Desmond Tutu writes a passionate call for American divestment in Israel. He gives me some food for thought on BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and on my role as an Israeli in the struggle for a just peace.

Justice requires action to stop subjugation of Palestinians

Desmond Tutu, TampaBay.com

A quarter-century ago I barnstormed around the United States encouraging Americans, particularly students, to press for divestment from South Africa. Today, regrettably, the time has come for similar action to force an end to Israel’s long-standing occupation of Palestinian territory and refusal to extend equal rights to Palestinian citizens who suffer from some 35 discriminatory laws.

I have reached this conclusion slowly and painfully. I am aware that many of our Jewish brothers and sisters who were so instrumental in the fight against South African apartheid are not yet ready to reckon with the apartheid nature of Israel and its current government. And I am enormously concerned that raising this issue will cause heartache to some in the Jewish community with whom I have worked closely and successfully for decades. But I cannot ignore the Palestinian suffering I have witnessed, nor the voices of those courageous Jews troubled by Israel’s discriminatory course.

 Continue reading on the Tampa Bay Times »

I’m not entirely sure what I think about the Palestinian BDS campaign.

On one level, I support it because it is a form of non-violent resistance (the Israeli claims that this is “financial terrorism” are absurd and preposterous – what do they not call “terrorism” at this point?)

At the same time, it hurts all Israelis to one degree or another, and that makes it hard for me to really feel enthusiastic about it.

As an Israeli, I need to worry about the internal processes, within Israeli society, that can lead to an equal and just resolution to the conflict.

If the rest of the world wants to pressure Israelis into changing course, that’s their own business, and nobody can tell them what to buy from whom. BDS is a fair and reasonable way to go about it, and as long as it’s clearly a boycott of the Israeli state and not “the Jews” I’m glad it’s now such a central part of the Palestinian struggle.

I find Tutu’s piece an excellent contribution to the debate. It is personal, passionate, and compassionate. You don’t have to agree with his position in order to appreciate his ability to communicate in that way.

He quotes the great Martin Luther King Jr.:

I recall well the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in which he confesses to his “Christian and Jewish brothers” that he has been “gravely disappointed with the white moderate … who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom. …”

This strengthens my feeling on the place of Israelis in the struggle for peace. Some of us struggle because we want to see a different future for Israelis. Some because we want to see a different future for Palestinians. Often it is a combination of both.

Either way, it is legitimate for us to support Palestinian-initiated action we agree with. But it is not our place to tell Palestinians how to free themselves.

We can support them directly; we can support them indirectly by taking action within Israeli society independent of the Palestinians; if we disagree with their course of action, we can and should work against it. That much is ours to choose.

But we are not here to guide them to enlightenment. That mistake is made far too often by progressives, and a habit we have to kick.

If @msappir & #j14 won't distinguish between Ariel & "Israel proper," why should anyone? Full #BDS now more than ever. http://t.co/e3Ft9IG

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 16, 2011

https://twitter.com/AnnaGaius/status/103504033813245952

I have some more thoughts on this.

I

The strategy of exclusion, of which BDS is one example, is a tricky thing. It is effective when the excluder is (potentially) stronger than the excluded, on some dimension. International BDS is an effective strategy because it can actually hurt Israel: it can deprive Israel of services (such as a European-made tram system), entertainment, and a general feeling of legitimacy and business-as-usual. Boycotting products of the settlements within Israel is the same thing again on a smaller scale: if many in the Israeli market boycott settlement products, Israeli factories in the West Bank move back into Israel, and it’s no more business-as-usual. For a European boycott of the settlements to have an effect you would hardly need a couple percent of the European market to adhere to it. But would the EU care if the settlers decided to boycott all European products? Even if all 300-odd thousand of them strictly adhered to the boycott, it would hardly register, never mind causing some shift in EU policy.

