1. An article about today’s election on the Jerusalem Post website:
In Meretz, veteran politicians hoped [to...] re-energize the party. With a predicted four seats in the Knesset according to the exit polls, [Haim] Oron … pledged that Meretz would “return to be a central factor in the establishment of a Zionist, social-democratic left-wing, dovish and humanistic State of Israel. This space was left vacant in these elections.”
2. From the blog South Jerusalem run by Gershom Gorenberg (an American-born Israeli journalist who I heard speak in Boston the other night) and Haim Watzman:
South Jerusalem is…. The only place in the world where you can be a left-wing, skeptical Orthodox Zionist Jew and feel like you are part of a mass movement.
3. From the controversial Israeli historian Benny Morris’s book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999, which I recently started chipping away at, here writing about the early 1920s:
Zionist spokesmen argued, as after previous rounds of violence, that the May rioting had been the work of a few agitators, not a true reflection of majority Arab opinion. The reason: If the violence was widely supported, there was no hope for Zionism. It had to be explained as the work of a small group of criminals, with the Jews — whose “interests were identical” with those of the Arabs — striving for “peace with the Arab nation.” This of course ran contrary to the truth, and contrary to the findings of the British commission of inquiry…. The violence, it concluded, was rooted in political and economic reasons arising from Jewish immigration and Zionist aims and was not caused by envious effendis, as the Jews claimed….
Zionist officials, though they maintained the fiction in public, were well aware of the truth. As Thon put it…. “This may be fine as a tactic, but, between ourselves, we should realize that we have to reckon with an Arab national movement….”
Comment: After Gorenberg’s talk the other night, I asked him the question I hadn’t been able to give after his talk. He had hinted that Israeli democracy needed improvement, even calling on Diaspora Jews to remind Israel that democracy requires equal rights for minorities rather than simply imposing majority rule. I wanted to know if he thought the second-class status of Israel’s Palestinian citizens was really a fixable problem, akin to that of racial minorities in the US where the law in theory even when not in fact holds all citizens to be equal, or whether in Israel the refusal to become “a state of all its citizens” demonstrated a structural distinction that meant second-class status for non-Jews must be eternal. He said it was a good question, but unfortunately the crowd at the literature table left room only for small talk.
Benny Morris, despite his meandering from army refusenik to right-wing apologist, and despite his reliance on Israeli sources and perspectives, at least provides useful evidence that from its very inception in the late 1890s Zionist organizers made public comments far removed from their actual goals and expectations. It’s sobering reading for those who still cling to popular pro-Israel defenses, and especially useful I think because it comes from a now-right-wing Israeli academic. For me, it’s one more reminder that Meretz’s Haim Oron and South Jerusalem’s Gershom Gorenberg remain mired in a past that never had a chance of moving forward.
Technorati Tags: Israel, Benny Morris, Gershom Gorenberg
For an evaluation of Benny Morris’s work, I highly recommend “Fabricating Israeli History” by Efraim Karsh, a historian in the University of London.