Repeated elections in Israel reveal the intensification of rhetoric around "transfer" and the normalization of the settlement project in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. At the same time, recent reports by a host of respected human rights organizations brought into question the limits and blinders of the construct of "Jewish democracy." A panel of public intellectuals examined the gradual strengthening of Jewish exclusionary political parties, the influences of Jewish and Christian American agendas on Israeli political trends, and the historical and philosophical meanings of Jewish political modernity.
This event took place October 25, 2022.
Full Transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: "Another Israeli Election: Assessing Trends of Israeli and Jewish Politics." October 25, 2022.
DIANE L. MOORE: Good afternoon, everyone who is joining us live and those who will be viewing this recording at a later time. I am delighted to welcome all of you to our webinar, "Another Israeli Election: Assessing Trends of Israeli and Jewish Politics." We have an incredible array of panelists today, and I'm extremely excited about this important and timely discussion.
I'm Diane Moore. I am the Faculty Director of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, and this webinar is being sponsored by one of our two main branches of programming under Religion and Public Life-- the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. And I want to share a little bit about the foundations of that Initiative before I thank my colleagues and turn this over to our moderator, Atalia Omer.
So our work in Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative centralizes an analysis of structural injustice, violence, and power, and we examine how a more capacious or nuanced understanding of religion can and does yield fresh insights into contemporary challenges and opportunities for just peacebuilding. The primary case study that we're focusing on is Israel-Palestine, and we have an array of programs and courses and experiential learning opportunities related to that focus.
Our aim is to stretch the scholarly discourse around religion and the practices of peacebuilding, and to examine the decolonial potentialities of art, religion, and identity transformation. And so again, this webinar is an excellent example of our invitation to think about seemingly intractable challenges in fresh ways, with an incredible array of colleagues who will be leading and guiding this discussion.
Before I introduce our moderator and my colleague, I want to say thank you to the behind-the-scenes folks who make these webinars possible-- Navi Hardin, Reem Atassi, and Erin Burrows on our Religion and Public Life staff. And I also want to thank Hilary Rantisi, who is the director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, for her conceptualization, along with Atalia, of this important webinar.
So Atalia Omer is not only a dear friend and colleague and, I think, a brilliant, brilliant scholar and public intellectual around many questions related to religion and peacebuilding, but especially so related to her work on religion and peace, just peacebuilding in Israel-Palestine. She is the Dermot TJ Dunphy Visiting Professor of Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding here at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Harvard Divinity School, and has been our colleague in this work for the last five years.
And we couldn't do this work without her. She is also Professor of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Studies at the Keough Institute for International Peace Studies and Sociology at Notre Dame. And she's co-director of the Contending Modernities blog there. So Atalia, I'm going to turn this over to you and thank our wonderful colleagues, have you introduce them, and I look forward to this conversation. Thank you.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you so much, Professor Moore, for this amazingly generous introduction. So I have the great honor and privilege to introduce our panelists-- extremely briefly, because they simply need no introductions, and also, we are simply eager to launch right into the conversation.
Our speakers today are Amira Hass, who is a celebrated veteran journalist for Haaretz newspaper and an author of books capturing the meanings of Israeli sovereignty over Palestinians. Amira is especially renowned for covering Palestinian affairs in the West Bank and Gaza, where she resided for decades. Amira is also a former fellow with us at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.
Our next speaker is Professor Yaacov Yadgar, who is the director of Middle East Studies at the-- and also the Stanley Lewis Professor of Israel Studies at Oxford University in the UK, a prolific author. Professor Yadgar's most recent book, Israel's Jewish Identity Crisis: State and Politics in the Middle East, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.
Last but not least, Professor Shaul Magid is a rabbi and a distinguished fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. His most recent book, which was published with Princeton University Press in 2021, is titled, Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical.
Our panel today will ask each of these authors, thinkers, and public intellectuals to draw on their scholarly and journalistic-- or journalistic work in Palestine, Israel, and Jewish political thought and praxis. The intentionality here is not to offer another pre-election commentary in advance of yet another election, though obviously, we will offer this commentary as well.
But really, the intentionality here is to think about what this election tells us, in terms of a broader discussion of Judaism, Zionism, and modernity, Kahanism, the convergences of forces, Christian Zionist settlers, secular and political forces, and opportunistic agendas as well. So really, without further ado, let's begin.
Let's begin with you, Amira. And because you are on the ground, can you speak to whether and how the election campaign is felt where you are located in the West Bank? Have you observed changes in the course of this repeated cycle of elections, in terms of patterns of Palestinian dispossession and just patterns of violence? So anything you want to share with us from the ground.
AMIRA HASS: Thank you, Atalia, and this is, for me, good night, good evening. So good evening, good afternoon, for everybody. Look, let me start with a short description.
I live in El-Bireh, and I'm going to vote for a government that decides about the life and fate of all my neighbors here in this building, all the neighbors in the neighborhood, everybody-- every Palestinian here in the West Bank, as in Gaza. This is-- the Israeli government decides. In fact, it decides about the life of almost five million people living in Gaza, in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
But they are not eligible to vote. I'm voting. My neighbor cannot vote. So-- and this is the main feature of these elections-- not only this year, not only this time, but for the past-- for the past 58 years-- 50, 55 years, almost.
This is the main feature. Every Jew in this area-- there are-- we have so-called neighbors in Beit El settlement. They, of course, are going to vote, and their settlement is built on the land of El-Bireh and some villages around.