II

Although the housing protests are the strongest thing we’ve ever seen in Israel, garnering more support than any political party could ever dream of, it would be foolish to assume that this strength is of the same kind as the EU or US’s economic and political power, which makes BDS effective. The housing protest is strong only because it has managed so far not to step on anyone’s toes too hard. In Israel, that is an astounding achievement. If a prominent part of the protest movement¹ should pick a fight with the people of Ariel for the sake of total BDS, the movement’s strength may very well dwindle rapidly. The movement may even splinter. The movement boycotting Ariel would quickly become meaningless because not all tent cities would accept the boycott and it would suddenly just be a few isolated left-leaning groups going on about the settlements as usual.

III

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. BDS is an impressive and important tool, but it is not the only tool, certainly not the only tool available to Israelis who have the time and energy for political activity. The housing protests have to navigate the many illogical and contradictory conceptions prevailing in Israeli societies, and despite a majority opposing the settlements (in polls, at least), it is also a mainstream idea that Ariel is practically part of Israel and here to stay. (This stems from people not bothering to look at maps [PDF] or thinking these things through. Ariel has absolutely got to go in a two-state solution.)

Total inclusiveness, even of ideological settlers, drunks and lunatics, is probably the only way this movement can survive.²

IV

The fact that some so-called “leaders” of the movement fail to speak out against the occupation does not mean the movement ignores the issue or enables it. Actual discussions in the tent cities often turn to the occupation, and this movement has given the Israeli left more sympathy and more people willing to listen than anything else since at least the mid-nineties. But this too is different from one tent city to another, and it’s very hard to tell what the movement as a whole thinks. I doubt the movement as a whole agrees on anything except that the cost of living and the inequalities within Israeli society are unacceptable.

V

This movement is surprisingly open to criticism. Simply finding excuses to write it off and attack all those who support it will not get your issue addressed. If you think the movement should take a stand regarding the settlements, you have to either go to its assemblies or at least write something that actually tries to convince them. As Max probably knows, it takes a lot of explaining to get typical Israelis to even begin to understand BDS. Don’t take it for granted and just attack this whole decentralized thing for not following the methods you support. Engage the people involved in action and decision-making. You might even convince j14.org.il to list settlements separately from Israel proper if you actually try.

VI

I should note that despite my disagreement with Max, I’m sick of exclusion being the only kosher leftist tactic, and will continue to consider him an all-round good guy (as I consider other opponents of the West Bank apartheid). I will also continue to follow his blog and Twitter feed and list him on this site’s list of links. (I’m doing this as a favor to myself; I know nobody really cares who I like, follow or link to.)

Footnotes

1. j14.org.il is just a part of the movement – it is a decentralized uprising with no real center, leadership, or hierarchy, despite what the press may say
2. As far as I know, the only thing excluded is exclusionary messages: when extreme racist settlers showed up on Rothschild, they were eventually kicked out for having shirts reading “Tel-Aviv for Jews [only]” and other exclusionary slogans. The only thing that’s not tolerated is open intolerance.

Max Blumenthal has been raging against the official inclusion of the massive, strategically placed settlement of Ariel in the #J14 housing protest movement. (See Max’s Sunday post and Twitter stream.) I have to strongly disagree with his position, and I would argue that social justice for all, even the settlers, is a good goal and a good start.

I should preface this by saying that I’ve been following Max’s blog for months and this is the first time I ever strongly disagree with him; I think Max is an excellent journalist and activist and I believe we share many core values. I also agree with his assessment that the settlements, Ariel in particular, are unacceptable on multiple levels: they are built on stolen land, make people’s lives miserable (to put it mildly), and have done much to intensify and prolong the conflict.

However, the fact that the residents of Ariel are part of a horrendous crime does not mean they are not the victims of the Israeli socio-economic and political system along with the rest of us. No doubt, any person who knowingly makes the choice to move there is making themselves part of the occupation. But the fact that the settlements have grown so slowly despite massive government support, and the fact that only about a third of the West Bank settlers are ideological, tells me that the West Bank is hardly anyone’s first choice for location. Since stolen land tends to be the cheapest kind, especially when it’s also subsidized, there has always been a strong economic incentive to move to the settlements. The people who end up making that choice are people who, like the rest of us, were not able to achieve the standard of living they aspired towards, but made a dubious choice (one supported by many vocal members of society and government.)

