Confessions of a reforming cynic

I’ve got a confession to make. This isn’t easy for me to say, and it may change the way some of you think about me. I hope you understand, and once you get over the initial surprise, that you choose to accept me regardless. So here goes:

I… like… New Year’s resolutions.

I don’t just like New Year’s resolutions, I actively think about them. I make them. And just like everybody else, I then fail to stick to them. Usually by the end of January it’s coming into and out of my mind intermittently, and by some point in February it’s gone, placed on a dusty shelf in my mind until the year ends.  I’ve come to the conclusion that part of the problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they’re often so vague. For example: I want to get in shape. What shape, will any shape do? Or: I want to be a better person. Better than who/what? Better in what way? You see the problem?

Last year I fell into that trap. My resolution was to change my often cynical, sarcastic and pessimistic attitude to life. That cynicism is why I figured you’d be surprised to hear that I make New Year’s resolutions. I don’t seem like the kind of person that would. Without concrete goals though, that resolution is almost impossible to define, and therefore to achieve.

I did make some progress. I learned to give compliments and positive feedback, and that didn’t come naturally. I’ve developed a taste for upbeat pop music, and that’s good.  My biggest change though was to switch my degree at university from one that deals almost entirely with the negative, to one that, to my mind at least, deals with a lot more of the positive.

I always partly doubted whether I wanted to study politics at university, I just couldn’t think of anything else I might want to study instead. That started to change during my time in Siena last year. During the year, two friends from separate places asked me, unprovoked, why I wasn’t studying languages, why politics? I had no good answer to give them, and the idea stayed with me, somewhere at the back of my mind, on the dusty shelf alongside past New Year’s resolutions. But I didn’t act on it because I already had a place at university to study politics. In my mind I wanted to keep correcting imbalances, I wanted to be the advocate for peace, equality, justice, and for Israel.

It took me only one International Relations lecture to realise I couldn’t be that person. It was the first class of the first year, the very basis of the beginning of our first steps in international relations. The lecturer stood in front of 250 of us and gave us an hour long spiel about how the US was a colonial, aggressive, imperialist power. At one point he mentioned Israel/Palestine, and promised “we’ll get to that a bit later on.” I didn’t stick around. Within three days I was attending language classes in German and Italian, learning about new cultures, people, food, and languages in a positive way.

The truth is that talking about politics, especially in our region, thinking about it, reading about it, just drives my blood pressure right up. The number of people I’m willing to talk Middle Eastern politics with these days is very low, I could count them on one hand, and I’d probably still have a few fingers left over. I don’t want to be one of those people who is willing only to talk, and not to listen. Nor do I want to be one of those pointing fingers. There are enough people doing that already. Enough people who think that if they just shout “Arabs are terrorists!” “Israel is an apartheid state!” “Palestinians don’t want peace!” “Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing!” “The Arabs want to drive us all into the sea!” “Boycott Israel!” often and loudly enough, that’ll make them right, and once they’ll be proven right, everything will somehow work itself out.

I can’t stop people doing that. But I can stop being part of it. There are so many positives to focus on. Instead of giving airtime to BDS racists and settler extremists, I could sate my love of writing and making people laugh in a more positive way.

I watched an interview with Adam Hills (@adamhillscomedy), a comedian with a well-known “nice guy” image, where he talked about realising while performing that telling negative jokes, picking on members of the audience, the things that every comedian does, were having a negative impact. He decided mid show to change his approach, and later went back to his jokes and changed them from things such as “I hate Americans because…” to “I love Americans because…” and realised that the jokes worked just as well. He discovered that the show was equally funny, only now when people left at the end of the show, they were not only laughing, they were also smiling. So that’s what I want to do with this blog. Not stop trying to be funny or sarcastic, but just try to be funny in a more positive way about more positive things. I’m going to change the blog from political issues to anything else. The funny side of learning languages (and there are plenty of them), my love of travelling and seeing new places, adjusting to university as a mature student. There’s no shortage of interesting topics to discuss, so stick around, it should be a blast.

I wish you all a wonderful 2014,

Sahar

A Bad Time to BDS

Spare a thought for the anti-Israel “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. It’s had a rough couple of weeks.

