Greens Engage

British Greens tend only to pay attention to the Jewish-Palestinian fault-lines in Israeli society. But of course like any society – and particularly in the Middle East with its many different communities – there are others. The New York Times has a piece on Jerusalem’s Sabbath Wars between the secular and militantly orthodox (sexually segregating, sabbath enforcing) Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem.

“In a modest counterstrike on a recent weekday morning, eight non-Orthodox Jewish activists — six women and two men — got on a No. 40 bus heading from the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot D into town. The women sat down in the front rows. The men went to the back.

Ramot D is an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood where rigid religious rules are applied. The No. 40 is one of several public bus lines designated as “mehadrin,” or strictly kosher, where the men sit in the front and the women behind. The activists view this draconian interpretation of the modesty code practiced by Orthodox Jews as discriminatory, and the policy is being appealed in Israel’s Supreme Court.

Stern black-coated male passengers muttered their disapproval, but the Rosa Parks-inspired act of civil disobedience took place peacefully, largely because the bus driver, an Arab, decided not to try to enforce the rules.”

A (lamentably unsourced) scan of attempts by Lieberman’s party to keep Israeli Arabs down, and responses from the leftermost sections of the Israeli government, from Dan Katz at Workers’ Liberty.

Issue 16 of Democratiya (latest edition but I’ve been slow off the blocks) is partly concerned with revisiting the two-state solution in the light of Gaza.

“First, we asked a range of writers whether the two-state solution was viable after the conflict in Gaza, and if so what they saw as the obstacles to its realisation. Michael Walzer argues that two states is in bad shape, but remains the only viable solution and can be advanced by a combination of ‘internal unilateralism’ on both sides, and greater support by the US and EU. John Strawson argues the time has come for the international community to consider compelling the two parties to reach a compromise. Ghada Karmi makes the case for the one-state solution as realistic not utopian, while Donna Robinson Divine calls for both sides to go beyond those constitutive narratives around which identities have hardened and which have blocked progress. Martin Shaw calls for 1948 to be revisited as well as 1967 and for the idealism of the one-state solution to inform the two-state solution, while Alex Stein argues none of the existing ’solutions’ remain viable and what’s really needed is imagination and radical new ideas. Menchem Kellner and Fred Seigel and Sol Stern warn of the dangers of moving towards two states without a radical change of attitude towards Israel by the Palestinian leaderships, while Eric Lee surveys the trade unions reaction to the conflict in Gaza.”

Hal Draper and his political party, the Workers’ Party, rejected the idea of partition and believed the ultimate decision to set up a new nation state of Israel in 1948 was a regrettable one. But, recognising that most socialists had not pursued an argument against nationalism in general and should not do so with Jews in 1948, and cognisant of the nature of the enemies of Israel at that time, he authored How To Defend Israel: a Political Program for Israeli Socialists.

This was a time, note, when religion was eclipsed as an influence in Middle East conflicts by a raft of other warring ideologies, and so does not receive the emphasis he would probably give it if he were writing today. The idea of Britain being part of the Big Three is also quaint. And the notion of ‘imperialism’ is, as ever, left unpacked (in my previous post Moishe Postone examines how anti-capitalism became internationalised as anti-imperialism). It was also a time when Palestinians who had suddenly found themselves as Israel’s Arab citizens were living under military rule; since that time a great deal of progress has been made (notwithstanding the present Israeli government – as Mohammad Darawshe remarks “There have been worse”). However, Hal Draper’s thinking about Israel is worth revisiting because of his distinction between elites (which he terms ‘Zionist leadership’ and ‘Arab lords’ or ‘effendis’) and the interests of two peoples, and his acknowledgement of their right to self determination.

“… socialist thinking on this subject must start by understanding the distinction between (a) the Jews’ right to self-determination, and (b) the correctness or advisability of exercising this right to the point of separation under given conditions. We need only refer to the fact that, before and after the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks’ program called for defense of Finland’s right to self-determination: before the revolution, Marxists in Finland advocated separation; after the revolution, the Communists in Finland advocated unity with Russia; but both before and after, there was no question in their minds but that the Finns had the right to separate if they so willed. Never under Lenin did the Soviets attempt to deprive them of that right by force of arms.

But in the present case we do not even have the complication of a workers’ state being involved. Far from it! The attack upon the Jews’ right to self-determination comes from a deeply reactionary social class – the Arab lords – whose reactionary aims in this case are not alleviated by the fact that they themselves suffer from the exploitation of British imperialism (at the same time that they cling to that imperialism in order to defend their privileges against their own people).

In this conflict, as socialists – that is, as the only thoroughgoing and consistent democrats, we not only support the Palestine Jews’ right to self-determination but draw the necessary conclusions from that position: for full recognition of the Jewish state by our own government; for lifting the embargo on arms to Israel; for defense of the Jewish state against the Arab invasion in the present circumstances.

But for us this is not the end of the question but only the beginning.

…

The question which we have asked, following Lenin’s method, was: What politics does this war flow from? War – so goes the platitude – is the continuation of politics by other, forceful, means. In the case of every concrete war, we try to analyze concretely the politics of which that war is the continuation. The Spanish loyalist government was an imperialist government; it exploited Morocco and oppressed the peasants (and shot them down when they revolted!). But when the Franco fascists sought to overthrow even this miserable government, we called for its defense – in our own way, by revolutionary means, and without giving the slightest political support to the bourgeois People’s Front leaders – because our analysis of the concreteness of events showed that the anti-Franco war did not flow from the loyalist government’s imperialist character but from the fascists’ attack upon its democratic base.

