Where is the Israeli Left?

by Nicholas Jahr

A few weeks ago, the Israeli Knesset wrapped up a profoundly alarming session. It began in October with Netanyahu’s cabinet approving a change to the loyalty oath sworn by new Israeli citizens: instead of simply swearing “to respect the laws of the state of Israel,” new, non-Jewish citizens would now have to swear allegiance to the country “as a Jewish and democratic state.” A campaign promise of Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel My Home) party, this revised loyalty oath, if passed by the full Knesset, would be a bitter pill for the future spouses of Palestinian-Israelis (around a fifth of Israel’s population). After the cabinet vote, Labor minister Isaac Herzog detected “a whiff of fascism on the margins of Israeli society.”

The scent got stronger at the end of the session, when the full Knesset passed two more discriminatory pieces of legislation into law: the Nakba Law and the Acceptance Committees Law. The former was originally intended to criminalize recognition of the Nakba – the ‘catastrophe’ in which over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to establish the state of Israel – threatening anyone (whether Jewish or Palestinian) who commemorated the tragedy with jail time. The bill’s sponsors ultimately traded criminal penalties for financial ones, and now any local authority or school that officially observes the Nakba can be fined up to three times what they spend to do so. It’s a form of collective punishment that threatens institutions like schools with crippling costs.

The Acceptance Committees Law paints with an even broader brush, allowing certain communities of up to 400 households to deny anyone the right to live within them, based solely on whether they are seen as “fitting with the life of the community” or “fitting with the social fabric.” Reminiscent of the restrictive housing covenants that kept Jews and others from purchasing homes in the US, and which they campaigned to defeat, the law is a license to discriminate, whether against Palestinian-Israelis, same-sex couples, Mizrahi Jews, or any other ‘undesirables.’ Even single mothers have been barred from such communities in the past. Like the revised loyalty oath, both the Nakba Law and the Acceptance to Communities Law were sponsored by Yisrael Beiteinu, but the latter also won support from Kadima.

All of which raises the question: where is the Israeli Left?

The cabinet vote on the revised loyalty oath was followed by an anemic demonstration. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, along with the Abraham Fund, has already filed a challenge to the Nakba Law and the Acceptance Committees Law in Israel’s High Court. But look for any signs of mass protest or outrage and you’ll be disappointed.

Two answers to the question worth considering come in the form of a recent cover story in The Nation, entitled (appropriately enough for our purposes) “The New Israeli Left”, and a not-so-recent manifesto, The National Left.

About a year ago, the internet was briefly afire with the news that Israel’s largest chain bookstore, Tzomet Sfarin, had yanked 10,000 copies of a new leftist tract from their shelves. Predictably, the coverage was all heat and no light: the censorship burnished the authors’ leftist credentials, but very little consideration was given to what they actually had to say.

The National Left, which the authors made available for free online [PDF], was a biting look at the Israeli Left written by Eldad Yaniv, a former advisor to Ehud Barak, and Shmuel Hasfari, who has written for both the Israeli stage and television. The similarities between the American political landscape and the authors’ take on the Israeli scene are striking: the damning image of espresso-drinking, effete liberals; the need to avoid at any cost the appearance of being weak; the resurgence of religion in politics; the sense of unchecked corporate power. At moments it’s like reading a dispatch from the 2004 political season (which is not to say all of these issues don’t remain relevant here), when the Dean campaign and Kerry’s loss triggered a debate over what the Left needed to be.

“The basic principle of the Left is solidarity,” declare Yaniv and Hasfari, and they argue that Israeli leftists—or at least their political parties—have abandoned that principle, failing to stand up for Mizrahi Jews and the working class. So far so good. Things get a little less clear cut when they call for a renewed social contract, one essentially grounded in military service. As they put it: “Whoever takes no part in the mutual responsibility should leave.” That’s not so far removed from Avigdor Lieberman’s original vision for the revised loyalty oath, which would have gone so far as to require Arabs born in Israel to either enlist in the military or commit to some other form of national service (which Yaniv and Hasfari also grant would be acceptable). Making rights contingent on ‘obligations’ is a dangerous game.

Similarly, Yaniv and Hasfari urge a rapprochement with the religious elements of Israeli society, specifically Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who enjoys a fair amount of support among the Mizrahim. Of course, a few months after The National Left saw print, Yosef—spiritual authority of the reactionary Shas party—called for Mahmoud Abbas to “vanish from our world.” Yosef let that disturbingly familiar phrase fly shortly before Netanyahu and Abbas met in DC. The knee jerk anti-religious sentiment often characteristic of the Left is a problem, but attempting to combine forces with Yosef doesn’t seem like the solution.

Nor does it seem like they share much common ground with Yosef when it comes to their real concern, the settlers. On this front they take no prisoners: the settlers are “an infected organ”, “brainwashed, hypnotized zombies,” “the Golem that has turned on their creator and over whom no rabbi has control.” For Yaniv and Hasfari, ’67 is more or less when everything went off the rails. “The State of Israel,” they write, “has had apartheid for decades.” But it’s an apartheid of the settler over all others, not of Israelis over Palestinians. That will come about soon enough: “The settlement enterprise is an enterprise that produces nothing apart from apartheid and destroys the Israel we knew and loved.” As a matter of electoral politics, accusing the settlers of effectively “building the future Palestinian state” might just be brilliant, and Yaniv and Hasfari’s rhetorical assault is vicious and bracing. The risk they run is mistaking a strategy for selling peace as one for achieving it.

