Rene — What became of the Israeli left?
Topic(s): Palestine / Israel | Comments Off on Rene — What became of the Israeli left?====================
Ed. Note:
I am not sure how clear the author of this article is about the Occupation and its effects on the Palestinian population. Most glaringly, the author seems to miss the tragedy and futility of the current course of Israeli politics. (At least in the tone taken in this article) It seems as if he suffers from the same humor as those he comes in contact with. I do think about the question of “the Left” he poses often, and I think about who may exist within Israel who may offer more insight or other positions/narratives. There are many points in this article that I do not particularly agree with, but I must say that the distinction he makes between human rights and political rights is clear and noteworthy. (rg)
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What became of the Israeli left?
Israel was founded by Europeans with socialist ideals and utopian
dreams. Now the embattled country is dominated by the right and
religious fanaticism is on the rise. What went wrong? Ian Buruma heads
for the cafes of Schenken Street in search of the answer
Thursday October 23, 2003
The Guardian
“The Israeli left is now at its lowest ebb”, says Nissim Kalderon, a
magazine editor, academic and political thinker in Tel Aviv, and
smiles sadly. He should know. A few years ago, he organised a
conference on what was left of the left. The conclusion then was: not
much. It is even worse now. We are walking through Schenken Street,
past some of the coolest cafes in town, where young Israelis discuss
anything from soccer to postmodernism, happy in their collective
relief to be far away from the religious crazies in Jerusalem and the
fanatics in the occupied territories. Nissim points out some of the
architectural landmarks in the area, recognised this year by Unesco as
a world heritage site. Tel Aviv is known for its Bauhaus buildings,
designed in the 20s by European-trained architects such as Zeev
Rechter and Dov Carmi. Some of the houses, stark and elegant, were
restored recently. Others are visibly falling apart; the concrete is
not ideally suited to the humid and salty air. We walk past an empty
space, filled with rubble, where a fine Bauhaus building once stood:
the offices of Davar, an old leftwing newspaper, which closed down
five years ago.
Bauhaus represents something vital in the development of Israel. This
was a state founded by Europeans, many of them with high socialist
ideals, who wanted to break away from being a persecuted minority, but
also from the religious customs and narrow horizons of east European
shtetl life. In Israel, they had hoped, a new man would be born, as
modern and rational as the Bauhaus buildings of Tel Aviv. In the words
of a Zionist song of the 40s, Israel would be “dressed in concrete and
cement”. Zionism, as the British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper,
observed, “was an invasion of a new culture in an old world”.
So what happened to that brave, new Zionist world, those socialist
dreams of concrete and cement? Religious fanaticism is growing. The
Labour party, which is hardly socialist at all, and Meretz, which
still is in parts, have little chance of coming back to power
soon. The role of the kibbutzim is much diminished. Histradut, the old
trade unionist backbone of Israeli society, is reduced to one-third of
its old membership. The upper ranks in the army, once a stronghold of
Labour-supporting ashkenazim, are now filled more and more with
religious sephardic Jews with roots in Casablanca or Baghdad instead
of Krakow or Minsk.
What happened, then? The problem is partly social. One pleasant
evening in Jerusalem shows me much of what remains there of the
left. It is an evening of poetry (Seamus Heaney in a new Hebrew
translation) and music (Chopin and Brahms) at the house of the
Schocken family, who own Ha’aretz, the liberal daily paper, as well as
a publishing company, originally founded in Germany. There they all
are, the great and the good of the left/liberal intelligentsia,
professors at Hebrew University, poets, philosophers, enlightened
bureaucrats and journalists; all tireless promoters of peace with the
Arabs, and cultivators of the high European culture transferred from
Berlin and Lvov by their parents and grandparents. Most would vote for
Labour or more leftwing parties. All, so far as I can make out, belong
to the ashkenazi elite.
The left in Israel always was the preserve of the European
elite. Socialism did not grow out of the socio-economic problems of a
local working class, but was transferred, along with Bauhaus, Chopin
and Brahms, as part of Zionist idealism. Ideology was not the product
of circumstances; it preceded them.
