openDemocracy: Can the Corbynite left make peace with Zionism?

The moral and legal case for the rights of refugees, and the people that remained to suffer slow erasure and systematic subjugation, is watertight. Palestinians were victims of historic injustice as surely as were the Native Americans and Aborigines of Australia. No just solution to the conflict could exclude their claims for liberation and restitution. But their supporters may have to think a little harder about what rigid opposition to Zionism means to Jewish people, and whether efforts to keep fighting the war of 1948 are politically useful for Palestinians. [...]

Pro-Palestinian activists are often frustrated by the refusal of liberal Zionists to support their campaigns and positions when they should in theory be natural allies in a fight for universal human rights. Instead, particularly at times of war and crisis, liberals often align more closely with right-wing Zionists whose hawkish and often openly racist attitudes to Palestinians should not be possible to square with their own values. One major contributor to this state of affairs is that anti-Zionism is a red line that few Zionists, and by extension few Jews, are willing to cross no matter what horrors are perpetrated by the Israeli state, and what chauvinism takes hold among its supporters. To take an unyielding position against Zionism is to make an opponent of all Jews who cannot countenance the dissolution of a Jewish homeland, and drives progressive Jews into the orbit of the ultra-nationalist right. [...]

On a pragmatic note, the precarity of the Palestinian position supports the case for a new approach. If Palestinians are to avoid the fate of Native Americans and Aborigines, herded into isolated enclaves with only a residual, diminished identity, urgent action is required to forestall that ongoing process. Since much of the Palestinian liberation strategy is invested in efforts to build international solidarity, inspired by the example of South Africa, the imperative to expand and mobilise an effective global movement is clear. Dropping the requirement for anti-Zionism would lift a major barrier to participation in the movement for progressive Jews as well as people who sympathise with both sides, while exposing the intransigence of hardline nationalists who refuse to recognise the validity of Palestinian claims. The fantasy of reversing Zionism is not one that Palestinians have time to indulge, the better strategy is to shape its course.

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Al Jazeera: The danger of conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism

In particular, the Labour Party is being called "anti-Semitic" because it has refused to recognise the entirety of a disputed definition of "anti-Semitism" - the code of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), repeatedly described in the media as an "internationally recognised" definition, but in reality is a highly controversial one. The IHRA code considers any description of the Israeli State as a "racist" institution to be anti-Semitic - the Labour Party's rejection of this clause has been portrayed as a rejection of the UN bill of human rights. In reality, the IHRA code has not only been challenged by groups such as the ACLU and Jewish Voice for Peace, but was even queried by an all-party Select Committee for the UK Parliament earlier this year. Absolutely none of this nuance makes the mainstream media. [...]

If the mainstream media wins and Labour has to re-formulate its definition of anti-Semitism to fit the one currently used by the government, I see two dangers emerging, one for each side. For pro-Palestinian campaigners, any serious attempt to call Israel "racist" or revise its history will be criminalised. This is not hyperbole: organisers at the University of Birmingham a few years ago asked panellists not to use the word "apartheid" in a debate on Israel and Palestine. Within the Labour Party, the pro-Israeli, right-wingers will have won a subtle victory - a chance to purge the party of Corbyn-supporters under the guise of "extremism".

For the Jewish community, a much more long-term danger emerges. By enfolding criticism of Israel within the definition of anti-semitism, a cherished goal of the Israeli Right will have finally been realised. There is a subtle mechanism here - British Jews critical of Israel (and there are many) will be involuntarily yoked together with Israel itself within such a definition, ironically mirroring the anti-Semitic logic of the mindless idiots who lump all Jews together in the first place. It might not be exaggerated to say that the result of all this, ultimately, will be the death of the term "anti-Semitism" itself as a meaningful word.

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Tzipi Livni to Haaretz: Next Israeli Election Will Be Referendum on the Declaration of Independence

But Livni plans to use the situation to her advantage. In one of her first moves as opposition leader, she gathered together representatives of 40 civil society organizations active in a wide range of causes and invited them to join her new “emergency coalition,” as she terms it, to fight this law, which she believes jeopardizes Israel’s democratic character. [...]

An outspoken advocate of the two-state solution, Livni has led numerous rounds of negotiations with the Palestinians on behalf of the Israeli government. Her cabinet posts have included stints as foreign minister, housing minister, immigrant absorption minister and, twice, justice minister. And in more than two decades of government service, she has moved increasingly toward the left. [...]

