Great interview. This is only the first part of a three-part interview. There are Jews in the world, as you may know already, who are not Zionist & actively reject Israel's claim, & the resultant brutality & occupation, of Palestine.
I loved the last part of the interview where it shows that the only way a human being discards or reduces the humanity of another human being is through ignoring that there IS that another person who is like me. This ignorance can happen at international level (America, Saudi Arabia, Israel, India, Russia etc.) & it always happens wartime, e.g. the only way Saudis can bomb Yemenis & keep blockade on, is by thinking of Yemenis as something not human, or American soldiers bombing & firing at Iraqis, all the while laughing & enjoying, can only happen when those soldiers think of those Iraqis as not being living & breathing humans. This attitude of ignorance also takes place domestically when rich elites keep hoarding money & resources while their compatriots are dying of hunger, thirst, unavailability of medical facilities, no education etc., & this also takes place at individual level where a husband treats badly his wife because he thinks she is not a human but something less than a human.
We need to develop empathy & conscience to think & see as the other person as a human being with the similar needs & wants as ourselves. A Palestinian or Kashmiri or Chechen or a Yemeni or an Afghani needs & wants as an Israeli or an Indian or a Russia or a Saudi or an American; food, water, freedom, education, medical facilities, job, safety for his family & future etc.
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LIA TARACHANSKY, ISRAEL-PALESTINE CORRESPONDENT, TRNN: I was born in the Soviet Union, in the former Soviet Union, in Kiev. And then, when I was six, we moved to Israel. We moved to the heart of the West Bank, into a settlement called Ariel, the same year that the Oslo Accords were signed. So, while the global community was getting involved in our conflict and trying to divide the two halves of the land into two states, we moved into the middle of what would become the Palestinian state, into a settlement that used the guise of all of these negotiations to double the numbers and then triple the numbers.
And that’s really the story of the failed peace process. While America was busy shuffling envoys back and forth between Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, we were growing as a settlement movement, getting more and more empowered by the total impunity.
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And the reason why we moved there is because my mother wanted to contribute back to Zionism, because my family is from the Soviet Union. As Jews, we’ve encountered a lot of anti-Semitism. Also, members of our family died in gulags. Most of the family was killed in the Holocaust in World War II fighting the Nazis. So all of this history is very prominent in our identity. And so we moved to Israel. And after 31 years of Soviet anti-Semitism, my mother is basically being told, it’s your turn to serve Zionism, to serve the Jewish national homeland. And so she says, what can I do? The settlements? Let’s do it. So we move to the settlements. And that’s where I grew up ...
... I was the only Jew in my kindergarten in the Soviet Union. That’s what to me is a Jew is my kindergarten teacher hated Jews. She made sure everybody knew that I was the Jew. And as the only Jew–and in Russia, it’s a visible minority. So, visibly, looking at me, they would know I’m not a Russian, I’m a Jew. ... And in Israel-Palestine, ... we are the powerful, but we identify ourselves as the not that, not the local.
And that’s particularly poignant when you look at the majority of Israelis, who are Mizrahi Jews, Mizrahi meaning Orientals. But Mizrahi Jews are basically Jews that came from Spain in 1492 and settled in North Africa, as well as Jews that have been living in the Middle East and in Yemen and in the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. And so, for them, they moved to Israel in the first years of the state. They come from the Arab world. They speak Arabic. A lot of their traditions are inspired by Arabic culture. And within a few years, they’re Ashkenized, they’re Europeanized. And their kids don’t speak Arabic, their grandkids don’t speak Arabic, they don’t identify as Arabs, and they identify very strongly with Israel. All of a sudden, the falafel becomes the Israeli food, you know, hummus becomes houmous.
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Yeah. That was amazing. But, I mean, I moved to Israel when I was six. I was more preoccupied with the fact that three months after we moved there, the first Gulf War started, and we spent the first months–my first memories of Israel are sitting under sirens in a gas mask waiting for Saddam to bomb us with gas. Like, these are the things I remember. I remember being–because in Israel, yes, I was now a Jew amongst Jews, but Israel is a very racist society. So, from being the stinking Jew in the Soviet Union, I became the stinking Russian in a Jewish state.
So these are my memories. I mean, as a child, you don’t have an analysis of your identity or of politics. So, for me, what I cared about is my relationship with people my age. And in Ariel, everybody was a Russian, or a lot of the people who lived there were Russians, so you immediately felt like you were part of something. Plus, being part of a closed, gated community in the middle of the Palestinian West Bank, it’s another layer of segregation and insularism. And being in a country that is a Jewish Europe style country in the middle of the Middle East, in the middle of Arab countries, is another layer of that. And so Israel is a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble, and inside of all of that is the settlement right-wing movement.
And so those years in the settlements were the happiest years of my life, because I finally felt like I belonged to something, I was a part of something. And I never thought in bigger terms.
And, in fact, the first time I was ever called a settler, I was in my 20s. I was studying in university in Canada, and a Middle East correspondent called Jon Elmer came to speak on my campus, and I thought that he was very biased, and I was going to teach him what it’s all about, and asked him some kind of really ignorant question, and he just said, I’m so sick of you settlers coming to my talks and telling me I’m wrong. You go to Gaza. And I said to myself, what do you mean I’m a settler? I’m not a settler. And that’s when I started digging what does the settler mean.
