About a month ago, while living on a kibbutz at the northern tip of Israel’s Negev desert, I had my first frightening encounter with Israeli racism. It was only a matter of time.
It started when my friends and I met a group of Israeli Arabs staying on the kibbutz while they butchered meat in an area slaughterhouse for the upcoming Jewish holidays. Israeli Arabs are citizens of the state who live within Israeli territory, primarily in segregated villages where infrastructure and educational needs are bureaucratically ignored by the Israeli government. Theoretically, Israeli Arabs possess full and equal rights, though this is not the case in practice.
Having assumed that the kibbutz would be completely segregated, we were surprised to find the workers living nearby and decided to make friends. Many of them were around our age and were extremely welcoming. We drank coffee and smoked cigarettes in their room, speaking in Hebrew about Nazareth, Israeli women, etc. For a bunch of inexperienced young American Jews, this was an interesting and unexpected social interaction.
Our third visit, however, wrought significant drama. After leaving the workers’ room, one of my friends realized that she had left her cell phone inside. When she tried to retrieve it, they denied that the phone was there and refused to return it. When another friend tried calling the vmissing cell phone, no one heard a ring as it had apparently been shut off and hidden.
Though only a petty theft, the aftermath of this incident embodied some of the volatile tensions in Israeli society. My friend–extremely irritated–reported the stolen phone to the kibbutz manager, a college-educated young woman who responded with alarming fury. Such a theft was intolerable; she insisted that the entire group of a dozen or so workers be kicked off the kibbutz and their employer never again house butchers there. She sanctimoniously informed us that this is what we get for befriending the workers because this is what Arabs do: They lie and cheat and steal. She apologized for not calling the group Israelis, but to her, “They are only Israelis on paper, they are not real Israelis.”
Fearing lost wages if kicked off the kibbutz, our more familiar acquaintances quickly spoke up and offered to cover the cost of the phone. It became clear through our conversation that one individual was primarily responsible for the theft, and that forcing the entire group off the kibbutz was an unfair collective punishment.
Ultimately, their employer fired the responsible worker so that the rest of the group could stay through the duration of their employment. Yet the whole saga remains profoundly unsettling. The irrational rage that the kibbutz manager unleashed reflects an Israeli social order that breeds fear and hatred and refuses to acknowledge, among its Arab neighbors, the legitimacy of working for one’s livelihood. She instantaneously labeled every Arab guest as guilty, reflecting the hypocritical application of judicial ethics: Any principle of due process applies only to Jews.
Furthermore, my friends and I spontaneously came to possess an absurd amount of power over the lives of people we knew absolutely nothing about. As a group of privileged American post-graduates spending a year abroad for our own edification, we found several much older men–laboring for their own and their families’ subsistence–begging us to allow them to stay. As guests of the Israeli kibbutzniks, we were allied with the authoritative party, so should we have persisted in our outrage, the kibbutz manager would have kicked out the entire group. Since we were tepid with our blame, she decided to be lenient.
The overall lesson is a depressing one: It is practically impossible for Jewish Israelis to integrate Arab Israelis into their midst with any shard of equality. The workers were on the kibbutz to fill a labor void and to bring revenue to the kibbutz; they were allowed to stay only out of paranoid and reluctant pragmatism. When the tiniest of crises reared its head, the response of the Israeli woman in charge was pathological. As her guest, she expected us to adopt such a tic ourselves. •
Sidebar:
Israeli demographics
According to the CIA World Factbook (https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook) the total Israeli population is 6,352,117. 74.6% (approximately 4.74 million) of the population is Jewish, 23.6% (1.5 million) Arab. Some segments of the Jewish population live in areas that the international community does not recognize as Israeli territory: about 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, about 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on the Syrian border, and about 177,000 in East Jerusalem.
The Arab population can be divided into three categories: Israelis with citizenship (above), residents of Israeli territory that do not have citizenship, and citizens of territory governed by the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It is not clear how Arab residents of Israel who do not hold citizenship are counted in these statistics. Territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority: 1,428,757 Arab Muslims in Gaza, and 2,460,492 in the West Bank.