Livni broke with Likud in 2005 and, together with then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and future Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, helped found the centrist Kadima party. After Kadima disintegrated, she started a new party, Hatnuah, which focused on promoting peace. It joined with the Labor Party before the 2015 national election to form the Zionist Union alliance. After Isaac Herzog left the Knesset earlier this month to assume his new position as chairman of the Jewish Agency, Livni was appointed opposition leader by Avi Gabbay, Labor’s new chairman. (Although he heads the party, Gabbay does not have a seat in the Knesset and, therefore, cannot serve as opposition leader.) [...]

Livni steps into her new role at a time when Israel-Diaspora relations have also hit rock bottom: Progressive Jews – who account for the vast majority outside of Israel – have grown increasingly anxious about the direction the country is taking, both religiously and politically.

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Haaretz: Israel's ultra-Orthodox Establishment Is Consolidating Its Power

The dreaded proposal recommended establishing a new state-run Orthodox authority independent of the Chief Rabbinate to take on the formidable task of converting the hundreds of thousands of Israelis - mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their families - who remain officially “without religion.” This population, most of whom consider themselves Jewish and are fully contributing members of Israeli society have refused to subject themselves to the difficult and often humiliating process of converting to Judaism under the auspices of the Rabbinate. [...]

With the switch of a few words, the message was sent that the state of Israel was only committed to the unity of the Jewish people outside its borders. Within the state, the ultra-Orthodox rabbinic monopoly wanted to make it clear that there was only one officially approved form of practicing Judaism in Israel - their kind. [...]

It was yet another sign that the leader of what is now officially the "Jewish Nation State” cares little for the concerns of the non-Orthodox and modern Orthodox Jews who live outside it - as well as the embattled minority of Jews in the country who, under increasingly difficult circumstance, continue to believe that there is more than one way to observe their religion.

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Haaretz: Only a Conditional Boycott of Israel Will Lead to Change

There are also Israeli organizations fighting tooth and nail to create an alternative to the conversation and practices that prevail at the top – an alternative that favors Israeli-Arab coexistence, humanistic education, human rights in the territories, exposing the injustices of the occupation, and providing legal assistance to Palestinians. The left’s galaxy of idle chatter is also studded with groups of authors, intellectuals and academics who believe they have the power to come up with a magic formula that will convince hundreds of thousands of people to flock to the polls on Election Day with the correct ballot in their hands. [...]

It’s worth studying a few lessons from the battle against apartheid in South Africa. Few people remember that the boycott movement there actually began as a domestic effort by the African National Congress in 1952. Its model was the effort by India’s Congress Party in the ‘30s, which called for a consumer boycott that undermined Britain’s economic interests such as its monopoly on salt production. In other words, long before there was an external boycott, a boycott was organized within South Africa by opponents of the regime. [...]

Awareness of the situation in South Africa began filtering into the West, and especially the United States, after human rights activists realized there was a connection between, say, the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama – which was ignited by Rosa Parks in December 1955 – and the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in March 1960 in which police killed 69 black demonstrators. But liberal groups worldwide haven’t yet made the connection between their war on xenophobia, anti-Semitism and racism in their own countries and, for example, the war crime Israel committed when it slaughtered more than 120 Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. [...]

In Israel, its base must be Jewish liberals and leftists and Arabs. The Israeli left must understand that the only hope – albeit a small one – to change Israel’s direction lies in creating a full alliance with the Arab minority. After that, the left must also try to add other spurned groups to this coalition of minorities.

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Ministry Of Ideas: Apocalyptic Politics

Evangelical voters made up a significant portion of Donald Trump’s base in the 2016 presidential election. Their political agenda may not be peace or prosperity, but instead bringing us closer to the end of time.  

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The New York Review of Books: Confederation: The One Possible Israel-Palestine Solution

Colonial Zionist pioneers, in contrast, harmed native Palestinians by working toward Jewish cultural and economic self-sufficiency, and thus the methodical displacement of the Palestinian peasantry—which is why, at least since the Peel Commission in 1937, an arrangement like “partition” could be entertained. The Israeli occupation may be, in its own way, as cruel as apartheid. But comparable cruelty does not necessarily entail a similar political architecture. (I suspect Erekat knows this, but was hoping to shake Israelis out of their complacency.) [...]