Let me be clear: nothing can justify the choice to be part of the colossal crime of the settlements. But making that wrong choice does not make a person or their family less of a victim.¹

But making this about the wrongs perpetrated or perpetuated by different parts of Israeli society is the wrong way to go. I’d say it plays right into Netanyahu’s hands, and goes along perfectly with the economic and social system of Israel, pitting sectors of the populations against one another. If Netanyahu had his way, J14 would exclude the settlers (alienating big parts of the right), it would exclude non-Jews (alienating big parts of the left) and it would be almost entirely a movement of spoiled young Ashkenazis whose parents and grandparents were part of the old elite (alienating almost everyone else). With that kind of movement, Netanyahu could just sit tight and wait for it to blow over.

But since the movement is radically inclusive – going both against mainstream prejudice (e.g. that the Arabs are not part of this society) and the prejudice of many activists (e.g. that all settlers are the enemy) – it is able to actually achieve something, and so far has not made an enemy of any major sector of society. Only the government and some far-right nationalists seem strongly against the whole thing. And this openness is undermining vital underpinnings of the occupation – whether J14 acknowledges the connection or not.

How? First and foremost, it has ended the prevailing apathy in much of society and made it possible to discuss almost anything. People are very publicly talking about racism, the division of resources, even the use of “security” to silence social movements, and many people are actually listening. This won’t end the occupation tomorrow or in a month, but then nothing else could, either. In the longer run, it sets the stage for major changes to happen, and we may find many more people willing to listen than we did before. The movement  seems to be redefining “left” and “right” so that for many people, being a “leftie” isn’t the absolute worst possible thing ever anymore.

Moreover, the movement’s focus on the division of resources will make it very difficult for future governments to act as if the settlements are the only part of the country worth their attention (as this government sometimes has). The movement may well work against the interests of the settlement movement while at the same time working in the interests of individual settlers. These interests are not identical.

Finally, with general welfare now at the center of the public agenda, and general disillusionment about the government’s narrative, many people will be reminded of how peace is in their own interest and refuse to buy excuses for maintaining the current line of policy.

I think it is unrealistic to expect immediate solutions from J14 – whether for social issues or political ones. There’s a lot of work ahead and absolutely nobody can predict how things will go. But looking for excuses to distance oneself from J14 plays only into the hands of the status quo.²

Footnotes

1. In the same way, the generation that started this country was both victim and perpetrator, and the two do not cancel each other out — the victimhood does not cancel out the atrocities as the right would have it, and the atrocities do not cancel out the victimhood as some in the far left would have it.
2. And anyone who doesn’t see their position or background represented in the movement should stop whining, go out and make their voice heard. The only thing stopping you is you!

PEACE: Harry Potter and the Politics and Terror

Dan Nexon over at The Duck of Minerva took two stabs at analyzing the last installments of the Harry Potter series. Both are an amusing and interesting read:

• “Harry Potter and Foreign Policy, or Voldemort is not Osama Bin Laden” 
• “Terror, Counter-Terror, and Insurgency in Harry Potter, or Why Harry Won” 

The Duck also points to a piece on Foreign Policy about the post-conflict reconstruction that must be done after the fall of Voldemort.

LANGUAGE: Pullum on apes and (possible) racists

Over at Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum has two excellent and characteristically sharp posts:

• “Caesar and the power of No” (on the peculiar theory of language evolution in that new Planet of the Apes movie)
• “David Starkey on rioting and Jamaican language” (attacking some racism and misconceptions around non-standard Englishes)

Other fine links

The enigmatic Six in Battlestar Galactica incessantly reminds us: “all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again”.

Remember, in late 2008 we embarked upon the very same path, unleashing massive amounts of firepower on Gaza, killing at least 700 civilians and launching us into Israel’s most isolated couple of years in its history. Back then the idea was the same: hit them so hard that they can’t hit us back.

