Racists and Rapists: How Israel Deals (Or Doesn't) With Its Own 'Confederates'
If
Israel hasn’t experienced its own version of the Confederate statue
wars waging in the United States, it’s not for lack of controversial
historical figures.
Rather, it has to do
with the fact that statues are rarely used in Israel to pay tribute to
heroic individuals or famous personalities.
That does not mean
that those who have made their mark go unacknowledged. But instead of
statues in their likeness, they get schools, hospitals, highways,
bridges, parks, city squares, army bases and streets named after them.
As in the United States, some pretty objectionable figures have been honored in the Israeli public sphere. Meir Kahane,
the racist American-born rabbi whose political party was outlawed in
Israel, has a street named after him in the town of Or Akiva and a park
named after him in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba. Situated in
that very park is the gravesite of another figure of infamy: Baruch Goldstein,
the Jewish-American physician who massacred 29 Palestinians while they
were praying in the nearby Tomb of the Patriarchs. Although it is not an
official monument, Goldstein’s gravesite has over the years become a
site of pilgrimage for many radical right-wingers.
Rehavam Ze’evi, a
former Israeli general and tourism minister who headed a far-right party
that hoped to evict Arabs from Israel, has a bridge, a highway, several
monuments, a West Bank settlement and a number of streets named after
him. Ze’evi, who was assassinated in 2001 by Palestinian gunmen at the
height of the second intifada, was considered controversial not only
because of his extreme political views.
A
recent expose, published after his death, alleged that he had a history
of sexually assaulting women. Responding to the allegations at the
time, his widow Yael Ze’evi (who has since passed away) said that the
report brought “anonymous testimony about events that supposedly
happened decades ago, and the man accused of them is no longer alive in
order to tell what happened.”
Ze’evi’s
detractors won a rare victory several months ago, when the government
withdrew plans to name a key War of Independence memorial after him. The
decision came in response to a public campaign led by well-known
veterans of the war and supported by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.
Other campaigns have been less successful, including the attempt to remove the bust of Moshe Katsav
– the former Israeli president who spent five years in jail after being
convicted of rape – from the official residence of the head of state.
Katsav’s bust still appears alongside those of his predecessors and
successors in the presidential garden, where foreign dignitaries and
official ceremonies are often hosted.
Katzav may have
prevailed, but Yasser Arafat did not. Several months ago, it emerged
that a street in the Arab town of Jatt had been named years earlier
after the Palestinian leader, considered by many to have been a
terrorist and arch enemy of the Jewish state. After Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu posted a protest on his Facebook page, Interior
Minister Arye Dery gave the municipality of Jatt a 48-hour deadline to remove the signs. It complied.
It is not clear,
though, that it needed to, at least not according to Prof. Maoz
Azaryahu, a geographer from the University of Haifa who has written
extensively on commemoration culture – and in particular, the politics
of street-naming – in Israel. “In Israel, as in the United States, it is
the local authorities that have the power to decide these things, and
they do not need to take orders from high up.”
That can explain, he
notes, how a settlement like Kiryat Arba could get away with honoring
someone as controversial as Kahane and nothing could be done about it.
Or, by the same token, how the Arab town of Kfar Manda could name a
square after Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who was one of
Israel’s most formidable enemies, and the country would have to swallow
it.
When Israeli cities
began commissioning public monuments in the 1950s, recounts Azaryahu,
the tenders they issued stipulated that the artists had to respect
Jewish tradition and not cause offense. “This was their way of
discouraging statues of people, and it explains why we have so much
abstract art in the public sphere here in Israel,” he says.
Nonetheless, statues
can be found here and there on the Israeli landscape, among the most
prominent examples are a full-figure sculpture of Mordechai Anielewicz,
leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai; a statue
of Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, sitting on his horse,
outside Independence Hall; a bust of Yitzhak Rabin outside the main city
square in Tel Aviv, where he was assassinated; and busts of both Rabin
and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, at Ben-Gurion
International Airport.
Azaryahu recalls only
one example of a statue ever being removed, and that was before Israel
had even gained its independence. “In the 1930s, as part of their revolt
against the British, the Arabs took down a statue of Edmund Allenby
that had been erected in Be’er Sheva,” he says, referring to the British
general who helped bring an end to Ottoman rule in the region during
World War I.
Many streets that
bore the names of British imperial figures were renamed after the 1948
War of Independence (though Allenby still has a major street named after
him in Tel Aviv), but since then, says Azaryahu, it has been fairly
uncommon.
“There used to be a
King George Street in Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,” he notes. “The one
in Haifa was renamed after the War of Independence, the one in
Jerusalem was renamed, but it didn’t stick, so it went back to its
original name. In Tel Aviv, they kept the name as well, but added
alongside it, in parenthesis, the fact that King George had been the
British ruler when the Balfour Declaration was signed so that there was
at least some Zionist history included,” Azaryahu said, referring to the
1917 document issued by the British government supporting the formation
of a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine.
Local authorities
have the right to rename streets, with one exception, according to
Azaryahu. “You are not allowed to rename a street that was named after a
national hero.”
That didn’t stop the
city council of ultra-Orthodox B’nai Brak from renaming Herzl Street
(named for the Zionist visionary Theodore Herzl) in honor of Rabbi
Eliezer Schach, a spiritual leader of the Haredi community in Israel,
after his death. “They found a clever way to get around this
prohibition,” says Azaryahu. “They left Herzl’s name on a tiny part of
it.”
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