This point needs emphasis because rash talk about one state has been obscuring it. Palestinian youth have told Shikaki of their growing interest in pursuing full civil rights in a single state, but this is really a sign of gloom and no small measure of spite—“the conviction that extremists run Israel, and a certain alienation from the corruptions of the Palestinian Authority,” Shikaki told me. His latest polling, conducted at the time of Trump’s Jerusalem statement, shows a depressing spike in the number of young Palestinians preferring “armed struggle” over the status quo—though they know that Israel, a nuclear state, cannot be invaded and destroyed by regional neighbors, and have witnessed the horrors of civil war in Syria. Israelis, for their part, may indeed be complacent regarding the status quo, but most understand that—even if the occupation can be walled off—violent polarization means that their children and grandchildren will be patrolling hostile streets, while over a fifth of their own citizens, Arab citizens, grow inflamed on their side of the wall. [...]

Indeed, if self-determination means national autonomy in security matters, it is a recipe for disintegration. Israeli and Palestinian governments would be seen, respectively, as accountable for the actions of people acting from their territories—“You’re sovereign, so you’re responsible.” They would make themselves hostage to extremists. Any sustainable solution would entail security cooperation—conspicuous security cooperation—making plain the two states’ reciprocal responsibility for the entire environment. The failure to prevent a terrorist atrocity, which will almost certainly come, must be seen as a joint failure, not one side’s bloody-minded effort to gain advantage over the other.   [...]

We hear much, in this context, about Jewish extremists, the settlers, as much for their encroachments on Israeli democracy as on Palestinian farmers. Many of them see themselves as a messianic vanguard and pour salt on longstanding Palestinian wounds. Grotesquely, they rally much of West Jerusalem to theocracy and treat Arab neighbors with contempt. (There are, as I have argued elsewhere, sound reasons to subject the settlements to an international boycott.) But settlers have also worked to interrupt Palestinian “territorial contiguity,” and so, presumably, to foil independent Palestinian economic prospects (the Likud rank-and-file recently voted to annex much of Area C, the roughly 62 percent of the West Bank where the settlements are, and which, owing to Oslo, was left under exclusive Israeli control). To assume they are succeeding in that mission is to attribute too much power to the settlers. We are no longer living in the period of the 1948-9 war, when about a million people on each side fought for hilltops to control the agricultural land in the valleys.

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The Washington Post: Long, uneasy love affair of Israel and U.S. evangelicals may have peaked

The idea of a Palestinian state conflicts with the belief of some evangelicals that the entire territory — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, including the West Bank — was promised by God to the Jewish people.

And those voices are becoming louder. Evangelical lobbying groups such as Christians United for Israel, advocating views that align more tightly with the Israeli right, now rival the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in their influence on behalf of Israel. While AIPAC backs a two-state solution, CUFI does not.  [...]

Over the past half-century, many American evangelicals came to support Israel through an end-of-days theology. The idea — popularized in the 1970 book “The Late Great Planet Earth,” which later became a movie with Orson Welles, and the Left Behind series, which began in the 1990s — is that the establishment of Israel was part of a preordained divine plan preparing for the return of the Messiah. [...]

A poll released last month by the evangelical firm LifeWay Research asked American evangelicals about their overall perception of Israel. Among people over 65, 76 percent said it was positive, compared with 58 percent among those ages 18 to 34. About 30 percent of the people in the younger group said they were “not sure,” nearly double the figure for the older group.

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Haaretz: The 'Two-state Solution' Only Ever Meant a Big Israel Ruling Over a Palestinian Bantustan. Let It Go

This is a skewered view, to say the least. In fact, every Israeli government since 1967 has failed to live up to those proud liberal values by pursuing an expanded Israel ruling over a truncated Palestinian Bantustan, even if they did it under the guise of a "two-state solution."

Within weeks of the start of the occupation in 1967, the Allon Plan (under Labor prime minister Levi Eshkol) already proposed Israel annexing territory surrounding and isolating the Palestinian population centers. [...]

By Oslo’s end in 2000, there were 400,000 settlers in massive "settlement blocs" that fragmented the Palestinian territory into some 70 tiny enclaves of Areas A and B, plus the prison that is Gaza. Today, the settler population approaches 800,000.

