[Peace-discuss] Israel/Palestine at the Farmers' Market

[Carl G. Estabrook]

[I had a representative of the local Democrats explain to me at the  
market today that the problem in the Mideast is that "There need to be  
peace makers on both sides [sic]." (The USG role was not mentioned.)   
But that's not quite the point. --CGE]

 From <http://www.maxajl.com/israels-miracle-economy/>:

Israel’s Miracle Economy
I saw Dan Senor speak last year at Cornell when he was on book tour  
for his well-timed  inter­ven­tion about Israel’s miracle economy.  
Jewish groups on campus which I didn’t even know existed popped out to  
paste their names onto posters as sponsors of his talk. Senor was a  
spokesper­son for the Coalition Pro­vi­sional Authority in Iraq, and  
an adviser to the Bush II admin­is­tra­tion, and so almost certainly  
culpable for war crimes, but for the organized campus organs of  
American Jewry, mobi­liz­ing Jewish identity behind state aggres­sion  
and the murder of millions is nearly reflexive.

Be that as it may, one student at the talk, after hearing Senor pon­ 
tif­i­cate about the smoothly-oiled machine that is the Israeli  
economy, and taking in his allusions to the high-tech economy as an   
off-shoot of the defense-industrial base, asked an unusually per­cep­ 
tive question: “would true peace be bad for the Israeli economy?”  
Senor fumbled and fidgeted, offered some patently dishonest figure  
about defense spending only being five percent of Israeli GDP, and  
then said: “Of course they want peace. It’s so hard though!”

For sure.

Eyal Press reviews four books on the Israeli economy and Israeli Pales­ 
tini­ans in a recent NYRB piece, a reaction to the #J14 protests which  
recently convulsed Israeli society. Press politely demol­ishes Senor’s  
ridicu­lous tract, writing that “a miracle is not how most Israelis  
would describe what has happened to their economy in recent years,”  
and jux­ta­pos­ing Israeli unem­ploy­ment and economic dys­func­tion  
against the unem­ploy­ment rate in Gaza: 45 percent. Pretty good, and  
better still when Press writes of the reluc­tance of the Labor Party  
parastate insti­tu­tions to accept the Mizrahi immi­grants into their  
channels for Israeli social advance­ment – although better yet would  
have been mention of the racist disgust the European Jews harbored  
against the Arab Jewish immi­grants from the outset, as leaders like  
Ben-Gurion fretted about the “Lev­an­ti­za­tion” of Israeli society.

Press goes on to write of anger at the families who have sequestered  
for them­selves much of the fruit of Israeli settler-colonialism,  
making Israel the country with the highest poverty rate in the OECD.  
And then the lack of anger at Israeli-settler-colonialism itself: “The  
leaders of the movement calling for “social justice” did not draw  
attention to the daily injus­tices taking place across the Green Line,  
in part to avoid alien­at­ing potential sup­port­ers on the Israeli  
center and right.”

He goes on to discuss Shir Hever’s fine study of the political economy  
of the occu­pa­tion, which I will be reviewing elsewhere, and goes on  
to conclude, after noting the 100 billion dollars that Israel spent in  
the occupied ter­ri­to­ries between 1970 and 2008, that “Were expen­di­ 
tures on set­tle­ments more explic­itly rec­og­nized, the pro­test­ers  
who took to the streets this summer could poten­tially achieve  
something the left has failed to do: convince main­stream Israelis  
that the occu­pa­tion is unsus­tain­able,” something which strikes me  
as untrue, given the way that the benefits from the set­tle­ments,  
which include material benefits such as sub­si­dized set­tle­ment  
housing are dif­fer­en­tially dis­trib­uted over Israeli ethnic  
groups: large numbers of Mizrahi live in set­tle­ments and serve in  
the army, while support for the occu­pa­tion and Israeli mil­i­tarism  
enables them to prove their “Israe­li­ness” in a society which never  
wanted them in the first place and in which one competes for symbolic  
capital through hatred of the Arab.

As Smadar Lavie writes, “The left almost always chants the slogan,  
‘Fund the ‘hoods, not the set­tle­ments,’ in the context of the  
military occu­pa­tion of the West Bank and Gaza without acknowl­edg­ 
ing the fact that the Mizrahim are the silent majority of the West  
Bank and Gaza settlements.”

