Some Israelis Count Open Discourse and Dissent Among Gaza War Casualties. By Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, August 5, 2014.
Carlstom:
How Israel’s hawks intimidated and silenced
the last remnants of the anti-war left.
TEL
AVIV — Pro-war demonstrators stand behind a police barricade in Tel Aviv,
chanting, “Gaza is a graveyard.” An elderly woman pushes a cart of groceries
down the street in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon and asks a reporter, “Jewish
or Arab? Because I won’t talk to Arabs.” A man in Sderot, a town that lies less
than a mile from Gaza, looks up as an Israeli plane, en route to the
Hamas-ruled territory, drops a blizzard of leaflets over the town. “I hope that’s
not all we're dropping,” he says.
Even
before the war, Israel was shifting right, as an increasingly strident cadre of
politicians took ownership of the public debate on security and foreign
affairs. But the Gaza conflict has accelerated the lurch – empowering
nationalistic and militant voices, dramatically narrowing the space for debate,
and eroding whatever public sympathy remained for the Palestinians.
The
fighting seems to be winding down, but it leaves behind a hardened Israeli
public opinion: There is a widespread feeling that Israelis are the true
victims here, that this war with a guerrilla army in a besieged territory is
existential.
Hawkish
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has found himself under pressure from
politicians even further to his right. The premier has suspended negotiations
with the Palestinian Authority, arrested more than 1,000 Palestinians,
demolished the homes of several people convicted of no crimes, and launched an
offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 1,800 people. That's not enough,
even for some members of Netanyahu's own party, who see worrying signs of
weakness.
“We’ve
seen the influence of [Tzipi] Livni over the prime minister,” Likud Knesset
member Danny Danon told Foreign Policy,
referring to the justice minister and her centrist party. “My position is to
make sure we’re not becoming a construct of the left.... As long as he stays
loyal, he’ll have the backing of the party.”
Netanyahu
fired Danon from his post as deputy defense minister last month, because he was
too critical of the government's strategy in Gaza. But Danon cannot be
dismissed as a marginal figure: He took control of the Likud central committee
last year, and has used the post to steer the party further right – an ironic
turnabout, as Netanyahu used the same tactics to drive out former Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon a decade ago.
Even
before his election, the 2012 Likud primary turned Netanyahu into perhaps the
most liberal member of his own party.
Public
opinion polls confirm the Israeli right’s gains during the current conflict. A survey conducted by the Knesset Channel last week found that the right-wing
parties would win 56 seats in the next election, up from 43 last year. The
center-left bloc would shrink from 59 seats to 48. Other surveys suggest that
the right could win a majority by itself, without needing religious parties or
centrists to form a coalition.
But
perhaps more striking is the public’s near-unanimous support for the Gaza war,
from Israelis across the political spectrum. Roughly 90 percent of Jewish
Israelis support the war, according to recent polls. Less than 4 percent
believe the army has used “excessive firepower,” the Israel Democracy Institute
found, though even Israeli officials admit that a majority of the 1,800
Palestinians killed so far are civilians.
Meanwhile,
Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, the ostensible head of the opposition, is
doing public relations work for Netanyahu, defending the war at a gathering of
foreign diplomats. Livni herself at times sounds more hawkish than the prime
minister, arguing that Israel should topple Hamas and build a moat to separate
itself from Gaza. “I have two words for you: Get lost,” she told the U.N. Human
Rights Council after it voted to investigate possible Israeli war crimes in
Gaza.
And
Finance Minister Yair Lapid, who once threatened to bolt the coalition if talks
with the Palestinians collapsed, has been another vocal advocate. “This is a
tough war, but a necessary one,” he said last month.
Decades
ago, a commentator coined the phrase “quiet, we’re shooting” – a reflection of
the Israeli public’s tendency to rally behind the army in wartime. But this
time, public dissent hasn’t just been silenced, it’s been all but smothered. A
popular comedian was dumped from her job as the spokeswoman for a cruise line
after she criticized the war. Local radio refused to air an advertisement from
B’Tselem, a rights group, which simply intended to name the victims in Gaza.