If the two-state solution is gone, it is because of successive "sane" Israelis in government, in particular those of Golda Meir and Ehud Barak, as well as of the Likud, Kadima and the religious right, and the Zionist left, "hard" right, and the always malleable center that put them into office. [...]

But Yoffie is also wrong about how he characterizes what he calls the "hard left's" one-statism. Left groups who acknowledge the death of the two-state solution have not moved to a one-state alternative – at least not yet. Jewish Voice for Peace, which Yoffie demonizes because of its support for BDS, does not actively advocate for such a solution. And the rest of the "hard" left is still wrestling with where to go.

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Haaretz: Abbas Is Right. Why Does Israel Keep Saying He's Wrong?

From Nadav Eyal ("a wacky, despicable speech") to Ben Dror Yemini ("delusional ideology"), they all competed for who will attack Abbas more. Nobody faced up to what he said. After all, he swore at Donald Trump, the champion of refined rhetoric, "may your house be demolished," and the Israelis with their sensitive ears were oh so appalled. And he said colonialism, and the self-victimizing Israelis yelled: "anti-Semitism." Nobody said what was incorrect in his speech and what was anti-Semitic about it. Except perhaps for "the Dutch fleet that brought Jews here," Abbas spoke the truth. It's hard to swallow. Israel chose to shriek. It always does when it has no answers.

Abbas said the Oslo agreement was over. Indeed, what is left of it, some 20 years after the final-status agreement was due to be signed? Israel did everything it could to sabotage it. Every soldier who invades A territories every night and every prisoner left in prison from before the Oslo agreement is a violation of it. [...]

Wasn't he telling the truth when he protested against Trump's deranged argument that the Palestinians foiled the negotiations? A super power that punishes the occupied instead of the occupier – that's an inexplicable matter. Instead of stopping to finance and arm the occupier, the United States is stopping the funds to the rescue organization assisting the occupied party's refugees. It's insane. Abbas responded with restraint. American ambassadors Nikki Haley and David Friedman are indeed friends of the occupier and enemies of international law; how can those two oddballs be described in any other way?

But the main shock happened when Abbas touched the rawest Israeli nerves and classified Zionism as part of the colonial project. What is incorrect here? When a sinking colonial power promises a country it isn't ruling yet to a nation whose absolute majority doesn't live in it, while ignoring the nation that does – what is it if not colonialism? When more than half the country is promised to less than a tenth of its residents, what is it if not a terrible injustice?

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The New York Review of Books: This Land Is Our Land

This British policy represented a victory for the Zionist movement. It made it possible for more Palestinian land to be sold to Zionist Jews. Yet although many offered lucrative sums for the land, not all landowners were tempted to sell. In some places, Najib wrote, landowners were establishing an agricultural school and planting more olive trees to stand against the encroachment. Enough Palestinians refused to sell that the Zionists ended up acquiring little land. The Palestinian writer and educator Khalil Sakakini was an educational inspector under the British Mandate. In his diary he described a trip he took on December 13, 1934:  [...]

The state only began to use this legal ploy in earnest after 1982. Until then, the authorities acquired land for settlement primarily by requisitioning it for military purposes. A smaller percentage of land had been acquired by declaring it absentee land or territory formerly held by the Jordanian government. By 1979, when I cofounded the organization Al-Haq with several other lawyers to bring legal challenges against the Israeli occupation, Israel had gained control of roughly 30 percent of the land in the West Bank. But those acquisitions were for the most part scattered and separated by plots of private land, rendering most of them unsuitable for settlement building. [...]

In his chapter on the colonization of North America and the subjugation of Native Americans, Fields describes how “the law emerged as a crucial instrument in dispossessing Amerindians and transferring their land to colonists.” In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he argues, the English “tended to favor acquisition of Amerindian land through what colonists considered lawful purchase,” although it was invariably the colonists who had the advantage in such transactions. By the early nineteenth century, in contrast, “the law had become an instrument…enabling the transfer of Amerindian land to settlers through forcible seizure.” A crucial moment in this development, for Fields, was Chief Justice John Marshall’s ruling in the 1823 Supreme Court case Johnson v. M’Intosh that “conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny.” In this way, Fields concludes,

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Haaretz: Why I'm Not a Zionist - and Why You're Not, Either

I’m not going to dwell here on the dual ironies of the government claiming Israel is a functioning democracy while denying entry to its critics, and the wailing from those who want to boycott an entire country and visit it at the same time. I’ve scant expectations of either side making any logical or moral sense. But the by-now-standard reaction from the opponents of every latest wheeze by the government still mystifies me. [...]

