Breaking the Impasse

-Am Johal

A friend once remarked that human rights is too

important a matter to be left to politics.

But the Left is dead in Israel. And if you hold to

the observation that social change related to human

rights in Israel will be initiated by the Left, this

is a worrisome trend.

In the land of home demolitions, military

assassinations, movement restrictions, settlement

construction, religious and secular strife, collective

punishment, military incursions and legal and

socio-economic discrimination, and all the

psychological and physical damage associated with the

Occupation there is a growing chorus of those who

believe that the situation will deteriorate before it

gets better.

Vicki Knafo, a single mother of three, momentarily

captured the imagination of a country mired in

violence in the summer of 2003 when she walked 200km

from Mitzpeh Ramon to Jerusalem when her social

security had been cut by 1,200 shekels a month. She

then proceeded to camp out in front of the Finance

Ministry demanding to meet with Binyamin Netanyahu and

was joined by 600 single mothers. She had a

compelling story and she brought people together.

As Sigal Haroush, the Director of the Left Bank Club

in Tel Aviv and spokesperson for the Democratic

Mizrahi Rainbow noted in the pages of Haaretz

recently, the left is "too busy writing for those

bullshit websites." According to her, they are the

intellectuals looking to give themselves visibility

and are divorced from the real situation and feeds

those intellectuals more than it helps the situation.

The question she poses is important - how much does it

help and to whom and what responsibility do they have

if any as the leaders.

Haroush says the Left needs to build in the

neighbourhoods and at the peripheries. She doesn't

consider mainstream organizations associated with the

progressive movement like Peace Now as a Left

organization - she calls them liberals which only

pressure the structure as it is now. She sees the

role of the left in Israel, in the context of an

Occupation situation in the Territories, to aim to

change the structure, hegemony and power relationship

that currently exists through democratic means.

Needless to say, she is a devout Marxist. And as an

Arab Jew where most of her community left the social

protest of the 1959 Wadi Salib riots where they fought

over 'bread and work' in order to get into bed with

Menachem Begin and Likud in a strategy shift in the

70's to advance their rights, the Mizrahis are also at

a crossroads, questioning their allegiance to the

right.

She sees the Left as being more rooted in their

communities and with a responsibility to communicate

in more popular forms to the communities which are

marginalized and do not consume the culture of power.

She sees Israel as still holding the vestiges of a

colonial mindset that his been in the region since the

Ottoman Empire, the British Mandate and the

establishment of Israel in 1948. This divide between

'high culture' and 'low culture,' 'enlightened

culture' and 'dark culture,' as has often been cited

by the late Edward Said still holds today according to

her - it is built into the mainstream body politic of

Israeli DNA.

There are bright areas on the Left such as the

Jewish/Arab partnership called Ta'ayush and individual

members like Khulood Badawi, the former head of the

National Union of Arab students who recently spoke at

a rally in East Jerusalem with Arun Gandhi, the

grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. It was the university

students called the "Stand Tall Generation" who were

protesting in the Spring of 2000 before the Intifada

erupted.

On one day she is writing an eloquent op/ed in the

Israeli newspapers and the next day she is on the

cover being strangled by security forces - such is the

bizarre nature of the Israeli political climate today.

There is a high personal price for political

activity which contributes to the floundering nature

of the Left and to constructive dissent in general.

Abir Kopty, an activist and member of the Hadash

political party and a spokesperson for the Mossawa

Center, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens of

Israel, says, "There is not a movement that is Left in

Israel - the right is mainstreaming their agenda. The

Left is small and has failed to get out of this

marginalization."

The Geneva Agreement is already dead according to her.

The atmosphere isn't right and the people are not

prepared to make peace in this environment. As well,

the Left is not united on basic issues like the

Occupation, the Separation Wall, refugees, right of

return and Jerusalem. They do not have a common

agenda today.

She also adds that due to the socio-economic

situation, the effects of globalization, changes in

the Israeli economy to a more capitalist system and

since the outbreak of violence and the military

crackdown, people have lost the readiness to fight

back and that there is a fear from struggling.

Says Kopty, "The last ten years have been a disaster.