It all started with Roger Waters, Pink Floyd frontman, in late July of this year. For the last few months, a controversy has been raging as to whether Waters, one of the cultural leaders of BDS, is anti-Semitic or not. The point of contention was a giant inflatable pig that Waters used in his tour, and which had printed on it various symbols of capitalism, dictatorial regimes and the like. One of these symbols was the Jewish Star of David. This, coupled with the symbolism of the pig, considered an “unclean” animal in Judaism, was enough to get people wondering. To deflect criticism, Waters added a Crucifix and a Star and Crescent to the pig as well, in a somewhat warped gesture of “goodwill”. At the time, Abe Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, defended Waters, saying of the show “It’s artistic exuberance and crossing the lines of whatever, but he’s not an anti-Semite.”

Fast forward six months, and Waters has managed to change that perception of himself in an interview with the American CounterPunch magazine. In it, he referred to a shadowy “extremely powerful” Jewish lobby controlling America, a standard anti-Semitic trope (for those interested in further reading, this article by Michael Koplow (@mkoplow) is a great rebuttal of this argument). He then went on to accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and rolled out another popular anti-Semitic line, that of Israel being equivalent to Nazi Germany, and Israel committing acts equivalent to those of the Nazi regime. He gave his source of information as a book by an author whose name I won’t repeat here. Suffice to say that the book has been almost entirely ignored in the media as extremely shoddy and biased journalism, and so it should remain. Waters’ comments have come in for praise from notorious Holocaust-denying anti-Semite and fellow BDS supporter David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan. And Abe Foxman? He has reluctantly had to change his view, telling the Times of Israel: “Roger Waters has absorbed classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and these have now seeped into the totality of his views.”

It got worse for the BDS movement though. The central claim for the movement, and the reason for its existence, is its claim to be backed by the Palestinian people, a statement which is almost impossible to qualify. The President of Al-Quds University, the second biggest in the West Bank, and a leading Palestinian intellectual, Dr Sari Nusseibeh, said in response to a British academic boycott in 2005: “Our position is based upon the belief that it is through cooperation based on mutual respect, rather than boycotts or discrimination, that our common goals can be achieved.” Last week at the funeral of Nelson Mandela, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas added his voice to Nusseibeh’s, telling the South African “Star” newspaper: “we do not ask anyone to boycott Israel itself… we have relations with Israel, we have mutual recognition of Israel.”

The BDS movement was cheered though by news of a vote in favour of boycotting Israel by the American Studies Association of the USA. The motion was carried by 800 members of the 3800 members of the organisation, a whopping vote of support of around 20%. In the days following the vote, two American universities, Penn State Harrisburg and Brandeis, quit the organisation. What made this particularly tragic was the quote given afterwards by the President of the ASA, Curtis Marez, on the reasoning behind the vote. His response? “One has to start somewhere”. As already pointed out in another blog on the subject, this is Nelson Muntz style logic:

The next anticipated battleground for the BDS movement is the American Modern Languages Association (MLA), and its shaping up to be a classic peek into the workings of the  BDS movement. The MLA will be “debating” whether to support BDS or not next month, but for those who can’t wait until then to find out the results of that debate, here’s how it ends.

Nelson Mandela

There are a few posts I want to write, and hopefully I’ll get round to writing them over the next few weeks. One of those will be my grandfathers story as promised, I’m working on translating the materials and stories I have of him, as soon as that is done I will post it. Its been a busy period and I haven’t had much of an opportunity to post, despite the many important stories that have taken place recently.

I did want to write a short post on the recent death of Nelson Mandela, as an antidote to all the editorials, opinion pieces, analyses, commentaries and reports that I was hoping I wouldn’t see, but inevitably knew I would. These pieces, by “experts” from every walk of life, more often than not dealing with his views on the Middle East and “whose side” he was on, miss the point of Mandela’s life and his work spectacularly.