The problem is that this logic never, ever works. We’ve been trying it for decades. We kill them, even demolish their infrastructure, but in the process we give so many people cause to hate us that within a few years their ranks are replenished and out to get us again.

Chatting with a right-wing friend the other day, I said something about the families of the victims and how they’ll feel about us after we take their siblings/children/parents away. He said the mistake is to leave any family. (I’m not sure whether he was serious or not — this was a textual conversation and I didn’t feel like pursuing the topic.)

Yet even if we follow this sick logic to its conclusion — total annihilation of the rival tribe — we will gain no peace. We will only push the frontier a little further, gaining enemies in places where nobody used to give a damn about us. We will only gain international isolation and brain drain, as people leave what has become of our country, a country created by and for the victims of genocide.

Observation: there are some 11 million Palestinians in the world (according to Wikipedia). Total genocide of the Palestinians will give Israel the dubious honor of having surpassed the Nazis’ genocide of Jews. (I suppress nausea, breathe deep, continue.)

Incidentally, it will not end all of our haters.

So long as we use violence, we invite violence. The more we kill, the more people will want to kill us. So long as we continue acting as we’ve acted, we will not break the cycle. Hamas could try to break the cycle as well. But bombing Gaza is not the way to convince them to do so. Israel’s citizens and few remaining allies must demand and enforce a ceasefire.

We now have Iron Dome, a system that can destroy rockets fired out of Gaza in mid-air. Instead of financing another war, build more Iron Dome units. Fund peace proposals. Pay Arabic-speaking copywriters, pay printers, and bomb Gaza with flyers. Stop wasting money and lives on a cycle of violence in which Israelis and Palestinians – especially the poorer of both groups – have their everyday lives disrupted or destroyed, every day.

All I can do is write, but for days I have not been able to. Every time violence flares up against Israel, I am reminded of how urgent it is to strive towards peace. There is always a sense of the inevitable to it; knowing that my country continues to use violence, I know we will be faced with violence.

It’s painful, and all I can do is write. It seems like so little. I don’t know if I’ll write about this again any time soon.

For now I’ll just continue to try not to think about it, while thinking about it all of the time. I’m an Israeli; denial’s my life.

UPDATE (two hours later):

I’ve just read that there’s some kind of tacit cease-fire, apparently as of last night. I hope this lasts and the rhetoric of “final escalation” loses out to some common sense. A strategy that has failed us dozens of times will continue to fail us no matter how many times we try.

I just wanted to point out something particularly intriguing: the government’s lightning-fast decision to approve a bunch of new settlement houses in the West Bank in response to the heinous attack. As far as I’m aware, this is the first time the Israeli government admits that construction in the settlements is an attack against Palestinians. How surprising that they aren’t constructed purely out of love of the land!

As some may have already heard, today for the second day in a row a Palestinian teenager has been killed by settler fire. Assuming for the sake of argument that the version on Ynet is not a total embellishment, what happened today was that a few settlers were out on a peaceful hike when some Palestinians started throwing rocks at them. Fearing for their lives, they responded with live fire and hit a boy in the head, who is now clinically dead. Subsequently,

[e]xtreme rightist Baruch Marzel of the SOS Israel organization urged the settler public “not to be deterred and continue traveling throughout the Land of Israel. The Arabs must take into account that Jews are not suckers and are allowed to defend themselves against those who want to take our lives,” he said.

There’s a few interesting things about this case. First of all, the settlers going for a nice stroll through the Holy Land were, obviously, carrying firearms; there’s nothing unusual about this. Second of all, they were there asserting their right to go wherever they damn well please in the Land of Israel, disregarding the established practice (and law?) of coordinating this kind of thing with the police and military.¹ Third of all, once the clash had begun, the IDF showed up and defended the illegally hiking provocateurs, wounding further Palestinian civilians.²

There’s a logic to each of these things that’s at least well-understood in Israeli society, if not outright accepted or taken for granted:

