How many Israelis support Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to annex part of the West Bank?
It is about fifty percent of the Israeli population.
–
Is it across the country?
No. If Israel were just Tel Aviv, I think we could find a compromise with the Palestinians.
–
What about Jerusalem?
That’s a different story – like the rest of the country, it’s much more right-wing. However, this applies not only to Israel, but also to the United States and, in fact, the whole world. You always have the capital, a few other larger, more liberally oriented agglomerations – and the rest of the country. Do you know what percentage Netanyahu won in the last elections in Tel Aviv? Nineteen! In other words, the upper classes of Israeli society, or more precisely most of them, are against Netanyahu, the lower ones are on his side. The same goes for Trump and the like. It is a general phenomenon and I do not want to analyze it now, there is no room for it, just let me say that I think it has to do with the transformation of the proletariat into a lumpen proletariat – if I have to express it in old terms.
–
Benjamin Netanjahu a Donald Trump
Photo: Evan Vucci, ČTK / AP
Let’s go back to Israeli society.
Our problem is that Israel is not a democracy, but an ethnocracy. Leaving aside the occupied territories, twenty-five percent of Israeli society is non-Jewish. But the state of Israel is defined as Jewish. It belongs more to the American ambassador to Israel than to my Palestinian student. We have a Jewish flag and a Jewish anthem that non-Jewish Israelis cannot sing because they talk about Jews… We grew up in this environment, our children and the children of our children grow up in this environment. What will one of them be like one day? Well, Jewish nationalists, what else? I would not be afraid to say that our consciousness is the product of a colonization process that began some hundred years ago and has still not stopped.
–
But now the country belongs to you.
The Zionists believe it belongs to the Jews; I am an Israeli, and therefore I believe that it belongs to the Israelis – all who live within the borders of Israel. Understand me well, I do not question the outcome of the colonization process. That would be absurd. After all, something happened, it can’t be stopped. The state of Israel, my state, was created. Australia is also a product of colonization and it is nonsense to criticize it and question its existence. The problem is that colonization in our country did not end in 1948, but continues.
–
Apparently, this is due to a certain fragmentation of the Israeli borders.
That may be the key to understanding our current misfortune. States have fixed borders. They may fall apart, as happened some time ago to Yugoslavia, but the borders are still there. But where are the borders of Israel? Something like this is completely missing in the Zionist imagination. Respectively, there is reality and there is myth. The myth says that all the territory up to Jordan, even the Jordanian capital Amman and including Amman, is the territory that the ancient Hebrews, our supposed ancestors, once walked through. That is why it is our country and it will always be our country.
–
A concrete wall separating the West Bank from Israel near the Kalandiya border crossing.
Photo: Svatava Kučerová
There are not only reality and myth, there is also a factor that myth can make reality, and that is the factor of power…
… And Israel has power – and great. He is no David fighting Goliath. He has military and technological power and historical power, given by the Holocaust. Negotiating with Israel is not the same as negotiating with Serbia or Bulgaria. It’s much more difficult. Europeans certainly do not feel comfortable if they have to blame the Israeli government.
–
The guilt is understandable.
But I fully understand the feelings of Europeans. The problem is when such a sense of guilt opens the door to other people’s suffering. And those who are suffering today are the Palestinians, of whom six million live between Jordan and the Mediterranean, essentially the same as the Jews.
–
How do Palestinians suffer?
One example for all. Jerusalem, together with the Arab villages that surrounded it, was de facto annexed as early as 1967. The Palestinians who live there were not granted citizenship by Israel. And this is still true today – fifty-three years later! This also applies to Palestinians born in Jerusalem after 1967; most of them are already. There are exceptions, but Israel is doing everything in its power to stay with the exceptions. Today, Palestinians make up thirty-eight percent of Jerusalem’s population. They are residents of Jerusalem, but they are not – unlike their Jewish neighbors – citizens of Israel. In other words, more than a third of the population today lives in the eternal capital of the Jewish people without the most basic political rights. In addition, three-quarters of them are below the poverty line by our standards. Isn’t this a sad result, especially if we are talking about such a symbolic place as Jerusalem?