But the people who own the land, which means the Palestinians-- they are-- the legal owners of the land cannot vote. More than that, most the main parties that we see are going to succeed or to win in the West Bank are the most right-wing parties. So those-- and some of them who advocate, openly, expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank as a solution to the problem or as a punishment if they are not loyal to Israel-- we can term it-- there are many, many, many terminologies that we can use here to describe this reality.
But I describe it just in order for people to understand the basic unjust absurdity, or absurd injustice that is at the core and at the base of any Israeli elections. This is the first. Now, some people say that the-- I don't know-- I cannot call it a centrist left-wing government, that reigned here for a year.
It was a soft-right-- it's not even soft. It's right-wing and a little bit with some shades of centrist parties. Everything was worse during their reign, when it comes to the policies of colonization and of allowing settlements to exercise their supremacy by unchecked violence against Palestinians, and also when it comes to the conduct of the army.
I think that in about-- I don't remember. In almost 10 years, it's the highest number of Palestinians who were killed by the Army, this year. Some say it was some sort of a-- that the Israeli government, this present government, felt the need to show that it's nationalist enough.
And that's why it exercised-- it has taken upon those policies or escalation of policies, including today's raid on Nablus. And in its campaign, Nablus has been under actual curfew, internal curfew, for two weeks already. I'm not sure-- I'm not sure it is really a conscious electoral campaign, which makes our Minister of Security or Minister of War and the Prime Minister to escalate their tactics.
I think it is-- the escalation is inbuilt in the system. But there are Palestinians who feel that it's on their back, on their backs and at their account, Israeli centrist parties launched their electoral campaign, hoping to convince people to vote for them, because of this. But you know, why should you vote for Lapid or Gantz if you have the original, which is Ben-Gvir or Netanyahu? So this is the question.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you, Amira. Just a quick point of clarification-- an anonymous questioner is asking why you can vote and your neighbor cannot vote, so maybe you want to, kind of--
AMIRA HASS: Oh, I vote because I'm an-- yes, I vote because I'm an Israeli citizen, and my official address is in Jerusalem. I guess if you compare, you would say that they are American journalists-- the American journalists of New York Times, for example-- if they live here, they cover the area, the Middle East. They would vote-- they would vote by envelopes or early voting or by--
ATALIA OMER: Absentee ballot.
AMIRA HASS: Or absentee ballot, yeah. Absentee ballot. I do not need, because it's only a distance of 15 kilometers from here to Jerusalem. So I don't need this absentee ballot. And I can drive to Jerusalem and be there.
My neighbors not only cannot vote, they cannot even go to Jerusalem. For them, Jerusalem is an abstract. It is a dream, an old memory from when they are children, maybe 30 or 25 years ago.
So this is also part of this reality that I call the reality of enclaves or Bantustans, or reservations, or Pale of Settlement. No matter what you call it, but it's a policy that condenses Palestinians into pockets of territory while taking control and-- taking control and using and grabbing all the area around those pockets of territory.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you. Shaul, let's turn to you. I also invite you to react or reflect on anything that Amira just talked about. But also, I wanted to ask you to speak specifically and share with the audience an argument that you recently articulated in an opinion piece that you wrote, where you argued that Itamar Ben-Gvir is a bigger risk than Meir Kahane ever was.
So can you unpack your argument there in this piece in Haaretz? And we'll also share it with the audience. And kind of, contextualize your argument and whether-- why you think that Ben-Gvir is more dangerous, and is it the case that somehow Kahanism hijacked good, old Israeli democracy?
So anything that-- any kind of insight that you want to offer will-- I think, will really enrich the discussion. Also, since Amira already mentioned, kind of, Ben-Gvir, and how we might-- or kind of that type of argument that Ben-Gvir is making. So--
SHAUL MAGID: Thank you. Thank you. I first thank you for inviting me. And this is an important thing to be a part of. It's always an occupational hazard to be on a panel talking about elections that haven't happened yet, and I know that there's a lot of discussion.
So in this op-ed piece in Haaretz, the argument that I made-- and there have been a number of different pieces about Ben-Gvir. In some way, I think that this Israeli election cycle kind of reminds me of a TV series where there are kind of-- there's a returning cast, and then there are these new characters who constantly appear.
So if we go back three or four elections, the new characters-- the new character was [INAUDIBLE] And everybody was talking about him, and he was kind of the new kid on the block, and there was a lot of optimism-- certainly, among people in the center and the left-- about the potential for a real important and influential and-- a potential game-changer, in a way. And then, that didn't really pan out, and then in the next election, we had Mansour Abbas, who was a kind of divide-and-conquer character who entered in because the government decided that they would be able-- they wanted to split the Arabs in the North and the Arabs in the South, and ended up-- he ended up breaking the glass ceiling and becoming a part of the political system.
And that also didn't really pan out. And now, we have Ben-Gvir. He's the new character. So who is Ben-Gvir? Where does he come from? Should we be surprised that he's here?
And I think that one of the interesting things about Ben-Gvir and what I call in my book, and also in the op ed, neo-Kahanism versus Kahanism-- and I can explain what the difference between those two things are in a moment-- is that he's more dangerous to Israel because of the way he is quintessentially Israeli. Not only that he's a native Israeli-- a Sabra, as they say or they used to say-- but there's something about Ben-Gvir that is very, very cognizant of the system. He knows how to work the system.