Mandela was a man who despite the struggles he faced and the apartheid regime he lived under, overcame everything to become a symbol of a united South Africa for all its citizens. When you talk about great statesmen and great people, there are probably none better than Mandela. His ability to empathise, forgive, and bring people together was unrivalled. We should all do our best to hang on to those memories of him and that image of him, and to combat all the political points-scorers on every side of the spectrum who are attempting to hijack his legacy for their own political means. It doesn’t take much research to find articles already springing up discussing whether Mandela was a friend of the Palestinians or the Israelis, whether he considered Israel an apartheid state (largely on the basis of a letter he was supposed to have written but which was later proven to be a fake), who his close friends were and what that said about his own views etc…

It was inevitable that journalists would attempt to extract meaning from every quote and speech of his, especially because during his later life he was so careful not to openly take sides. Now that he no longer has the ability to respond, the hijacking of his memory has already begun. Far from maintaining it, this does irreparable damage to his legacy. Instead of allowing him to remain a symbol of the best of humanity, he is being dragged into the mud of political arguments he largely avoided. The truth of it is that he supported both the existence of a Jewish state in Israel, and the establishment of a free and democratic Palestinian state, being one of the very few men in the world capable of being simultaneously a Zionist and a Palestinian nationalist. Instead of making that co-existence and desire for peace his legacy, his memory is in danger of becoming yet another battleground in a region that already has far too many.

In Memory

I confess that when my parents sent me a message telling me that granddad had been taken to hospital, I wasn’t overly worried. The truth was that he’d been afraid of dying for the past few years, and he’d always felt that doctors would be able to keep him alive indefinitely. Every twitch in the knee felt like the first stage of paralysis, every cough became an incurable disease. The standard response to the question “how are you?” was “it could be better, its not easy being old.” That dialogue always ended the same way, with me replying “but could it also be worse?” and him not replying, just laughing what seemed to be an almost guilty laugh, as if I’d got him there, and yes, things could probably be worse.

Jewish tradition doesn’t leave much time for letting things sink in. 10 hours after my parents called me to tell me that he’d passed away, I was already back in Israel. Funerals take place almost immediately, usually within 24 hours. There’s very little time to think, to react, or to understand.

Family, friends and his care-givers from his last few years all gathered at the cemetery that same afternoon to send him off. In the Jewish burial custom there is no coffin, merely a sheet that covers the deceased and separates them from those standing around them. As we led his body on his final journey, my brother and I, pulling the trolley with him on it from in front, both felt it digging into the gravel path, making the journey more difficult. It felt like he’d understood where he was going, and was resisting it as he’d resisted it his whole life, telling us that he wasn’t ready to go yet.

If the funeral is for the deceased, then the Shiva, the week long period of mourning following the funeral, is for those they left behind. It’s one of the most important Jewish traditions, not only from a religious point of view but also a psychological one. It’s a time for the family to come together in one place, for guests and friends to visit and pay their respects, to share stories and anecdotes and to look after the mourners. The saddest part of the situation is that sitting surrounded by family all day, all I can think about is how much granddad would have loved to have been here with us.

After the war he was left almost completely alone, his only living relation a cousin who died soon after. A short time after he arrived in Israel, he met Yaffa, who was to become his wife of over 50 years until her passing six years ago aged 89. As they grew older together, their family grew with them: Three children, who between them had 10 grandchildren, of whom I am the youngest, and then 20 great-grandchildren, the most recent of whom was born just over three months ago.

He used to say that we were his ultimate victory over the Nazi murderers: a large, happy and healthy family, with him and grandma at the head of it. We were his pride and joy, and our family milestones were what kept him going. From Brit to Bar-Mitzvah and from birthday to wedding, he was never happier than when he was taking part in another family celebration.

In the spirit of my blog, where I write that it is possible to be both Zionist and left-wing, I will be dedicating the next few posts to telling his story. He is the embodiment of that spirit, an ardent socialist who loved his country unconditionally; and dedicated his life to serving and improving it. He always pushed us to be the same, to be active and never apathetic, to work for others, and to stand up for what we believe to be right. His memory will always stay with me, as will everything he taught me.

Rest in peace Granddad, we all miss you down here. 
ת.נ.צ.ב.ה

A Chemical Reaction

It’s the world’s most prestigious award, given annually to the individual or group who has done the most in their field to promote education, welfare, security and peace. Past winners have included diplomats, world leaders, businessmen, lawyers, and activists of all kinds and from all over the globe. The award is perhaps at its best when being awarded to those whose work sometimes goes under the radar, such as 2008’s winner, former Finnish President and conflict negotiator Martti Ahtisaari, or Chinese democracy activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010. It brings global attention to their cause and to their achievements, and applauds the real, visible progress they’ve made in a field to which they have dedicated a large part of their life.