Scattered
anti-war rallies have drawn small crowds, mostly in the low hundreds; the
largest brought several thousand people to Tel Aviv on July 26. But most of the
protests ended in violence at the hands of ultranationalists, who attacked them
and set up roving checkpoints to hunt for “leftists” afterwards. Demonstrators
have been beaten, pepper-sprayed, and bludgeoned with chairs.
In
hundreds of interviews with Israelis over the past month, there has been little
criticism of their government’s actions, much less sympathy for Gaza’s. “We
have suffered terribly, but when you are pushed into a corner, you have no
choice,” said one man in Ashkelon. “Their children? What about our children? If
they cared about their children, they wouldn’t have chosen Hamas,” said a woman
in Kiryat Malachi, a city in Israel’s south.
The
media, by and large, has become a unanimous choir in support of destroying
Hamas. The only exception is Haaretz,
where Gideon Levy, one of the newspaper’s best-known columnists, has started
reporting with a bodyguard after he was accosted during a live television
interview in Ashkelon. Yariv Levin, a Knesset member from Likud and a chairman
of the governing coalition, wants to charge Levy with treason because of his
writing.
“I’ve
never had it so harsh, so violent, and so tense,” Levy said.
“We
will face a new Israel after this operation ... nationalistic, religious in
many ways, brainwashed, militaristic, with very little empathy for the
sacrifice of the other side. Nobody in Israel cares at all.”
Already,
figures who challenge Israel’s dominant narrative about the conflict – or even
dare to tweak public sensibilities – have been met with an overwhelming and
vicious backlash. Last week, Hanoch Sheinman, a law professor at Bar-Ilan
University, emailed his students about their revised exam schedule. He opened by wishing “that you, your families and those dear to you are not among the
hundreds of people that were killed, the thousands wounded, or the tens of thousands
whose homes were destroyed.”
The
dean of the law school pronounced himself shocked at Sheinman’s email, and
wrote to students that Sheinman’s “hurtful letter ... contravene[s] the values
of the university.”
“Even
this trivial expression of concern stirred such a backlash, and that’s not
trivial at all,” Sheinman told Foreign
Policy. “To be shocked or angered ... by a trivial expression of sympathy
to everyone is to betray a lack of such sympathy.”
Even in
the Knesset, voices of dissent have been silenced. Knesset member Hanin Zoabi,
a Palestinian citizen of Israel who is a favorite target for the right, has
been barred from most parliamentary activity for six months. Her punishment,
the harshest one meted out by the Ethics Committee, was a response to a radio
interview in which she said the June 12 kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers
was not terrorism. “The atmosphere has become very radical,” said Basel
Ghattas, a colleague of Zoabi's.
On the
other side of the political spectrum – and dominating the conversation – are
people like Moshe Feiglin, a clownish figure from Likud and a deputy speaker of
parliament. He called last week for the “conquest” of Gaza, and the “elimination
of all military forces and their supporters.” This is our land, he wrote, “only
ours, including Gaza.” Nobody has demanded his censure.
Though
this current bout of fighting in Gaza may be now at an end, Israel’s rightward
turn appears here to stay. The deaths of more than 60 Israeli soldiers in the
conflict have not dented public support for the war; if anything, it appears to
have whet many Israelis’ appetite for vengeance.
At a
funeral last month, hundreds of mourners sobbed softly as the flag-draped
coffin of an Israeli officer was brought into the cemetery. The soldier’s
mother lay her head on the coffin, refusing to let an honor guard lower it into
the grave; steps away, the officer's pregnant wife consoled his anguished
father, who wore a torn black shirt in accordance with Jewish custom. Next to
the grave was another freshly dug plot.
One
young woman, a casual acquaintance of the officer’s, leaned on the metal police
barricades ringing the gravesite. “We should kill 100 of theirs for every one
of ours,” she said.