And I think the distinction that I made between Ben-Gvir and Kahane is that Kahane, first of all, was an outsider. He was an interloper. I mean, even when he was in Israel, he was always considered to be an American. And Kahane was really a revolutionary, and a revolutionary in the sense that he was willing to take down everything with him.
He was really willing to burn the house down for his ideals. Ben-Gvir is not really a revolutionary. He's somebody that comes from the inside, and he really wants to change society from the inside. And the reason that he's more dangerous is because Israel is already-- the Israeli electorate is already more sympathetic to those ideas, so that Ben-Gvir doesn't have to be as radical as Kahane was.
Because the society is already more radical than it was. Remember, in 1986 and 1987, the Knesset, both on the right and the left, by the way, voted to implement the racism law that made Kahane's party illegal. And so when people ask-- and people have asked me, well, why don't they use that same racism law to oust Ben-Gvir and his religious Zionist Party?
And the answer is simple, because it wouldn't pass in the Knesset anymore. In other words, that the entire system has moved so far to the right, that Ben-Gvir is able to do the same work that Kahane did without being Meir Kahane. That is, without being the revolutionary, without being the real radical who's bucking the system.
Ben-Gvir isn't really bucking the system. Ben-Gvir is a piece of the system. And you can see this just in the way that Netanyahu is willing to partner with Ben-Gvir, and basically, in an article in Times of Israel today said that he's not going to bow down to America if America opposes a government with Ben-Gvir.
So I think he poses a real threat, because as I said in the op ed, it's like the frog in the pot of water. It's slowly, slowly, slowly getting hotter and hotter, until the point that the frog just is burnt to death. And in a certain way, I think Ben-Gvir is a sign.
Now, one of the things that I think is important to note is that in the latest polls in Haaretz that I just checked this morning, religious Zionism is slated to get about 12 or 13 seats. Now, if it gets-- I think we're standing between a disaster and a catastrophe. If Ben-Gvir should get 13 seats or his party should get 13 seats, and he becomes a minister in the government, that's somewhat catastrophic.
If Ben-Gvir gets six seats, it's still a disaster. And I think a lot of people will say, oh, well, you see, he didn't get 13 seats. He only got six seats, so maybe it's really-- there's nothing really to look at here.
But I think that the issue is, whether he gets 13 seats or whether we get six seats, I think that Ben-Gvir is a sign that the Israeli electorate has changed, that the political climate has changed. And whether that's permanent or not permanent, no one knows. But there is a new norm, as Tomer Persico wrote in his essay on Ben-Gvir in Haaretz-- he's Kahane for the whole family.
He's normalized and regularized a certain kind of ethnocentric chauvinism that is no longer surprising to many Israelis. And I think that people that are surprised that Ben-Gvir exists really haven't been paying attention. I mean, we can talk a little bit later about American Jews and American Zionists and how they'll react to it.
But I think that whether Ben-Gvir is as successful as predicted, or whether he's less successful than predicted, the issue is not Ben-Gvir. The issue is the Israeli electorate and what's actually gone-- what has happened since 1987 when Kahane was removed from the Knesset, or whether the decision was upheld by the Supreme Court, and 2022. I think that's the-- the real danger is that it's already here, not that it's on its way.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you.
AMIRA HASS: Can I--
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, Amira, go ahead. Yeah, so in one sentence, we should say that he is dangerous more than Kahane was, because he represents so many Israelis. So the danger is not in Ben-Gvir, but the danger is in a great part of the Israeli society-- a great, great part of the Israeli society.
SHAUL MAGID: And one thing-- yes, and I want to mention one thing if I can. I think one of the more interesting things that people aren't paying attention to in the Ben-Gvir story is that his base is not only made up of right-wing settlers. His base is also increasingly made up of young Haredim.
Now, that's actually new. Because I think that the Gen-Z Haredim have really abandoned some of the traditional Haredi parties, basically, as irrelevant. It's a kind of a Boomer phenomenon within the Haredi world.
And basically, a lot of these young Haredim are saying, no, Ben-Gvir is-- Ben-Gvir is saying something new. He's interesting. He's not just getting money for yeshivas and giving us a Ptor from the army. He's actually-- he's actually articulating a particular kind of ideology that we identify with.
And part of that is that the young-- a lot of young Haredim are becoming very politicized and very nationalized. And if you take a Haredi mindset and you politicize it, and you make it into a political register, you have Kahanism on some level. Right?
The idea is that the Arabs living in the settlements are no different than the Cossacks living in the Pale of Settlement. The way in which the politicization of young Haredim is strengthening the far-right base is something that I think, in a certain way, people like Ben-Gurion may have kind of regretted the aspiration to make the Haredim a real part of the political culture.
Because they're bringing with them a particular kind of attitude, and they're great in number. And I think they're very powerful, and I think they have a lot to do with Ben-Gvir's popularity.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you. Yaacov, let's turn to you for this initial round of questions. So in your recent book, you examine what you call Israel's Jewish identity crisis.
Can you please explain your thesis and discuss how your analysis of Jewish modernity and Israel's Jewish identity crisis can help us understand the political and rhetorical shifts away from the construct of, quote unquote, "Jewish democracy," and perhaps if you can also speak specifically about the significance of the Jewish nation-state law, what it is-- the law that passed in 2018-- and how it connects to-- to the degree that it connects to your analysis in the book. So in a sense, now, with you, we are stepping a bit outside of the moment of the elections.