Fur­ther­more, the occu­pa­tion also provides a built-in excuse for  
the mil­i­ta­riza­tion off which the elite directly or indi­rectly  
feeds, while also hardening the nation­al­ism which holds together  
Israeli society from bottom-to-top by main­tain­ing the specter of the  
Arab threat. Press over­states the ease with which pro­test­ers could  
have raised the occu­pa­tion by focusing on its costs rather than the   
benefits it provides in various ways to varied social groups within  
Israel.

Press also writes of Israeli Pales­tin­ian par­tic­i­pa­tion in the  
tent protest movement, managing to capture the nuance and truth of  
that par­tic­i­pa­tion with con­sid­er­ably more grace than the  
dishonest, oppor­tunist, pandering polemics some saw fit to provide:

No group in Israel stood to benefit more from the emergence of a  
movement dedicated to social justice. But the Israeli Arabs had good  
reason to wonder whether the vision guiding the pro­test­ers this  
summer included them, which is why some hesitated to par­tic­i­pate.  
“Many say we shouldn’t join this struggle because it’s the Israeli  
middle class and we’re not part of the Israeli middle class,” Shahin  
Nasser told me. A jour­nal­ist from an Arab neigh­bor­hood of Haifa  
called Wadi Nisnas, Nasser was among the founders of a tent encamp­ 
ment estab­lished in the community despite such mis­giv­ings. He saw  
the protests as “an oppor­tu­nity to raise our voices,” he told me  
when I visited one night, which is why he’d been paying visits to  
encamp­ments in Haifa’s Jewish neigh­bor­hoods. “I want them to know  
what it’s like for Arabs here.” I asked him if he thought people were  
listening. “Yes,” he said, “they are very open.”

The openness was not always on display. At a tent on Roth­schild  
Boulevard one night, I heard a man denounce some Muslim women from  
neigh­bor­ing Jaffa who had been invited to talk about the problems in  
their community (the man, who spoke in Arabic, was an Iraqi Jew). One  
of the women later told me she’d walked the length of Roth­schild  
Boulevard shortly after the protests began, and come away feeling that  
there was no place for her there. Yet by mid-August, it was no longer  
unusual to hear of an Arab speaker talking of injustice at a demon­ 
stra­tion and receiving a rousing ovation from a pre­dom­i­nantly  
Jewish crowd. At one protest, poor Arabs from the Jaffa neigh­bor­hood  
of Ajami marched together with poor Jews from a tra­di­tion­ally pro- 
Likud neigh­bor­hood in south Tel Aviv, something few could have  
imagined back in June.

Press writes elsewhere of moves to the center amongst working-class  
Mizrahi, tra­di­tional sup­port­ers of the right, and the meager  
offerings of the Tra­jten­berg Com­mis­sion: an 8 billion dollar  
spending package and some shifts in tax rates. One can hope that this  
will not be enough to buy off the pro­test­ers. Last week, a friend  
tells me 100,000 gathered in squares across the country. But for the  
moment the mobi­liza­tion has stalled.	Meanwhile, Netanyahu has re- 
charged with mil­i­taris­tic energy an atmos­phere already crackling  
with the static of war: first, punishing the PA for pushing the Pales­ 
tin­ian mem­ber­ship in UNESCO by delaying transfers of funds and  
accel­er­a­tion the con­struc­tion of 2000 housing units, thereby  
hoping to placate the right and secure his coalition by shoring up his  
support amongst the Mizrahi voters, a support that had been buckling  
under the intense social pressure generated by the Israeli protests  
wave, second, pushing talk of war with Iran, and third, lashing out at  
Gaza in the recent round of murders.

As Yacov Ben Efrat writes,

"While taking pity on the Jewish pop­u­la­tion and under­stand­ing the  
dire straits of the Jewish middle class, it is cruel, hard­hearted and  
racist towards the Arab pop­u­la­tion. This is a Knesset which seeks  
peace at home while under­min­ing the foun­da­tions of peace abroad.  
This is a Knesset which the protest leaders have decided to lobby and  
“supervise,” showing their faith in its parties, no  matter how right- 
wing they are, as long as they adopt a social agenda."

The question is where now. Ben Efrat argues that “a real protest must  
raise the peace flag as well as the social flag.” If that occurs, it  
will not occur because the pro­test­ers suddenly “realize” that they  
are being racist and that the occu­pa­tion is wrong, but because they  
see it in their interest to do so. As indeed they should. The question  
is if they will.


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