Their problem is with the latest racist law going through the Knesset, deportation of African asylum-seekers, discrimination against non-Jewish citizens and non-Orthodox Jews, the killing or arrest of a Palestinian teenager in the West Bank, the ongoing iniquities of the occupation and the gradual erosion of Israeli democracy. [...]

Many of those on the left who are now denying they are Zionists would probably approve wholeheartedly of the intellectuals of Brit Shalom who, in the 1920s, called for a bi-national Jewish-Arab state in Mandatory Palestine and accused the rest of the Zionist establishment of perverting Herzl's vision. The enlightened German-born professors who founded both Brit Shalom and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem claimed to be the "true Zionists." [...]

I'm Jewish and Israeli and believe we can fix Israel’s massive problems and injustices, but I’m not a Zionist, in the same way I'm not a Pharisee, a Roundhead or an Abolitionist. I may have been had I lived in the relevant period in history, but I can't belong to, or leave, a movement whose purpose ended long before I was born. 

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Haaretz: What the 'One-state Solution' Really Means: Israeli-sanctioned Apartheid or Eternal, Bloody Civil War

The Likud Central Committee and the Jewish Voice for Peace have joined the same team, along with other extremist forces on the right and the left. Both are intent on establishing a bi-national state in place of the Jewish state of Israel. Both are committed to a one-state solution that will put an end to Israel as a Jewish and democratic commonwealth. Both constitute a mortal danger to mainstream Zionism. [...]

Contrary to widespread press reports, the awkwardly worded resolution adopted that evening did not actually call for the formal annexation of territories. Its intention was to encourage the application of Israeli law in the West Bank to Jews - and Jews alone.

In fact, this is already the case; but the current legal situation is temporary, at least in theory, and is dependent on the approval of the military governor of the territories, who has ultimate legal authority. But if the resolution were to be passed into law, as Likud now demands, the legal discrimination would become official Israeli policy. [...]

And if adopted by the Knesset, the decision would put in place some form of apartheid - a word that most of us in the mainstream Jewish community have carefully avoided until now. But since the Likud resolution intends to apply two different sets of legal rules to different populations occupying the same territory, there is simply no word other than "apartheid" that fits.

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The New York Review of Books: Bulldozing the Peace Process in Israel

So far, there is nothing new in this unhappy litany. But in the last few weeks, we have seen a dramatic deterioration at a local level. What is now happening is not a series of isolated demolitions, but an effort to eradicate entire communities. At Ein Hilweh and Umm Jamal in the northern Jordan Valley, Palestinian shepherds were notified by leaflets left nonchalantly by the side of the road that their villages were about to be evacuated entirely. Hundreds will be left homeless. On December 4, the State Attorney’s office announced in a statement to the High Court of Justice that 40 percent of the village of Susya, in the south Hebron hills, is to be destroyed. Susya has already withstood repeated campaigns of demolition, but this one will cripple the village, perhaps irreversibly. Among the structures to be demolished is the village school. [...]

What has brought about this move toward mass demolitions and dispossession of Palestinian communities in Jerusalem and the occupied territories? Simply put: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers think they can now get away with a campaign of slow ethnic cleansing. When Netanyahu claims, as he did recently, that Israel’s situation has never been better, he means, in part, that in his own mind he has smashed the Palestinian national movement once and for all. I have no doubt that this has been his goal all along. Indeed, Palestinians in the occupied territories are worn out, demoralized, fenced into small discontinuous enclaves where they lack basic human rights, where their land and other property may be appropriated at any moment, and where they may be arrested and incarcerated at the army’s whim. They are, by now, largely paralyzed by despair. Trump’s announcement may galvanize them back into action; we shall see. [...]