YAACOV YADGAR: So first of all, thank you. Thank you for asking me a question that would be three book launches in proper answer at the same time. And allow me, just before starting to answer you, to actually touch upon this point that was repeated both by Shaul and Amira, and kind of-- in the name of balancing the discussion.
I want to highlight that the legitimation of Kahanism or the Kahane-style rhetoric and-- well, sometimes even pure racism-- doesn't start with Ben-Gvir and maybe Netanyahu putting his hand around his shoulder. I think it starts slightly earlier, if you consider the legitimation given to Lieberman-- Lieberman, who was advocating loyalty tests to Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Lieberman was advocating transfer, basically, with the land. But a sense of transfer of Palestinian citizens of Israel has been endorsed by the Israeli left because of what we would call the left-- I'm sorry, and I fully accept Amira's hesitation about this-- has been endorsed by those who would do anything to have Netanyahu not be Prime Minister, without really, I think, taking into consideration this effect of legitimating this kind of discourse. That just-- I'm sorry, I-- a reaction I wanted to offer.
Now, as to your question, I think that's one of the biggest issues that lie at the root of the Israeli polity that many people simply do not address, because they assume the answer is given, although the contention over this and this question-- what does it mean for Israel to be a Jewish state, or what does it mean to be the nation-state of the Jewish people, or what does it mean for Israel to be a national home for the Jews, to go all the way back to the Balfour Declaration-- is an unsolved question.
It is at the root of not just Israeli nation-statehood, but at the root of Zionism itself. Maybe captured most clearly in the Zionist claim to Jewish history, the Zionist claim to Judaism itself, while at the same time, rebelling against this history, rebelling against this Judaism with correct religion or otherwise, and claiming and arguing that Zionism is now the moment of politicizing and modernizing Jewish identity.
So Zionism never solved this tension, and it brought to life these dual, competing readings of the very meaning of the national project. One meaning-- and very crudely-- obviously, this is just a caricature of a more complicated-- much more complicated ideological debate. But one dominant answer-- let's title it with Herzl, with Theodor Herzl-- would say that Israel is not anything beyond European nation-state for the Jews.
So following the European post-enlightenment, post-emancipation notion of Jewish identity as an ethnic or even racial kind of identity, nationalizing it, and then endowing it with what is the collective right of these people-- self-determination in a nation-state of the Jews, in which case, the only prerequisite would be for Israel to be-- when you think about the practical matters of politics-- to have a Jewish majority.
Now, this is not a simple prerequisite. This is necessarily a demographic and demographic, stress-inducing exercise that renders one's supposed ethnic, or even racial identity, the basis of the polity. So if you think about the question, the first question that was addressed to Amira, one way of answering this question is that, yeah, because she's considered by the state a Jew, no matter what America's position regarding Jewish identity and Jewish history might be.
The other, the competing, answer to this question-- what would it mean for this project to be a national project, a Jewish national project-- is the one that Ahad Ha'am, Asher Ginsberg, was giving, which-- it has to be a project of corresponding with Jewish tradition in one way or another. And in no way would it be traditionally Jewish, what they would call a religious project, but it would have some sense of correspondence.
And Ahad Ha'am was very happy to say, yeah, I'm a chauvinist. I'm a Jewish chauvinist, if you think that an outright preference of Jewish matters is something that this polity to be should adopt. In my understanding, this contention, this tension between these two readings, characterizes the Israeli reality throughout.
And in this regard, the nation-state law, which passed in 2018 after more than a decade of debate, more than 14 years after it was first initiated by this outright conservative-thinking, Zionist think tank, It was meant to anchor-- this was the use-- to reaffirm Israel's identity as the nation-state of the Jewish people, in reaction to a sense of threat by those who promoted it to this law.
If you ask me, what is it actually about how do we understand it, I think the best way to understand the nation-state law is to see it as another point in a long developing narrative of reassertion of nationalism. We can connect this 2018 law to the 2016 moment here in the UK with Brexit and the 2016 moment here in the US with Trump and a long list of reassertion of what we would call right-wing or neofascist. It continues now with Italy.
Nationalism raises its head again, reasserting itself against all these predictions that would be giving way to, I don't know, post-Cold War liberalism, kumbaya. And the nation-state law is trying to say that, to reassert nationalism while using Jewish as its subject.
The problem is that it is confused between the Jewish state and the state for the Jews. So it starts with an initiative that was clearly aimed to reassert that Israel can discriminate in favor, collectively, of the Jewish nation, and it ends with an attempt to maybe instill some Jewish meaning into this polity, which was very, how I would say, handicapped. It's an odd mixture, where both supporters and detractors say this is a highly fundamental but redundant law.
We really need it, but we don't really need it, and not in this way. And I think the cycles, the election cycles that we've been seeing-- so this is, what, the fifth election cycle in two years-- are dancing around this question. One of the ways of understanding Ben-Gvir is that he is-- or religious Zionism-- they are reasserting this nationalist premises without shame, I would say-- what Israelis call "political correctness," for some reason. And as Amira said, it's very difficult for other parties who are nationalist but trying to paint nationalism more, how I would say, palatably-- have to argue with someone who just says it outright.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you. Maybe at this point, that's an opportunity for the panelists to respond to one another, to whatever thread-- I mean, there are quite a few threads on the table. So yeah, Shaul, go ahead.
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah, I think-- thank you, Yaacov. I think you're right. I think it's a hard pill to swallow. I don't think that there's a tremendous difference between Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu, on some level.
