Why I will not live in Israel

[lethargic_man]

One of the aims of my year-off group was to encourage participants to make aliyah afterwards. Some of the group members did indeed do that; I came back firmly convinced that this was my country, and that there was a valuable place and role for Jews to have living in the Diaspora.

Whilst I'd been living in Israel, I'd been reading The Jerusalem Post and innocuously swallowing its right-of-centre agenda. After I came back, my political outlook stabilised as left-of-centre, and I was appalled by the political views I'd been taken in by during my year off.

Later still, I would listen to Israelis, and be appalled by the views I'd often hear from them. "Palestinians are like animals," and "it's all right to kill them" are taken out of context, but stay in my mind as demonstrative of the attitudes I hear from some Israelis. Obviously, not all are like that; most Israelis want (or wanted, a dozen years ago) peace with the Palestinians and are frustrated with the leadership of both sides. However, this strengthened my resolution that I did not want to live in Israel: I did not want my children to grow up with Israeli attitudes, whether the like of the above, or more general Israeli aggressiveness, etc.

I forget who it was that said "You can take the Jews out of the Diaspora, but you can't take the Diaspora out of the Jews", but they were wrong. A look at Israel today shows all it takes is two generations, if that.

More recently still, reading the mailshots of the Israel Religious Action Center, which I have blogged about before, I've become ever more convinced that my decision was the right one. However, recently I've noticed a change in emphasis of the IRAC mailshots: no longer is the focus on Israel's kafkaesque bureaucracy and discrimination against non-Jews (and Jews deemed non-Jews), but it has shifted towards the increasing political and physical muscle shown by the growing Chareidi community in trampling over the rights of women.

If you want to know why I will not live in Israel, here's your answer (and if you only follow one link from this post, follow this one). It's enough to make one cry, what the state founded upon positive Jewish values we all had so much hope in is turning into.

To quote Haaretz:

We are turning [into] Iran. And every step we take toward that end, Iran wins.

Every time a bureaucrat in black—ostensibly, ostentatiously, a Rav, a rabbi, a man of greatness—can discriminate against women; every time he can deny them access to holy sites and relegate them to the backs of buses; every time he can prohibit the image of a woman's face in public advertising; every time he can decide when and where and if, as soldiers, as students, as worshippers, they may sing or dance or speak or stand or even be present in Jewish worship, Iran wins.

Every time a well-connected crackpot preacher holds up vital hospital construction, brandishing a voodoo ruling of his alone; every time he abrogates the religious rights of Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Renewal and even fellow Orthodox Jews, even rabbis; every time he bars Ethiopian or Moroccan schoolgirls from studying with Ashkenazi schoolgirls, Iran wins.

Every time a self-styled pious Jew places an extremist holy man above the law and its commands; every time he desecrates a mosque, every time he destroys Palestinian-owned olive trees; every time he attacks Arabs with rocks; every time he threatens peace activists in their homes; and every time he gets away with it—which is every time—Iran wins.

Every time the cabinet and the Knesset advance anti-democratic bills meant to stifle dissent, suppress the Arabic language, demonize human rights workers, and curb freedoms of expression and the press, Iran wins.

Every time the pro-occupation minority, here and in the Diaspora, defines the illegal Migron settlement outpost as Zionism, equates Israel's vital strategic interests with the permanent, God-mandated, clergy-driven, Messiah-oriented occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem; and blackmails the government into shunning peace talks, Iran wins.

I am posting this here unlocked with trepidation. This blog post does not portray a balanced picture of Israel, the only genuine democracy in the Middle East, about which many positive things can be said; it concentrates on the things wrong with Israel, which need to be publicised so that they can be fixed. However, this article is not intended as an excuse for Israel-bashing; if I see this going on, I will disable comments.

Comments

[awful-dynne.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to say thank you. I'd seen various articles around pointing toward some of the issues you've raised here but had not really put effort into reading said articles and being aware.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

What was interesting was coming to Jerusalem, when we were at the Conservative Yeshiva, after reading about the struggle for control of Jerusalem in the IRAC mailshots, and not seeing any evidence for it whatsoever.

Mind you, I was also quite aware that as a capel-wearing man (as I was in Jerusalem), a lot of the hostility would slide off my back. Also, I never tried to go anywhere contentious like Mea Shearim; and I was aware that as a Masorti Jew, I would have had issues living in Jerusalem long-term that I did not as a short-term visitor.

[liv]

This comment is really insightful. I suspect a lot of the explanation for how Israel can be sliding into theocracy like this with hardly a murmur of protest is precisely this kind of thing. If you're an Orthoprax man, most of it doesn't affect you. Further, if you're a completely secular person of Ashkenazi origin (but not a recent Russian immigrant), it doesn't really affect you. And people like that occupy most of the positions of influence in the country; that's part of the problem in a direct sense, with people not from the dominant group being marginalized, but it's also indirectly a problem that the people in power are often fairly oblivious to the discrimination against Arabs, ethnic minority and immigrant Jews, women, non-Orthodox religious Jews.