Every so often however, the award goes to someone whose drive towards peace and progress is in words alone, and has shown little or no concrete results. Yasser Arafat, awarded it in 1994 alongside current Israeli President Shimon Peres and former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for reaching the Oslo Accords, is a prime example of this. While Rabin and Peres were both heavily involved in bringing Israel to peace with Jordan, Arafat was awarded it alongside them solely for signing a deal which never got very far. Similarly Barack Obama (and I am in no way claiming that Obama is ideologically or politically similar to Arafat, he isn’t) was awarded it in 2008 for getting people to believe him that he was going to make the world a better place, not for actually doing anything to advance that cause. Five years later and I can’t imagine Obama would be seen as a viable candidate today. Like a very poor negotiator, the prize is often awarded before the results are visible and tangible.

And then occasionally the award goes even further, and the committee throw a complete curveball that has people wondering whether they’re all just having a bit of a laugh and pulling names out of a hat. The favourite for this year’s award was Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani girl who was the target of an assassination attempt by Taliban militants last year for the crime of standing up for womens rights, specifically in the field of education. Since writing a blog under a pseudonym for the BBC at the age of 11, detailing life in the Taliban-controlled Swat Valley, she has become a global icon. Her case led to the passing of the first Right to Education Bill in Pakistan, and her continued activism has massively increased awareness and pressure to act on the problems facing women and children in the developing world. Her refusal to be silenced despite the assassination attempt is inspirational.

Malala did not win the award. Instead it went to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). In a year where, if anything, we’ve seen just how common chemical weapons are in global arsenals, with many nations possessing some form of chemical stockpile, the OPCW has emerged as a baffling winner. According to the New York Times:

“The organization is supposed to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1997 with four aims: to seek the destruction of all chemical weapons under international verification; to prevent the creation of new chemical weapons; to help countries protect themselves against chemical attack; and to foster international cooperation in the peaceful use of chemistry.”

With that in mind, they have failed (or at least not yet succeeded) on three of those four counts, and fostering international cooperation in the peaceful use of chemistry alone is hardly a reason to be awarding a Nobel Prize. What’s more, even if they had succeeded in all four of these goals, they’d be doing the job they were originally set up to do, nothing more, in contrast to Malala.

In a bid to clarify, the Nobel Prize Committee released this tweet earlier through their account @Nobelprize_org, saying: “OPCW has NOT been given the #NobelPeacePrize because of Syria but because of its long standing work.” So now we’re supposed to leave Syrian atrocities aside as an anomaly, a small, unimportant blip which shouldn’t affect our opinion of the OPCW and the sterling work they’ve been doing. If not for its work on removing a part (not yet even all) of Syria’s chemical stockpile, then why this year? Why not wait for a year in which use of chemical weapons against civilians is not one of the main stories?

On a separate note, it would be remiss of me, focusing as I do on Israel in this blog, not to congratulate Israelis Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel on winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry this year alongside Martin Karplus. In a week where the controversy over comments made by Finance Minister Yair Lapid still rages (he said he was “impatient” with Jews who chose to emigrate from Israel “simply because Berlin is more comfortable”), it is perhaps just as well that Lapid’s Facebook page remains quiet on the achievement by Professors Levitt and Warshel, both of whom live and work in the USA. As someone who is proud to be an Israeli living abroad, I congratulate them wholeheartedly on becoming the 11^th and 12^th Israeli Nobel Laureates, and among 6 Israelis to have won the prize in the field of Chemistry in the last decade.

A Toast to Airport Security Done Well!

I propose a toast, on this rare occasion when I am prepared to give credit to public transport for a job well done. Over the past month I’ve flown from both Heathrow and Tel Aviv, and the difference between their security was massive.

At Heathrow security I had to take off my belt, shoes and watch, leaving me holding my trousers up with one hand and waddling through the metal detector. I also had to separate the liquids (100ml aftershave) as well as laptop and kindle from my bag, and throw away my shaving foam that I’d accidentally brought with me for the cardinal sin of being more than 100ml.