And again, going back to Lieberman, of course, it goes back much further. It goes back to the revisionists. It goes back to Jabotinsky. It goes back to everything we've been through.
And it even goes-- it goes to things that Ben-Gurion himself said. So I think it's deeply embedded in the Zionist project-- a kind of nationalism, a kind of chauvinistic nationalism. I don't think that Zionism was ever really a liberal project. It was an illiberal project that had certain liberal positions.
And when those liberal positions very often get pushed forward, whether it's with Brit Shalom early on, or Peace Now in the '70s, right? They very, very quickly become marginalized, because, as you said correctly, the nationalist project is deeply nationalist on some level. And Ben-Gvir may be a scary iteration, but he certainly is not unprecedented.
I mean, you can take one side. He's certainly not impressive to me. This kind of attitude has been going on throughout the history of the state, and even before the state.
So I think Israelis, especially center, center-left, left Israelis-- it's very hard to confront the possibility. And I say this openly, provocatively, but also seriously, that the problem is Zionism-- that that's the problem. Right? And that Ben-Gvir is not some kind of a Frankenstein of Zionism, that he is a particular moment and a particular iteration of something that is a project that needs to be reassessed.
And I'm not saying that as an anti-Israel position. I think separating Zionism from Israel might be an interesting way to begin to address the kinds of issues that you raise. So thank you.
YAACOV YADGAR: I want to-- sorry, Amira, if you have a point-- I'm sorry I'm jumping into this. I want to stress something, which I'm sure is also in the mind-- on the mind of some of the audience. There is-- the danger of understanding us as singling out Zionism, or signaling-- or misunderstanding me as singling out Zionism-- in no way am I meaning to say that there's something unique about Zionism in this regard.
This is the nationalist project. And in this regard, Israel is a model of a nation-state, like some of the proponents of Zionist nationalism now go around staying in the US. It is the only nation-state that claims sovereignty in the name of the Jewish people, and it's the only nation-state that has to somehow account for its Jewishness.
Because if any-- for the fact that most of its citizens do demand some sense of reassertion of its Jewish identity. But the set of problems in play are not uniquely Israeli, nor are they Zionist. The biggest question in this regard is whether this distinction between Zionism and/or Zionist nationalism, or nationalism and the Israeli nation-state, is possible.
In some readings, we would be now understanding as denying Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, which has been both illegal in Israel, and potentially also very anti-Semitic in other contexts, which neither of us mean to say. This is where the debate becomes really complicated, because questioning nationalism necessarily brings about questioning Zionism, which necessarily brings about questioning Zionism's appropriation of Judaism, which then brings us to a more complicated field.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, thank you. This is really important. It's really-- and I'll turn to you in a second. I just want to amplify two things that I heard. One is about how Ben-Gvir is entirely consistent with kind of the grammar of Zionism, of secular Zionism.
And another point that was just articulated, and we articulated, is about-- this is something about the project, the modern project of the nation-state, of nationalism. And I just want to put on the table-- and Amira is a perfect interlocutor for this, because you have this analysis-- that while we have an analysis of nationalism foregrounded, there is also a deeper analysis of settler-colonialism that is also operative.
So perhaps this is something, Amira-- I mean, feel free to respond to whatever you want to, but maybe you can bring in the settler-colonial lens. And also, if you can thread into your reflection one comment or question-- I guess, comment-- I don't know how to call it-- from the audience, basically, asserting that this was supposed to be a panel on the Israeli elections, why are we talking about the occupation? So maybe we can start there and go from there.
AMIRA HASS: Yeah, of course you stole from me my remark to Yaacov, that it's not just a national project like any other national project, but it's a settler-colonial entity and a settler-colonial process that we have been experiencing for the past 100 years. But here, I would like to remind us of another historical fact that was omitted, and I feel, as an unhappy or-- an Israeli citizen who has not chosen to be an Israeli citizen, or a Jew born in Israel, there is another fact that I would like to mention-- is that Zionism did not attract-- was not an attractive project for many years, to most of the Jews in the diaspora.
Because most of the Jews in the diaspora preferred to stay in the diaspora and to find other ways to combat anti-Semitism and persecution and economical distress. And we all know that. So we all know that Zionism started to attract Jews when anti-Semitism or discrimination started to be genocidal and when the most of the Western world did not accept the Jews, starting with 1924.
So while we are talking about ideologies and the kind of deterministic dynamism that national ideology-- any national ideology-- has, I feel the need to stress that there were some historical processes and-- more than events, a series of events, that made this project succeed and started or reignited the dynamism that we see today, whose combination is Ben-Gvir. At the same time, there are other processes.
When the world was bipolar, the Palestinians had some kind of ideological back, based on values of liberation. Absurdly enough, it was the Soviet Union, the existence of the Soviet bloc. So at that time, the fight for liberation and independence was not termed as terrorism as it is today so easily by most of the world. And this is also-- when it was a bipolar world, the internal or the inbuilt dynamism, Kahanist dynamism, it was possible to check it.
Even in Israel, Likud did not-- the party of Begin-- Begin would not-- or Shamir-- they did not agree to talk with Kahane. So there is a process that-- I would like to say that we-- I, as leftist, of course, I don't want to think that everything, every deterioration, is in-built and inevitable and that we are doomed to deterioration. Otherwise, why would we act? Why would we participate in protest, and more than that, and in combat, if we think that everything is deterministic?
