The Cup Runneth Over in Israel/Palestine
There is too much pain and trauma here for anyone to digest and process, but there is also hope and a chance for co-existence.
As I prepare to fly back to New York tomorrow, I told my cousin N. that it’s going to be impossible to convey all the things I’ve seen, experienced and learned during my three weeks here in Israel/Palestine. “It’s also impossible to live them,” she answered drily. Life here is like a water basin that is constantly filling up and overflowing, and the spigot is on all the time, filling it even more. “We don’t even get a chance to process what happened yesterday before something else happens,” she said. She was born in 1961 and has lived here her whole life, apart from some artist’s residencies around the world for a few months or weeks, here and there. While we spoke, multiple sorties of F-16s flew down the coast from their air base north of Haifa, drowning out our words. N. was perturbed. This is more than usual, she said. Something must be happening again in Gaza.
Americans and other foreigners have a privilege that the people living here don’t, which is a detachment from the costs and pressures of daily life in this place. It makes it incredibly easy to turn three dimensions into two, to flatten the conflict down to a simple binary, to pick sides and to issue judgments. The view from afar is a deeply inadequate way to convey even a small shred of the truth of what this place is and what it is becoming.
If you want, I can cite up-to-date polling on the situation. Our Americans for Peace Now group had a briefing last Wednesday with Dahlia Scheindlin, one of Israel’s premiere opinion researchers, and the picture she outlined was not encouraging. The Israeli Jewish public has been moving steadily to the right since 2000 and the second intifada. War makes the public move to the right, and “violence doesn’t make Israelis more conciliatory,” she told us. Roughly 60-64% of the Jewish public identifies as right wing; about 25-28% are in the center; and about 11-12% are on the left. These labels refer to how people think about security and the national conflict with Palestinians, not economic or social issues. Before October 7, she added, if you included the Israeli Arab electorate in this picture, then about half of all Israeli citizens were on the right.
If there were elections now, the ruling coalition would shrink drastically from its current 64-seat majority (out of 120 in the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament) to about 42 to 44, she said. “People are deeply, deeply angry at the government.” But the result would be a new center-right coalition of perhaps 70 seats built around Benny Gantz, a former general who leads the “National Unity” party and indeed joined the governing coalition in a broader national unity coalition after October 7. But no mainstream Israeli politician will say anything about a two-state solution right now. Israel is not moving to the left.
Even Yair Golan, a former Member of Knesset and deputy IDF chief of staff, who is now running to take over leadership of the moribund Labor Party and “unify the left,” isn’t highlighting his support for a two-state solution. Golan is one of the heroes of October 7 because of how he sprang into action that day, taking his gun and driving south to single-handedly rescue many of the revelers at the ill-fated Nova Festival. He argued, in a meeting with our group, that first and foremost any opponent of the current government must address the fears of the common Israeli. Making political arguments about the danger the country faces from the rising power of the extreme right (which Golan said will “lead to Israel’s destruction”) will not sway ordinary Israelis. “Fear is the most powerful emotion in politics,” he said. The left can’t build its agenda on fear, like the right does, “but we can’t ignore it, we have to provide a sense of security.”
So his answer is to tell Jewish Israelis that he will not repeat the “mistake” of the Oslo Accords and the 2005 disengagement from Gaza by leaving military security in the hands of Palestinian authorities. He wants to offer them “civil separation” with Israeli maintaining all responsibility for security. “There is zero trust” in the Palestinian Authority right now, he argues. How would this differ from apartheid, someone from our group asked him? His package, he says, would include Israel promising the Palestinians a state according to borders that he would unilaterally outline, and any land Israel (holding settlements) that Israel would take would be compensated equally by other land transfers. This package, he said, would come along with the normalization of relations with the Arab world, especially Saudi Arabia, and this, he believes, could provide Israelis with real security while eventually giving the Palestinians a state. He also imagines that Israeli Arabs would pragmatically embrace this package and he told us he wanted to create a political partnership with them on the basis of equality. “An Israeli leader should declare that we want you; we see you as a bridge to the rest of the Arab world,” Golan said.
