The first to take to the streets against the rising tide of anti-democratic legislation was the LGBT community on July 22, 2018. They protested the government’s surrogacy law that discriminates against gay men, raising the banner of equality and drawing support from both the private sector and liberal circles. This was undoubtedly an opening shot that ignited new protests, this time against the nation-state law, which prioritizes Israel’s Jewish sector. On August 4, the Druze, waving their five-colored flags, filled Rabin Square. They received a warm embrace from the security establishment, led by former Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin, who delivered a scathing speech against the law. This Saturday, the Israeli Arab Monitoring Committee will try to fill the square to protest what they see as an emerging apartheid regime. However, there is a split within the opposition camps: the LGBT, Druze, and Palestinians will always march separately.

While sectoral flags are being raised, one flag is absent – the flag of democracy. Fifty-five Knesset members (MKs) voted against the nation-state law – 14 were from the largely Arab Joint List. The remaining 41 failed to organize a rally that would unite all forces opposing the national law, in order to demonstrate their power against the right wing, fractious government that is tearing Israeli society apart.

MKs and activists from the Left attend various demonstrations: they support the LGBT community on Saturday night, return a week later to show solidarity with the Druze, and some will also appear on August 11 as a sign of solidarity with the Arab sector. They hide behind the downtrodden but refuse to stand in the forefront of the struggle against a racist law that tramples the principle of equality.

Why? What prevents the heads of the opposition, the Labor Party, aka Zionist Camp, and Yesh Atid from calling for mass protests against the nation-state law that they opposed in parliament? Both parties are in lockstep with key sections of Israeli society that are fed up with the behavior of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his ministers. This group attempts to secure its electoral future by inciting against the Supreme Court, the New Israel Fund, Ashkenazi elites, the press, writers, and artists, and especially against the Arabs. Why are the opposition MKs hiding behind the LGBT and Druze instead of storming the barricades themselves? After all, the nation-state law was not intended to harm the Arab or Druze population. The real target is the Supreme Court and the liberal character of Israeli society as expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

Signed and proclaimed in 1948, the Declaration of Independence reflected a broad consensus that included Communists and Revisionists, the National Religious and Herut. It promised “full and equal citizenship” for all of Israel’s citizens, “irrespective of religion, race or gender.” This statement did not prevent the enactment of discriminatory laws against the Arab population that favored the Jewish majority: the Law of Return, the Absentees’ Law, zoning and building laws, and tax and budgetary policies that have discriminated against the Arab population for 70 years.

What led to the enactment of the nation-state law are the rulings of the Supreme Court of Israel, such as decisions that prevented the expulsion of asylum seekers from Africa, that allowed Arabs to purchase land in Jewish towns, that evacuated illegal outposts in occupied territory, and other decisions that impeded the Right’s attempt to change the face of Israeli society. In the wings is the “Basic Law on Legislation,” which will define the limits of judicial review for years to come. In other words, the Arabs are the excuse, but the goal is to change the liberal lifestyle and the fruits of democracy enjoyed by the Jewish majority. It was not necessary to pass a nation-state law. Discrimination thrives without it.

The government openly admits that the Left is the target; the Left is the internal enemy and it must be defeated. “If we look at the hysteria that has gripped the Left in the face of this law, I think it is excellent,” Minister Yariv Levin said in an interview with Haaretz on August 6. What is of great importance to Levin is the hysteria of the Left and not the panic gripping the Arabs. The factor that threatens the peace and security of the coalition is undoubtedly the Zionist leftist opposition, not the Arab-dominated Joint List.

The purpose of the nation-state law is to ensure that the right-wing government continues to rule for as long as possible. When Standard & Poor’s upgrades Israel’s credit rating, and Trump continues, with Putin’s help, to drive the US and the world crazy, the nation-state law is just a sideshow, a global footnote that helps Netanyahu mobilize his base and neutralize the opposition.

How can the Zionist Left dare oppose a law that says that the State of Israel belongs only to the Jewish people? How can Avi Gabbay, head of the Labor Party (a.k.a. the Zionist Camp) support the protesters in the square when he himself has declared that the Left “has forgotten what it means to be Jews,” adding, “We are Jews, living in a Jewish state. I think one of the Labor Party’s problems is that it has distanced itself from that”? After all, it is clear that Netanyahu has the upper hand in the ‘who is more Jewish’ competition. The nation-state law aims to pull the rug out from under Labor’s Gabbay, and it gives Netanyahu the competitive edge over Yesh Atid’s strongman, Yair Lapid, who is trying to out-bibi Bibi.

