The battle for the soul of Israel

Source: Financial Times

The country’s moderates are not giving up the struggle against their rogue government — and progressives elsewhere must not give up on them, writes historian Fania Oz-Salzberger

Here’s a truth to reckon with: neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going to disappear any time soon. No one can destroy their respective claims to a sovereign state in their ancestral homeland, which happens to be the same land. Barring a cataclysmic event, there will be no river-to-sea Palestine and no Greater Israel. This is a conflict that can only be solved by territorial and political compromise.

Such tough realism is often rejected in the global conversation. Much of the street-level human empathy for innocent victims in Gaza — a very just empathy — is marching under the banner of “Free Palestine”. The catchy and moving slogan has one main problem: whenever it appears as a standalone, it means “Eradicate Israel”. This is why ordinary Israelis, often misinformed by their government and media, mistakenly assume that every protest against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is merely a matter of antisemitism.

Which brings me to another brutal truth: people attacking Jews on the streets or on the web simply for being Jews are antisemites. Those praising Hamas as freedom fighters are obviously sharing its antisemitic and genocidal creed. But people accusing Israel of war crimes against innocent Gazans are not antisemites, they are simply human. Both groups exist, and between them lies a huge spectrum of passionate ignorants, led by lazy and egotistic intellectuals who want to “free Palestine” and let the Jews somehow vanish or be subdued.

A centuries-old dispute lies beneath the current Gaza conflict. As a historian, however, I strongly feel that now is not the time for history. We need to prioritise saving lives. You don’t bicker about the past while facing deadly fire. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at present too bloody for that.

I am not a neutral observer (no one is) but a deeply involved Israeli Jew, raised in a kibbutz, coming from a Zionist family of secular Jews. One side was liberal-nationalist, the other kibbutz-socialist, but all my grandparents were peace-loving and believed that humanism is the best part of our Jewish inheritance. I am glad they do not have to witness what is happening today, and I still try to carry their torch.

My kibbutz background has new significance since October 7 2023. People I know, friends and colleagues, were barbarically bereaved on that date. Occasionally, when I write about it, certain “pro-Palestinians” attack me on social media for harping on October 7, as if I were a cunning demagogue, as if only one side deserves recognition of collective trauma. Dear Palestinians, beware of such friends.

I belong to the majority of Israelis who felt that Hamas must be defeated, and to the majority who currently (in my case, for more than a year) think that Israel’s war against Hamas has gone horribly wrong, morally and practically. I also voice a majority opinion when I take to the streets to demonstrate for a ceasefire in Gaza and a deal releasing the remaining 50 Israeli hostages, of whom about 20 may still be alive.

A compromise is the only bloodless choice. A compromise or eternal war.

Please do not underestimate the lure of eternal war. Powerful fanatics on both sides consistently say they are happy to fight for ever — until the Messiah comes, or the enemy vanishes, or, as Andrew Marvell put it, “till the conversion of the Jews”. There is neither humanism nor rationality on either extreme of the Palestinian-Israeli discord; both are ruled by the worst, most aggressive versions of the Hebrew God and Allah.

We, the moderate, secular and liberal, are currently hunkering between those extremes. Many of us are cowed or traumatised, perhaps for life. Others, hundreds of thousands of Israelis, are struggling to push back the fanatics. It is no help that Gaza is still ruled by Hamas, and that Israel’s cabinet has gone rogue in the service of religious extremists. But we keep fighting for a peaceful compromise in the shared homeland of Israel/Palestine. The world needs to know it, and moderate Palestinians, who are either very silent or very brave, must know that Israeli peace-seekers are still holding out their hand.

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Let me focus on Israel, my country, and clear up a few common misunderstandings. First and foremost, Zionism. Many people see the word as inherently lethal. Too many people smirk at the camera and say “I don’t hate Jews, only Zionists”.

Well, nice to meet you too. I happen to be a Zionist. Which simply means what it meant originally to Theodor Herzl and his movement: Zionism is the Jews’ claim to a national home within their ancestral homeland.

