "Yeah it's bad, but you don't criticize other brutal ethnic-based repression like you do ours, so you must just be upset because I'm Jewish, so I'll just keep on doing awful things to millions of others."
What the European settlers did in N. Am. was horrific. It's embarrassing that Lord Jeffrey "Are you cold? Need a blanket?" Amherst is the namesake of one of our most prominent colleges. We have to live with our guilt - and any right-minded American should have some.
But pointing to what others did more than a century ago as justification for your systematic racial repression of millions today is just weird. (See esp. Tintin and Roger above for examples hereof.) By that logic, I guess the Israelis would also be justified in just having open-air slave markets and plantations - hell, we had em here until the 1860s!
I do find it interesting though, what #evildoer wrote above about the Settler/Immigrant/Native dynamic. Do you think that perhaps the reactionary apologism of the SAJ population with respect to Israel's actions, esp with its reliance on comparisons to how culpable other Europeans are in their own respective dominations of others, is rooted in some degree in the fact that the SAJ population in America feels more like part of the Immigrant population and not the Settler population (although considering the fact that the CSA Sec Treas was Judah Benjamin, they really are as Settler as the rest of us WASPs)? Could it be that they feel the geosocial mores of modernity have arrived too soon - it's robbed them of their own, respective European birthright to dominate non-Europeans? And so, petulant, they fight against the application of widely-accepted standards of acceptable national behavior?
June 1, 2010 2:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Not sure I get the argument, so maybe you want to restate it, but two points of clarification:
1. SAJ is a term that only makes sense in talking about Israel. It is a relative term within Israeli society. A secular American Jew of Eastern European background is not a SAJ just as a White British Protestant is not a WASP.
2. "Settler" in this distinction is a technical term, different from the actual act of settling. "Immigrants" are of course settlers as much as all settlers are by definition immigrants, but sometimes a real immigrant can become a "native" within this definition (as happened to black slaves in the US), whereas some immigrants can become "settlers" (as happened for example to immigrants from the US and the UK after 1948 in Israel).
The difference is a matter of location within a racialized caste system that is typical of settler societies, between 1) the founder groups and all those who are allowed to join it without restrictions, 2) those, primarily the indigenous population, that are the unassimilable "other," and 3) those others who are allowed to join the settlers but with reduced privileges.
June 1, 2010 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
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June 2, 2010 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
This quote from Mr. Sleeper is just precious...
"...the virtual takeover of a once-social-democratic country (Israel still has one of the worlds' best and most universal health-care systems) by hundreds of thousands of smart, cynical Russian Jews."
Wow if ever a liberal has shown his true racist colors. Talk about a racist generalization made by an intellectual midget. "Smart..cynicall "Russian Jews"??? Taken from the pages of the best of the best of Russian antisemites who used to call us "clever, cynical Jews" -- but never considered us Russian.
Basically, this "useful Western idiot", as Lenin used to refer to liberal fools from the west who symptathized with radical leftist views without really udnerstanding them and were therefore very useful to the fascist and racist "leftis" Soviet system, is attributing a negative stereotype to all the Jews who emigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Uniton. They are ALL "smart and cynicall" and worst yet they are "taking over". Nice combo of positive and negative stereotypes. What a flashback to the good old Soviet days when the "tolerant" commies referred to the Jews as "shrewd cosmopolitans" and complained how these not so SLavic looking "shrewd" semites were taking over a whiter than snow white and gullible Slavic population. Clearly what is upsetting to Mr. Sleeper is that Jews who came to Israel from the Soviet Union (and by the way the term Russian Jew is an oxymoron that shows Mr. Sleepers ignorance of the relevant history) by and large find the liberal agenda to be quiet distasteful. While we have our share of "useful idiots", the majority of Eastern European Jews have no interest in serving as useful idiots in their own destruction. By and large, having lived through a fascist "liberal" regime which used to outwardly espouse "tolerance" and love for all races, creeds etc. while at the same time would refer to us ALL as "shrewd and cynical" and then treated us like dirt second class citizens, we simply have seen this type of "progressive" hypocricy before.
Of all the troubles in this world -- the genocide of blacks by the Arabs in Darfur, the never ending wars by Islamo fascists around the world, the massacre of the entire Chechen nation by the Russians, the mal treatment of gays and women in the Islamic world -- what draws the ire of our progressive/liberal friends the most? Yep...it's Israel -- the existence of which is a thorn in their side. Mr. Sleeper here is dreamign of a civil war in Israel now necause two gourps of JEws one both "smart and cynical" and the other one apparently not so smart f we read betwen the lines, are taking over and are doing somehtign very very cynister to a "once social democratic country" ...I am not sure what it is that is being done to this "once social democratice country" and apparentyly neither is Mr. Sleeper. Are the smart and cynical Rusian Jews destroyign the universal helthcare that Israel "still" and/or for now enjoyes. Anyhow, in response to MR. Sleepers apparently deep rooted desire to see a civil war erupt in Israel, here's a famouse Russian phrase from a "smart and cynical" Easter European Jew : "da poshel ti ....!!!"
June 7, 2010 1:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
This quote from Mr. Sleeper is just precious...
"...the virtual takeover of a once-social-democratic country (Israel still has one of the worlds' best and most universal health-care systems) by hundreds of thousands of smart, cynical Russian Jews."
Wow if ever a liberal has shown his true racist colors. Talk about a racist generalization made by an intellectual midget. "Smart..cynicall "Russian Jews"??? Taken from the pages of the best of the best of Russian antisemites who used to call us "clever, cynical Jews" -- but never considered us Russian.
