There’s some possibly good news coming out of Israel in the past few days. News that encourages me to hope. Hope—meaning that I care about what kind of spirit wields power in that nation, I care whether a spirit that makes the world more whole or makes it more broken.
I am an American. But as an American Jew born in 1946, just after the Holocaust and a couple of years before the nation of Israel, I have always taken a special interest in the remarkable nation that got formed on the land that had so long ago belonged to the ancestors of the Jewish people who founded Israel, so that they could at last be in charge of their own protection.
(I was aware of Israel when I was three, and I’ve followed Israeli politics fairly closely since 1956, when the Suez Crisis rocked the world.)
For a long time, I was very proud of what “my people” had created— making the desert bloom, the only democracy in the entire region, militarily punching way above its weight.
But then has come the past 20 years— something darker has gained power.
Maybe it was the way that Arafat walked away from talking once a real resolution seemed maybe in striking distance. That was enough to kill off the Israeli peace movement, and it seemed deeply connected to the collapse of the political party that had given Israeli leaders like Ben Gurion and Golda Meir and Ehud Barak to the Party that at first gave Israel as Prime Minister a principled hard-liner like Menachim Begin, but then that party degenerated one that in power Ariel Sharon (stained with war crimes he allowed to happen) and, for the past decade, Bibi Netanyahu.
(Netanyahu, who in terms of his corruption and his willingness to appeal to the worst is much like Trump, but who, quite unlike Trump, is quite intelligent and highly competent at achieving his political goals, both domestic and international.)
I’ve been unhappy to witness this slide into darkness and brokenness.
I visited Israel for the first time, for six weeks back in 2017, and I was indeed proud of the society that they have created. It is truly wonderful in a great many ways. (See for example what I wrote about “Amazing Jerusalem” at the time— and it truly is unlike any place on earth I’ve been, in some rich and beautiful ways.)
But the wonderfulness of the society stands in some contrast to the state of the state— i.e. power in Israel — which has come under the control of a political force that shows an ugliness of spirit.
The way they have dealt with the Gazans has been in a spirit of pure punitiveness. Justifiable if one conceives of the situation as one of war with an enemy, which makes some sense given that Gaza is under the control of Hamas, which really is an enemy. But I believe that the admirable Jewish leaders that one sees in history would deal with the Palestinians — both in Gaza and in the West Bank — differently. Ready to defend themselves against an enemy, but also seeking the best path to get someday to a place where peace can be made, and hatred start to turn to something better.
In Israeli policy in recent years under the Netanyahu government, there has been none of that search for a path of healing. Not even with a generational horizon. It is conflict, and they’ve undercut the Palestinian leadership with whom some kind of peace might be found, albeit with difficulty. (But that difficulty has only been increased by the Israelis’ lack of interest in finding a more whole path for a happier and more harmonious future.
Netanyahu once said he was for the “two-state solution” that has been the goal of the United States and other major powers for decades. But that turned out to be just a begrudging gesture, because he’s pretty well abandoned the two-state solution, and making such a solution ever-harder because of the big Jewish settlements the right-wingers are building with the support of Netanyahu’s coalition. And now there is a move among that coalition to annex all of that settlement-territory, making impossible the formation of a Palestinian state that enjoys all the main elements of the status of a people with their own state.
An ugly spirit I really have been disappointed and repulsed to see rising out of the Jewish state. In so many ways, over the past couple of centuries, a great many Jewish figures in history were able to create out of all their people’s suffering and injustice a powerful force for a world that was more moral more whole, than what they’d discovered it to be, the hard way: something better than “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” A way that is compassionate for the downtrodden, and passionate for justice.
It is not just coincidence that the two white young men (Goodman and Schwerner) who died in Mississippi with their black comrade in arms (Cheney) during the time of the Anerican civil rights freedom riders were Jews. Centuries of suffering from injustice, centuries of seeing the ugliness of power being able to do whatever it wants regardless of the needs of others, created a moral force that was an important part of the culture.
(Not that there weren’t also gangsters and shysters.)
But in Israel in the past almost generation, in the arena of power, Israel has come to express a different kind of spirit. It’s a spirit with a lot more brokenness in it, a brokenness that also expresses itself in the fact that the Prime Minister has been indicted for corruption and breach of the public trust.
But as with Trump, it has not just been his corrupt acts, but his willingness to attack and damage the system of justice in order to protect himself from the consequences of his corrupt acts.
(I met Netanyahu’s father once, and I saw him as a right-winger, but not as a corrupt man. Like Menachem Begin that way. Honorable, and Begin was ready to make peace with Sadat, just as Reagan was willing to make peace with Gorbachev, against the advice of more broken people like Dick Cheney.)
It seems that something has darkened with the passage of these decades, from father to son and from Begin to Sharon and Netanyahu.
Why has this darkening occurred? Is it because the Israeli people gave up on the Palestinians and the idea of peace after Arafat ran away from Camp David? Is it because Israel has gradually absorbed the dark spirit that governs pretty much the whole region?
Is Israel’s devolving into the hands of the likes of Netanyahu and his Party and the bullying orthodox and the fervent settler movement part of whatever that spirit is that has been sweeping the world as a wave of thuggishness in power— from Assad’s Syria, to Sissi’s Egypt, to the Ayatollah’s Iran? Is it part of whatever this global thing is that has this wave of ugly autocrats rising around the world— from Erdogan’s Turkey, to Putin’s Russia, to (President-for-life) Xi’s China, and Modi’s India, and Hungary and Poland and the Philippines and now, for God’s sake, the United States of America?
I don’t know. But I’m glad to say that the results of this most recent election just possibly might represent the beginnings of Israel turning back toward something better. The news is that this indicted prime minister is apparently not going to be allowed to remain Prime Minister. And power may shift – at least for now -- from the right-wing to something looked more humane, although the possible new coalition would span from the Arab-Israeli contingent to a small right-wing party: something that will be hard to put together (especially given that the gulf between Jews and Arabs allows no explicit alliance) and hard after that to keep together.
It is the leader of that small right-wing party — Avidor Lieberman — who has prevented Netanyahu from forming a government (which requires controlling at least 61 seats). Where Lieberman represents a break from the right-wing force is over the way Netanyahu’s coalition allowed the religious theocrats continue to dictate public policy on matters touching on religion. Lieberman may have been OK with the brokenness of showing no interest on peace, for all I know, but when it came to the brokenness of some people insisting that their religion be forced on others, Lieberman chose to stand on the side of people being free to live according to their own religious or secular values.
Meanwhile the Arab Joint List has gained in power to fight back against the ways in which Netanyahu and his coalition have treated them as the weak who must suffer whatever the strong impose upon them.
While it is not clear just where all this may end up, for the moment at least it appears that the force that has brought corruption, and conflict, and intolerance, may have to relinquish power.