When it comes down to it, regardless of whether solidarity is “the basic principle of the Left,” Yaniv and Hasfari are more than willing to act unilaterally. They embrace the separation wall, unilaterally withdrawing from the West Bank (with the settlers evacuating “to the big blocks”), and are almost boastful when they talk about retaliating against the attacks that might follow: “On the spot, with power, and a lot of it.” As they see it the peace process has become something “holy,” an end in and of itself: “The goal is to establish the State of Israel as a home for an exemplary society. That is the goal. One way of achieving that goal is through peace. It is one of the ways, but not the only one.”

Which could be refreshing or ominous, depending on your perspective.

Early in The National Left, Hasfari and Yaniv ask: “How come that all that remains of the Zionist Left today is an anarchistic group that harasses the Border Police every Friday near the separation fence or at checkpoints and Women in Black?”

It’s those ‘anarchists’ Noam Sheizaf and Joseph Dana focus on in their impressive story for The Nation. Dispensing with Yaniv and Hasfari’s sarcasm, they’re careful to note that “The term ‘anarchist’ is somewhat misleading; though some in AATW [Anarchists Against the Wall] follow anarchist ideology, in practice the group focuses on the occupation and violations of Palestinian human rights.”

In stark contrast to Hasfari and Yaniv’s unilateral Left, Sheizaf and Dana emphasize the ways in which these activists work in solidarity with Palestinians:

Unlike traditional Israeli peace rallies, the West Bank demonstrations are led by Palestinians. The Jewish participants arrive at the invitation of local Palestinian committees, and they must accept the political and tactical choices of the local leadership. Although there is coordination, it’s the Palestinians who decide on the course of action and the level of confrontation with the army. The Israelis see themselves as guests.

For those who have bemoaned the lack of a nonviolent Palestinian resistance, here it is. (Although Sheizaf and Dana report that Palestinians, particularly young people, have thrown stones at IDF soldiers during these protests, it’s clear that isn’t part of the organizers’ plan.) That resistance is apparently less concerned with the holy ‘peace process’ and far more with the immediate circumstances in which Palestinians must live their lives; hence the significance of the wall, and the role of AATW. After the relative success of well-documented protests in Budrus, the villages of Bil’in and Nil’in seem to have become the major flashpoints, though Sheizaf and Dana also report weekly protests in a number of other places, including Hebron and Walaja (a village located immediately south of the municipal border of Jerusalem). Shockingly, they note that “Walaja is about to be completely surrounded by the wall, leaving only a narrow gate in what will become an open-air prison for its 2,000 residents.”

While according to Sheizaf and Dana the tactics used in these protests have also been adopted by activists fighting deportations from the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem, the extent to which these many protests are coordinated, if at all, isn’t clear. What is clear from their reporting is that the Israelis involved in these efforts number in the hundreds, not the thousands. While history might one day recognize they formed the nucleus of a revivified Israeli Left, for the time being their influence on Israeli politics seems indirect at best.

Avraham Burg, the former Speaker of the Knesset and increasingly a trenchant critic of liberal Zionism, offers Sheizaf and Dana a few acute quotes on the collapse of the Left:

In fact, the Israeli left never recovered from Rabin’s assassination... Later, Ehud Barak came and presented his personal failure in Camp David [in 2000] as the failure of the entire way. When the head of the peace camp declared that there was no partner on the other side, it opened the door for unilateralism.

The conflict between a unilateral Left and one that is ready to act in solidarity seems inescapable. Yaniv is starting a new political party ostensibly grounded in his and Hasfari’s manifesto; apparently he’s dialed down the ‘national’ aspect of their appeal, and begun offering legal counsel to the settlement of Ariel to boot. Barak, his former mentor, first led the Labor Party into the wilderness and then abandoned it there, breaking with the party this past January and taking four of its MKs with him. This would be a moment for all the usual cliches about rebuilding amidst the rubble and taking defeat as an opportunity to regroup, if we hadn’t trotted them all out when Labor reached its last historic low in the wake of the 2009 election. Where the Israeli Left goes from here is less clear than ever.

Updated, 2:30 PM ET 18 May: Added a link to Zochrot, an Israeli NGO “whose goal is to introduce the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli-Jewish public” (under “the Nakba”, second paragraph).

I’m told by Roni Schocken, Director of Public Advocacy and Government Relations for the Abraham Fund, that the proper name for the bill enabling communities to deny people admission is the Acceptance Committees Law, which the post has now been edited to reflect. The legislation covers more than 300 communities of up to 400 households in the Negev and the Galilee.

Update 2, 12:45 PM ET 25 May: Downward revision of the estimate of Palestinian refugees in the wake of ‘al Nakba’ (see comments).