7/8/2014 Left out: Israels liberals find themselves isolated and lacking influence and power | The National

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Joseph Dana
August 7, 2014 Updated: August 7, 2014 03:18 PM

Left out: Israels liberals find themselves isolated and
lacking influence and power
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One-page article
As Israeli warplanes were pounding the Gaza Strip a few days ago, the
portly, elder Israeli politician Reuven Rivlin confidently approached the
podium facing Israels parliament. After a hotly contested battle for the
presidency, one that exposed rampant corruption among senior Israeli
politicians, Rivlin secured his spot as Shimon Peress replacement to
become Israels 10th president. Despite his staunchly right-wing views
concerning the solution to Israels crisis with the Palestinians, Rivlin
received a standing ovation as he was inaugurated in front of the country.
With almost no concrete opposition from the left, Rivlins appointment
confirms that Israel is one step closer to making official the one-state reality
that exists on the ground. In Israels parliamentary democratic system,
power lies firmly in the hands of the prime minister, leaving the position of
the president as a largely ceremonial and symbolic one. At a time when -
Israels secular left is on life support, with nationalist sentiment sweeping a
country in the grips of war in Gaza, Rivlins accession to the presidency is a
Right- and left-wing Israelis clash at a rally in Tel Aviv last month calling for an end to the occupation and for a
ceasefire. Andrew Burton / Getty Images