The Palestinians don't have a lot of options and

accessibility to the Jewish people. It will take

years to build an agenda on how to struggle in the

long term together. We have to focus on how to be

creative in our struggle, we have to build our

capacities. Then we have to go to the streets. My

dream is to have non-violent massive action by Jews

and Arabs in a creative way."

In Israel where the prevailing trend is to be European

and not be part of the Middle East, it translates into

Israeli participation in the Euro Vision Song Contest

and Euro League Soccer - the championship incidentally

won for the first time by an Israeli Arab team this

year, Bnei Sakhnin. This cultural divide between the

European vision of Israel and the Middle Eastern Arab

world is a fundamental one and not easily

surmountable.

And only in Israel could you fairly say that Ariel

Sharon and the Likud Party are seen as a moderate

political movement today. The mainstream Israeli

response to the criticism of its policy is a simple

one - this is the price of self-preservation for a

Jewish state.

The Holocaust is such an important part of the

collective memory of the Jewish people and so

engrained in the establishment of Israel since 1948.

There is a prevailing argument in the Israeli

mainstream that says Israel must negotiate from a

position of strength, whatever the consequences to the

Palestinian people, in order to avert Jewish

suffering.

But what is being done today in the name of protecting

Israeli security cannot be justified now or in the

long term. And as Israel's New Historians have noted,

even Israeli history is built on mistruths about the

effects of settlement on the existing Palestinian

population. The Israeli society as a whole, Jews and

Palestinians, are engaged in a 'Grand Dissonance'

eroding their ability to have a collective memory and

narrative. Their entire civil society is in trauma as

a result and their citizenry is mired in suffering.

This is the path they have inherited.

In the end, this is also about gaining control over

land, resources and establishing a culture. It is

through design, power, coercion and outright bullying

that Israel is implementing new facts on the ground as

it takes part in the public relations machinations of

the current peace processes.

Maybe in the middle of all this dire news, Yossi

Beilin still has a trick up his sleeve. Maybe Dr.

Gandhi's call for mass non-violent resistance with the

implementation of international law is the way. But

for now, the War on Terror is sufficient cover for

Israel to buy time to strengthen and expand their

immense foothold in the West Bank and to build the

infrastructure which that entails.

After the death of the 2000 incarnation of the Camp

David Accords with Bill Clinton acting as Master of

Ceremonies and the backroom wheeler dealer running out

of time to put the finishing touches on his

Presidential legacy, it may yet prove to be the last

best hope for peace since the death of Rabin and for

at least the next fifteen years.

The failure of reaching a deal there set the stage for

what was to follow. Ariel Sharon visited the Temple

Mount and kickstarted the Second Intifada. Months

later, Barak ran for Prime Minister saying that his

"Generous Offer" had been rejected and the Arabs who

could vote boycotted the election and called it

"Barak's Big Lie."

Naomi Klein's recent observation about the

'Likudization' of world politics, the US in particular

through the Bush docrine since September 11th, holds

true enough here that it has rendered the left in

Israel largely obselete since the beginning of the

Second Intifada. The first intifada as a mass

non-violent struggle had material gains to speak for

even if everything ended up in failure. The Rabin

assassination put an end to it all.

The Second Intifada and the Israeli military response

has a pathetic legacy: a Separation Wall, nearly 5,000

Palestinians and Jews dead since the outbreak of

violence, thousands of homes demolished, no end to the

useless relic of the suicide bomb despite months of

quiet, continued humiliating treatment of Palestinians

in the Occupied Territories, withholding of equal

rights in Israel of the Arab minority, continued

settlement construction, outright land confiscations,

brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners, extreme

marginalization of the Bedouin, daily movement

restrictions - in short, an all out assault on basic

freedoms to the benefit of nobody.

There has been a gross failure of leadership at every

level in this conflict. The US in working on their

disingenuous 'Roadmap to Peace' is too busy worrying

about regional interests to be concerned with

implementing a just, balanced peace in Israel and

Palestine. The US, bogged down in its own wars and in

the middle of an election year, has looked the other

way when it has come to its Israeli ally and given it

ample room to implement a pre-set agenda. A

clandestine spy scandal involving the Pentagon and

AIPAC won't change that. A wholesale turnover of its

right wing Defense establishment might.