Within it. No claim for exclusive ownership. A national home and a sovereign state for the Jews (per UN Resolution 181), not at the expense of a Palestinian state but alongside it. That’s the only basic definition of Zionism, and it is fully in line with the two-state solution and with Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Herzl also demanded that the state of the Jews be a liberal democracy exercising full civil equality for men and women, Jews and Arabs. This Zionist ideal was powerfully repeated in David Ben-Gurion’s Declaration of Independence of 1948, and accepted by every Israeli leader until Benjamin Netanyahu. For sure, they didn’t always play by their own rules; but a peaceful democracy, fair to its own Arab citizens and friendly with its Arab neighbours, was Israel’s declared goal until two decades ago.  

This is why a vast majority of the Israeli peacenik left has always defined itself as Zionist, and still does. Foreign demonisation of Zionists, in this light, is irrelevant. The only person who can destroy our basic Zionism, the moderate, pragmatic and peace-seeking Zionism, is Netanyahu.

When asked about the battle for the soul of Israel, I can give only one reply, via the age-old Jewish habit of answering a question with a question: which Israel?

If by “Israel” we mean Netanyahu’s near-autocracy, then “Israel” is doing everything in its power to keep Netanyahu on his prime ministerial seat and to annul his ongoing trial for corruption. Everything else is subservient to this cause.

Years before Donald Trump, Netanyahu amassed a cult-like following, filling every nook and cranny of the Likud party with his admirers. Some of his own Knesset members are currently depicting him as king or God’s emissary. The hard base of “Bibists” would follow the leader anywhere, whether it is an all-out war or a peace agreement with the Palestinians, as long as the policy suits their boss’s personal interest.

This should explain Netanyahu’s utterly irrational decisions on the Gaza war and on Israel’s international relations. At home, he is facing one of the world’s strongest and most principled civil societies, comprised of the moderate centre and the left. Abroad, he is shocking and betraying Israel’s best and oldest friends. Worse, Netanyahu is systematically abusing the intricacies of Jewish identity, in Israel and globally, by crying antisemitism in the exact same way that the legendary shepherd cried wolf. At the same time, he is allowing the most fanatical Jews on the planet, his far-right coalition partners, to decide what Judaism means.

Perhaps “Israel” means the extreme-right parties of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir? The former is an obnoxious zealot, serving leaders and rabbis who are conducting a hostile takeover of Judaism and pushing it to its furthest, atavistic edge of biblical warmongering. Unpopular in opinion polls, Smotrich enjoys a hugely disproportionate influence on the current government. Ben-Gvir, a criminal thug with at least eight previous convictions including for support of terrorism, was deemed fit by Netanyahu to serve as minister of national security. These people appear to want Israel to sacrifice all the remaining hostages and hundreds, even thousands more soldiers, to conquer the whole of Gaza, ethnically cleanse it of Palestinians and settle Jews instead.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, alongside dangerous fanatics such as Orit Strook, are our greatest curse. Other western countries have similar problems with far-right parties, but arguably these countries can afford them. Israel cannot. We are facing real mortal enemies, Iran and its protégés. We are tottering on a cliff’s edge, driven into the abyss by our worst ever government.

Please do not conflate these far-right fanatics with the older right wing, whose hawkish views were secular and rational, based on their idea of how best to keep Israel safe. This is not what the Messianist right is about. They don’t care how many civilians and soldiers would be sacrificed to the cause. They don’t seem to give a damn about “western values”, the great tradition of Jewish humanism or Israel’s moral standing in the world. Their goal — and please take them very seriously — is the coming of the Messiah, the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem and eternal power and glory for the Children of Israel, Smotrich-style.

Then there is the third partner propping up the Netanyahu government: ultra-Orthodox parties. If this group had its way, Israel would become a theocracy based on Halachah religious law, an equivalent of the Muslim sharia. This part of society, about 13 per cent, are buoyed by privileges given to them by Ben-Gurion in the 1950s: granted their own education system, hermetically closed to any secular core curriculum and funded by the state, they also have almost wholesale exemption from military service, which is mandatory for most Jewish Israeli citizens over the age of 18.

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Since November 2022 these three groups — the Netanyahu devotees, the nationalist-messianic right and the self-serving ultra-Orthodox — have formed our government, the first exclusively far-right government in Israeli history. All Netanyahu’s previous coalitions included one centrist party or more. This was the first time anyone had allowed the openly racist and criminally convicted Ben-Gvir into the government. Never before have so many ultra-Orthodox demands met in a coalition agreement. In exchange, the ultra-Orthodox parties give Netanyahu free hand in every decision except for issues touching their voters’ funding.