Which doesn't mean that I'm not terribly, terribly pessimistic and frustrated, of course. Because I see this-- I see that Israel's level of impunity has reached unprecedented levels, and the world tolerates Israel's policies, settler-colonial violence, military policies against the Palestinians in a scandalous way. This is also-- I mean, 20, 25 years ago, 30 years ago, still, there was some hope that European states would stand up against Israeli expansionist policies.
And they haven't. So which brings me to the question about, why do we talk about occupation when we promised to talk about elections? You know, it'll be like talking about elections in-- I don't know-- in England, without talking about poverty in England, or about the problem of the enormous economical gap between the rich and the working people, or talking about elections in Iran without talking about oppression against women in Iran.
The occupation is part of Israeli life, and the occupation, which is part of Israeli settler-colonial essence, is on the agenda, only that most of the Israeli population calls it our right of security, our ancestral existence, et cetera. But what we see here is not just the military occupation that has lasted for more than 50 years, but it is-- maybe what's happening is maybe the most vital proof that Israel is a settler-colonial entity at the basis.
Because it aims all the time at marginalizing Palestinians, to a point of being only individuals and not the people. And when they are-- and when it's not enough for the Israeli talks, then they are in danger of banishment or in danger of expulsion. So it is very much connected.
And every election is about-- as I said in the beginning, it's not only about the life of Jews in Israel, and Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, and actually about Jews all over the world who can come any moment and become citizens in a matter of a day or two. It's-- more than anything else, it's connected to the Palestinians who live in the occupied territory of '67-- cannot vote, but their life is determined by this election.
SHAUL MAGID: Can I add one thing, Amira? Just very, very quickly, just on nomenclature-- it's interesting you use the language of liberation, regarding the Palestinians. From 1967, at least through '74, founding [INAUDIBLE] the language that was used to talk about the consequences of '67, meaning the acquisition of these territories, was not occupation, but liberation.
Because that was the language-- that was the language that many Israelis used. It was the liberation of territories. Right? So it's a liberation of territories, and then becomes an occupation of people. And I think now-- and this is going to swing back to that question that the person asked-- it's moving from liberation, or the land of liberation, to occupation, to de facto annexation.
So there is a kind of transition where the question of occupation is, in some way, becoming less relevant, only because it's becoming less temporal. It's becoming something-- it's becoming something permanent. So the reason that we're talking about occupation-- and the truth is, talking about Ben-Gvir is not only talking about occupation. He's also talking about the Arabs in Israel-- is that that's where Israeli democracy hangs in the balance.
Right? So if we're talking about an election in a democratic society, we're talking about that scene, which actually is undermining, or could undermine, the state as a democratic state. So of course, of course you can't-- that's the albatross, right? I don't think we can get beyond that.
The question is really not occupation. The question is democracy. And that's why I think [INAUDIBLE].
AMIRA HASS: So let me sharpen. I mean, from day one, after the military occupation of the acquisition, military acquisition of Gaza and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, it rendered Israel not as a no democracy. Because the people who are-- because it includes so many people who don't have citizen rights at all, and no right to vote.
And yet, their life is so much shaped by Israel. And this is not to mention, of course, all the Palestinians who were expelled in '48, and of course, are not part of the-- could not be citizens. But even if we think about Israel before '67 as a lame democracy or whatever, something aspiring democracy, this changed immediately in '67.
So the world's admiration of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East is, from the start-- I mean, from the start, the world is blinded and has been blinded. Because this is not true. Because we always had the population.
It's a growing Palestinian population that is not allowed to vote. I mean, it's not allowed to even decide which economy to develop. So they are not allowed to vote either.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, and maybe this will be a good place to speak explicitly about the erosion of the so-called green line. This is also in reference to one of the questions that-- a question that was posted.
So how does the green line, as both supposedly kind of a geopolitical line, but also a normative line, in the sense that it separates what is within the green line is Israel proper, and there, we can talk about, quote unquote, "democracy," and then outside of the green line. So how would you bring, kind of, the green line, from all of your perspectives, into the conversation? Yeah, Shaul, go ahead.
SHAUL MAGID: I think one of the interesting-- one of the interesting moments in the erasure of the green line was two years ago, with what was known as Ben and Jerry gate, when Ben and Jerry decided not to sell ice cream to settlements, but was selling ice cream all over Israel. There was an outcry among Jews and many liberal Zionists as well, that there was something-- there was something fundamentally wrong with Ben and Jerry making that decision.
In a certain sense, that the underlying assumption is that there's no real green line. In other words, I don't know-- Havat-- oh, no I'm trying to think of a settlement, whatever something like Beit El and Tel Aviv are the same thing. There's no difference.
So if you're not going to sell ice cream in Tel Aviv-- in Beit El. It's as if you're not selling ice cream in Tel Aviv which is basically saying there is no green line. So in a sense, that the opposition to Ben and Jerry's decision, even though you may not agree with it, is basically assuming that Beit El Tel Aviv are the same thing. And if you say that Beit El and Tel Aviv are the same thing, there's no green line.
And I think that that's been true for a long time. Except the Ben and Jerry's episode just brought that to the surface and in a certain sense, a lot of liberal Zionists who would say, "Yes, I'm against the occupation," meaning there is a green line will then oppose to the Ben and Jerry's decision which was assuming there actually was an agreement.
ATALIA OMER: And that also coincided with various human rights organizations like the Israeli B'Tselem, and Human Rights Watch using that the category of apartheid to describe the entire geopolitical space. Of course, it manifests in different ways depending on where you are in '48 or '67. But this category has become kind of deployed to explain the situation. Of course, with an understanding that Palestinians have named, used that language a long time ago to describe their realities. But yeah, so Amira do you want to jump in or Yakov?
