Nothing much to say for this piece of the interview. I only wanted to put this interview here to show how much Israel is a racist society, devoid of any & all social mobility among people. There are many Jewish groups in Israel, who are treated just like caste system in India, and at the same time, Israel needs Palestine & this ongoing conflict with Palestine to keep itself alive.
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: How does it get to that point? What is it about–where, in terms of the evolution of the Israeli identity, does this absolute overt racism come from? ...
LIA TARACHANSKY, ISRAEL-PALESTINE CORRESPONDENT, TRNN: As an Israeli Jew, this is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Also, literally, I’ve been robbed of my anonymity on many fronts. And there’s a lot of it that creeps into your life.
But the way I understand it is, like, it’s a combination of two things. I think what you’re seeing on the streets today in Israel, with the constant street-level violence and racism and attacks on anyone who questions anything, attacks on leftists, attacks on Palestinians, that it is the natural conclusion of the Zionist idea coming to its most screeching, screaming peak in having to defend itself. And this is part of the ethnocracy we’re talking about. This is the natural conclusion.
What is Zionism? Zionism is the idea that the Jews have a homeland in historic Palestine, in the ancient land of Canaan. That’s spiritual Zionism. Practical political Zionism means that the Jews have more right to be on this land, and then they must be a Jewish majority on this land. How do you do that in a place that was never empty, in a place that, first of all, was already home to competing national movements, that was already engaged in very rich and ancient culture, both from the Ottoman Empire and the Arab invasions, and was–this place is the crossroads of human migration. How do you come to this place, which is in the middle, between Asia, Europe, and Africa, and you say, no more, here’s our walls, and we’re building a wall with Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Egypt, and no one but Jews can get in? As I’m sure you know, there’s no immigration to Israel unless you’re a Jew. You can’t immigrate, you can’t come in. It’s a state for Jews and only Jews, and we will eventually get rid of anyone who is not a Jew. That is political Zionism today.
And the disparity between understanding that this is what it is here in North America as I’m touring my film and I’m realizing how few people understand what it is and the reality on the ground, this idea playing itself out to its screeching peak, is–the disparity is astounding and playing itself out is incredibly violent and intense. And so, today, if I was to talk to you on the bus or I was out walking down the street with you and I was saying all these things, there’s a very good idea that we would be beaten by the time we get to the end of the street, because there is now so much threat to that idea surviving. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing is colossal disappointment over the so-called peace process finally completely dying. There was a little bit of hope with Obama, Kerry, a little bit of hope with George Mitchell. It was kind of like no one really believed that they would do anything. A lot of people said, well, at least something’s happening. America, having taken the side of Israel on all of the peace negotiations, having put all its capital on the side of the Israeli negotiators, all of its weapons on the side of Israel’s negotiators, and then sat in the middle calling itself the unbiased mitigator in this negotiation, which we’re doomed to end, gave us a false sense of hope. It has built endless institutions in Palestine. It built a government called the Palestinian Authority. It gave that Palestinian Authority billions in donations. And it’s based on hot air and nothing else.
And that thing finally collapsing now, over the last year, and the taking root of nonviolent movements, effective nonviolent movements, such as the fight of the Palestinian political prisoners with ongoing hunger strikes, such as the boycott movement and the antifascist movement inside of Israel, and the most important of which, the rising of national identity amongst Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and inside Israel, and the linking of these three peoples irregardless of who are their leaderships, this is the most important element in the picture.
So the total disappointment with the peace process and the collapse of hope that the conflict will ever end gave rise to a new kind of wave of understanding the conflict is never going to end. The generals and the capitalists that are sitting over there and are making money off the war don’t give a shit about us. Israel saw a huge social justice movement that we’ve covered here on The Real News for two years. That social justice came and fell, and nothing changed except there was a huge change in the public identity, in the public, the way people see Israel, and the way that the people see that their fight is not just with the Palestinians, it’s also with the government, and it’s also with each other. It has further segregated us inside Israel.
And so all these things together burst out. And ... people look at this war that happened this summer, this attack on Gaza, and they say, oh, it was really the worst attack on Gaza so far. They were right. But this attack was not just this summer. What happened this summer was, yes, 51 days of war, but it actually started not even with the teenagers getting kidnapped; it started with the Palestinian hunger strikers in the beginning of the year.
What we were seeing in January a year ago is that the African refugees were rising up, demanding freedom, because they were being shipped off to a massive prison in the south of the country, something very similar to a concentration camp for African refugees. So they were rising up demanding freedom. The Palestinian hunger strikers went on a hunger strike and were very close to getting achievements with that hunger strike. Hamas was on the verge of signing unity with Fatah, which would’ve been the last thing that would’ve saved it. And this was when we went to war.
