The Israeli Elections Demand Our Honesty & Rage
Priest and Prophet alike, they all act falsely… saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. – Jeremiah 8:10-11
“What I wish I could have done for the readers of this book,” writes Indian activist and author Arundhati Roy in the introduction to My Seditious Heart,
is to recreate the prevailing atmosphere in which I published each essay. They were written when a certain political space closed down, when a false consensus was being broadcast, when I could no longer endure the relentless propaganda… mostly I wrote because it became easier to do that than to put up with the angry, persistent hum of my own silence. I also wrote to reclaim language.
It is the banality of the violence here and the wan, false hope of those who refuse to confront the reality of what is happening here that makes me want to write in this moment.
Rebbe Nachman teaches again and again that it is forbidden to despair; equally, I think it is forbidden to lead anyone else to a place of despair. But hope borne of ignorance, particularly willful ignorance, is itself a form of despair; real hope can only come from honestly facing the world as it is – without excuses, without a veil.
Intellectually, I didn’t have any illusions about the outcome of the Israeli election yesterday – that the absolute best-case scenario was a deadlock that would lead to yet another round of elections. I suppose there was also a small chance of another cobbled-together right/center/center-left coalition, but it’s hard to imagine that such a coalition wouldn’t have ended exactly as the current one did.
This morning, though, I felt the grief and rage of knowing that the number of openly Kahanist MKs alone will quite possibly be greater than the number of center-left/left wing MKs, that the next coalition will likely be Israel’s most right-wing, and that the majority of Israelis have voted for parties – Likud, Religious Zionism, Shas, and UTJ – support endless occupation and dispossession. The same could also probably be said of the National Unity Party, though it will likely be in the opposition and its leader, Benny Gantz, has recently paid lip-service to a two-state solution.
It was strange to walk the streets of Jerusalem today. The city leans significantly to the right, and I knew that most of the people I passed had voted for right-wing and far-right candidates, and that, in particular, many of the people I saw wearing kippot likely voted for Kahanism. It was strange to wear a kippah today and realize that many of the people passing me by probably made the same assumption about me, and that many of them likely approved.
I wanted there to be some sort of public melancholy; I wanted to yell at passersby. But the day was largely normal, with the exception of a group of 60 or so bubbly teens who walked by me on the street sporting stickers with the face of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the front man for Israeli Kahanism and the second-in-command of the Religious Zionist party.
There is a truism that a government is not the same as a people. But as a friend of mine pointed out, this is much truer in a dictatorship than in a representative democracy. Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu represent a plurality, if not the outright majority, of Israeli society: right-wing, racist, and opposed to democracy. The percentages are obviously even worse if you only consider the Jewish population.
The only way in which Israel’s incoming government doesn’t represent a determinative portion of the civilians living under that government’s control is, of course, if one counts the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank (and – yes – in Gaza, too, though from a distance) who are not allowed to vote for the military that dominates their lives. But barring that caveat, this incoming Knesset is Israel, and it will only get worse. Israeli youth are more right-wing than earlier generations, and Haredi youth in particular are beginning to be attracted to the Kahanist right. The right controls a vast array of institutions, many of them part of or attached to the state, and is therefore capable of producing and reproducing more and more people who share its ideological stance.
But what about Israel’s previous coalition? Wasn’t it a combination of right, center, and left Jewish parties, as well as a Palestinian party? Isn’t that Israel, too?
I suppose so, but not in the way that it’s been represented. What the outgoing coalition demonstrates is that the only alternative to a far-right government in Israel is a Frankenstein-esque assemblage of political parties who share no concrete values except an opposition to Netanyahu, alternately run by someone who just a decade ago was considered right-wing beyond bounds (Naftali Bennett) and a centrist without any discernable political agenda (Yair Lapid), along with a defense minister whose initial campaign advertisements boasted of how he had “taken Gaza back to the stone age” (Benny Gantz).
That same government continued to support the “creeping annexation” of the West Bank – more settlement growth, the continued demolition of Palestinian homes in Area C, and the renewal of the regulations that ensure a different legal system for Jewish settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. The last of those projects – the renewal of those regulations – was carried out with the consent of the ostensibly left-wing Meretz because if those regulations had failed to be renewed, the coalition would have collapsed (as it eventually did), leading to a far-right government (as it soon will). In other words, even a government that was not far-right could only survive by continuing to support the occupation. And, in the end, Meretz’s decision to so completely compromise its values only delayed the inevitable resurgence of an even more right-wing government and may have cost Meretz enough votes to prevent it from being part of the current Knesset.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t inspiring movements for justice happening here, too. The Joint List and Balad both presented powerful visions for what a democratic Israel would look like, but neither garnered much support. Omdim Beyachad, a joint Palestinian-Jewish social movement, has in the past managed to turn out significant numbers of Israelis for progressive causes. And, of course, there is a courageous network of Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations. But even taken all together, they represent a small fraction of Israeli society.
There are, then, only two major political camps in Israel: a coherent, far-right nationalist one that openly embraces the occupation and an incoherent, “politically diverse” one that propels the occupation along at a slower rate with less nationalist and perhaps more embarrassed rhetoric.
That second camp may yet eke out a pyrrhic victory in the form of yet another round of elections, though this seems increasingly unlikely. Even if it does, though, such a victory would yet again be a delay of the inevitable. Should Netanyahu somehow fail to build a coalition, he will be ousted as the head of Likud, which will allow voters who share his politics but dislike him personally to return to the traditional strongholds of the right.
