Independence Day Evening in Tel Aviv

Tuesday was my last day at work, so I’m now officially retired. I sat with Ira again, explaining a few more of the responsibilities and departed the office in the early afternoon.

This was also Israel’s Memorial Day, which precedes its Independence Day which, because the Jewish Holidays extend from evening to evening, began at sundown. We currently have a foreign guest, so we took him to Tel Aviv to see the part celebration / part demonstration happening there, and were joined by H., first for a meal in an Italian restaurant.

crwod of demonstrators on Independence Day

It’s the first time in memory that I’ve visited any kind of celebration for the Independence Day, and H said it was the first time for her too. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Lots of children spraying foam at each other from cans that they later discarded in the streets, among other garbage left there – I guess there will be a massive clean up operation on Thursday morning.

This year the event was combined with the protest events that have been taking place for the last 3 or 4 months. Walking around Tel Aviv and joining the crowds, there were lots of opportunities to take photos, and I’ve already uploaded some of these.

National self-harm

I watched the 2nd part of the BBC’s The Modi Question, heard a discussion with a historian of modern India, on The Wire, and watched the Israeli TV news.

Israel’s turn to the right has many of the same characteristics as India’s. In both cases, rightwing politics are causing ongoing national self-harm. This is not unlike the self-harm caused by Brexit in the UK.

The item in the Israeli TV news spoke about how the uncertainties created about Israeli “democracy” and the independence of its judicial system is likely to damage its economy by discouraging investment in its all-important high-tech industry.

The articles about India showed how the policies of Modi and the BJP have destabilized the delicate structure that keeps the (soon to be) world’s largest nation together and undermined its democracy while failing to address core issues of concern to every Indian no matter what caste or community they belong to, such as the dead rivers and poisoned air, disease and poverty.

The articles about Britain speak of the reversal in public opinion regarding Brexit, as people gradually realise that they were mislead: the broken promises regarding the public health system that is now in crisis; the so-called economic opportunities that have come to naught, and the prospect of a shrinking economy.

It seems to be an almost universal paradox that right-wing political parties, while championing nationalism, only harm the nations where they come to power. It should be obvious really that the only way to advance a country is to bring benefit to all citizens, rather than promoting some and leaving others behind. Otherwise, the structure you are building is a house of cards.

In Israel, this means creating a nation where Jews and Palestinians from every ethnic, religious, geographical and economic sector can live as equal citizens.

In Britain, the Brexit referendum was determined by the country’s longstanding inequalities; huge parts of the population that felt left behind, and a large segment of older people who were willing to betray the hopes and dreams of the young.

In India, the BJP came to power for a host of reasons, including the lingering after-effects of colonial rule, but the result has been to deepen the country’s divisions and to damage, perhaps irreparably, the secular democratic framework that made India so unique among South Asian nations.

India’s Taken a Dangerous, Divisive And Self-Destructive Direction Under Modi: Ramchandra Guha https://yewtu.be/3SjZNXIDibQ

Indian students watch banned BBC documentary critical of PM Modi https://www.france24.com/en/video/20230126-india

Truss and Brexit have sunk Britain’s economy – and the right is in deep denial about both

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/01/liz-truss-brexit-sunk-britain-economy-right-in-denial-imf

Hundreds of economists warn on gov’t judicial system reform https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-hundreds-of-economists-warn-on-govt-judicial-system-reform-1001436443

Bank of Israel governor says judicial reform could hurt economy – reports https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/25/bank-of-israel-governor-warns-netanyahu-that-judicial-overhaul-could-hurt-economy-reports

NSO, Yuli Novak

My younger son and his fiancée came over from TA and I brought D’s mom over from her retirement home. We kept her away from my daughter and her kids because they were exposed to someone who has been sick with the Omicron, lately. The weather started to clear up, though it remains cold.

NSO

There was an item in the TV news about NSO; an interview with one of the founders, and the CEO, Shalev Hulio. He doesn’t cut a very impressive figure and seemed nervous and evasive when asked key questions. A family man, maybe a little naive or unused to journalists. The TV news channel spent 2 days in the NSO headquarters in Herzlia and interviewed a few others there too. One guy demonstrated how what the company does is not simple interception of phones; it helps the clients to interpret the information collected and to construct an elaborate porfolio of the target and their network of connections. Sounds familiar from the descriptions of intelligence firm operations found in Cory Doctorow’s novel, “Attack Surface”.