One of the regular guests at cultural gatherings in Jerusalem is
Mordechai Bar-On. In the 60s, he was in charge of education for the
Israeli army; the chief ideologue, so to speak. He later joined Peace
Now, a civic movement dedicated to making peace with the Arabs, as a
leftwing Labour party member. He tells me about his early life as a
young kibbutznik. Bar-On had been part of a movement called Ha-Shomer
Ha-Tzair, literally the Young Guardians, led by men from Vienna and
Warsaw. Soviet communism was their main inspiration, and their paper,
the Guardian, was modelled after the Manchester Guardian. But there
were other, less political influences too, and these showed some of
the peculiar origins of the Israeli left. Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzairniks were
great readers of Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud.
They were young romantics, then, in the 40s and 50s, with visions of a
new society, but the proletarian struggle against capitalism did not
make much sense in Bar-On’s citrus-growing kibbutz; there were no
capitalists to struggle against. When Israel began to industrialise,
and later immigrants, arriving in large numbers from North Africa and
the Middle East, formed a real working-class, it was too late. For the
oriental Jews were religious and far removed in their cultural
interests from Rilke, Freud or Nietzsche. To them, the ashkenazi
idealists, ensconced in the kibbutzim, the upper ranks of the army,
the universities, and Histradut, looked like an exclusive
establishment. The left, as it were, was upper-class.
This impression was strengthened in the early 80s, when kibbutzniks,
especially secular ones, indulged in all kinds of speculative
financial schemes. A distinguished economist, Menachem Ya’ari, tells
me that the kibbutz movement was seen in those heady days “as rolling
in cash”, and was resented by the mostly sephardic working class as
“the epitome of bourgeois ashkenazim”. The sudden wealth came crashing
down in 1985, when inflation was reduced from 400% to 16% literally
overnight, but the damage was done. The kibbutzim had lost their
innocence, or at least their superior air of egalitarian
utopianism. Ben Gurion’s prediction that kibbutzim, in a capitalist
society, would inevitably become capitalist too, came true.
If the poor oriental Jews were not in tune with Marx or Rilke, their
sympathy for the Palestinian cause was practically non-existent. And
since the Israeli left, after its pioneering years, began to be
defined more by its willingness to compromise with the Arabs than by
economic issues, this made it very difficult for the socialists to
appeal to the poor. Peace Now, for example, is commonly regarded by
other Israelis as a bunch of Arab-lovers, if not traitors.
Yair Tzaban, a former cabinet minister under Itzhak Rabin, explains
how his leftwing Zionist party, Mapam, is always mentioned in the
polls as the party fighting hardest for social rights, but “can’t
capitalise on it because of our national problems”. For “the working
classes vote for the right”. In his view, the Israeli left cannot come
back as long as the Arab-Israeli conflict remains unresolved.
Tzaban began his political career as a communist in 1954. When the
communists split in pro-Soviet and Zionist factions, he chose the
latter. He speaks to me about his early Zionist idealism in Tel
Aviv. The goal of the pre-war pioneers had been to change the place of
Jews in the world. In Israel, they hoped, Jews could finally be like
other people, citizens in their own state, secure in their
nationality. For the first time in 2,000 years, Jews would no longer
see themselves as different from the rest of humanity, and thus
anti-semitism would cease to be a serious problem. This ideal of
normality was dashed first by the Holocaust, and then by the endless
state of war in Israel. As Tzaban puts it: “The Arab conflict, coupled
with the Holocaust, reinstated the feeling of us against the
world. This is not a good climate for the development of the left.”
Especially, since this feeling is most pronounced among the religious
and the underprivileged.
Like many leftists, Tzaban blames Barak for kicking the teeth out of
the left. He believes that Barak messed up any chance for a lasting
deal with the Palestinians by going for broke in 2000 at Camp
David. “I cannot find enough words to criticise him,” he says. “His
approach to Arafat was all or nothing: Messiah or Hell, a popular
dichotomy in the Hebrew tradition.”