Of all Israeli illusions, the two most serious are, first, the idea that Israel can, by sheer military force, put an end to the national aspirations of millions of Palestinian people, and, second, that the conflict between Jews and Palestinians in the Holy Land is a zero-sum game, which only one side can win. The obvious truth is the opposite. Either the two sides fall together into some inescapable hell of their own contriving, or they will find a way to flourish together in some political system or another—two states, a single bi-national state, or a confederation that allows each side its own autonomy and security. In any such scheme, West Jerusalem will be the capital of Israel and East Jerusalem, however it is configured, will be the Palestinian capital. It would have been helpful if Trump had said something like that, instead of capitulating to the Netanyahu vision of brutal domination.

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Haaretz: Israel's Minister of Truth

If in 1975, Chaim Herzog dramatically tore up a copy of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, equating Zionism with racism, the justice minister has now admitted the truthfulness of the resolution (which was later revoked). Shaked said, loud and clear: Zionism contradicts human rights, and thus is indeed an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps even racist movement, as proponents of justice worldwide maintain.

Shaked prefers Zionism to human rights, the ultimate universal justice. She believes that we have a different kind of justice, superior to universal justice. Zionism above all. It’s been said before, in other languages and other nationalist movements. [...]

Thus Shaked believes, as do so many around the world, that Israel is built on foundations of injustice and therefore must be defended from the hostile talk of justice. How else can the repulsion to discussing rights be explained? Individual rights are important, she said, but not when they are disconnected from “the Zionist challenges.” Right again: The Zionist challenges indeed stand in contradiction to human rights. [...]

Zionism is Israel’s fundamentalist religion, and as in any religion, its denial is prohibited. In Israel, “non-Zionist” or “anti-Zionist” aren’t insults, they are social expulsion orders. There’s nothing like it in any free society. But now that Shaked has exposed Zionism, put her hand to the flame and admitted the truth, we can finally think about Zionism more freely. We can admit that the Jews’ right to a state contradicted the Palestinians’ right to their land, and that righteous Zionism gave birth to a terrible national wrong that has never been righted; that there are ways to resolve and atone for this contradiction, but the Zionist Israelis won’t agree to them.

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Haaretz: Secular Residents Have Already Lost the Battle for Jerusalem

Today when residents say Barkat has divided Jerusalem, they mean that he has recently divided it into neighborhoods based on the identity of their residents: He has declared some of the neighborhoods Haredi, that is, ultra-Orthodox, and others pluralistic – meaning they’re intended for secular Jewish folk and adherents of religious Zionism.

Not that Barkat has forbidden secular people to live in Bayit Vegan or Ramot. He is simply allocating school buildings in those neighborhoods that until now had been part of the state-religious education system to the Haredim, and transferring students from national-religious families to schools in neighborhoods that under his plan are slated to remain “pluralistic,” where secular and national-religious citizens live in harmony. Because members of the secular and national-religious communities are capable of living together, whereas living with Haredim is a different matter.

For Haredim, coexistence actually means forcing the other side to adopt their way of life. It’s never a case of ultra-Orthodox allowing people who aren’t part of their community to go on pursuing their life as usual. The few secular people who still live in the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood (which on Barkat’s map is intended to be Haredi, although when it was built, after 1967, was anticipated to be a totally secular area) have already become habituated to shutting off their radios and televisions on Shabbat, and getting around on foot and not by car. Their behavior isn’t motivated by consideration for beliefs they don’t hold. The motivation is fear. Because spitting, cursing and stone throwing are not considered desecration of the Sabbath.

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Haaretz: For Israel's Jews and Arabs to Truly Coexist, This Is What Needs to Happen

Budgetary equality is an essential condition for the creation of a better reality. The Arab citizens and their leadership, together with Jewish partners and civil-society organizations – such as Sikkuy: The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality, of which I am the co-director, together with Rawnak Natour – have for years waged a persistent struggle against budgetary discrimination. That struggle is not yet over, but the data show that even alongside the government’s discriminatory policy, and even in the shadow of the political attacks on and the inflammatory rhetoric used against Arab citizens – the effort to achieve material equality has scored considerable successes in recent decades. There’s been a slow, consistent process of narrowing the material disparities between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens. That’s good news, and if we wish to promote true equality, it’s better not to deny it. The road to equality is difficult and complicated, but with regard to material resources – budgets and land – it’s relatively easy to define what equality is. [...]