AMIRA HASS: Yeah, I want to. Look, the green line exists and doesn't exist at the same time in many forms. So I wouldn't be too theoretical about this, me. Where it exists really sharply so is when it comes to citizens rights, citizenship. Because the Palestinians who are born in '48 Palestine, which means in what's called the Israeli Proper, and are born now are Israeli citizens.
And even if some of them live in the West Bank, they remain Israeli citizens. Their position as the citizens of the place and residents of the place are secured. While Jerusalemites are subject to a different set of laws that actually-- they are regarded as people who emigrated to the country-- the absurd of it-- that emigrated to the country.
And if they leave it, if they leave Jerusalem, even if they live in the West Bank but mostly if they live abroad, they might lose their status of residency. So this is another group. But it is because they are beyond the green line.
And then the Palestinians who are in the West Bank and Gaza whose situation was similar to that of Jerusalem might, but changed after Oslo, because after Oslo, Israel no more can revoke their status of residency as it did to tens of thousands if not more since '67 to '94. So in that sense when it comes to citizenship, the green line exists. And it really does.
When it comes to territory, it has never existed actually for the Jews. Because the Jews could come freely to the West Bank, and settle in the West Bank, and get land, and move freely from one place to another. While Palestinians could not go and buy and build settlements or rebuild their villages in '48.
So there are many ways that it's being played. And from the start, and from '67 or 1970, the green line did not exist for the Jews but existed for the Palestinians. And so let's not make it only theoretical.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you so much. Yeah Yaacov, go ahead.
YAACOV YADGAR: I want to follow on Shaul's point. Amira, forgive me for going more theoretical than the practicalities of this. And maybe make a meta comment and then a less meta comment. More election-related comment. The meta comment, they are both emanating from Shaul's point about this Ben and Jerry's gate and the whole atmosphere around it.
I think there's no way of understanding Israeli politics without accounting for the sense of potential undermining of the legitimacy of this state. I think the one thing that dominates the discussion on Israel and specifically the Israeli political culture is reaction to perceived threats or to perceived critiques or outright critiques of this or that policy.
It is that at the end of every logical reasoning, national logical reasoning, it's unnecessarily pure reasoning, there is the threat of the state being delegitimized, the state being no longer, a second Holocaust is a possibility.
And I don't want to make this a caricature. I think this is an essential part of the Israeli mindset-- that the state is not just any other organization. It's a government too of the very existence of the Jewish people.
Questioning the legitimacy of the legitimacy of the state which the Ben and Jerry gate somehow is understood to be somehow ends up with this fundamental anxiety. And I think it's also important to note that we should be able to talk without necessarily meaning-- and this should not exist. Or this should not be. So critiquing the political reality.
It's interesting, you know, can have many discussions on American politics and mention horrible elements from the American history and from the American presence. And no one would suggest that you may be arguing that all Americans should go into the ocean. Well, it is something that stands at the back of many people's mind. And I think that's an essential meta point to make.
More specifically, about the election, what comes up also from Shaul's point is that I guess the very small elephant in the room. It's not a big elephant. The elephant is the Israeli Zionist left and the very notion of liberal Zionism. So numerically, it is a diminished group. And I wouldn't suggest that we fall into the rhetoric of Netanyahu, of blaming anyone who's not a Netanyahu supporter as a leftist.
So if we do abide by some sense of leftist politics as having to do with the Palestinians, there's very little by way of representation for this in the electoral map right now. And more so, on an ideational level, it's very clear that this shift to the right, as Shaul was describing earlier, is also looked at from the other side is the diminishing of the liberal Zionist option.
And I think it can be seen as pushing the liberal national. Again, I don't want to talk only about Israel. I don't think this is a necessarily solely Israeli problem. The whole idea of liberal nationalism is really being pushed to its logical limits.
Maybe the one point that really attracts my mind, if you ask the proverbial liberal Zionist from Tel Aviv, OK, they're all Tel Aviv somehow, secular Israeli, what does it mean for Israel to be a Jewish state? They would say one and one thing only-- it's only a state of the Jews. It's only a state that has a Jewish majority.
And they celebrate this as a liberal idea. Because this means that Judaism should not have any presence in the public sphere that civil rights can be happily granted to the minorities and so forth. But they never pay attention to the fact that this is based on a racial or ethnic or whatever you want to call it demographic notion of Jewishness which they become fully subscribing to even if they didn't mean to in the first place.
It's about who you count as you in your own culture which is the most fundamental national logic. Us as majority and them as minority. And they will always be a threat to us. And this is, again, this is a liberal Zionist mindset. The conservative right wing religious Zionist camp is speaking more and more forcefully in terms of political theology which becomes theology. The Temple Mount becomes a better [INAUDIBLE]. The temple itself becomes a locus of political contestation.
So they're very much Zionists. But they're very much also committed to a sense of Judaism which they would adhere to. So they can have their own very vibrant debate, I guess. But it doesn't account for the fact that the liberal Zionist answer is kind of exhausted.
ATALIA OMER: Thank you, actually. Maybe I can introduce now a question from the audience that is relevant to what you just talked about, Yaacov. The question is from Benjamin Mordecai Ben-Baruch. And he writes, "I want to ask a question about Jewish identity, which I think is an underlying issue in the Israeli election. Is Judaism being redefined as Jewish Israelism? That is, is Judaism becoming a political, religious identity that demands support of right wing Zionism and the right wing policies of the Israeli government?" So perhaps another opportunity to get into that issue from a different angle.