1. It really wouldn’t be safe to hike in a large group unarmed, even if in recent years it hasn’t been quite as bad as it used to.
2. Settlers have always argued that Jews should be allowed to go and live wherever they want (preposterously claiming that Arabs can, an outright lie); while most Israelis probably see this kind of thing as a provocation, the basic logic is appealing and accepted on some level. Ideally, I too wish it were possible and safe for Jews, Muslims, Christians, or just humans in general to go and live wherever they want.
3. The IDF is the military of Israel, and Israel sees its mission in physically defending the Jewish people, including any Jew, anywhere, from violence. That’s how the Holocaust justifies our statehood, after all. Also, Israeli taxpayers (which include the settlers) rightly expect the army they pay for to come to their aid when they face violence.

However, taken together, especially points 2 and 3, these things result in a tragically skewed balance of violence. Palestinians who wish to defend themselves must do so with stones. Israelis can do so not only with their own guns (which are sometimes full-fledged military-grade assault rifles) but with the assistance of an advanced modern army with a bigger budget than any other organization in the country. Combine this fact with Israel’s lenient attitude towards settler provocations, settlers can easily just “go hiking” somewhere where there are Palestinians, and be fairly certain the latter will come out of it with more bullet wounds than themselves.

I don’t mean to insinuate that all settlers are out to kill as many Arabs as possible. Some certainly are, but I’ve known too many lovely people who come from settlements to make generalizations about the whole population. However, there is an ideological settler movement which holds it to be perfectly fine to use violence against Arabs in order to maintain freedom of movement. This movement is currently not effectively reined in by the Israeli government and security establishment, and I’m not sure it ever has been. While the army regularly claims “keeping the peace” to be its motivation, such as when imposing a closed military zone somewhere, it usually ends up helping provocateur settlers rather than hindering them. In fact, settlers now know they just have to go to, say, a water hole, clash with some Arabs, and they will no longer be allowed to go there and collect water.

It should be obvious these provocations do not further our overall common interest of living in peace.

It gets worse though. Arabs prosecuted for violence towards Jews rarely win. It is common practice for the state to submit secret evidence, which the defense is not even allowed to see, and such “evidence” is often used to convict them. Sometimes, dubious information extracted from youths under duress is used as well, as it famously was in the case of Abdullah Abu-Rahma of Bil’in. On the other hand, Jews prosecuted for violence towards Arabs often have their case dropped before trial, and if convicted will always have a very lenient sentence. It’s also far unlikelier that the state will even try to prosecute them in the first place.³

The bottom line

Even if the bits of logic each kind of make sense on their own, the situation in the West Bank is currently a very vile form of apartheid. Not kinda-like-apartheid. Apartheid.⁴ If the Israeli state were truly interested in peace, public order, sovereignty, etc., the IDF would easily be able to keep the settlers from provoking violence.⁵ If the Liberman/Netanyahu/Barak government doesn’t do something quick (like, today) we may see more and more enterprising settlers go on “hiking trips”-cum-pogroms next week. And all the while, Egypt is exploding in revolution, our neighbors to the North and East aren’t looking as stable as they used to, and every week another country recognizes the Palestinian Authority as a sovereign state in the ’67 borders.

The Middle East is headed towards a world of violence, and frankly I don’t see anyone in the position to stop it. Shalom aleynu, wa salaam aleykum, wa salaam ma3hum. Peace be with us all.

Footnotes

1. This isn’t limited to the West Bank; I used to go hiking in an organized youth hiking thing and all hikes were coordinated with the security forces and escorted by an armed civilian.
2. Fourth of all, Marzel sees the armed killers as the victims, but whatever.
3. All of this is just my semi-educated impression. I may have read it somewhere, but I admit I can’t be certain. If I’m wrong, please provide data to contradict what I said! I’d be glad to be corrected!
4. It should be noted the division of rights in this apartheid is not based purely on race, but also on citizenship. It is apartheid none the less.
5. One way to do this, off the top of my head: take away weapons from all civilians in the West Bank, provide IDF protection only within settlement and in activities coordinated in advance and deemed non-provocative. Dismantle indefensible outposts as though they were unrecognized Bedouin villages.

