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July 11, 2002
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
Resources:
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
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July
11, 2002
A Deep Ideological
Crisis
by Irit Katriel
About a year ago I took a train to Tel Aviv. As
this is the place that the Zionists created, where Jews can be
safe, I took a taxi from the train station to where I was going.
You don't get on a bus in Israel if you don't have to. The radio
was on and the driver, wanting to make conversation, reacted
to it. He repeated what he and the rest of us heard on the radio
all day from politicians, callers, 'analysts': This Sharon doesn't
know how to fight. He should go into Beit Jala and crash and
smash... "if you do a war, do it right".
When he was done I said "I think
the problems here can also be solved without wars".
"Yes," he said thoughtfully.
"This is true".
I believe that this exchange illustrates
a lot of what is reflected and perceived as "public opinion"
in Israel. It is perhaps difficult to understand it if you live
in a country where opinion is less intimidated, uniformity of
thought is less of a requirement, toughness not the central value.
Humanistic attitudes, in the Israeli Sparta, are at best smiled
at; at worst condemned as 'softness' and 'daydreaming'. On the
extreme Right, they are denounced as treason. Wanting to live
a normal life is "leftist weakness".
Like all Western societies, so is the
Israeli strictly divided into two publics: the opinion makers
and the spectators. The first includes the politicians, army
men, academics, journalists and "analysts". The second
is suffering from a deep economic crisis. The young, those who
are able, are emigrating in large numbers to where they can find
a job, keep their human face and maybe get a life.
In recent weeks, the opinion makers were
obsessively discussing what is called in Israel "the demographic
problem". That is, the number of Palestinians in the country.
This discussion is not reflected in foreign media, so I will
explain it in a nutshell. The presupposition is that Israel,
the Jewish state, can tolerate a small and obedient Palestinian
minority. Obedience is called "loyalty to the state"
in NewSpeak. In English it should be called "acceptance
of their third class status".
In the past, it was assumed that the
Palestinian citizens of Israel (a fifth of the population) are
a small and obedient minority that can be ignored, with few exceptions
that the police and secret service quietly took care of. The
Zionist Left, therefore, restricted its demographic ideology
to the occupied territories: advocating a withdrawal in order
to "get rid" of three million non-Jews. The marginalized
non-Zionist Left demands the same, but for a different reason:
because three million human beings are deprived of everything
by the occupation. This has been the basis for a tactical alliance
between the Zionist and non-Zionist opponents of the occupation.
The Zionist Right, which includes both
Labor and Likud, is acting through the settlement program for
35 years to incorporate the occupied territories into Israel,
bottling up the Palestinians there in smaller and smaller enclaves
and waiting for them to understand that their only option is
to evaporate in one way or another.
All of this does not detract from the
opinion makers' view of themselves as supporters of democracy.
In an intellectually corrupt climate, it can be perceived as
democratic to discuss how to change the population when it doesn't
fit the regime.
Today, the demographic discussion includes
also Palestinian citizens of Israel. The demographers (headed
by Haifa U Professor Arnon Sofer) are predicting that by 2020
the percentage of Jews in Israel proper (excluding the West Bank
and Gaza) will drop to 64 percent. Faced with this reality, different
"solutions" are suggested in newspaper opinion pieces:
on the one hand, how to increase the number of Jews - from finding
more Jews who will immigrate to Israel (e.g., in economic stricken
Argentina), to converting Romanian guest workers to Judaism and
granting them citizenship. On the other hand, how to reduce the
number of Palestinians or make them invisible - with various
ideas ranging from reservations to ethnic cleansing. The only
real solution, of democracy in a de-Zionised state, is only rarely
mentioned in the mainstream media and immediately dismissed.
The Zionist Left has been largely silent
with regards to this intensified trend in public debate. It condemns
the "solution" of ethnic cleansing under the cover
of a regional war or a US attack on Iraq, which has become more
and more prominently advocated by the Rightwing (including government
ministers). But it has not discussed the issue further.
The taxi driver in Tel Aviv, who knew
that it is possible to solve the problems of Israel/Palestine
without wars, but did not know that he is allowed to say this,
is listening to this discussion on the radio. I don't know what
he thinks should be done with regards to the "demographic
problem", but I am quite sure that he is not offered, as
a legitimate view, the opinion that the current and future demographic
composition of Israel is not a problem, but rather a fact; that
if the population doesn't fit the regime, the regime should change
and not the population.
The reason that I am so sure is because
I read the latest opinion piece by Uri Avnery ("A maddened
cow", July 6), who marks the extreme Left within the Zionist
spectrum. In an attempt to explain apparently conflicting results
of public opinion polls, he writes: "the one thing that
unifies almost all Jewish Israelis is the wish to live in a state
where there are only Jews. ... Some call this 'racist'. ... But
this attitude is rooted in the fact that for thousands of years
Jews have lived as a religious-ethnic community dispersed throughout
the world and often suffered cruel persecution (especially in
the Christian world). They have developed a ghetto mentality.
They want to live among themselves, separate from others, surrounded
by a high fence. ... For most Israelis, the ideal situation would
be a state without a single non-Jewish citizen." This does
not prevent Avnery from concluding that "the majority is
ready to pay the price of peace".
Imagine the reaction if a Christian would
write that Jews always wanted to live in a ghetto - that's the
way they like it.
Anyone who is familiar with Avnery's
writing will not be surprised that he assumes that the Israeli
public is thinking in the same terms as the TV talk show hosts:
that they are not worrying about their lost jobs, but rather
about the demographic composition of the country. That they would
rather starve in a Jewish ghetto than live a normal life in a
democratic country. This is standard for Avnery, who usually
believes the government when it tells us what we want. But it
is incredible, in today's context,
that Avnery accepts the presupposition
that the attitude he attributes to most Israelis is legitimate,
not racist, and not in any way contradictory to peace.
Avnery has invested a lot in the struggle
for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. It is
only in an extremely regressive political culture that a person
like him can fail to see the difference between a (supposed)
wish to live in a closed Jewish community and a wish to achieve
an ethnically pure state "without a single non-Jewish citizen".
It is reflective of the nature of current mainstream Israeli
discourse, that a person with his pro-peace credentials accepts
that Palestinians are, for most Israelis and not only for the
ideologues of the status quo, "a demographic problem".
At a time in which blunt fascism is in
power in Israel, the Zionist Left seems unequipped to give the
most basic answers that are required. These are dangerous times
in West Asia.
Irit Katriel
can be reached at iritka@zahav.net.il.
Today's
Features
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
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