Amira Hass : Opinion | The Israeli Left Never Learns
Articolo in inglese qui
Let me tell you something about the left. Israelis often talk about it, using the loosest, most bizarre definitions that the dictionary offers. So perhaps they’ll agree to listen to some comments by someone who has spent 80 of her 64 years of life in Israeli left-wing circles.We have a big problem on the left. We refuse to learn from past disappointments. We also have another problem. In our view, contradictions are the cornerstones of our social existence, and we have an almost religious faith (to aim a barb at ourselves) in their ability to jumpstart developments, including positive ones. This faith partially explains our refusal to learn from past disappointments.
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Consequently, we, the consistent, radical left, welcome the demonstrations that are now taking place outside the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem and at intersections and 200 meters from people’s homes. Many of us (that is, many of our admittedly small number) even participate in them.
We welcome the demonstrations because they shout out the truth – Israel’s government is bad for its citizens. We’re happy about them because they have a chance at thwarting the plots of those in power, and because without freedom to think and criticize and to express those thoughts and criticisms, human beings are diminished. Finally, we welcome the potential the protests embody – the possibility that more Israelis will make the desperately needed connections.
Police are violently suppressing the protests? These are the same police for whom the lives of Israel’s Palestinian citizens don’t matter. The government has sent its citizens into an economic tailspin? That’s exactly what it (and its predecessors) have been doing for decades to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The government discriminates between different segments of Jewish society? Visit Palestinian-Israeli towns in the Negev, the Galilee and the Triangle region and you’ll learn what deliberate discrimination really looks like. The authorities are making light of violence against the protesters? They long ago received a prize for excellence in encouraging the pogromists from the West Bank hilltops.
Cabinet ministers are undermining our natural right to protest? The sentence for Palestinian protests ranges from injury and arrest to death. This government (like its predecessors) is privileging the tycoons and the super-rich at the expense of the general public? That’s just what happens in the West Bank: Every day, successive Israeli governments have stolen Palestinian land and water sources and given them to ... Oops. That’s where we get stuck.
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The daily thefts of Palestinian land that successive Israeli governments have perpetrated and are still perpetrating (and let’s not forget that it began inside Israel proper) are intended to benefit Jews simply because they are Jews. This is the election bribe that Israeli governments have offered for generations, also investing enormous resources in nurturing Jewish Israeli encroachments on stolen Palestinian land. This bribe has enabled quite a few Jewish Israelis to escape economic distress and even rectify the injustices of discrimination.
To a growing share of Israeli Jews, this theft is a birthright, the 11th commandment given at Mount Sinai. Together with the rifles they were given and the cult of blood and soil they nurture, together with the governments that sent them and serve as their emissaries, they are determined to continue down the path of expulsion that began in 1948. This is the bribery and corruption that the average Israeli is involved in from childhood but doesn’t see, or alternatively sees as a legitimate patriotic enterprise.
Despite the hopes we pinned on it, the 2011 protests faded away and funneled Knesset seats to the center-right Yesh Atid party. The Labor Party has never atoned for the crimes committed by its predecessor, Mapai, from 1948 and 1967 and still supports the blockade on Gaza.
Neither the battle for fair pay waged by teachers, doctors and social workers nor the protests against police violence by Ethiopian Israelis brought any new activists into the anti-occupation group Ta’ayush. The demonstrations against corruption at the top saddled us with Kahol Lavan, yet another party located somewhere on the spectrum from mild to hard right.
But despite all this, we continue supporting the mass demonstrations and being amazed by the undeterred protesters. We continue hoping that they’ll also join Ta’ayush and the veteran soldiers’ group “Combatants for Peace,” that they’ll refuse to accept the bribes of land and won’t choose Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Theft party as their savior.
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