This was ABC once.”

Read on.

(I also got a lot out of Hal Draper’s his ABC of National Liberation Movements. I have yet to read his much-cited Two Souls of Socialism. See also Sean Matgamna, whose organisation Workers’ Liberty frequently draws on Draper’s thinking, and who cautions “Draper, I think, did contribute more than a little to the Zionophobe conquest of so much of the left”.)

Via Contested Terrain.

Update: I wrote up the presentation on Engage – I think you will enjoy reading it.

Via the unofficial blog of the UK Friend of The Abraham Fund:

POST GAZA & ISRAEL’S ELECTIONS – CAN THERE BE COEXISTENCE IN ISRAEL?

Speaker: Mohammad Darawshe, Co-Executive Director of The Abraham Fund Initiatives.

Date: Tuesday 2nd June, 7.45pm (doors open 7.30pm)

Entry: Free, but we suggest a donation to cover our costs: £5 / £4 concessions

Hosted by the UK Friends of The Abraham Fund Initiatives and St Ethelburga’s, at 78 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AG.

Download flyer [PDF]

“Pursuing peace on every front” means something different to Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s new hard-line Foreign Minister, than it does to most people, including the Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has pledged to pursue peace. Lieberman, on the other hand, has pledged to continue with Bush’s roadmap but has brushed aside Annapolis on the puny grounds that it wasn’t ratified.

Israel’s Movement For Quality Government launched a petition to disqualify him from government because of an ongoing police investigation – but an ongoing investigation was insufficient reason, said the State Prosecutors Office.

On OpenDemocracy, Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal (!) has just published a security briefing which points out:

“Hamas denied any difference between the two administrations or any of the other “governments of the Zionist entity…. because all of them have killed and slaughtered our people”.

This suggests there is no Israeli government Hamas would negotiate with. Maybe it’s just talk, but Hamas love death and state that they will ethnicly cleanse Palestine of Jews. Lieberman’s type thrives on fear and to a significant extent it is Hamas who are responsible for his power. There are many reasons to suppose that the presence of Lieberman is going to strengthen the pro-war elements of Palestinian politics.  Radicalisation cuts both ways.

Earlier I promised a post on the new Israeli government. It seemed necessary on Greens Engage, a blog about the intersection of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. But at Greens Engage we could be more interested in Israeli politics. In fact, we are much more concerned with our own back yard – keeping Britain a good place for Jews to live. It happens that this involves putting up some alternatives to the unfeasably vilifying ways of regarding Israel which are stridently advanced in the Green Party. Personally I find it strange that in order to safeguard my place in this country, I have to get acquainted with Israeli politics – to debunk untruths, to balance slants, to point out counter-examples to the vilification. But there you go.

Luckily, I can sit back today because we have Alex Stein, an Anglo-Israeli blogging at False Dichotomies. He has written a guest post on Harry’s Place analysing the state of Israel’s new Netanyahu-led government. Have a read.

Bitter Lemons is a weekly publication of two Israeli points of view and two Palestinian points of view on a given topic of the day. This week’s topic is outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

See also previous editions.

Um Al Fahm is a primarily Arab village in Israel, and a place of anti-Zionism. Some far right Zionists organised a march there this week – which the Israeli Supreme Court permitted according to the right to free expression.

Alex Stein took a bus there with members of Peace Now, Meretz and Hadash (two parties on the Israeli left) to demonstrate in solidarity with the residents of Umm Al Fahm, and describes what happened.

“As we came down the hill with our banners and our sloganeering (“Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies”, “Fascism won’t pass”), I became aware of a clear division among the protesters already in place. On one side Israeli-Arab men, some with Palestinian flags, many in keffiyehs, pastiches of their counterparts in the territories or abroad. On the other side Jews and Arabs, Zionists and anti-Zionists and non-Zionists, earnestly shouting the shouts of peace, holding banners up high. This was the welcome the 100 far-rightists could expect.

If fascists marched through my parents’ neighbourhood in London, I’d expect that non-Jews would oppose them. This is why I came to Umm-el-Fahm. I try to be a libertarian, and I think the Supreme Court took the correct decision in permitting the march, but in doing so it also implicitly gave people the right to stand in opposition, and this is the reason I came. Baruch Marzel thinks he’s oh-so-clever, asking what’s wrong with him marching through sovereign Israeli territory with the sovereign Israeli flag. Needless to say, he won’t be taking a similar march through Mea Sharim, another place known for its ambivalence bordering on antipathy for Zionism.

I have little time for the Balad-style nationalism or Islamism that some people suggest is dominant in Umm-el-Fahm. But I’m aware of the context. Having visited the city I found that our government has done precious little to win hearts and minds in places like this, and that only when I am confident we are doing everything we can to fully integrate Israeli-Arabs into the broader polity will I feel comfortable chastising Israeli-Arabs when they demonstrate hostility against the state. By standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the people of Umm-el-Fahm, then, I hoped to show Marzel and his clique that they were hopelessly outnumbered and that Israeli-Arabs could count on Jewish support when threatened by fascism.”

So, they waited. Needless to say, it started to rain. Read on.

A short assessment, focussing on Turkey, by veteran diplomat and negotiator Shlomo Ben Ami, of Israel’s historical strategic alliances since Ben Gurion’s pessimistic assessment of the ’60s that Israel would never be permitted by its immediate members to exist in peace.