[Marxism] Israel's Growing Internal Divide

[milongonsinga <milongonsinga@xxxxxxxxx>]

Israel's Growing Internal Divide
"How long can a relatively large minority be assumed by the majority to be an 
enemy without in the end actually turning into one? How long can the state 
exist as a stable political framework if this is how it treats a sixth of its 
citizens?" So asked the Israeli novelist David Grossman in his brilliant and 
sadly prescient book Sleeping on a Wire, a portrait of Israel's Arab minority 
that was written in 1991. "Slowly and steadily, as if slumbering, Israel is 
missing its chance to rescue itself from a horrible mistake," Grossman warned. 
"It is creating for itself the enemy it will run up against after its other 
enemies have made their peace with it."
Eighteen years later, a new poll finds that only 53.7 percent of Israeli-Arabs 
believe Israel has a right to exist as an independent state, down from 81.1 
percent in 2003. An astounding 40 percent deny that the Holocaust ever 
happened. This is proof that "they hate us," some Jewish Israelis will likely 
contend, "they" being all Arabs, from Cairo to Nazareth. Yet until recently, 
surveys had consistently shown that the majority of Arab-Israelis wanted to be 
accepted as citizens despite being subjected to discrimination in everything 
from land ownership to education. Polls conducted in the past by Sammy Smooha, 
a professor at Haifa University (who also conducted the latest survey), found 
that 75 percent of Arab-Israelis between the age of 16 and 22 supported 
voluntary national service; 68 percent were willing to live in a Jewish 
neighborhood; 75 percent supported a return of Palestinian refugees only to a 
Palestinian state.
That was before the Second Lebanon War and the war in Gaza, which may not have 
vanquished Hamas but which clearly did further radicalize Israel's Arab 
citizens. Before proto-fascist Avigdor Lieberman was appointed Israel's Foreign 
Minister. Before another government took power that has shown no interest in 
stopping the growth of illegal settlements in the West Bank, much less 
addressing the inequities between Jews and Arabs in Israel. "Time is running 
out" on Iran, Benjamin Netanyahu tried to persuade President Obama in their 
meeting this week. As Bernard Avishai points out here, it is running out on 
something else: the notion that Israel can be the democratic state its founders 
dreamed of creating.
 
"To investigate a problem is, indeed, to solve it," Mao.


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