The NYT story on NSO that I read yesterday had lots of new information. If it can be relied upon, it shows, in a more detailed way than known previously, how the sale of Pegasus went hand in hand with Israeli diplomacy and created friends among client countries who voted for Israel and against Palestinian interests in discussions at the UN. It also clearly states that India and Djibouti among others purchased Pegasus, despite denials or refusals to comment.

In the news item, Hulio is given the opportunity to make the case for the need for cyberweapons when facing sophisticated criminal or terrorist organizations. This is overshadowed by the fact that most of the countries to which the system was sold ended up using it against political opponents, critical journalists, ordinary citizens or diplomats of other countries. In this way, cyberweapons are not like other weapons. They are ideally constructed to undermine democracy wherever they land; even in supposedly democratic countries.

Yuli Novak

Haaretz runs stories in its English edition that have often appeared a few days earlier in its Hebrew edition. So today they have the story about Yuli Novak, a previous director of the Breaking the Silence organization. When the NGO and its members began to be hounded by rightwing groups, the media and politicians, and the group’s members began to receive death threats, she stepped down and away from Breaking the Silence and fled overseas for a time. Now she is reassessing her relationship with her country and with Zionism.

Breaking the Silence is an organization that publishes testimony of former soldiers as a means to help Israeli society reevaluate the meaning of its military occupation of Palestinian territories. It is not the radical political organization that it is made out to be in the Israeli media. It actually stays clear of direct criticism of Israel. It simply tries to show people the consequences of what the army is doing in the Occupied Territories; to “break the silence” about what is being done by the military. Like Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers, it spreads awareness of activities that are normally kept out of sight and removed from the consciousness of ordinary citizens.

As such, it does not need to take a political stance and it is actually better for its work if it stays out of politics. The organization is made up of former soldiers who, when they signed up, believed in the army’s mission, but got freaked out by what they saw happening on the ground. Whatever political conclusions they came to as a result are personal, and do not necessarily represent the organization itself. The point is to gather the soldiers’ testimony and to present it as part of a public education campaign, so that citizens can form their own opinions. At least that is what I understood after going on a tour of Hebron with one of the organization’s founders and listening to him at other times.

Choosing to target Breaking the Silence, and other organizations that are within the fold of the Zionist left, such as Betselem and the New Israel Fund, seems to have been a conscious choice of the Right. They obviously see them as more of a threat than truly anti-Zionist groups, whose numbers and resources are even more scant.

Yuli Novak – feminist, LGBT person and leftist as she is – seems to have taken quite a long time to question the narratives she grew up with and only recently has been coming around to opinions that many Israelis reached long ago. But eventually it dawned upon her:

“What sort of coexistence are you proposing here?” she asks rhetorically during our conversation, aiming the question at the Zionist left. “A coexistence that favors only you? That simply will not work. The moment we recognize that we are not living in a democracy in the deepest and most basic way, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on here. And it’s no longer chaotic.”

I guess by “chaotic” she means the dissonance between her received understanding of reality based on what she has been told, and what she actually sees. I’m not sure that she’s entirely out of it herself, just like all of us. A certain part of us always wants to believe that we are living in a fine sort of country that will basically be OK if we can only fix a few things. But that’s not true in any of the liberal (and increasingly less liberal) democracies. It certainly isn’t true of a society that is based on myths about selective group identity.

Nations, if we need them at all, should exist for the welfare of the totality of their citizens, not just for their elites, for particular ethnicities, castes, religious or ideological communities. They should provide us with a comfortable framework in which to live and maintain a peaceful relationship with other nations and the biosphere. The details may be difficult to work out but at least the mission statement should be clear.

Israeli binationalism is old news – Opinion Israel News | Haaretz

Israeli binationalism is old news – Opinion Israel News | Haaretz.

Thoroughly agree.  But this is for an Israeli audience.  And though some Israelis are beginning to wake up to this reality, they do so at a time when Palestinians are finally having some success at getting European governments to accept “Palestine” as a state.  So now, if Israelis start saying, “wait, the two state solution is completely unrealistic,” it puts Palestinians in a position of looking foolish.