–
And now, after Trump’s plan to annex some thirty percent of the occupied territory…
–
El I thought we were talking about Netanyahu’s plan, not Trump. Or do you mean that Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan is just an application of Trump’s Middle East “deal of the century”?
Few people know whose plan it is, who participated in it and to what extent.
–
In any case – for the sake of accuracy – I should say that this is not about Trump, even though he is the one who is now called a Messiah by a large part of the Israeli population. Trump is not important. The American ambassador to Israel, the Jewish nationalist David Melech Friedman, is important. If you ask whose plan it is, then most likely Friedman, Trump’s adviser Kushner, and some other people around the US president who have a relationship with Israel. Netanyahu then gladly agreed. Trump himself most likely knows absolutely nothing about Israel and Palestine, he doesn’t care.
–
Remember Lord Balfour. He gave Palestine to the Jewish population in 1917, although he did not know much about it. She wasn’t very interested either. It was not his country, his country was Scotland. If he had given the Jews Scotland in 1917, I might have understood a little, though I don’t know if the Scots would have understood.
–
Is the announced annexation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank a serious statement, or is it just political rhetoric?
It’s a test. By the way, it is interesting that the annexation of the Golan Heights has been forgotten a bit. It happened a year ago, but no one in the world has yet accepted it.
–
Except for the United States.
Except for Trump’s United States. But it is true that the civil war in Syria has only made history of it.
–
You look pessimistic.
After all, I’m also a pessimist. But far from just because of Trump or Netanyahu or Friedman or Kushner’s plan. That plan is topicality – sad, but only topicality. What these people have come up with is nothing radically new. Netanyahu has not redesigned Israeli policy. Israel has appropriated the West Bank for a long time. Day after day, hour after hour. Sure, you can say that until now the annexation was slower, sometimes almost invisible, but the annexation was.
–
So the only difference between Trump and his predecessors in the US presidency is that under Trump, that “colonization” process accelerated? Doesn’t its essence change?
Yes. This is not a radical change in the course. As I say, it’s a test. Netanyahu, Friedman and Kushner ask us if they can move on to the next colonization phase. And that is in an advantageous situation for them, because the Palestinians are in a very difficult position. Syria is out of the game, dictatorships in Egypt and Saudi Arabia support Israel. The only problem is with Jordan. But Jordan is weak, no one needs much interest. It just doesn’t look promising.
–
But let me add that I am a pessimist, but not a fatalist. I don’t believe in miracles, I’m not a religious person, as you probably know, but I know that whenever it seems that nothing can be changed, that it’s over, something happens.
–
First Intifada, 1987
Photo: Profimedia.cz
If you had asked me a few weeks ago if what could have happened in the United States after Floyd’s death, I would have said no, that it was nonsense that the 1960s were long gone, that people were too tired, exhausted, and frustrated. And yet it is raging in the United States today. People are still resisting. And the same goes for the Palestinians. I remember saying to ourselves before the first intifada that the Palestinians were too tired, exhausted and frustrated to revolt. The year was 1987, no one believed anything like that anymore. There was absolute peace. But suddenly it happened – the Palestinians rose up.
–
The storm is one thing, but it needs to turn into a political action that will bring about change. And this is hard to believe after so many negative experiences.
To be honest, I am also skeptical about this. I do not believe that the gap between the – in short, the liberal intellectual strata of the capitals and the lumpen proletariat will be bridged in Israel. Maybe I should believe it, but I don’t. This is a problem that concerns not only Israel, but also you in Eastern Europe. By the way: do not forget that a significant part of Israeli society came from Eastern Europe. Their ancestors lived there. I almost have an urge to look at Israel as another Eastern European state. And you – as a person from Eastern Europe – certainly know what I’m talking about.
–
Even in Eastern Europe, it often played a significant role in whether your parents had the right nationality. You return to the notion of Israel as an ethnocracy, not a democracy.
But that’s not just me. Israel has now also been described as the ethnocracy by the editor-in-chief of the left-liberal Ha’arec. I’m not alone in this.
—