In Tel Aviv, by comparison, the security people had no interest in stripping me of any items of clothing, nor in tearing me apart from my bottle of water. I simply came in, put laptop and bag through the scanner, and continued on my way. Yet at no point did I feel less safe wandering around Ben Gurion Airport; and here’s why:

In England, they were so busy taking away my shaving foam, that they completely forgot to take away the shaving razor which was right next to it. Not only that, while I was unloading my pockets into the tray, I discovered I’d accidentally brought my penknife with me. Rather than just give it up, which I knew would mean it being taken away from me, I decided to take the chance. I put it on the tray with my wallet, phone and keys (its bright red, and had the Victorinox logo facing up!), and waited to see what would happen. Sure enough, it rolled straight through the scanner, with the person supposed to be monitoring it mentally AWOL.

So now you know, if you do want to smuggle a weapon onto a plane, don’t hide it, send it straight on proudly through security. As long as you’re at Heathrow and it doesn’t look like shaving foam, you should be fine!

Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, is the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. It is the final day of the period known as “Yamin Nora’im” or “Days of Awe”. This period begins with Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and is when God is said to decide everyone’s fate for the coming year. For religious Jews, the period in whole is one of reflection and prayer, asking for forgiveness from both fellow man and God. I, as most of you are probably aware, am not a religious Jew. I’m not even nearly religious. I don’t eat pork or seafood, and I had a barmitzvah and there, more or less, ends my religious affiliation with Judaism. That, and I fast on Yom Kippur, almost alone among my close circle of friends to do so.

Every year the same debate starts up with my friends, namely “you don’t believe in God, you never go to Synagogue, you’re not religious, so why bother fasting on Yom Kippur?”

The answer is partly that its not uncommon among Jews who live outside of Israel to be more observant than they might otherwise be within Israel, and I’m no exception. When I lived in Siena, the Synagogue was a natural first port of call, an instant-solution community to belong to. For University next year, without knowing any of the societies I’ll be joining, the only (almost) certainty will be the Jewish Society.

None of this has a religious reason. I’m not looking for prayers and religious teachings, or searching for a deeper meaning. Being Jewish, especially outside of Israel, means always having a community to belong to. That same reason is why I fast on Yom Kippur. Here in Israel, Yom Kippur is a quiet day, unimaginable and unrivalled in the rest of the world. Try to imagine your country shutting down for one day a year. No TV broadcasts, no radio stations, no cars on the road, just complete silence. Its one day a year to put aside my phone and my laptop, shut down communication, and spend a quiet day at home with my family and friends, no distractions.

My other answer to my friends is that even within Israel, Yom Kippur is one of the most widely-practiced holidays. Jewish news website ynet estimate that 73% of Jewish Israelis, including almost half of those who identify as secular, will be fasting this year. On the eve of Yom Kippur, synagogues around the country report a surge in visitor numbers. More than any other Jewish holy day, it brings us closer together and allows us a day of calm and reflection.

This year is also the 40th Anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, one of the deepest scars in Israel’s history. On this holiest of days in 1973, Israel’s enemies launched an assault on Israel, knowing that the government would have difficulty communicating with its citizens due to the lack of broadcasts, and that the holiness of the day would cause delay in an Israeli response. My father was on duty along the Suez Canal when the assault began, where hundreds lost their lives, and his generation was the one that suffered the most. We pause to honour the 2,656 Israeli soldiers who gave up their lives in that conflict, and the estimated 9,000 wounded.

As I’ve already mentioned, Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement. It is the day when we ask for forgiveness not only from God, but from those around us. Its a moment to stop and ask forgiveness for any actions in the past year that might have hurt or offended, and to pray that next year might be better than the one just gone. In that spirit, I too ask for forgiveness if I’ve offended, and wish everyone a very happy new year.

Prisoners of No Conscience

So it has begun… again. Not for the first time in Israel’s history, not even for the first time this decade, Israel has released Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. With 26 released last night, and a maximum of 78 more over the next nine months, in terms of numbers, it barely registers. It certainly doesn’t even come close to the over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners released in exchange for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit two years ago. Rather it is the nature of these prisoners, and the circumstances under which they are being released which should be of concern.

The main problem with this prisoner release is not the release itself. In exchange for a peace deal and security, I’d chauffeur each of them into the West Bank personally; let them become the problem of the Palestinian state. In 2011, in exchange for those 1000 prisoners, we got kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit home. Israel held true to one of its base principals; that no soldier will be left behind in enemy hands. And that came at a very high price, but Israel paid it. This time, it’s given Israel nothing. The whole sordid process so far reflects very badly on both the priorities and leadership qualities of Abbas and Netanyahu.