In terms of control, Israel pulls the strings, calls the shots, but in terms of an occupied people and their moral right for freedom, it is the underdog that has to be listened to.  Every people has a right to self-determination, with regard to the character of its leadership and national identity.  If the Palestinians want to be independent, they have the right to be, and if they would prefer to coexist with Israelis in a single nation, then it’s a question for both peoples to decide, together.  Israel would need to present a proposal to them to agree to go on living together, but in a binational democratic state.  What is not acceptable is to leave things as they are.

By A Large Majority, Israelis Fed Up With State-Mandated Religion – FailedMessiah.com

By A Large Majority, Israelis Fed Up With State-Mandated Religion – FailedMessiah.com.

The 2014 Religion and State Index demonstrates growing public support for freedom of religion and equality in Israel. In addition to surveying Israeli public opinion on core issues surrounding Israel’s religion and state conflict, (marriage, conversion, equality in sharing the burden, Shabbat, gender, and others) this year’s Index bears a clear and crucial message for world Jewry: More than two-thirds (67%) of Israeli Jews support joint efforts between Israel and world Jewry for freedom of marriage in Israel.

Is Zionism Racism?

A Palestinian friend shared (he wasn’t the originator) the following photo and caption:

zionism

Some of my friends, neighbors and colleagues consider themselves to be Zionists.  Some declare themselves anti-Zionists, and many others don’t wake up at night wondering about it at all.

I’m not going to start looking up “Zionism” in Wikipedia, but as I understand it, in its broadest sense, it mainly expresses the aspiration by some Jews to “return” to the “promised land”. Of course others (both pro-and anti-) have attempted to define that further, such as by saying that Zionism holds that the land of Israel belongs exclusively to the Jews. But if we take it in the broadest sense, I wouldn’t say that Zionism necessarily equates to racism. Zionism has certainly been used as a motivation for racism at many levels, including racist policies towards Palestinians by the State of Israel. By the same token, many other ideologies and religions (perhaps all of them) have been used as a motivation for reprehensible and often genocidal policies. I’m not positive that Zionism is demonstrably more tainted than other isms.

The aspiration of Jews to “return” to the land of Israel is not necessarily something evil. People all around the world, now and in the past, have been expressing the aspiration to go to other places.  The entire history of the human race has been one continuous migration of peoples across continents, and sometimes these migrations have been back to perceived homelands or promised lands. There is no doubt that many mass migrations have been responsible for the displacement or extermination of indigenous peoples.

Did the newly United Nations in the 1940s understand that by sanctioning the formation of a Jewish state in Palestine this would entail both the birth of a decades long conflict and the birth of a state that embodies racist policies towards its non-Jewish population? Maybe, but I prefer to think, regarding the latter, that they had higher expectations from a people who had just suffered their own holocaust. The European states that are Christian in character do not necessarily treat non-Christians as second-class citizens. A state that is Jewish in character need not necessarily treat its Palestinian citizens, or refugees from other places, badly. That’s only a choice that it makes. It isn’t or needn’t be inherent in the fact that the state has a Jewish character, or is founded on Zionist principles, if this only means that the state has decided that from its own perspective it is “Jewish” and will preserve an option for all Jews to live here in their “homeland”. It could maintain a similar option for Palestinians and place limits on both. It could proclaim itself entirely secular while still being the “homeland for the Jewish people”. The existence of Jews in a Jewish homeland does not necessarily preclude that others can see it as their homeland too, and that everyone can live in peace together. In the same way, no reasonable person disputes that Jerusalem is sacred to three religions: its sacredness to one religion does not preclude its sacredness to the others.

When we talk about entities such as “the Jewish people” or “the Palestinian people” we are actually only giving credence to myth. That is not important. People are what they believe themselves to be. They are the illusions they cling to, and the affiliations by which their enemies know them too.  Those who see the myth, do so only because they are outsiders or have somehow managed to break free of it. Probably they are clinging just as strongly to other illusions or delusions from which they are unable to extricate themselves.

To return to the picture of the children with the flags, the question is not whether the Israeli flag, or all flags should be burned. They won’t be. People will always keep their flags. Flags are not racist.  They are only symbols drawn upon fabric. We humans decide for ourselves what the symbols mean.  The swastika has meant one thing, over millenia, to Hindus and meant something entirely different for Nazis (and their victims).

I look forward to the day when the Israeli flag will not mean that the land of Israel belongs only to Jews, and when it and the Palestinian flag can fly together, or even be merged as they are in this optimistic picture. For that to happen will require an arduous struggle. May it be waged humanely and nonviolently, so that these children and other children will not have their hopes dashed.