I’ll tell you, one thing that is characteristic of ethnocracies, and particularly colonial ethnocracies that we see a lot in Israel, is a number of very strong contradictions. So Israeli identity is a mixture of the strong, the invincible, the strongest among the nations, we are the strongest army in the region and one of the strongest armies in the world, coupled with we are persecuted, we are hated, we are victims. Now, both of those things are true, and both of them work off of each other, and both of them are absolutely necessary for the ethnocratic project.
And what’s more important to me is not the colonialism that Israel perpetrates in the West Bank and in Gaza; what’s more important to me is the ethnocratic regime inside of Israel, because ethnocracies such as Israel, such as the former Balkan states, such as Sri Lanka and Macedonia used to be and South Africa used to be, are–this is the frontier of the global laboratory of how to deal with globalization. And this is why there is a rise of fascistic and extreme-right movements in the United States and in Europe and a lot of these Western places where they want globalized capital without globalized migration. And Israel is a laboratory for a lot of that, as well as weapons, but also a lot of those ideas. And that’s what I stay up at night worrying about.
And for that identity, for that national identity, you need a number of things. You need the justification for endless war. That’s where the victim identity comes from. You also need to inspire people. You need a story of success, of heroism. And this has been the story of Israeli military conquests throughout the last 67 years, to the point where if you ask an Israeli which war did Israel lose, they would say none. Maybe ’73, but none. No, we always win wars.
That’s complete bullshit. We have lost most of our wars, definitely in the last 20 years. We lost Lebanon I, we definitely lost Lebanon II, we lost the intifadas and these perpetual conflicts. Even this last summer attack–I was covering it for you, and I was out there on the ground every day covering what was happening all around us–Hamas didn’t just shock the Israeli military establishment in its ingenuous ways of combating this giant military machine with the tunnels, with the sneaking in through the sea, with rockets, with smuggling weapons from Libya after the 2011 civil war, and so on, and the number of things that they did that they pulled out of their hat of tricks that surprise us, but they forced us–and this nobody–nobody could have predicted this–they forced mighty Israeli into a negotiation with Hamas, a terrorist nothing group that was on its knees before the war started, was falling apart before the war started. And today, while everyone on the street was against Hamas before the war started, you won’t find a single person critical of Hamas. My point is we are perpetual war losers, and yet we have to perpetuate this identity that we are invincible.
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: It may be that–I mean, it depends what you consider winning, because it wasn’t clear the objective was to get rid of Hamas, ’cause I think Israel feared what the alternative would be. But in terms of the relationship of Israel and the Israeli state to the Palestinians, right now they’re winners. I mean, the occupation looks like it’s endless.
TARACHANSKY: It’s true. Let me explain what I mean by win and lose. As I’m sure you know, since World War II, we haven’t had many wars where you have a clear winner and a clear loser. And Israel is not fighting an army. And so there isn’t never going to be a checkmark–you won and you lost. We’re fighting a civilian, largely civilian population.
I’m talking about Israeli public identity, this point at which you can get to the Israeli public, average Israeli thinks, we won that war. And the average Israeli today thinks, we’ve lost the last 12 years of war. And that’s incredibly important, because, yes, on the ground we have the West Bank, we can bomb Syria if we want to, we can bomb Lebanon if we want to, we can do anything we want.
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... At this point, my intellectual identity was already very much questioning of the Zionist project. But to physically be there surrounded by these Palestinian villages is completely different than to understand something from watching the news and so on and so forth. And to physically be in that space and to realize that I had grown up here, I’d spent my happiest years here, and here comes “Allāhu Akbar”, and it’s the first time in my life that I’m hearing the sound that I had somehow–and the call to prayer happens five times a day. Israel is surrounded by villages whose names I didn’t even know, all around, each village, five times a day, the call to prayer, and I somehow didn’t even register hearing the sound. And when I turned around to point out to you what is a settlement and what’s a Palestinian village and what’s a settlement, what’s a Palestinian village, I was naming them to you, but in my mind I was thinking, I don’t even remember them being there.
You’re so busy constructing your identity, you’re not even paying attention to what’s right in front of you. And that is in essence the representation of collective denial. That is what Stanley Cohen, on whose work I did my documentary, exactly what he describes. What do two people looking at the same object, how can it be that they see two different things? And what do they do to that knowledge? And what does that knowledge do to them? For me, that changed my life, and I know that for the rest of my life I’m going to have to fight not just the Zionistic idea of Jewish exclusivity to the land, but I’m going to have to stand up against what’s going on in Israel-Palestine until there is justice for the rest of my life. And it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my life; it doesn’t matter what I want to do with my free time. This is my responsibility, just like it is the responsibility of every person in America to stop police brutality against the largely people of color minority. It is your responsibility. It’s not about right and wrong. You have to do this. You don’t have a choice.
And that’s what I realized in that moment is that implicated in my own guilt for having enjoyed colonialism on this land, this land that does not belong to just one group, it is now my responsibility to fight it forever. And this is the effect that this seeing and hearing for the first time had on me.
And I have to tell you the truth. Since have been the best years of my adult life, understanding that, having the clarity of thought to finally lay out not just the historical narrative, but also understand so many things that I was afraid to ask questions about, to finally look beyond my fear and go to the West Bank and have friends in Gaza and sit on the phone with them as they were being bombed by, supposedly, my army, and hear each other’s humanity, and have them tell me, Lia, I know this is not you, I know you’re in solidarity; I’m here with you, I’m sorry that there’s people sending rockets at you, it’s not my intention. My privilege to be able to see across these walls, it was a direct result of being able to have that moment.
And I wish for everyone in my country, I wish for all my people to have that moment, because it’s only once we look past these walls that we can see the humanity of the other and we can move out of this collective trauma.