One thing came through consistently in Netanyahu’s open letter to the Israeli public in the wake of the news of the prisoner release (that in itself a shockingly cowardly way to address the nation). That was Netanyahu’s fear of his own Likud party’s right wing, and even more, his fear of coalition partner Naftali Bennett and his far-right Jewish Home party. “Incomparably difficult decisions” would have to be made, “painful” concessions delivered. Fear not however, the Prime Minister assured us, for he had drawn very clear red lines. “Even with all of the importance” of ending the conflict through diplomacy, when the time came to withdraw from existing settlements and freeze existing ones, he had put his foot firmly down. Not a single settlement would be pulled down, not a single expansion plan shelved. “Please, please don’t leave me” he seemed to be saying to Bennett, “I can be good for you, I promise. I’ll even give you in writing that referendum you asked for.”

So now we know, justice is very important to him, that murderers pay for their crimes is paramount, but not as paramount as saving his right-wing credentials by continuing to build in illegal settlements. Of the three preconditions Abbas set, ’67 borders as a basis for negotiations, a complete and public settlement freeze, and the release of prisoners, Netanyahu could only stomach the prisoner release.

His response since then has been that of a child. He has announced plans for over 2000 new units in the settlements (presumably to placate Bennett), and has written another letter, this time to Secretary of State Kerry, complaining about how the mean old Palestinians are saying horrible things about us. That came in response to a letter from the Palestinians saying that the nasty old Israelis are doing horrible things to them, like two schoolyard children complaining to the teacher about how “he started it, make him stop!”

And what of Abbas? Like Prime Minister Jim Hacker in political satire Yes, Prime Minister, he seems to have adopted the position that “I am the peoples leader, I must follow them.” The issue of the prisoners is seen as central to the Palestinian public, but in practical terms, it is hardly the one that gives them the greatest benefit (or indeed any benefit at all). Instead, Abbas could have demanded, for example, removal of certain checkpoints, removal of hilltop settlements that sit on Palestinian land, or assurances over PA tax money, to give but three examples. Less showy and populist, but to a true statesman that isn’t the measure of success. Abbas has proven himself to be no statesman, he is seemingly more interested in photo-ops and sound-bites than real progress.

Last night, when the prisoners crossed into the West Bank, Abbas met them personally and praised them as heroes. In the UK, the BBC today ran with a picture of Abbas with an arm around two of the prisoners and a video of the scenes of joy in the West Bank. In the USA, CNN’s coverage looks very similar, as does the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera (Italian). They did all also make mention of the nature of the crimes committed by these people, and of the Israeli lack of enthusiasm for the prisoner release (the BBC even quoted a parent of one of the victims).

Behind the scenes of joy, I wonder how the families of the four Palestinians Hamed Burhan murdered for “collaborating with the enemy” are feeling. I doubt they were within the crowd welcoming him on his return as a triumphant hero of the Palestinian cause. I wonder whether, when his turn to be released comes, mothers will send their children to embrace Jameel Shahada, whose jail term was for the violent rape and murder of a 13 year old boy. Were it the other way round, if, for example, the man dubbed the “Jewish terrorist”, Jack Teitel was in a Palestinian prison for his murders of a Palestinian taxi driver and a shepherd, not only would I not celebrate his return to Israel, but I would demand that he be put straight into an Israeli jail instead. The way the Palestinian people have embraced these murderers shames them.

I’m attaching to this post a list of all the prisoners released today. I can only urge you to read through it here, even just at a glance, to get a general idea of the kind of people Netanyahu would rather release than withdraw a settlement for. The kind of people whose freedom Abbas places a higher value on than the economic and social wellbeing of the non-criminal majority of Palestinian society. The kind of people who will be pictured over the coming days kissing their mothers, holding their children and recounting their tales of hardship, without mention of their victims. The kind of people, in short, who should only have been freed as a very last step in the process.

