The Violence of the Occupation Comes Home To Israel

As Israel careens toward the 21st century version of right-wing authoritarianism, complete with violent police suppression of peaceful protests and a menacing speech from the strongman denouncing “foreign elements” like Putin or Orbán, it occurs to me that we on the long-shattered Israeli left made some serious errors, in addition to our main mistake of thinking that the Palestinian leadership was ever going to give up terrorism and seriously negotiate peace. When we tried to convince the Israeli Jewish mainstream that the military occupation of the West Bank could not continue indefinitely, we used language that was too highfalutin and abstract. Unless Israel quit the “territories,” we said, it would end up having to choose between remaining democratic and remaining Jewish. That was true, and so was our insistence that occupying another people against their will was corrupting Israeli society. But mainstream Israelis were overwhelmingly concerned with their personal safety, not with abstract ideals, and they could not fail to notice that every time Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops (who are everybody’s sons, because there is a draft) from places like southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, the result was not peace, but a tremendous upwelling in the mass murder of Israeli Jews.

We should have put it to our brothers and sisters that the violent methods used to suppress the West Bank Palestinians would one day be used to keep Israeli civilians in line. Perhaps they wouldn’t have listened, but they would have been on notice that “democracy” and “anti-corruption” are not hazy concepts hatched by dreamers; they also affect personal and national security. Instead, we were left with no emotionally effective response when right-wing politicians accused us of being yefei nefesh, bleeding hearts who cared more about the rights of “Arabs” who wanted to throw us all into the sea than about our own security. We also had the disadvantages of opposing Israel’s “colonial empire” in the West Bank that is no bigger than the U.S. state of Delaware, and is a short and easy drive from almost any locale in Israel proper, and of having to refute the obvious and disgusting lies from Israel haters about Israeli “genocide” or “Nazi” behavior in the “territories.”

There are broader implications of this disaster that will be missed by non-Israeli leftists convinced that the Jewish state is a misbegotten endeavor that ought never to have been established, and never mind that disestablishing it would require a second Holocaust. It is a staple of left-wing anti-colonialist ideology that imperial methods will inevitably end up being used in the metropolitan country, eroding whatever democracy and human rights exist there. But while this is broadly true, the details matter tremendously. Mainstream society in the metropole can go on an awfully long time without ending up on the wrong end of the gun or the baton, and in today’s world of universal electronic connection, government surveillance can go almost unnoticed rather than feeling like the Stasi is lurking on every streetcorner. The international left must do a much better job explaining to ordinary people the true costs of empire, rather than speechifying to itself on the matter.

As for the remnants of the Israeli left and those who support it in America and elsewhere, we are left bleakly echoing David Ben-Gurion at the outbreak of World War II, with Holocaust refugees blocked by the British Mandatory authorities from the future state of Israel under a “White Paper” policy of the British government: “We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper.” That is, we will continue to stand up for our Israeli brothers and sisters in the face of the Iranian regime’s genocidal threats and atomic bomb-grade uranium as we fight to bring down the Netanyahu government.