It is too soon to say what effect rising criticism from leading Democrats in America will have on Israeli politics. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s speech last week breaking with Bibi, a man he was photographed hugging just a year ago in the midst of the massive pro-democracy protests against the “judicial coup,” is still sinking in. At the weekly Saturday night demonstration in Tel Aviv, where the main theme has become “Elections Now,” they played a video highlighting Schumer’s words followed by clips of lots of rightwing Israeli politicians and commentators pooh-poohing them, but the crowd of thousands on the street didn’t pay much attention either way. We don’t yet have polls on the public’s reaction.
But polls are also the view from afar, a snapshot of a moment in time that can be easily adjusted by how you word a question. I asked Scheindlin how many Israelis supported a ceasefire and she grimaced. It all depends on the details. Everyone understands that some kind of stoppage of fighting is required to allow for some hostages to be released, but the terms people hear about vary widely. Roughly half or perhaps 55% of the public favors a deal, she said. But “people are responsive and reactive [to the news] and are responding accordingly,” she added. In other words, the spigot is constantly on and the basin is constantly overflowing.
I have heard first-hand stories that are too much to absorb. At an off-the-record sit-down with a group of human rights workers, one activist with Breaking the Silence, a group of reservists who collect and publicize stories from soldiers about the occupation, told us his unit commander, Shachar Zemach, the man who brought him into the organization, was killed on October 7 while defending his home, Kibbutz Be’eri. After seven hours of fighting off Hamas attackers, he ran out of ammunition. “I am not your enemy,” Zemach shouted in English at the people invading his community. At his funeral, Zemach’s father said his son’s body was found with him holding his M-16, “but he always held an olive branch in the other.”
I have heard left-wing Palestinian Arab politicians denounce October 7 as well as Israel’s war in Gaza, argue ferociously for their rights in Israel and against the current government, and never utter the word “apartheid.” I asked one, who preferred anonymity because he is likely going back into a leadership role soon, why he didn’t use the usual buzzwords of the anti-Zionist left, and he said his way of thinking was that he preferred to work for change instead of just expressing his feelings. “The concept of settler-colonialism in an academic setting may be right, but I want to make change,” he said.
I have also heard many stories of Jewish-Arab cooperation and partnership. Unlike the peace dialogue groups of the late 1990s, which melted away after the Hamas-led suicide bombings of the second intifada, the new generation of “shared society” groups that have arisen since then held their own during the intercommunal riots of May 2021, when rightwing Jewish youth and radical Palestinian youth attacked the other side in the streets of several mixed Jewish-Arab cities inside Israel proper. After October 7, many of these groups formed rapid response networks to quickly respond to hyper-local flare-ups and tamp down rumors before they could generate violence or go viral on social media.
On one afternoon, we met Mohammed Faheli, the director of the Clore Jewish-Arab Community Center in Akko, which provides low-cost services and classes to 500 Arab and Jewish families in that mixed city. Akko, which has grown metastatically like the rest of Israel since I spent six months on nearby Kibbutz Shomrat back in 1980, has been riven more than once by violence between the communities. He told us how, as a young teen, he had made friends while working at a nearby kibbutz, whose members then started giving him wagonloads of fresh produce to help his family. Then, a few years later, while working at a Texas hotel, its Jewish owner heard him speaking Hebrew and asked him to tutor his children. That led to an even bigger friendship, and when he returned to Akko the hotel owner gave him $5000 to buy his first home in Akko.
Those acts of generosity changed his life and led him to open the community center. It’s a place, Faheli proudly noted, where Jewish and Arab families sit together, eat together, and play together. “We don’t have a security guard here,” he noted. “Everywhere you go in Israel, Jewish places have security guards. We don’t because we aren’t afraid of each other,” he declared. “The only solution is to live with each other.”
Yesterday, I sat in a café at the Beilenson Hospital complex in Petah Tikva, waiting for an old friend of mine to finish a doctor’s appointment. The hospitals in Israel/Palestine are among the most integrated places in the whole country, with roughly half the doctors and nurses coming from the Palestinian Arab community. I spied an Israeli nurse talking in Hebrew talking to an Arab colleague who was wearing a traditional scarf covering her hair. I tried to quickly snap a picture as they walked by, but even this moment of comity was too fleeting for me to capture.
Micah:
what makes your comments so interesting is that you speak to Israelis and Palestinians in the community, who are NOT political big honchos", as well as political leaders. We often hear only from the latter
Dan Pilowsky
Excellent summation.