A True Zionist

It’s time to reclaim Zionism, as promised in my introductory post. The anti-Israel lobby has gotten used to using the word Zionist as an insult, someone who enjoys oppressing Palestinians in his free time and can’t see an Arab without twitching and bursting out into a heartfelt rendition of HaTikvah with the sole purpose of provoking them. Among the more sinister elements, Zionist is also interchangeable with “Israeli” or “Jew”. On the other side, too often in Israel especially there is a sense that while the left has a trademark on human rights and liberties, the right has the exclusive access to Zionism. This is based on an equally flawed assumption that Zionist means someone who supports Israel no matter what, and will always defend the conduct of the military and the government. Before the last election, too many right-wing acquaintances on social networking sites were equating left-wing with “self-hating Jews”, “anti-Israel”, and “anti-Zionist”.

I’m not the only one finally waking up to the fact that we’ve all but lost our “original” Zionism. In his first post-election interview, far-right Jewish Home MK Uri Ariel singled out left-wing Meretz for praise for doubling their representation in the Israeli Parliament. According to Ariel, it was a sign that there was still a “strong, ethical, Zionist left”. One a religious settler, one a secular left-wing party, nonetheless both, as Ariel made a point of highlighting, equally Zionist. 

Because here’s the thing; Zionism is the right of the Jewish people to self-determination and to safety from persecution. That’s it; one of the worlds most misunderstood and controversial ideologies summed up in one line. And if those words sound familiar, they might well be. They’ve been a cornerstone of international politics since they were first laid out by Woodrow Wilson as part of the Atlantic Charter in 1918. That means we’re now closing in on almost a century since this principal was first laid out. Today, self-determination is an inalienable, unquestionable right.

I’ve been told that a true Zionist will always want to live in Israel (in connection with my decision to study in the UK) and that a true Zionist will believe in the right of the Jewish people to all the land of “greater Israel”. I’ve been called Zionist for supporting decisions made by the government of the day, and anti-Zionist for questioning and opposing other decisions. All of these are not only inaccurate, they’re irrelevant.

It bears repeating. Zionism is another name for Jewish self-determination. It has nothing to do with settlements, borders, Jerusalem, land swaps, IDF service or any of the other things people on all sides associate with Zionism. You don’t have to be Jewish, you don’t have to live in Israel, it doesn’t mean you oppose Palestinian statehood; you just have to believe in self-determination for all people.

The fault is partly ours. As Israeli Zionists we have not done enough to differentiate our belief in our right to a homeland with our beliefs on what form that homeland should take. We’ve granted extremists on both sides the “coup” of successfully redefining Zionism to meet their own interests. Now it’s time to launch a counter-coup, and to take it back.

Who, What, Why? – Welcome to my Blog

I’m a very lucky person. Being Israeli ensures life is never dull. It also gives me a home, a community and a sense of identity wherever I go in the world. Being born in England and having spent about half of my life outside of Israel also means I am horribly aware of how Israel often comes out in the global media. Many pro-Israel activists insist there is a double-standard employed against Israel, while many anti-Israel activists will tell you that on the contrary, Israeli actions are often under-reported and ignored. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in the middle, and it’s in that middle ground that I wish to place my blog.

There is occasionally a sense that being left-wing is part of a package that includes opposing Israel, and that the two are mutually inclusive. Combating this ridiculous notion is another reason why I decided to start this blog. While I don’t know whether to define myself as liberal, social democrat, liberal democrat or any of the myriad of labels that are out there, or even whether it is right to search for that definition, I know that I land within the moderate left of the political spectrum on most issues. I believe that Israel can and should be a fully democratic and Jewish state guaranteeing full equality to all its citizens. I also unfortunately feel that we’re not yet there.

As you may have gathered by now, I am not only left-wing, but also a proud Zionist. That term is so often abused to meet varying political ends that very few people (in Israel or abroad) use it in its proper context. In my next post I will expand on this; but in short it means that I believe in the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in Israel, otherwise known as self-determination. That in itself is a concept that historically belongs to the left more than to the right. Any other political views I hold about Israel should be held apart and examined separately. 

So now you know a bit about me; who I am and what motivates me to write. One last thing; I hope my blog upsets and provokes you. The stories and issues I hope to address are well worth getting upset over. Feedback is always appreciated, and if you like what you read, feel free to subscribe to the blog, and/or follow me on twitter @saharzivan.

 

 

Sahar