the exile within

Saturday. In the late evening, I drive to Tel Aviv. I have to say that I love driving. After living in the city and relying on public transport for so long, the freedom that comes with turning the wheel in whatever way you fancy is just intoxicating. It’s not the speed I love as much as the freedom.

I take my dear friend Y to one of the best hummus joints in town on Ben Yehuda St. near the new port. Once suspicion had been cleared that a few pieces of cooked onion were in fact some unpleasant form of human waste, we moved on to talk about more pressing issues. My mind is still reeling from conversations I have had in London only few days ago.

What I realised is that there is far less Zionism in my life than I had previously suspected. This has to be said. Why is it important? Well, just like in many capitalist democracies, there has been a serious erosion of the line between Left and Right in Israeli party politics. The Left are no longer the keepers of worker rights any more than the Right are. In the first place, Right and Left in Israel have tended to demarcate themselves around the Occupation and the military, not the economy. The Left want to end the 1967 Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank with as little military violence as possible, while the Right, and the religious Right in particular, want the entirety of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river to be dominated by Jews. This may seem like the crux of the matter. However, a short survey of Israeli governments, both Left and Right, shows a very consistent policy in regards to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, namely that of expansion and preservation. This is one of many signs that tell us that religion indeed has nothing to do with this: the places where power concentrates are the same places where the religious and traditional loyalties of the People become a commodity, something that can be cultivated and then used. There are good reasons why even an Arab-loving Jewish government would rather postpone Palestinian sovereignty as long as it possibly can. For starters, around 1/3 of Israel’s water supply comes from underground sources in the West Bank, which Palestinian are prevented from drilling by military law. What has emerged in the last few years is a Centre political movement that tries to deliver the “best” of both worlds by expressing willingness to evacuate Jewish settlements in exchange for peace, at the same time as keeping Palestinian sovereignty in the Occupied Territories to a saddled minimum and violently oppressing Palestinian civil freedoms. This has greatly weakened humanist voices within the Left, those people who believe in a pacified yet constitutionally Jewish Israeli state. On the upside, it has become a good reflection of the truly relevant line in Israeli politics - the one that separates not “Right” from “Left”, but Zionism from Democracy. Because the idea that a state belongs not to its own people but to a globally dispersed ethnic and religious group can only go so far before it hits the Discrimination Wall. We see this happening in Israel every day. The “situation” and “status” of the non-Jewish population is constantly under review, under scrutiny. Euphemistically, we are keeping tabs on civil rights. Our greatest fear as Israeli Jews today is still this: to become a minority.

“Well, we would just end up in the sea, you do realise”, mom reminds me. “Really?”, I say. “How come there are still white South Africans then?”.

It’s time to face up to the facts. And the fact, at least from where I’m standing, is that Israeli Zionism would not be doing so well, would not go so unchallenged, if we actually had better options. There is no healthy democratic movement in Israel today. If you are not a Zionist, then you must be an Arab. But the more I look for Zionists in my immediate, Jewish, middle-class environment, the fewer I find. Fear of extermination exists independently of religious ideology, and it is that same fear that lends so many people’s power to a cause that is becoming more irrelevant by the day: the idea that a Jewish majority in Israel must be maintained at all costs. Many of us are sick and tired of defending this. One of the sadder implications of this fatigue is a fierce dog-eat-dog culture, each for her own. Don’t talk to us about Jews and Arabs and bloody Jerusalem, we jsut want to get on with it, thank you very much. There is a limit to the number of wars that parents will send their children to die in before they realise that the system they are being asked to protect is corrupt at its core. In Israel, it’s always been Us or Them. We are transitioning - painfully - into Us and Them.

Revelation always whets my appetite. The hummus is simply divine.