Nevertheless, the Left is content to see the LGBT and the Druze rallying at Rabin Square, since they aren’t necessarily leftists. Both groups represent a broader spread: MKs Itzik Shmuli (Labor) and Amir Ohana (Likud) are gay, while Ayoub Kara is a Druze Likud minister, and Salah Saad is of Labor. If they were leftists, Netanyahu would have no trouble dismissing them. But because they represent a wider circle in public opinion and enjoy public support, he is in danger of having to pay a political price.

Despite the above, Tzipi Livni (recently appointed as leader of the opposition) is still trying to spearhead the struggle, and promises, if elected, to override the nation-state law with the Declaration of Independence. However,the Declaration of Independence does not have the power to build a truly democratic and egalitarian society. Moreover, it even prepared the ground upon which the nation-state law is built. Discrimination against the Arab population and the division between Jews and Arabs are the fertile soil from which the Israeli Right arose. Since 1948, and despite the Declaration of Independence, Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza and established an occupation that has lasted 50 out of its 70 years of existence.The marriage between the revisionist and messianic Right, together with the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi ultraorthodox, forms a stable coalition that can lead a counter-constitutional revolution and set up a benighted nationalist-religious regime.

In order to block the right-wing revolution, the Left must adopt a comprehensive program that will be a clear and unambiguous answer to the Right. Confronting the Jewish State, we must advocate for a truly democratic state, a state of all its citizens. Confronting the Occupation and the separate laws for settlers and Palestinians, we must present a far-reaching solution based on a single democratic state with equality and majority rule. Ironically, the Declaration of Independence states that Israel will “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or gender. It will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education,and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions, and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations…and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.”

Economic unity already exists. It is based on the single Customs Envelope for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, one currency, and almost complete economic integration, but without equality or political rights. The Left has lost its vision; it has no political path and no socioeconomic alternative, and therefore it remains weak and doomed. The vision of a single state, a shared economy,and one constitution can defeat the Israeli Right and ensure peace and democracy. This is conditioned, of course, on Israelis and Palestinians finding a way of joining forces for the creation of a new reality.

*Translated from the Hebrew by Robert Goldman

The post In the shadow of Israel’s nation-state law: The Left ducks first appeared on Da'am Party: One state - Green Economy.

Herzog and Livni join forces

We’re headed for elections again. Less than two years have passed since the meteoric ascent of the “brothers” Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, who forced Binyamin Netanyahu into a coalition without the ultra-orthodox parties, and already Netanyahu is dismantling the government to seek a fourth term. His dream is to go back to the “ideal” composition of the previous government, which brought together the ultra-orthodox, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, and Ehud Barak’s Labor party. But it is not at all clear that Netanyahu will manage to make this dream come true. He now faces a broad alliance of his past victims, including the ultra-orthodox, Lieberman, Lapid, Tzipi Livni, Moshe Kahlon, and Labor head Isaac Herzog – all past ministers in his governments.

What brings Lieberman together with Herzog, or Kahlon together with Lapid? Only hostility for Netanyahu and the desire to bring him down. Other than that, they represent a mishmash of opinions, portending anything but a stable coalition. Therefore, these elections again herald a shaky coalition, with or without Netanyahu.

The Right has made up its Mind, while the Left Stutters

The impossibility of a stable coalition comes from current political forces’ inability to decide on two central questions: the fate of the occupied territories and the place of Arab citizens in this country. These two questions are inseparable, as the fate of the occupied Palestinians projects directly on the fate of the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

In these two questions, the Israeli Right under Netanyahu has made a clear decision: The Oslo Accords are dead, the idea of a Palestinian state is discarded, and the alternative is now Palestinian autonomy, entrenching the status quo. As for the Palestinian citizens of Israel,  the Nation-State Bill put forward by the Right asserts that Israel is first and foremost Jewish, its democracy subordinate to the state’s Jewishness. Therefore, the civil standing of the Arab citizens is subordinate to the state’s Jewish character.

These two questions are no doubt always at Israel’s doorstep. You cannot postpone them indefinitely in favor of a social agenda, or to combat socioeconomic gaps, or to protest the price of cheese and housing. The European parliaments are now reminding us that the world is sick of Occupation and war. The total destruction of the four towers in Gaza, decisive in ending the past summer’s war, have been termed a war crime by Amnesty International.

The recent events in Jerusalem mark the end of an era as well. The racism reflected in Amir Benayoun’s lyrics has spread everywhere. Ministers and MKs’ racist statements against Arabs also spur on the rise of extremist Islam, and mutual hatred makes life here intolerable for all those who wish to live in a normal country and to educate their children on the values of democracy and equality.

The Right, headed by Netanyahu and Bennett, has forced through a clear agenda, an agenda that challenges the Zionist Left. The Right says No to a Palestinian state, proposing that Israel be a racist state rather than a democratic one. And what does the “anything but Bibi” camp say? Nothing, essentially. In the face of the Nation-State Bill it proposes that we make do with Israel’s venerable Declaration of Independence. As to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Labor head Isaac Herzog proposes “getting Abbas into Gaza” for regional peace. These answers are not substantially different from what the Right has to offer.