So, since then, and if you were actually following what’s happening on the ground like we were on The Real News, that’s when the street-level violence started. And the war ended at the end of August, but the street-level violence never ended. In fact, it’s getting worse day to day to day. You know, a few weeks ago, a Palestinian bus driver, who drives an Israeli bus in an Israeli bus company called Egged, was beaten to death and hung in the bus that he was driving, because he’s Palestinian. This is one of the things.
Now, there’s no doubt in any Palestinian’s mind that I’ve met that he was beaten to death and hung. But the police was claiming that he killed himself, and most Israelis believe that he killed himself. And this sparked a wave of bus drivers rising up against insecurity on the job, demanding that the bus company either separate them from the people who get on the–the passengers, or get a security guard, because the Palestinian bus drivers in the Israeli bus come company were saying that they were experiencing daily racist attacks, daily racist assaults. And the company refused. And forty of them have quit. So a third of the Palestinian workers who worked in the Israeli bus company quit because of racism and violence.
That’s where we are today. So six months of endless street-level violence.
JAY: Are there internal factors that you can see amongst Jewish Israelis that will change things? I mean, like, I interviewed quite a few families who lost people in 9/11 in New York, and I was told at least half the families either joined or supported the Not In My Name campaign. They didn’t want revenge. There were saying, don’t start another war, this is not going to bring my loved ones back. And they started getting their head around the context of why it happened. And there’s other examples in the world, including Palestinians, who have lost children, but they get the context. They don’t just want blind revenge.
But one gets the feeling that in Israel there’s been kind of a tipping point where the majority, even a preponderance of people are saying, they’re out to kill us, let’s kill them first, kind of end the conversation.
TARACHANSKY: Yeah. The consensus in Israel has now gotten so bad that the general consensus debate’s between expel the rest of them or kill the rest of them.
JAY: It’s a real fascistization of public opinion.
TARACHANSKY: Well, we saw, during the war, protests where ... people holding up signs during the protest, reading “one nation, one army, one leader”.
...
So I think that in America, in North America, there’s a lot of this mentality of there’s a problem, what’s the solution. We are light years away from resolving the conflict. I think a lot of people here in North America think that we’ve always been in conflict. But if you look at the history of Israel-Palestine, the history of this specific geographical spot, conflict over the centuries has actually been an exception. Peace and coexistence has been the rule. And our conflict is only about 70 years old, and we’ve already gone through huge changes as societies. And so let’s think a little bit before we start talking about solutions.
But what I can tell you is that profound changes are happening inside Israeli society, putting aside the Palestinian conflict for a second or the conflict for the Palestinians. Israel ... is a very segregated society. You have the Russians here, you have the Ashkenazis there, you have the Mizrahim here, and then you have the Orthodox there, and Ethiopians here, and so on and so forth. And inside the Mizrahim you have the Persians, and then you have the Iraqis, and you have the Moroccans. And there’s very little mixing. Israel has almost zero social mobility. If you are born poor, you will die poor. You will not come out of the ghetto. And the media in Israel focuses on a couple of neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And that’s it. What happens outside of these communities, what happens of Haifa, what happens in Palestinian majority towns, what happens in poor peripheral Mizrahi neighborhoods–completely absent.
That doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening. What is happening is that these segregated communities–and I think it’s a result of the social justice movement that was in 2011, 2012, when we saw the biggest protests in the country’s history, half a million people on the streets in Tel Aviv one night in a country of 7 million people. That’s a lot of people on the streets. As a result of that, people started looking around them, and for the first time identity politics is becoming something that is on the fore. So the Mizrahim are saying that–the Jews that came from Arab countries are saying, we’ve been oppressed all along for the Zionist Ashkenazi project. What about us? To the level of forcing the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, to apologize for Ashkenazi European condescendence towards the Mizrahim, something that would have been unimaginable. We’re seeing the Orthodox digging their heels further as new laws inspired by Yair Lapid’s party are forcing the Orthodox to go to the army, makes them more united and further in conflict with the society.
So a lot of these groups, for various complex reasons that we don’t have time to discuss here, are getting more insular and more against each other. And so this is–I think this is a very important change. It’s because for so many years, with the illusion of the peace process, we were not looking at the real problems inside Israel.
JAY: Well, I was going to say, somebody once told me, ... that if it wasn't for the external fight with the Palestinians, Israel would rip itself to shreds, especially the secular-Orthodox split.
TARACHANSKY: Yeah. And this is what we’re seeing. Israel is now ripping itself apart. And fascism is celebrating in the ruins.