Thanks for the original post, too. It's worth talking about these things in public, regardless of the downsides of giving ammunition to the anti-Israel crowd.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this. What's the story about the hospital?

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Here's a summary of it (http://www.jpost.com/HealthAndSci-Tech/Health/Article.aspx?id=171302). It involves (a) placing the importance of the dead above the living, in a city within close rocket range of Gaza, and (b) ignoring archaeological evidence that the cemetery in question was not Jewish, so there should not have been any halachic argument against moving it.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

You say that most Israelis want peace and are frustrated with their leadership - so how is their current failure to elect a government that's serious about achieving it to be explained?

This is a genuine question: the place is still a democracy, the issue is plainly a pressing one, yet from the outside there's remarkably little evidence of governmental interest in any kind of sustainable peace.

That isn't to say that I see the Palestinian leaderships as spotless - but it is much easier to see how a poor society with at the very best limited experience of democracy can end up with leaders so poorly committed to actually solving the biggest problems of the day.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is the Israeli electoral system: they use PR, which means no party ever gains an overall majority, which means small parties always get to act as kingmakers. At the last election, the centrist Kadima party won the most votes, but it was the smaller right-of-centre Likud which was able to put together a working coalition.

And now the right-wing and religious parties have Netanyahu over a barrel: if he refuses any of their demands, they'll resign from the coalition and bring the government down, and he likes his job too much to risk a confrontation on that.

Part of the problem is also frustration with parties failing to deliver; this is why the left, which ran Israel for the first several decades of its existence, completely collapsed at the the start of the noughties.

But a large part of it is that every election in Israel is determined on the basis of national security. (Israelis dream of being able to vote for parties on the basis of their economics like other countries.) The Labour party gave the Palestinians chance after chance to bring peace, but all it brought them was extremists on both sides, scared of true peace (as it would mean abandoning their true objective—occupying the entirety of the Biblical Land of Israel on the one hand, or the entirety of 1922–1948 Palestine on the other), using terrorism to sabotage the peace process.

The signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993—the famous handshake on the White House lawn, and Rabin's "an end to blood and tears" speech—did not bring peace, but a huge spike upwards in suicide bomb attacks, previously very rare. Rabin's own attempt to sign away territory in turn brought his assassination, ostensibly at the hands of the religious fundamentalist Yigal Amir (though the book Terminate with Extreme Prejudice: Inside the Assassination Game presents chilling evidence that this was actually at the hands of the Shin Bet security service). And in 2000, in the dying days of the Clinton presidency, Ehud Barak put an offer on the table that effectively gave in on all the Israeli demands.

The Saudi ambassador told Yasser Arafat that if he rejected this, it would not be a tragedy; it would be a crime.

Arafat completely ignored it, instead presenting arguments that there was never a Jewish Temple, archaeological evidence notwithstanding, in Jerusalem, but that it was on Mt Gerizim. (That was actually the Samaritan one.)

As Abba Eban put it, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. (Netanyahu made a reference to a further no-holds-barred offer a few years later in his address to the UN (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebOsg9CCj6c) after the Palestinian bid for statehood (with which, incidentally, I agree with almost everything he said with the massive exception of that building settlements is no bar to peace), but I don't remember that.)

So I think the Israeli public ran effectively out of patience with a peace process that saw them give and give and give and get nothing back for it except their own blood over the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But that's just my guess; I've less knowledge of the attitudes of the Israeli public than during the nineties.

[miss-whiplash.livejournal.com]

BBC Radio 4 carried a story about Jewish women and song comparing life in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv at about 17:30 on Thursday 10th November. It was an interesting listen and might be available still on i-player but I woulldn't know how to find it.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

It's not turning up under a search for "Jewish" on I-Player, I'm afraid. The slot you mention was PM; before that The Material World and before that the Film Programme; afterwards the News and then Listen Again.

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

I am pacifist and do not like conflicts but would bother me the most would be the fact that the extreme Orthodox people rule over everybody else women and other types of Judaism. Reform, Liberal, Masorti, Conservative and Reconstructionist and more left-winged Orthodox have no say. I do not see that this will change. You have more of the right-winged Orthodox or the complete secular. Anything in between is a minority. I am quiet happy living in England especially near London where you get all sorts of Jewish people. We are very free to practice the way we want.

[darren grant (from livejournal.com)]

Respect brother, respect.

I'm afraid so

[michael koplow (from livejournal.com)]

LM, like you in genral I'm a person of the left; unlike you I'm a Modern Ortho. I agree with all that you've said.

A friend of mine, a retired scientist, goes to an Israeli university to do research for a few months every year (his personal response to the academic boycott), and he remains immune to the bigotry in the air there. He publishes a newsletter directed to the Ortho community here in Chicago. In the general community, he'd be considered a very moderate moderate on Israeli issues; among us Orthos, he's a dangerous left-wing radical.

I understand what you mean about picking up rightwing views in Israel. A now-former friend of mine, who was a lefty, made aliyah. A few months later, she came back to tie up some loose ends, and she referred to Arabs as "sh'chin"--the plague of boils in Exodus. It's tragic.