For Jews and Arabs to see this place as a joint homeland and to promote a shared society, a few things need to happen. First, increasing representations of a shared society and joint spaces must be created. Second, education for shared society and the teaching of both languages must be a significant part of the Hebrew and Arab educational systems, from kindergarten through high school. This is more important than mathematics, and it’s worth moving quickly in order to take advantage of the fact that Arabic is the mother tongue – or the mother tongue of one of the parents – of the majority of Israel’s citizens.

Third, the Arab citizens must become part of the decision-making process in Israel, including in the government. And fourth, it is impossible to advance a shared society while the occupation of the Palestinian people in the territories continues. A society in which the majority operates a military regime against members of the minority cannot be a shared society. [...]

But we must also not flinch from acknowledging the harsh truths: namely, that the primary challenge is to advance an equal, shared society amid a reality of inequality and discrimination in almost every sphere; the exclusion of Arab citizens; continuing governmental incitement against them; a deep dispute over how the state is to be defined; and the strengthening of the anti-Palestinian Jewish extreme right wing and of voices in the Arab community that oppose Arab-Jewish partnership. And then there’s the elephant in the room: the solid, stable Jewish majority that is unwilling to forgo prioritized national rights for Jews – in symbols, in the definition of the state and in immigration rights.

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Haaretz: 'Judaism Is Not a Murderous Religion': The Israeli Group That Stands Up to Jewish Terrorism

Acts of terror perpetrated by Jews. Jewish terrorism, in short. Uprooting of olive trees, torching of houses of worship, spraying graffiti on houses of worship. The latter is something that people tend to downplay, but in the eyes of believers, graffiti that curses the prophet Muhammad or Jesus is as bad as arson. There’s terrorism that also exacts a price in human life, such as the Dawabsheh family [three of whose members died in the firebombing of their home, in the West Bank village of Duma, in 2015] or the youngster Mohammed Abu Khdeir [the Palestinian teen who was kidnapped and murdered in Jerusalem in 2014], and many more victims. For example, the Palestinian family that was traveling in a taxi at which Molotov cocktails were thrown, near Beit Ayin [a West Bank settlement, in 2012] – a whole family that was simply set ablaze. [...]

We coordinate with the people at the site, be it a rabbi or the head of a monastery or an imam. We inform people about the incident on the social networks so that they will come to the site. For example, 400 people showed up after the monastery at Latrun was torched [in 2012]. It’s very important to be there. It not only prevents acts of revenge, it also demonstrates humanity and solidarity. [...]

Great shame. Grief. A desire to atone. By the way, we continue to visit the Abu Khdeir family. Last Hanukkah we went there with 20 students. We ate holiday doughnuts from Jerusalem together and oranges from Jericho in the memorial room for Mohammed. Our motto is that it makes no difference what the political solution ends up being, Jews and Arabs in the State of Israel are going to live here together, whether there will be one parliament or four parliaments. This is a reality we all need to internalize, Jews and Arabs, and the faster that happens, the fewer victims there will be. [...]

As a religiously observant Jew who was raised in the religious-Zionist movement, whose family has lived in Jerusalem for eight generations, I am not willing to accept these people who have gone out in the dark of night, wearing kippot, and who in the name of Judaism decided to enter a mosque or assassinate a prime minister. They are turning Judaism, of which I am an integral part, into something different and frightening. Judaism is not a murderous religion, and I am anxious for my country, which is at risk of being taken over by zealous, benighted people. I am talking about the extreme right, not the entire right wing. I am talking about the people who settle in Judea and Samaria, who believe that they are truly fulfilling a holy mission, that we are in a process of redemption in the Land of Israel, the Promised Land.

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openDemocracy: The vertical apartheid

Indeed, on its fiftieth anniversary, the Israeli occupation seems to be in excellent form. Though the Gaza settlements have been removed, those in the West Bank and East Jerusalem prosper, and settler numbers have been growing at a rate of 15,000 people annually.[2] The domination of more than four million Palestinians has stopped being an economic burden and proven to be profitable. The people under occupation are a captive market (literally) for many surplus Israeli manufactured goods. Private industries, including international companies working in the Jewish settlements, prosper thanks to tax breaks, low rents, government subsidies, and a Palestinian labour force that is rendered cheap and flexible because it enjoys no civil or labour rights.[3] Israel’s international exports – many of them military and marketed as ‘road tested in action’ (on the Palestinians, that is) – are also steadily growing as more nations, including the United States and European states, adopt Israel-like xenophobic politics towards minorities, refugees, and migrants (especially Muslim ones).[4]

Within the Israeli political system there is currently no serious opposition to the settlement project. International diplomacy is largely inconsequential and there is no ‘peace process’ to threaten the settlements’ further expansion. Representatives of the settler movement hold power in all major governmental offices, running not only the occupation, but also the business of the state. International diplomacy is largely inconsequential and there is no ‘peace process’ to threaten the settlements’ further expansion. [...]

