‘Leftist’ is a bad word in Israel, and we are leaving
A DEBATE has been raging on the Israeli left recently — primarily on the opinion pages of and on my Facebook feed — about Israelis who are choosing to leave Israel as a political statement.
Although these leftists make up only a tiny percentage of Israelis, their departure has hit a nerve. The veteran Israeli left-wing activist and founder of Gush Shalom, Uri Avnery, has called on them to return, arguing that leaving is a cop-out, that they are needed here.
Everywhere I turn these days, many of my peers have left, are leaving, are planning to leave or are talking about leaving. My family and I included. The reasons are always personal, and it’s hard to point to a specific political trend. But the discourse around leaving is indicative of a real crisis on the Israeli left regarding the inability to effect change, and the sense that our ideals are unwanted and that we are outnumbered.
For me, this is not just about the normalisation of racism and violence that goes with the occupation, but the fact that so many Israelis who identify as liberals are either ignorant of the state’s actions or complicit in them.
When I became active in the West Bank nearly a decade ago, I witnessed and experienced many Israeli human rights violations that profoundly shaped my politics, setting me apart from most Israelis. After escorting Palestinians to their wells or their grazing fields while being confronted by settlers and soldiers, I would come back to the comforts of my life in Tel Aviv outraged that people could just sit in cafes with no clue what was being done in their name a few miles away — or worse, that they just didn’t care.
A decade later, and five years since the “tent protests” that saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis protest against the high cost of living without any mention of the disenfranchised Palestinians in our midst, this sense of alienation has only intensified.
Instead of gaining legitimacy, activist groups like Ta’ayush, Anarchists Against the Wall and Breaking the Silence, which came of age during the Second Intifada with the goal of exposing and opposing human rights violations, are now targets of state-sanctioned incitement.
Israel has the most right-wing government in its history, and “leftist” is a bad word. A 2016 poll shows that 72 per cent of Jewish Israelis believe Israel’s control over the territories does not even constitute an “occupation”.
Although I feel a constant and growing sense of alienation from the majority of Jewish Israeli society, I also live a comfortable life here and am invested in this place. It’s home. But every time I walk from my house in Jaffa to the beach, I am sorely aware of all the Palestinians for whom the chance to visit the sea is an extraordinary, onetime opportunity dependent on the whims of the Israeli establishment.
We cannot live in a constant state of guilt. But even as Israeli leftists are increasingly persecuted, we have to recognise that we also enjoy a lot of privileges. And it’s because of the privileges I enjoy here that I feel compelled to fight for those who lack them. The question, then, is not whether to stay or to go. It is how to have an impact and live a life that is true to my ideals.
72 per cent of Israelis do not think there is an ‘occupation’
Mairav Zonszein is a journalist based in Israel. This is an abridged version of an article that originally appeared at Forward. com, September 3, 2016, and is reproduced with permission