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Topics: Israel, Palestinian
Territories, Palestinian
Authority, Gaza assault,
Middle East unrest,
Palestinian statehood,
Benjamin Netanyahu, The
Review, Middle East
peace process
profound symbol of Israels desire to control the Palestinian territories
forever.
I would prefer for the Palestinians to be citizens of this country, Rivlin
reportedly told the Greek ambassador to Israel last year, rather than
divide the land. With statements like this, Rivlin has positioned himself as a
leader of an increasingly popular Israeli movement to reject the two-state
solution once and for all. While these voices have always existed under the
surface, the Israeli government tried to subdue them to convince the
international community that it was ready to negotiate with the Palestinians
in good faith about the division of the land between the Mediterranean Sea
and the River Jordan. The reality on the ground, as Israels occupation
closes in on its sixth decade, is a de facto one-state solution, where rights
are administered on the basis of ethnicity in a wholly unequal manner.
Israels secular left, which formerly held massive peace rallies in Tel Aviv
and provided dark hope that Israeli civil society had the power to exert
political pressure on its leadership to reach a two-state solution, has lost
most of its political clout over the past several years.
Under the leadership of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has
increased settlement activity in the West Bank, while entrenching an
infrastructure of control that extends to all of the territory from the river to
the sea.
I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there
cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security
control of the territory west of the River Jordan, Netanyahu said just under
a month ago, as the Gaza conflict raged.
At this point in Israels short but violent history, both the Israeli prime
minister and president are firmly on record stating that a two-state solution
is not viable because of security concerns, or the fact that Israel simply
doesnt want to give up the biblical heartland of the country.
Years of fruitless negotiations have produced an Israeli political
establishment that is openly antagonistic towards the two-state solution
framework, which, with the outbreak of violence in Gaza, is difficult for the
countrys PR handlers in the foreign ministry to contain.
At the very least, Rivlin is now in the position to legitimise one-state
discourse in at least two ways, says Dimi Reider, an associate fellow at the
European Council on Foreign Relations. First, by emphatically legitimising
and embracing settler communities and maybe even reaching out to
Palestinian ones making settlement eviction and partition appear a lot
less self-evident as a path forward.
The rightist narrative of the conflict has taken such a strong hold that it is
no longer safe for left-leaning Israelis to even protest on the streets of Tel
Aviv. The upper echelon of Israels political establishment, attempting to
build on the rhetoric for political gains, is largely to blame for this dire -
situation.
Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, for example, recently led calls to
boycott businesses owned by Palestinian citizens of Israel who protested
against the attacks in Gaza. Groups of young Israeli rightist militants have
been roaming the streets, wearing shirts inspired by neo-Nazi logos, and
chanting death to leftists and death to Arabs. When these groups engage
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in violence, against either leftists or Palestinians, they are barely held
accountable for their crimes.
Tel Avivs famed liberal intellectuals face intimidation from family, friends
and peers for demonstrating basic empathy and remorse for the thousands
of civilians killed in Gaza. As the major 2,000-strong Tel Aviv rally for peace
in Gaza last month demonstrated, never before in Israels history has it
been so dangerous to publicly call for peace with the Palestinians.
What is new this time around is that it is unsafe for Israeli Jews to protest,
says Neve Gordon, a professor of political science at Ben Gurion University
in Beer Sheva. For instance, in the past I would take my children to
protests in Tel Aviv. I can no longer do this since the right-wing are
extremely violent. Ultimately, my children are safer in Beer Sheva, despite
the rockets, than in an anti-war protest in Tel Aviv.
The factors leading to the crippling of the secular left in Israel by the
dominant nationalist sentiment have been a long time in the making. For
one, Israel never really lived up to its stated desire for a two-state solution.
During the Labor governments of the 1990s Israeli settlement activity, for
example, increased on the land slated for a Palestinian state. Over the past
20 years, Israel has worked tirelessly to sever the Gaza Strip from the West
Bank. It is no coincidence that the latest round of violence in Gaza began
just two months after Hamas agreed to a unity government that would mend
Palestinian infighting and bring Gaza closer to the West Bank.
Despite a well-documented unwillingness to cede territory and reformulate
its control over Palestinian life in the occupied territories, Israel invested
heavily in a handsome PR campaign designed to show the international
community that it was interested in a two-state solution. While international
civil society accepted this with varying degrees of scepticism, Israels liberal
leftists and its supporters around the world, who often call themselves
liberal Zionists, accepted this PR strategy wholeheartedly. As Jonathan
Freedman recently noted in The New York Review of Books: For nearly
three decades, the hope of an eventual two-state solution provided a kind
of comfort zone for liberal Zionists, if not comfort blanket.
It is this contradiction that doomed the Israeli left and is now difficult to
conceal. Zionism as an ideology has always been difficult to reconcile with
liberalism. This is all the more profound in wartime, when nationalism
seemingly paralyses every sector of Israeli society with a sink or swim
mindset.
The Jewish left has been dwindling for years because the demarcation
lines are becoming clearer. It is becoming more and more difficult to be
both a Zionist and a leftist, even a Zionist and a liberal. Most people choose
Zionism over a left politics. But this is part of a long process, says Gordon.
The latest Gaza conflict, coupled with a new willingness of Israels
leadership to speak honestly about their long-term ambitions in the
Palestinian territories, means that talk of a two-state solution and a viable
partner in Israeli society that can help push the government to make painful
concessions is out of the window. The message to the international
community from Israels leaders is unequivocal: the occupation cannot and
will not be ended; Hamas will administer Gaza and the Palestinian Authority
will administer the West Bank both under the shadow of Israeli security
control. Talk of a two-state solution in any meaningful sense remains
illusory; the status quo will be enforced by military force if necessary for
7/8/2014 Left out: Israels liberals find themselves isolated and lacking influence and power | The National
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the foreseeable future.
The demise of the Israeli left was already crystal clear when thousands
flooded the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa in the summer of 2011,
chanting that the people demand social justice, without mentioning the
Palestine issue.
While liberal Israelis have focused on their own economic freedom and the
reformation of Israeli society, hardline rightists in the Israeli government
have entrenched their power in the political system. When the dust settles
on this summers violence in Gaza, Israel will be left with a PR problem that
its experts will be unable to control: a battle over equal rights in the one
state that extends across Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Joseph Dana is a regular contributor to The Review.
thereview@thenational.ae

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