Separation, in space and by law, is the most fundamental component of Israel’s system of colonization.[7] Even when settlers, Palestinians, and soldiers are brought together in the same incident, at the very same place, each group is still bound by different laws. The applicable law for the settlers is the Israeli civil law, by which settlers enjoy full Israeli civil rights including the right to vote. The reality for Palestinians is a military dictatorship in which civil and human rights rarely apply.[8] In military courts, where Palestinians are tried, the conviction rates for alleged violence against settlers or occupation forces are 99.74 per cent.[9] [...]

Israeli domination of Palestinians is not confined to the spaces occupied in 1967. In its early decades, Israel’s rule in the occupied territories used techniques of domination that were well-honed on those Palestinians who survived and remained in place during the expulsions of 1948. In recent decades, techniques of domination, land grab and separation, more intensely exercised in the 1967 occupied areas, inspired the further separation of Jews and Arabs within Israel itself. The occupation can thus not be thought of as an aberration of Israeli democracy, a ‘cancerous tumour’ that can be removed by dissecting more or less along the internationally recognized Green Line of 1949, as left-liberal apologists of Zionism propose. Rather, it is a local manifestation of Israel’s regime of domination and separation that extends, in different forms, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. [...]

A Jewish-only road network, the ‘apartheid roads’ started connecting the hilltop settlements with bridges that span over Palestinian fields and with tunnels that burrow underneath Palestinian towns. This type of infrastructure has in recent decades been greatly extended and currently comprises a full third of the total length of roadways in the West Bank.[13] In the last decade, as armed confrontations in the West Bank subsided, some military checkpoints were removed, allowing Palestinians freer movement between their villages and towns. But this movement was undertaken on a separate and tattered road network that, whenever crossing the Jewish network of highways, bows and bores underneath them. While the Jewish road network leads everywhere to Israel, the Palestinian road network is truncated on all sides by walls, checkpoints, and military zones.

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The Atlantic: The Six-Day War Was a Step Backward for Zionism

The stunning defeat of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and the sudden expansion of the territory under Israel’s control was ironically a step backward for Zionism, and it has struggled ever since to reconcile its core philosophy with the set of circumstances that has reigned for the past half century. The 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War is an opportunity not only to examine Israel’s past and future trajectory, but also to refashion a more pragmatic Zionism for the next 50 years. [...]

This was certainly not the fulfillment of Herzl’s utopian vision, laid out in Altneuland, of a prosperous country and harmonious society. But it was the fulfillment of the Zionist essence: Jewish self-determination in the Jewish homeland. That the boundaries of the state in that homeland were limited and that the state was beset by true existential threats presented daily problems for Israel’s governance, but they did not present a threat to Zionism itself. Zionism had become a quest not for the perfect but for the possible, and it was this pragmatism and focus on a single core idea that made Zionism the rare 20th-century ideology that actually delivered on its promise and survived the crucible of wars, upheavals, and Cold War struggles. [...]

The Zionism that envisions complete Jewish sovereignty between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea does not account for the complication of approximately 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians living in a state of limbo while their own legitimate national aspirations go unfulfilled. It does not account for Israel’s isolation within its own region and its increasingly difficult relationships with democratic European allies. It does not account for the security, economic, and ethical strains that controlling the West Bank places upon the Israeli state and society. [...]

The 50th anniversary of Israel’s greatest victory and the apparent realization of Zionism’s greatest desires can be a time for Zionism’s renewal, which means a more pragmatic and realistic ideology that marries ambition with advisability. Governing and statecraft almost always involve tradeoffs, and that means rejecting the 1967 myth that Israel and Zionism can have everything they want, and embracing the truth that Israel and Zionism have to live within their means. Otherwise, one of the most successful political ideologies of the modern age will find itself unnecessarily struggling to maintain its viability.

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