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Kibbutzim
The kibbutz (plural: kibbutzim) is an important installation in Israeli society. Kibbutzim were founded around the time of Israeli independence in the 1940s and 1950s as experimental socialist farms, driven by an ideology of Jews connecting with their land through manual labor. In the decades since their founding, kibbutzim have become progressively privatized and now employ many foreign laborers, primarily Thai, as well as Israeli Arabs, to perform the more undesirable labor. Currently, approximately 3 percent of the Israeli population lives on kibbutzim.
Showing posts with label Ben Mendelsohn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ben Mendelsohn. Show all posts
Feb 23, 2008
From the Midwest to the Middle East: Dispatches from the holy land
Before I left Ohio to spend a year studying and volunteering in Israel, I emailed a family friend who had just returned from a semester here, to express my sadness that the result of Jewish suffering has been to inflict suffering onto other peoples. While I take pride in Israel’s successes as a modern society with a high standard of living and a thriving intellectual, literary, and creative culture, the consequences of Israeli militarism often eclipse these brighter points. My correspondence with this friend began amidst Israel’s bombardments of the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon, as news of the rising Palestinian, Lebanese and Israeli death tolls cycled in. It was not a sunny moment.
My comment was a relatively simpleminded observation: After nearly two millennia of virtual pacifism, Jews in Israel have developed a powerful military force with a corresponding impulse to dominate any foe. The lingering humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip is evidence of the stark consequences of this arrangement. After Jewish residents were evacuated from Gaza last summer, the Israeli Defense Forces have continued a fierce military and economic siege that keeps Gaza, the most densely populated patch of land on the planet, in a constant state of crisis regarding food, water, sanitary conditions and electricity. Objectively, it’s a human cage; disagreement is only over the cause.
The response to my email by my friend and our families was interesting. News of my comments spread rapidly and an ideological alarm was sounded: Criticism of Israeli behavior is evidence of a traitorous Jew, a pro-Palestinian backslider. A famous quote by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was invoked more than once. “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs learn to love their children more than they hate us.” I had never fully realized the potency of the American Jewish bottom line and the rapidity with which any dissenting opinion should be squelched. As I prepared to depart for Israel, the challenge of developing a conscientious and ethically sound relationship with this country started coming into clear focus.
This personal episode is relevant because it reflects a frequent phenomenon among the American Jewish community at large. While there is a wide political spectrum in Israel with contentious arguments over every policy, especially settlements and major military operations, it is taboo to mimic these arguments in the organized Jewish community. Great organizational energy is instead directed at the narrowly defined concept of “support for Israel,” which entails total approval of everything that goes on here, so as not to fuel the nation’s anti-Semitic enemies.
Defining support for Israel in this manner preserves a binary that paints Israel as the morally pristine peace-seeking party left with no choice when dealing with the hostile, anti-democratic terrorists that surround them. This binary rejects the legitimacy of Arab grievances, making peaceful settlement a categorical impossibility and failing to acknowledge Israel’s role in creating its own enemies.
In a controversial article published in the London Review of Books, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt dissect American support for Israel, emphasizing non-Jewish neoconservative leaders who are equally intolerant of criticism of Israel. Walt and Mearsheimer ridicule the idea that open debate, by threatening the status quo, endangers Israel’s existence, and argue conversely that the status quo is extremely dangerous to both Israel and America. The status quo guarantees decades and decades of additional conflict, and makes the recruitment of radical militant enemies a certainty. It guarantees the intensification of anti-American opinion in the Arab world and underscores America’s arrogance in unilaterally charting the course for this region.
Additionally, the suppression of dissenting opinion is a great loss to Israeli peace organizations’ desperate fight to chart a less bloody future. Without a significant counterpart in American politics, Israeli doves cannot generate the necessary power and momentum to undermine the supremacy of their country’s military establishment and move toward a more sincere and lasting settlement.
