A STARTLING DESCRIPTION OF ISRAEL The Der Spiegel interview with Eva Illouz, Prof. of Sociology at the Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem, gives a description of Israel like none you will ever read in a U.S. publication. In case you missed it, I am repeating the substance below. It is important. You should read it whether or not you have any interest in Israel. Think about America as you read and you will realize that the same forces that have transformed Israel have been at work here for 35 years. We may even be the source of the mindset that has apparently overtaken Israel, and we are certainly continuing to contribute to it. It takes a different form here, but the underlying substance, the mindset, in my opinion is the same. Americans, whether or not Jewish, will not recognize the Israel described by Eva Illouz because we still live with the idea of the old, progressive, modern democratic Israel that is now dying. Read it and you will understand why Sean Hannity, Mike Huckabee and others of that ilk flock to Israel and find the atmosphere there so copacetic. Why fundamentalist evangelical Christians have become so attached to Israel (besides the Biblical compulsion to convert Jews to Christianity before the coming of the “last days”). Why opinion here is so different from opinion in Europe (so far at least). Read it to understand the power of fundamentalist religious beliefs, and their ability to insinuate themselves into civil society 400 years after the Great Enlightenment. Although not expressed directly by Ilouz, I suspect that a strong strand of Ayn Randian capitalist greed was imported into Israel from the U.S., and is especially strong among the West Bank settlers. It may be too that these disturbing trends in Israel are part of the decline of the nation state and global movement towards tribalism that I discussed in an earlier post. *************************************** 1. Israel is a colonial military power, a militarized society and a democracy all folded into one. The army, for example, controls the Palestinians through a wide network of colonial tools, such as checkpoints, military courts (governed by a legal system different from the Israeli system), the arbitrary granting of work permits, house demolitions and economic sanctions. It is a militarized civil society because almost every family has a father, son or brother in the army and because the military plays an enormous role in the ordinary mentality of ordinary Israelis and is crucial in both political decisions and in the public sphere. In fact, I would say that security is the paramount concept guiding Israeli society and politics. But it is also a democracy, which grants rights to gays and makes it possible for a citizen to sue the state. 2. I think Israelis have lost what we can call a humanitarian sensibility, the capacity to identify with the suffering of a distant other. In Israel, there has been a change in perception of the Palestinian other. The Palestinian has become a true enemy in the perception of Israelis, in the sense that they are there and we are here. They ceased having a face and even a name. Israelis and Palestinians used to be mixed. They worked as construction workers and as cheap, underpaid labor. Then the wall was built. Then the road blocks came, which hampered the Palestinians freedom of movement. The massive reduction in work permits followed. And in a few years Palestinians disappeared from Israeli society. The Second Intifada put the nail in that coffin, so to speak. The nature of Israeli leadership has also changed. The messianic right has progressively gained power in Israel. It used to be marginal and illegitimate; it is now increasingly mainstream. This radical right sits in Parliament, controls budgets and has changed the nature of discourse. Many Israelis do not understand the radical nature of the right in Israel. It successfully disguises itself as patriotic or Jewish. 3. Entire generations have been raised with the territories, with Israel being a colonial power. They do not know anything else. You have the settlements which are highly ideological. They expanded and entered Israeli mainstream political life. Settlements were strengthened by systematic government policies: They got tax breaks; they had soldiers to protect them; they built roads and infrastructure which are much better than those inside the country. There are entire segments of the population that have never met a secular person and have been educated religiously. Some of these religious segments are also very nationalist. The reality we are faced with in Israel is that we must choose between liberalism and Jewishness, and if we choose Jewishness, we are condemned to become a religious Sparta which will not be sustainable. Whereas in the 1960s, you could be both socialist and Zionist, today it is not possible because of the policies and identity of Israel. Then you have the role which Jews who live outside Israel play in Israel. Many of these Jews have very right-wing views and contribute money to newspapers, think tanks and religious institutions inside Israel. Lets face it: the right has been more systematic and more mobilized, both inside and outside Israel. 