On Leaving Be’er Sheva
Last Thursday I finished teaching my five-week seminar in Psychology, Law, and Justice, and tomorrow I have the last of my appointments at Ben Gurion University. After a stopover in Jerusalem to visit family and friends, I’ll return to Ramallah to spend a week or 10 days working with researchers in Birzeit University’s Law and Society Department and, also, to see more of life in Palestine.
My six weeks in Israel have been a blur of activity, only some of it described in this blog with text and photos. I could say that someday I’ll expand it all — there’s that imagined book again — but it will be hard to recapture the complexities and contradictions once they fade into the past.
The question of what psychologists might find interesting about the link between law and justice was central to my course as well as to other presentations and discussions over the past six weeks both here at the university and during my weekend visits elsewhere. My students tell me they were glad to see an outsider present ideas and information new to them, including material written by Israeli academics they had never before encountered. I did think that worked out well. Being an outsider can bring the advantage of not sharing basic ideological assumptions that shape interpretations of events past and present. It can help connect dots that those immersed in a society no longer notice.
On the other hand, an outsider running from place to place during a short visit misses a lot, sometimes connecting scattered highlights without enough context. At times I’ve felt that making sense of it all will have to wait for later.
But themes do emerge, or rather, reflecting I suppose my own assumptions, expected themes become more obvious. Paralleling what seems most obvious in Palestine — the difficult pull between justice and reconciliation, between principle and compromise — here in Israel the dominating pull is the one between the state’s Jewish and democratic ideals, between the urge for tribal survival and the moral principles of universal justice. In one arena after another Israelis confront, avoid, hide, or sidestep this conflict. It seeps into everything.
There’s a lot of talk here about the “demographic problem,” by which people generally mean the likelihood that someday Israel’s Arab citizens will outnumber its Jews and then vote to end Israel’s official Jewish self-definition. An endless amount has been written about this demographic likelihood, sometimes in learned academic prose, sometimes in apocalyptic warnings (where the envisioned outcome goes beyond voting to expulsion and massacre), sometimes in matter-of-fact bewilderment about what to do about something no Jew, it is assumed, wants to happen. All that matters, to many here and to many Jews abroad, is that Israel do what it must to remain a majority-Jewish state. That there’s no agreement about what it means to be a Jewish state doesn’t make much difference. Without the common Arab Enemy, internal Jewish conflict would inevitably escalate.
Thus, what often appears on the surface to be mere racial discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian citizens, or bureaucratic Catch-22’s, or haphazard neglect, can better be interpreted as intended. Arabs willing to accept second-class citizenship in a Jewish state reap the benefits of a higher standard of living and more personal freedoms than they might find elsewhere. Those who demand full equality, or who can’t manage to survive in places or in ways Israel doesn’t allow, are free to leave, taking their large families with them.
Razing Bedouin houses. Refusing building permits. Turning a blind eye to housing and job discrimination. Preventing Muslim prayer in Be’er Sheva’s only, but long unused, mosque. Making Bedouin residents of Rahat walk three kilometers to catch a bus to Be’er Sheva. Erasing Arab names from centuries-old streets. Destroying old Jaffa neighborhoods to make way for Jews. Rendering Arabs in “unrecognized” villages legally invisible, their lives made more miserable by the government’s refusal to provide electricity, water, schools. The list goes on an on, fully documented over and over and over again. But unlike comparable practice in other countries, here the explanation goes deeper than mere racism and elitism and class privilege. Here, liberal reform efforts can have even less impact than usual, because here institutionalized discrimination is seen by too many Israelis not as a relic of an outdated past but as a demographic necessity.
The news reports I’ve seen about Jimmy Carter’s new book describe its focus on the apartheid nature of Israel’s Palestinian occupation. Carter apparently admires Israel’s internal democracy. I wonder if he really means it, or if it’s merely the way he phrases his critique in order to reduce the massive hostility already heading his way. I can’t imagine that someone coming here with an observant eye could honestly set aside Israel’s institutional refusal to make all its citizens equal in law as well as in fact.
The demographic worry, which magnifies (it seems to me) the problems of a future Arab majority, is the flip side of a historical distortion that fails to see Arabs as integral to Israel’s Palestinian history. Forests built on destroyed Arab villages. Kibbutzim surrounded by olive trees planted hundreds of years ago. Accounts of life in Israel that minimize or ignore the impact of Jewish immigration on Palestinians already here. Monument after patriotic monument that only the majority can ever look upon with admiration.
I have been glad to find here in Israel thoughtful, troubled, even guilt-struck Jews horrified at their country’s choices and working in various ways to change their country’s direction. I wish there were more of them. And I wish more of them went further. Human rights legal work, community activism, teaching, social work — all these and more are important, but too often these efforts, enmeshed as they are in endless harrowing individual crises, aim for tinkering and amelioration rather than institutional and ideological transformation. Here, transformation is what’s needed, despite the obstacles, if Israel is to make its democracy a reality.
July 29th, 2007 at 10:31 am
[…] primary theme of my course on Psychology, Law, and Justice at Ben Gurion University last fall was the consequences for Israelis of the ideological proposition […]
March 19th, 2008 at 6:34 am
I would suggest to Dennis Fox, that he spend more than a few days in Israel before pronouncing judgment on the Jewish residents.
I suggest he investigate the crime rate among the Arabs, the burglarized homes, the stolen automobiles, the criminal coercion perpetrated on the small businesses by the Arabs. These things, in addition to their murdering hundreds of civilians by shootings, bombs, rockets, etc make it rather difficult for those that have lost loved ones to view the Arabs as being mistreated. Travel through Israel and count the families that have lost members to the unrelenting murders. Be fair, or keep quiet.