Month: January 2010

Mondoweiss, January 3, 2010

This is the sixth installation in a seven-part series. See Mondoweiss for details.

When Tania Hary was 15, she found her father’s birth certificate. It read Palestine. “It was a shock,” Hary, now 29, recalls. “I couldn’t assess the full ramifications.”

Though Israeli-born Hary was raised in Los Angeles, she knew about the conflict. When Iraq launched scuds at Israel in 1991, Hary’s grandmother sent the family a picture of herself in a gas mask. During one of the annual family trips to Haifa, the port city Hary left when she was an infant, Palestinians threw rocks at her family’s car. “And I was always aware of soldiers and guns,” Hary recalls.

But summer vacations spent in the north of Israel left Hary with more than violent images—they also gave her a visceral connection to the land. The smell of orange blossoms, she says, is particularly evocative, tugging her back to her childhood.

As an adult, Hary returned to her home country, settling in Tel Aviv to work for a prominent NGO that advocates for Palestinians. Although Hary is also exploring her connection to Israel, “the jury is still out,” she says of Zionism.

Hary feels that, yes, the Jews deserve a homeland, as does any group that wants to band together in a country—including the Palestinians.

“I think the biggest political statement that could be made would be if the Palestinians converted en masse to Judaism,” Hary continues. “They would become Zionists. It would stick Zionism in people’s faces and ask them ‘What is this really about?’”

Hary feels that the meaning of Zionism has been warped over time. “The mainstream needs to revise its definition,” she remarks. “The founding fathers were more left-wing than most people are today.” She points to Theodor Herzl’s comments about land acquisition and remarks of Meir Dizengoff, Tel Aviv’s first mayor, regarding non-violence and negotiation.

As for the country today, Hary offers a surprising sentiment—let some of the settlers stay in the West Bank.

She explains that she is against solutions to the conflict put forth by politicians like Lieberman, who, in the past, has proposed that Palestine take the Arab-heavy north of Israel in exchange for the areas of the West Bank populated by settlers. She thinks both sides should stay put.

“We will have two bi-national states,” she says. “There are progressive Palestinians who are behind this solution.” Hary is referring to, amongst others, Ahmed Qureia, the former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. In a recent interview with Haaretz, Qureia stated that, in the event of a two-state agreement, residents of the West Bank settlements Ariel and Ma’aleh Adumim would be welcome to stay in an independent Palestine.

Hary comments, “They would become Jewish Palestinians.” Like her father once was.

This series was printed in its entirety in the Fall 2009 print edition of Zeek, Israelology, which was distributed to J-Street conference attendees.

Mondoweiss, January 2, 2010

This is the fifth installation in a seven-part series. See Mondoweiss for details.

Judith, a character in Dvir Tzur’s novel Inverted Letters, lives alone on a cliff high above the sea. Judith was a settler, but her children live in the Diaspora. Gazing towards unseen lands beyond the water, Judith is no longer sure why she’s here.

Tzur, 31, whose work echoes Yosef Haim Brenner’s, explains that Judith is similar to many Israelis. She has stopped believing in her country. And she fails to see the big picture.

“Zionism has two layers. There’s the geographical layer,” he says, “and there’s the cultural layer. People are stuck in the geographical layer and don’t see the other layer. But both are equally important.”

And both are plagued by the same problem, “We [Israelis] don’t know who we are. We want to be European, but we’re not. We’re Asian,” Tzur, whose family roots lay in Kurdistan and Iraq, says.

Though Israel’s identity crisis seems to be a social issue, Tzur explains that it affects the nation’s security, as well. “If you know it’s wrong for Palestinians to shoot rockets at Sderot then you don’t wait eight years to retaliate.” The subtext to Israel’s inaction, he says, is similar to Judith’s, “We don’t know what we want, we’re not sure we’re going to be here in a generation, we’re not sure we have a right to be here.”

That is why the United States, which Tzur refers to as “the second center of the Jewish nation,” is crucial.

Tzur isn’t talking about American money or political support. He’s talking discourse, “It’s important to hear the voices coming from the States, even if we don’t agree with them. America offers alternative ways of thinking about Judaism and that can help Israelis see, personally and collectively, who we are.”

Turning back to our traditions is another step towards resolving our identity crisis, says Tzur, who dons a kippah. “I’m not religious,” he emphasizes. “I’m a traditionalist. If there’s one thing that has kept Jews a people, it’s the traditions.”

But Tzur’s call for Israel to find itself doesn’t translate to a call for an exclusively Jewish state. Tzur, once a supporter of Hadash, a political party popular with left-wing Israelis and Arab-Israelis, hopes to see a confident and open Israel. “I don’t want to live in a ghetto,” he remarks. “And I don’t want to be like Judith. I want to know my kids will be here.”

This series was printed in its entirety in the Fall 2009 print edition of Zeek, Israelology, which was distributed to J-Street conference attendees.

Mondoweiss, January 1, 2010

This is the fourth installation in a seven-part series. See Mondoweiss for details.

As an attorney for a NGO that advocates for workers’ rights, Hanny Ben Israel, 29, sees the many faces of Israel’s problems on a daily basis. Though some of the complainants she sees are Israeli and Palestinian, most are migrant workers hailing from places like India, Thailand, Nepal, and the Philippines. The immigration policies these foreigners are subjected to—in particular, the policies that penalize migrant women for pregnancy and childbirth by revoking their legal status or those that prohibit marriage between migrant workers—are, Ben Israel says, psychotic.

“Right now the immigration policy basically says ‘you’re good enough to be a worker but not to be a full person,’” Ben Israel observes.

Ben Israel’s statement illuminates one side of the recent debate regarding the status of migrant workers and their children.

In July, the Oz taskforce, an arm of the Interior Ministry’s Migrant and Population Authority, began cracking down on illegal residents. The Oz unit also began enforcing the hitherto ignored Gedera-Hadera policy, which states that asylum seeks—which, in Israel, means African refugees—must reside outside of the Israel’s center, bound by Gedera and Hadera. The Oz unit was also poised to begin deporting families of illegal workers, including their Israeli-born-and-raised children, as of August 1.

Thanks to public outcry, however, the Gedera-Hadera policy was revoked and the deportation of children has been delayed as the government formulates a policy regarding the minors of illegal residents.

To Ben Israel, whose grandparents immigrated to Israel from Russia and Poland in the 1930s, the solution is fairly simple—let them stay. “If we are going to sustain an economy on migrant workers we should give them citizenship or at least permanent residence,” she says. “We can’t build a society on exclusive and excluding terms.”

The country’s current attitudes and laws stem from “an obsession with demographics,” she says. “If you’re not Jewish, you’re indefinitely barred from joining the collective.”

To Ben Israel, who is secular, being Israeli means participating in a shared culture and language, “Filipinos can join in; Thais can join in.”

Still, she feels that history has proven a need for the Jewish people to be “authors of their own fate.”

“But the moral argument for Zionism, as rooted in the rights of people to self-determination, is gone when you deny the same right to others,” Ben Israel remarks. “The distance that I see between what used to be the promise of Israel and the current state is painful for me.”

This series was printed in its entirety in the Fall 2009 print edition of Zeek, Israelology, which was distributed to J-Street conference attendees.