4. Diaspora Jews have been shaped by the memory of the Shoah. They often live in societies in which their own democratic rights are guaranteed. Sometimes they are under the assault of anti-Semitism and thus feel an urge to reinforce Jewish identity. They do not understand the distress of Israelis who see democracy progressively eaten away by dark forces. Today, Diaspora Jews and Jews in Israel do not have the same interests anymore. One or two years ago, the newspaper Haaretz conducted a poll which found that 40 percent of the people said they were considering leaving Israel. I dont know the actual numbers, but I have never heard as much alienation from Israel as during this period. The people who live in secular Tel Aviv have much less in common with their religious counterparts in Jerusalem than they do with people living in Berlin. 5. Fear is deeply engrained in Israeli society. Fear of the Shoah, fear of anti-Semitism, fear of Islam, fear of Europeans, fear of terror, fear of extermination. You name it. And fear generates a very particular type of thinking, which I would call catastrophalist. You always think about the worst case scenario, not about a normal course of events. In catastrophalist scenarios, you become allowed to breach many more moral norms than if you imagined a normal course of events. 6. These fears are cynically used by leaders like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He makes Israelis believe that they all want to destroy us. Hamas wants to destroy us, the UN wants to destroy us, al-Qaida and Iran want to destroy us. ISIS wants to destroy us. The European anti-Semites want to destroy us. This is basically the filter through which a conflict with Hamas is interpreted by the ordinary Israeli. Another dimension of this prism is that they are not human beings. Palestinians are dehumanized because they put their soldiers amongst civilians, send their children to fight, spend and waste their money on building deadly tunnels rather than on building up their own society. Along with the dehumanization of the other, Israelis have a strong sense of their own moral superiority. We ask people to get out of their houses; we call them on the phone to make sure civilians are evacuated. We behave humanly, the Israeli thinks. An army with good manners. 7. Israel started as a modern nation. It derived its legitimacy from the fact that it had democratic institutions. But it was also building highly anti-modern institutions in wanting to create a Jewish democracy by giving power to rabbis, in creating deep ethnic inequalities between different ethnic groups such Jews of Arab countries vs. Jews of European descent; Arabs vs. Jews; Jews vs. non-Jews. It thus blocked universalist thinking. We are at the point where it has become clear that Jewishness has hijacked democracy and its contents. It happened increasingly when the school curriculum started getting changed and emphasizing more Jewish content and less universal content; when the Ministry of the Interior expelled foreign workers because Shas party members were afraid non-Jews would inter-marry with Jews; when human rights are thought of as being left-wing only because human rights presuppose that Jews and non-Jews are equal. 8. The right-left divide is no longer important. There is something more urgent right now: the defense of democracy. The voice of the extreme right is much louder and clearer than it was before. Thats whats new: a racist right that is not ashamed of itself, that persecutes dissenters and even people who dare express compassion for the other side. The real danger to Israel and its sustainability comes from within. The fascist and racist elements are no less a security threat than the outside enemies. 9. Im not a pacifist in the sense that I do not think that military operations are always wrong. But Im not in favor of this operation because there was no political process beforehand. Netanyahu gave such obvious sings that he was not interested in a political process. Instead, Netanyahu constantly undermined Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. I refuse categorically the idea that our only relationship with the Palestinians is a military one. We are in a march of folly. There is an increasingly large group of people who really think that they can subdue the Palestinian population and sustain a regime where Israel keeps dominating them. Israelis pay a price, but we are not really aware of it. We dont know how it feels to live in a peaceful society, devoted exclusively to culture, education and improving the living conditions of everyone. People dont make a connection between the bad living conditions they have and the amount of resources invested in the settlements and in the army. In psychology, they call it dissociation. Israeli society has become very insensitive. Not only to the suffering of others, but also to its own suffering.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 13:58:52 +0000
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