It’s been one damned thing after another. And yesterday, the Knesset managed to top it all. I spent the evening trying not to think about it, but today I can think of nothing else.

You see, dear readers, for a while now people in Israel have sensed that our state is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the world. However, the nationalistic Israeli mainstream can hardly imagine such a thing happening as the result of the state’s actions and character. We were all taught that Israel is a model of democracy, a holy state of utmost morality, and, of course, that there are Antisemites everywhere and anyone who questions Zionism is likely doing this because they secretly think Hitler was a good guy. So instead of realizing that we’re losing legitimacy because of decades of repugnant occupation on the West Bank; instead of seeing that we lose credibility as a state every time our army hurts people and goes through seven different stories in three days about how we didn’t do it, or they started, or they didn’t start it but we were right to do it, or all of the above; instead of seeing that the popularity of populistic nationalistic jingoistic nearly-fascistic politicians makes the world doubt us — instead of all that, people have let politicians and provocateurs convince them that the de-legitimization of Israel is a broad conspiracy of lefties who hijack the human rights discourse as part of some kind of evil Antisemitic plan to destroy the State of Israel, starting by putting IDF war criminals on trial.

This has been going on for a while now and I’m not the first to have said all this. The entire time, my impression has been that the claims of a delegitimization conspiracy are fantasy of the blood-libel variety: lies invented by those fixing to wipe out the opposition. As someone who eagerly reads this movement, all I’ve seen is very open discourse in the spirit of honest criticism and disagreement, with no hint of the cabal mentality needed for an international conspiracy. Besides, the human rights organizations in Israel are models of transparency, as opposed to the groups calling for them to be banned. And besides besides, what the hell does calling for war-crimes trials against a state’s war criminals have to do with delegitimizing it?? The Bush administration should be put on trial for Iraq, but that doesn’t mean the USA is any less legitimate for it.

For the time being, this is a lost fight. Those trying to save the legitimacy of Israel as a moral state and a democracy are now being targeted by the state’s parliament. Democracy has finally turned into a tyranny of the majority (a majority of parliamentarians, that is.) They will be investigated in a context that has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with internal political posturing. As Yossi Gurvitz points out (Hebrew here, English here), if this were a matter of justice there’s a justice system to deal with it. The Knesset is not an assembly of judges, neither by job nor by qualification. As always, they’re out to point to imaginary threats and make believe they’re dealing with them.

There’s bitter and obvious irony here, going after the human rights organizations, one of Hasbara’s last excuses to call Israel a democracy, under the banner of getting rid of those who would delegitimize Israeli democracy. It makes my head spin.

Time will tell whether this is the beginning of the end in a good way or a bad way.

All I am left to do is hope that the people I love will not be hurt in the process. That, and choose which organizations to donate to in this dark hour. I’m thinking NIF, B’Tselem, and Breaking the Silence… I can’t donate much, but you know, if everyone donates a little it might help. (h/t Noa Raz for proposing this [here, Heb]) I wonder who needs it the most. Any suggestions?

Many people have pointed out how society is addicted to the concept of security — in the US, in Israel, in the UK,  really everywhere in the developed world. This can lead to some paradoxical situations. For example, as Roi Maor points out, the wave of xenophobia in Israel is far more dangerous to the African refugees than they are to the Israeli public. The primal fear of the Other plays a central role here, as does the government’s utter failure to address the needs of the poor neighborhoods and of the foreigners that gravitate towards them.¹

I think another factor is the Israeli addiction to insecurity — the inseparable flipside of our addiction to security, as well as a bit of residue from Diaspora. You could call it chronic societal paranoia.