American Jews frequently tout their role in the civil rights movement and identify the recent suffering of the Jewish people as a driving force in preventing the suffering of others. Clearly, however, the civilian death toll in Lebanon and the lingering humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip undermine such claims, as the September InterActivist’s interview with Jehan Mullin demonstrates. (To receive a PDF version of September’s edition, email theinteractivist@gmail.com) There are enormous ethical and humanitarian issues relating the state of Israel, and as a young Jew deeply invested in the longevity of his people, I feel a responsibility to work sincerely toward resolving these issues during my lifetime. •
Ben Mendelsohn graduated from Ohio University in August, 2006 with a degree in English literature and film. He is currently living and volunteering in Tel Aviv, Israel.
My comment was a relatively simpleminded observation: After nearly two millennia of virtual pacifism, Jews in Israel have developed a powerful military force with a corresponding impulse to dominate any foe. The lingering humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip is evidence of the stark consequences of this arrangement. After Jewish residents were evacuated from Gaza last summer, the Israeli Defense Forces have continued a fierce military and economic siege that keeps Gaza, the most densely populated patch of land on the planet, in a constant state of crisis regarding food, water, sanitary conditions and electricity. Objectively, it’s a human cage; disagreement is only over the cause.
The response to my email by my friend and our families was interesting. News of my comments spread rapidly and an ideological alarm was sounded: Criticism of Israeli behavior is evidence of a traitorous Jew, a pro-Palestinian backslider. A famous quote by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was invoked more than once. “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs learn to love their children more than they hate us.” I had never fully realized the potency of the American Jewish bottom line and the rapidity with which any dissenting opinion should be squelched. As I prepared to depart for Israel, the challenge of developing a conscientious and ethically sound relationship with this country started coming into clear focus.
This personal episode is relevant because it reflects a frequent phenomenon among the American Jewish community at large. While there is a wide political spectrum in Israel with contentious arguments over every policy, especially settlements and major military operations, it is taboo to mimic these arguments in the organized Jewish community. Great organizational energy is instead directed at the narrowly defined concept of “support for Israel,” which entails total approval of everything that goes on here, so as not to fuel the nation’s anti-Semitic enemies.
Defining support for Israel in this manner preserves a binary that paints Israel as the morally pristine peace-seeking party left with no choice when dealing with the hostile, anti-democratic terrorists that surround them. This binary rejects the legitimacy of Arab grievances, making peaceful settlement a categorical impossibility and failing to acknowledge Israel’s role in creating its own enemies.
In a controversial article published in the London Review of Books, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt dissect American support for Israel, emphasizing non-Jewish neoconservative leaders who are equally intolerant of criticism of Israel. Walt and Mearsheimer ridicule the idea that open debate, by threatening the status quo, endangers Israel’s existence, and argue conversely that the status quo is extremely dangerous to both Israel and America. The status quo guarantees decades and decades of additional conflict, and makes the recruitment of radical militant enemies a certainty. It guarantees the intensification of anti-American opinion in the Arab world and underscores America’s arrogance in unilaterally charting the course for this region.
Additionally, the suppression of dissenting opinion is a great loss to Israeli peace organizations’ desperate fight to chart a less bloody future. Without a significant counterpart in American politics, Israeli doves cannot generate the necessary power and momentum to undermine the supremacy of their country’s military establishment and move toward a more sincere and lasting settlement.
American Jews frequently tout their role in the civil rights movement and identify the recent suffering of the Jewish people as a driving force in preventing the suffering of others. Clearly, however, the civilian death toll in Lebanon and the lingering humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip undermine such claims, as the September InterActivist’s interview with Jehan Mullin demonstrates. (To receive a PDF version of September’s edition, email theinteractivist@gmail.com) There are enormous ethical and humanitarian issues relating the state of Israel, and as a young Jew deeply invested in the longevity of his people, I feel a responsibility to work sincerely toward resolving these issues during my lifetime. •
Ben Mendelsohn graduated from Ohio University in August, 2006 with a degree in English literature and film. He is currently living and volunteering in Tel Aviv, Israel.
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