The Left’s conciliatory and cowardly stance towards the Right has led to its diminishment and retreat. The Zionist Left is afraid to confront the Right, preferring to reach an understanding with the settlers at the expense of an understanding with the Arab citizens. The Zionist Left, including Meretz, is a Jewish separatist Left. Its isolationism bolsters the Right’s position that there is no partner for peace, and that the root of the conflict lies in the Arab refusal to recognize the Jewish state.

The Israeli Left, which aspires to a democratic, liberal, and egalitarian state, has no future if it does not join forces with those elements among Israel’s Palestinian citizens who also espouse values of democracy and tolerance, opposing isolation and religious extremism. The religious extremism is not Jewish-Israeli society’s problem alone. It has long been a boomerang, projecting into Arabic society and consuming all that is good in it. The Arab equivalent of the Jewish-Israeli Shas party is the Islamic party, and the Arabic twin of Zionist Messianism is the Islamic Massianism of ISIS and of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement. The extremists on both sides are thriving at the expense of the divided Jewish and Arab moderates.

Israel Has to Decide: Jewish or Democratic

The Zionist Left’s decision to unite in an anti-Netanyahu bloc runs parallel to the aspiration among the Arab parties to unite and run a joint Arab ticket. However, make no mistake, even if the Islamic Movement runs with Balad while Hadash runs alone, this does not make Hadash a joint Jewish-Arab ticket. Hadash relies on Arab votes to pass the electoral threshold. It practices a nationalistic rhetoric in order to compete with the other Arab parties: in fact it speaks with two tongues, two messages, one in Arabic and the other in Hebrew

The differences between Hadash and the Islamic Movement reflect ideological and political divisions within the Arab world, between political Islam and Communists, whereby the Communists do not hesitate to support dictatorial regimes so long as they are secular. So for instance, in Palestine the Communists support Abbas; in Egypt they support General Sisi; and in Syria they support Assad, while the forces of political Islam work to topple him.

Hadash’s electoral considerations in refusing to merge with Balad are not too different from those of Meretz in refusing to merge with Labor. The fact that Jews and Arabs run separately six decades after the foundation of the state is a badge of shame for both the Zionist parties and the Arab parties. Both prefer narrow electoral interests over addressing the crucial questions facing Jews and Arabs alike.

The coalition which Herzog proposes with Livni, Lapid, Lieberman, Kahlon, and the Haredi Orthodox, does not portend real change – not economically, and certainly not diplomatically. The failures of Barak, Sharon, Olmert, and Livni to reach a peace agreement only strengthened the Right, which claims they were “willing to make all the concessions and still the Palestinians rejected them.” The truth is, these leaders negotiated with the Palestinians for one purpose only: to avoid deciding the questions left open in the Oslo Accords, which were supposed to be discussed in the permanent agreements – the status of Jerusalem, the future of the settlements, and the problem of the Palestinian refugees. They all worked as one to postpone the inevitable, creating more mistrust, leading to wars, and strengthening the Right wing, which bases its popularity on hatred of Arabs.

Those who now rush to vote for the Jewish “anything but Bibi” bloc or the “Arab parties” bloc have some serious soul-searching to do. The real question is not what will happen if Netanyahu assumes the role of Prime Minister yet again. The urgent question is what disaster we will inherit from an alternative coalition devoid of any program, lacking the courage to tell Israeli society what needs to be said: if we want peace and democracy, we have to evacuate the settlements and recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state. If we want to fight racism, we first have to recognize the fact that Israel’s governments so far have deepened the discrimination and alienation of the Palestinians living in Israel.

Israel has to decide whether it is Jewish or democratic. The Israeli Right has solved this deep-seated contradiction, by simply declaring that the State’s Jewish character wins out against its democratic character. Compared to the Right, the Left stutters and tries without avail to square the circle.

The political platform we need is based on two clear principles: the end of the Occupation and an egalitarian state. The only way to handle Netanyahu and the Right is to form a broad Jewish-Arab front, based on these two principles. Running separately just strengthens the Right and widens the gap between Jews and Arabs.

Against the backdrop of rising racism and the diplomatic dead end, it is becoming clearer that the inevitable can no longer be postponed. Voices in Israeli society are growing stronger in calling for the creation of a joint Jewish-Arab front, an alternative to the Zionist and Arab parties alike. This is the order of the day, and every democrat and peace-lover, Jewish or Arab, must work to create a joint political framework for the benefit of Jews and Arabs alike.

– Translated from the Hebrew by Michael Sappir

The post “Anyone but Bibi” Strengthens the Israeli Right Wing first appeared on Da'am Party: One state - Green Economy.