In the meantime, pro-Israel advocacy trainings, Birthright trips, programs about Israeli culture, and the Israel day parade will continue unabated, perhaps with a scattering of furtive glances now and again when the cognitive dissonance becomes, for a moment, unbearable. The federations, shuls, camps, teen programs, and Hillel chapters that have stationed themselves aboard the ship that is Israel will continue (Israeli) dancing on its decks as it sails itself into an iceberg of nationalism and fascism. Within the next few days or weeks, that the vast majority of American Jews and Jewish institutions will find ways to shrug the election off, ignore it, or wring their hands.
Though a few major Jewish organizations offered muted critiques of Ben-Gvir when he first began to come to power in 2019, a recent JTA article noted:
At least four of the major Jewish groups that spoke out in 2019 say they will not get involved this time around: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. The latter two represent a broad array of national and Jewish groups
As Peter Beinart recently argued, these and other institutions’ refusal to offer a serious moral critique of the Israeli elections is simply the logical consequence of their longtime refusal to confront the reality of the occupation:
[I]f you are not willing to stand on principle against threats to democracy early on, you ultimately find yourself in a quicksand in which you were willing to accept even the most horrific violations of human rights and human dignity. And Itamar Ben-Gvir is the latest example of the fact that the American Jewish establishment is willing to do just that.
For decades, American Jewish institutions have denied the systematic oppression of Palestinians by Israel. They have denied the occupation and its thousands of mundane indignities and shocking acts of violence: home demolitions, the violent suppression of protest, collective punishments, city closures, massive settler violence, the incarceration of children, night raids (though the army claims to have recently ceased these), and the denial of due process, access to resources, and the right to vote.
Lest anyone say that Palestinians can, in fact, vote, since they can vote for the Palestinian Authority (or would, if the PA would allow elections), make no mistake: whatever autonomy the Palestinian Authority has, it is still under Israeli military control. Israel governs who goes in and out of the West Bank, determines how resources are allocated, and exercises military control over the entirety of the territory. If anything, the Palestinian Authority often functions as a “subcontractor” for the occupation.
Ultimately, there is no moral way to deny another people of their rights. If Israel will not leave the West Bank, end the siege of Gaza, and allow an autonomous, full-fledged Palestinian state – and given continued settlement expansion and the forced displacement of Palestinians from Area C, this seems quite unlikely – then it cannot continue to deny Palestinians the right to vote in elections for the government that ultimately governs them. Hopes for, promises of, and vague rhetorical commitments to a two-state solution that Israel has for decades rendered increasingly impossible cannot be used as justification for endlessly deferring alternate solutions. As Beinart states in “Yavneh: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine,”
The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades—a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews—has failed. The traditional two-state solution no longer offers a compelling alternative to Israel’s current path. It risks becoming, instead, a way of camouflaging and enabling that path. It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish–Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish–Palestinian equality.
In 2015, similarly, Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy wrote, “Israel is already a binational state. There’s no other way to describe it: a state that governs two nations is binational.” In the absence of a two-state solution, the choice is between the undemocratic binationalism Israel already has or a democratic binationalism – whether as a single state, a confederation (not to be confused with the Federation Plan, which proposes a federal model as a way of maintaining Jewish hegemony over the entirety of Israel/Palestine), or some other configuration.
Beinart goes on to argue,
The essence of Zionism is not a Jewish state in the land of Israel; it is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that both offers Jews refuge and enriches the entire Jewish world. It’s time to explore other ways to achieve that goal—from confederation to a democratic binational state—that don’t require subjugating another people. It’s time to envision a Jewish home that is a Palestinian home, too.
For some, Beinart’s reinterpretation of Zionism might offer a way of committing to a just vision for Israel/Palestine without giving up a deeply and long held ideology; for others, the historical baggage of the term might seem superfluous. Either way, though, his vision of an Israel/Palestine that is a home for Jews and Palestinians, and allows both peoples to flourish – an idea, incidentally, that a significant number of Palestinians and some Israeli Jews have long advocated for – offers a compelling vision for a future beyond occupation and oppression.
It is on us to call upon our communal institutions, big and small, speak out. To insist that instead of unquestioningly supporting, endorsing, and defending the Israeli government, they support the Palestinian and Israeli activists and organizers on the ground fighting for a just, democratic future, even if the majority of Israeli Jewish society continues to vote for, endorse, and tacitly accept the occupation.
No matter how scary, frustrating, or futile it might seem, it’s our obligation to demand that our shuls, federations, youth groups, and other institutions that make any sort of claim to moral seriousness take a stand – because if they don’t now, they likely never will. But if they will not lead our community to a just future, then it is our obligation to be the leaders our community deserves.
In “Democracy: Who Is She When She’s at Home,” Arundhati Roy concludes her critique of Hindu ethnonationalism in India by stating:
Fascism itself can only be turned away if all those who are outraged by it show a commitment to social justice that equals the intensity of their indignation. Are we ready to get off our starting blocks?… If not, then years from now… [w]e too will find ourselves unable to look our own children in the eye, for the shame of what we did and didn’t do. For the shame of what we allowed to happen.
It is forbidden to despair. But the first step towards hope is honesty. May our honesty bring us heartbreak, and may that heartbreak bring us the fury necessary for the struggle ahead.