Basically, this "useful Western idiot", as Lenin used to refer to liberal fools from the west who symptathized with radical leftist views without really udnerstanding them and were therefore very useful to the fascist and racist "leftis" Soviet system, is attributing a negative stereotype to all the Jews who emigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Uniton. They are ALL "smart and cynicall" and worst yet they are "taking over". Nice combo of positive and negative stereotypes. What a flashback to the good old Soviet days when the "tolerant" commies referred to the Jews as "shrewd cosmopolitans" and complained how these not so SLavic looking "shrewd" semites were taking over a whiter than snow white and gullible Slavic population. Clearly what is upsetting to Mr. Sleeper is that Jews who came to Israel from the Soviet Union (and by the way the term Russian Jew is an oxymoron that shows Mr. Sleepers ignorance of the relevant history) by and large find the liberal agenda to be quiet distasteful. While we have our share of "useful idiots", the majority of Eastern European Jews have no interest in serving as useful idiots in their own destruction. By and large, having lived through a fascist "liberal" regime which used to outwardly espouse "tolerance" and love for all races, creeds etc. while at the same time would refer to us ALL as "shrewd and cynical" and then treated us like dirt second class citizens, we simply have seen this type of "progressive" hypocricy before.
Of all the troubles in this world -- the genocide of blacks by the Arabs in Darfur, the never ending wars by Islamo fascists around the world, the massacre of the entire Chechen nation by the Russians, the mal treatment of gays and women in the Islamic world -- what draws the ire of our progressive/liberal friends the most? Yep...it's Israel -- the existence of which is a thorn in their side. Mr. Sleeper here is dreamign of a civil war in Israel now necause two gourps of JEws one both "smart and cynical" and the other one apparently not so smart f we read betwen the lines, are taking over and are doing somehtign very very cynister to a "once social democratic country" ...I am not sure what it is that is being done to this "once social democratice country" and apparentyly neither is Mr. Sleeper. Are the smart and cynical Rusian Jews destroyign the universal helthcare that Israel "still" and/or for now enjoyes. Anyhow, in response to MR. Sleepers apparently deep rooted desire to see a civil war erupt in Israel, here's a famouse Russian phrase from a "smart and cynical" Easter European Jew : "da poshel ti ....!!!"
June 7, 2010 1:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
This quote from Mr. Sleeper is just precious...
"...the virtual takeover of a once-social-democratic country (Israel still has one of the worlds' best and most universal health-care systems) by hundreds of thousands of smart, cynical Russian Jews."
Wow if ever a liberal has shown his true racist colors. Talk about a racist generalization made by an intellectual midget. "Smart..cynicall "Russian Jews"??? Taken from the pages of the best of the best of Russian antisemites who used to call us "clever, cynical Jews" -- but never considered us Russian.
Basically, this "useful Western idiot", as Lenin used to refer to liberal fools from the west who symptathized with radical leftist views without really udnerstanding them and were therefore very useful to the fascist and racist "leftis" Soviet system, is attributing a negative stereotype to all the Jews who emigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Uniton. They are ALL "smart and cynicall" and worst yet they are "taking over". Nice combo of positive and negative stereotypes. What a flashback to the good old Soviet days when the "tolerant" commies referred to the Jews as "shrewd cosmopolitans" and complained how these not so SLavic looking "shrewd" semites were taking over a whiter than snow white and gullible Slavic population. Clearly what is upsetting to Mr. Sleeper is that Jews who came to Israel from the Soviet Union (and by the way the term Russian Jew is an oxymoron that shows Mr. Sleepers ignorance of the relevant history) by and large find the liberal agenda to be quiet distasteful. While we have our share of "useful idiots", the majority of Eastern European Jews have no interest in serving as useful idiots in their own destruction. By and large, having lived through a fascist "liberal" regime which used to outwardly espouse "tolerance" and love for all races, creeds etc. while at the same time would refer to us ALL as "shrewd and cynical" and then treated us like dirt second class citizens, we simply have seen this type of "progressive" hypocricy before.
Of all the troubles in this world -- the genocide of blacks by the Arabs in Darfur, the never ending wars by Islamo fascists around the world, the massacre of the entire Chechen nation by the Russians, the mal treatment of gays and women in the Islamic world -- what draws the ire of our progressive/liberal friends the most? Yep...it's Israel -- the existence of which is a thorn in their side. Mr. Sleeper here is dreamign of a civil war in Israel now necause two gourps of JEws one both "smart and cynical" and the other one apparently not so smart f we read betwen the lines, are taking over and are doing somehtign very very cynister to a "once social democratic country" ...I am not sure what it is that is being done to this "once social democratice country" and apparentyly neither is Mr. Sleeper. Are the smart and cynical Rusian Jews destroyign the universal helthcare that Israel "still" and/or for now enjoyes. Anyhow, in response to MR. Sleepers apparently deep rooted desire to see a civil war erupt in Israel, here's a famouse Russian phrase from a "smart and cynical" Easter European Jew : "da poshel ti ....!!!"
June 7, 2010 1:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
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September 12, 2010 4:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
.I am not sure what it is that is being done to this "once social democratice country" and apparentyly neither is Mr. Sleeper. Are the smart and cynical Rusian Jews destroyign the universal helthcare that Israel "still" and/or for now enjoyes. Anyhow, in response to MR. Sleepers apparently deep rooted desire to see a civil war erupt in Israel, here's a famouse Russian phrase from a "smart and cynical" Easter European Jew : "da poshel ti ....!
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Mr. Sleeper. Are the smart and cynical Rusian Jews destroyign the universal helthcare that Israel "still" and/or for now enjoyes. Anyhow, in response to MR. Sleepers apparently deep rooted desire to see a civil war erupt in Israel, here's a famouse Russian phrase from a "smart and cynical" Easter European Jew
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