This is a little unfair. Barak left enough room for further
negotiations, which Arafat refused to exploit. But most Israelis are
convinced that Barak, and his Labour party, shot their bolt in Camp
David. By turning Barak’s offer down, and then condoning the second
intifada, Arafat made sure that Israelis would no longer trust Labour
to protect them, let alone parties further to the left. In fact,
however, this trust had already begun to wear thin in the 70s, after
two major wars robbed most Israelis of any illusions that peace would
be swiftly at hand.
The occupation of Arab territories in the aftermath of the 1967 war
has made relations between Jews and Palestinians much worse. Settling
these territories with Jews began under Labour, but the real
architects of Greater Israel were the leaders of the Likud – Begin,
Shamir and Sharon. They understood the mood of the lower classes. Like
them, Shamir and Begin had always been against the Zionist left;
Shamir and Begin, because they were rightwing nationalists, and the
immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, because they hated
the Arabs, and resented the secular ashkenazi elite. Settlements were
also popular with the less well-off, because government subsidies made
them cheap to live in. And the army was there to protect them.
According to Mordechai Bar-On, the left began to lose its grip on the
army in the late 70s. Until then, “most officers came from the left
and were ashkenazim”. After that, educated European Jews drifted away
from army careers, because there were better prospects elsewhere. But
there was a strong element, too, of disillusion with the way Israel
was handling its relations with the Arabs. Peace Now was founded in
1978, one year after Menachem Begin’s Likud party took power, by 348
reserve officers and soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces.
In the 80s, after the invasion of Lebanon, many leftwing activists
became positively hostile to the army, further alienating the very
institution they had dominated before. This is regarded by many
people, including some members of Peace Now, as a disastrous
mistake. Israel is at war. To be against the army, upon which Israelis
depend for their safety, is tantamount to being against Israel. And
this makes no political sense.
What is left of the left, then, is something a little like Victorian
charity, applied to the Palestinians, not in the form of soup
kitchens, but as a desperate kind of solidarity, which is not always
reciprocated. Secular liberals organise committees to monitor the
roadblocks in the occupied territories. Organisations, such as
B’tselem, concentrate on human rights abuses. But none of this
translates into political power.
The paradox in Israel today is that the left has actually won some of
the ideological battles, as far as the Palestinian problem is
concerned. Most Israelis, including Ariel Sharon, agree that
Palestinians should have their own state, even if they disagree on its
ultimate form. Only a minority believe that Israel should occupy the
Palestinian territories for ever. Most people are in favour of
compromise. And yet, as Yair Tzaban put it, “only a rightwing
government can carry it out”.
Haim Oron was a cabinet member for Meretz under Rabin and Barak, had a
distinguished career in Histradut, and is still a kibbutznik; the
epitome, one might say, of the old Zionist left. We meet one afternoon
at Moment, the cafe in Jerusalem blown up by a suicide bomber last
year. Its speedy return to complete normality (apart from the armed
guard outside) shows the resilience of Israeli citizens. He talks to
me about the collapse of social solidarity in Israel, and the leaking
away of middle-class votes from Labour. He says: “We can’t touch the
middle class the way we still did 12 years ago.” Those who dislike the
influence of orthodox Jews, as well as what is left of socialism, now
vote for Shinui, the new middle-class party.
Still, sighs Oron, the main reason the left can’t make headway is
Arafat. Just then, we are approached by a plump, middle-aged man in a
tight polo shirt. He recognises Oron and asks him, in that direct way
Israelis favour, when he is going to change his soft views on the
Arabs. He adds that he used to vote for the left, but terrorism has
turned him towards Sharon. Instead of answering his question, Oron
asks the man when he will change his mind back again. And the man
says: “Only after 10 years of peace.” As General De Gaulle once said,
in a very different context: “A tall order.”