It was time to begin the legislative onslaught on the judiciary. By January 2023, Netanyahu and his justice minister Yariv Levin prepared a barrage of legislation aimed to weaken, neutralise and then politicise the Supreme Court, the attorney-general’s office and every other legal watchdog post. Unlike the ultra-Orthodox issue, this was part of a global trend. Netanyahu followed the Viktor Orbán and Trump playbooks. He is currently attempting to force out the attorney-general and has already ousted the head of Shin Bet — an organisation mandated by law to defend Israel from domestic threats, including threats to democracy. By the time most Israelis understand that Netanyahu is shutting down Israeli democracy, its defenders will be replaced by his own people and no legal power will be able to stop him.

In the terrible aftermath of October 7, we thought that at least the government’s coup d’état against the judiciary would be over. But it was not, and as the Gaza war deteriorated from a just counter-attack against Hamas to a bloodbath of Palestinian civilians, it became clear that Netanyahu needed to destroy democracy in order to stay in power. He was willing enough to destroy it in order to stop his trial for corruption; all the more so now that he’s a war criminal too.

The Jewish liberals and left will fare no better: we are already getting brutally beaten up by Ben-Gvir’s police during legal demonstrations. We are already getting arrested for no reason and threatened by the Netanyahu mob on a daily basis. The next elections are an enormous test for every moderate Israeli. In my broad social sphere, many academics and professionals speak of emigrating. Others are determined to remain, even as dissidents. Despite fake news of secret hoards of foreign passports, most of us Israeli Jews have nowhere else to go.

The Israel of the centre, including the moderate left and right, has one immediate goal: to free the hostages, at the price of a ceasefire and retreat from Gaza. The hostages must come first, not only because the survivors among them are evidently dying, but also because Netanyahu’s government has played with their fates, and treated their family members with shameless arrogance and inhumanity.

However large Netanyahu and his government might loom, the centre, the left and the centre-right are still the Israeli mainstream. At the core of this mainstream is our civil society — the organisations and individuals who rushed to defend democracy, provided support after the Hamas massacre, and are currently back to defending democracy while trying to end the war.

Hundreds of thousands have taken part in the largest street-level demonstrations in Tel Aviv, huge numbers for a country of 10mn. Prominent among them are Israeli academics and artists, the exact same people that self-styled western progressives are currently so eager to expel and boycott. It is true that many Jewish Israelis found it emotionally hard to empathise with innocent Gazans in the immediate aftermath of October 7. But a growing number are waking up to the horrors inflicted on civilians caught between Israel and Hamas. As numerous protest signs and speeches convey, we increasingly think of the ongoing war with sadness and shame. 

We are stronger and better-rooted than Poland’s liberals, but we are following their rebuilding of democracy with admiration. After winning the next elections — assuming they are not rigged — there will be a lot of rebuilding to do. Gaza needs physical reconstruction, a task for the whole international community. Israel needs moral and political reconstruction, for which we Israelis must assume full responsibility.

No power in the world can eradicate Israel except for its own government, and no power can rebuild it except its civil society. My late father, Amos Oz, wrote back in August 1967, shortly after the six day war: “The shorter the occupation, the better for us. Because even an imposed occupation is destructive. Even an enlightened and humane and liberal occupation is an occupation. I fear for the quality of the seeds we sow in the near future in the hearts of the occupied. More than that, I fear for the seed that is being sown in the heart of the occupiers. And the first signs are already recognisable now, on the fringes of society.”

Please take it as a warning for other democracies too. The current clash between fanatical Jerusalem and liberal Tel Aviv may herald the future of other western democracies. In parallel, what happens to the Palestinians next will shake the south-north axis as a whole.

Israel’s remaining true friends, and Palestine’s true friends, are invited to support our pro-democracy civil society, especially the peace-seeking part. Reasonable governments should sanction or punish Netanyahu, but beware of rewarding Hamas. Israel, the true Israel, is no longer its government but its civil society, including most of its academia and arts. Please consider whom you support, and think carefully about whom you punish.

Fania Oz-Salzberger is professor emerita of history at the University of Haifa School of Law and the Haifa Center for German and European Studies