The state of Israel was formed in struggle, on the backdrop of the greatest atrocity in humanity’s most atrocious half-century to date. The state’s formative first three decades were marked by constant external threats of the very real kind. It’s no surprise our national mentality is so security-oriented. Yet the world seems, for the most part, to have moved on. The Arab states have mostly accepted we’re there to stay, Antisemitism in the West has become a marginal phenomena, and even the Palestinians haven’t posed a serious threat in years, especially on the West Bank.² As for Iran, it seems unlikely they can realize Ahmedinejad’s Antisemitic banter — it would be national suicide, and I’m led to believe it’s not Ahmedinejad himself who would have to make the decision.

Yet these very threats continue to serve as justification for everything Israel does, from settlements through senseless IDF provocations, torture, and dismantlement of civil and human rights in Greater Israel as well as, more recently, the state of Israel proper. One hears a lot about these threats in Israel, and so they seem real. But here in Europe, where the press is freer, they fade out of view, not due to lack of interest (Germans, at least, are certainly interested), but probably due to the total lack of substance. The self-censoring mainstream media in Israel presents a very slanted view, always being desperate for the continued cooperation of the security establishment, and ever-eager to feed on the public’s siege mentality.

The states of the developed world, as I understand it, have for decades been accommodating Israel’s governments. The popular Israeli conception (as I know it) is entirely blind to this: the West is seen as a bunch of malignant Antisemites and the world at large as a place that is dangerous for Israelis. Our tiny country’s constant dependence on the world’s support (especially material support from the United States) is rarely acknowledged. Yet lately, the Hasbara mechanisms have shown awareness of this situation. Unfortunately, their response to the threat of isolation is to control who is let into Israel/Palestine and to run astroturf propoganda in the West. These policies, very much like the construction of settlements and the IDF’s systematic disruption of Palestinian society, manufacture more insecurity than they resolve.

A culture obsessed with security naturally espouses a politic of manufactured insecurity. This is hardly an Israeli thing. The US invasion of Iraq, the UK putting up useless cameras everywhere, states everywhere (lamentably including Germany) implementing insecure RFID chips in identification documents, Germany’s previous government’s utterly unimplementable plans for combating online child pornography (which would have been entirely ineffective even if they could be implemented)… The list goes on, and these are all symptoms of chronic societal paranoia. But the USA and the wealthy EU can afford imaginary threats. ³ Israel can’t. Israel has real, major problems to deal with: crumbling public services, underfunded education, huge economic gaps, loads of poverty, rampant corruption, and of course Hamas in Gaza and Hizbollah in Lebanon (who, no offense, are nothing compared to Israel’s internal problems — but much better at scaring people.)

A country in Israel’s situation has to pick its fights carefully to survive. Unfortunately, the opposite is true of political parties and ideas, whose survival depends on picking as many fights as possible, as quickly as possible, to give the impression that you know what’s going on. If you’re a politician, a political party, or a political idea, there are huge short-term gains to be had from paranoia. If party A promises to deal with problem X and party B doesn’t, the effect is pretty big, even if X is imaginary or harmless. In a society trying to lead a normal life while managing a variety of problems and threats, it’s easy and practical to believe authoritative-sounding claims without research and without question if they fit your world-view. This is even more so when the claims prey upon people’s fear of the Other, which in Israel is compounded by hundreds of years of Jews actually being persecuted and murdered by Others.

And so Israel bites off more than it can chew, taking on minor and even imaginary threats, overreacting and creating new problems while serious societal and infrastructural problems go untreated. Even if none of the real or manufactured threats get it, Israel may not survive such remarkably unsustainable politics for long.

Notes

1. It’s okay. They’re building a concentration camp for the foreigners now. That’ll solve the problem, right? (I guess the Israeli government is capable of not thinking of the Holocaust for a minute after all!)
2. None of this is to say the world has grown benign: The Arab states, I take it, are happy to have Israel oppressing the Palestinians because it saves them the work of doing this themselves. And while foreigner-bashing is on the rise in Europe, the European far-right has recognized Israel as a paragon of what they want to achieve (ethnic segregation) and their leaders have become “friends of Israel”. Most of the world is still pretty awful, the true awfulness just isn’t aimed at us anymore.
3. Well, they could at least up until the economic collapse. Now it’s more iffy.