YAACOV YADGAR: So I'm sorry allow me to jump into this. Also first I want to say, yeah, to give a shout out yes, Joyce, Joyce, lovely to see you. Yes, Joyce Dalsheim has written a book about this. It's called Israel Has a Jewish Problem, in which she gives a very clear sense of the paradox of Jewish identity in Israel. Thank you, Joyce.
Regarding Benjamin's question, I think you're touching a point which is very sensitive, and you're touching the point right on. One way of appreciating it is to see how people like Netanyahu, like Ben-Gvir-- well, it's only it's not only Ben-Gvir, the party that is now called the religious Zionist Party, but people who advocate this kind of identification between Israeliness and not just Jewishness, but Judaism per se, or I would say between Zionism or Jewish nationalism and Judaism. They regard anyone who does not subscribe to their political ideology as not Jewish or as not Jewish enough. So it's one's Jewishness that is questioned if one's political ideology does not fit that certain kind of interpretation of Jewish nationalism.
SHAUL MAGID: I just want to throw one thing. I think that there's-- I mean, again, it is election-related. it really is not religious Zionism per se that is the subject of the question, and really about the identity. It's really a particular development of religious Zionism that comes out of the [INAUDIBLE] school.
And it's not even the School of Abraham Isaac Kook, the chief rabbi of Palestine, who dies in 1935. But really, it's a move that's made of the religious Zionism of his son Zvi Yehuda Kook. And that move, which is a very, very important one, is the transference of the holiness of the land to the holiness of the state.
Now, once the state itself becomes the subject of religious devotion, once it's seen that going to the army is a mitzvah, language like that-- which is really Zvi Yehuda Kook's move. Once you have that, you have the sanctification of the state, not the sanctification of the land, not the sanctification of the Jewish people. You have the sanctification of a secular, modern, national body, which then gets transformed into a religious entity.
Once that gets locked in, I think you can see a lot of things that follow from that, where the Jewish national project-- as Yaacov called it correctly, the Jewish national project becomes a holy enterprise. And once you're there, it's very, very hard to step back from that point. And that leads to very problematic consequences politically, as well as existentially or on questions of identity.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah. Oh, Yaacov, go ahead. And then I'll come to Amira.
YAACOV YADGAR: Let me interject quickly on this. Shaul, you're right. But it doesn't start with Yitzhak Cohen or with his son. It starts with nationalism, political theology per se. The sacredness, the sanctity of the state, is not a matter of religious nationalism. It's a matter of nationalism.
And if you want the best expression of the sacredness of the state, you shouldn't look for a religious Zionist. You should look for Ben-Gurion. What we call statism among [HEBREW] is the sanctification of the state as the guarantor of existence. Obviously, he takes a different view when it corresponds with the Bible differently. It corresponds with the Bible, not with the sidduer, which is what Ben-Gurion is doing.
But I just want to stress that this political theological reality is much wider than religious Zionism. Religious Zionism in effect is more interesting because they start off with this distinction, with this separation. So the first Mizrahi rabbis at the beginning, they say, no, no, no. We're Zionist on one hand. We're Orthodox on the other.
Zionism is a project of saving Jews, and our religion is something somewhat separate. And this is what religious Zionism in Israel ultimately becomes. It becomes a fully-fledged national movement, which still sees itself as religious
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, thank you so much for bringing that analysis of political theology to the foreground. So perhaps we can turn to Amira now. And if you can react to whatever is on the table, but also maybe speak concretely on the patterns of collusion on the ground between the Israeli occupation forces and the religious settlers.
AMIRA HASS: As a lay woman or [INAUDIBLE] Jewish-- do you hear me? I'm sorry, I have some problems with my-- do you hear me?
ATALIA OMER: Yes, we can hear you.
AMIRA HASS: Somewhat as an observer, I've seen this the spread of the form of very chauvinistic Judaism. And the deliberate choice of the most chauvinistic aspects in Jewish traditions I think is developing and worsening over the years. And I think it's the mechanism. It's probably not the only thing, but what I see is the ideological mechanism, which comes to justify the enormous privileges, or the system of privileges, to Jews.
I think this basically, in most of the places, that's how racism is developing, in order to justify awful sexism, in order to justify and to maintain and to internalize the regime privileges. [INAUDIBLE] chauvinist and racist Judaism became stronger and stronger with the Oslo Accords, because actually, the Oslo Accords in a twisted way legalized the settlements by agreeing to postpone the discussion and the negotiation over the settlements it in a way legitimized them also by the Palestinian leadership. And the Palestinian leadership had to agree to consent to Israel's policies of securing the settlements, so that the interim agreement won't be harmed, which actually made the final status thing that it ever was in the mind of Israelis.
But theoretically, the final status of the settlement between Palestinians and Israel became redundant, not needed, because if everything is fine in the interim period, why do we need a final status? So at that time with Oslo, the possibilities of Israelis to settle in the West Bank became more and more appealing. That's why we have such a jump in the number of Israelis living in the settlements, in the colonies.
And then you have to protect and you feel that your life is being endangered by international law, by Palestinians' demands, by the international community, et cetera. So you develop or you enhance these ideological mechanisms that justify your very privileged, and actually illegal, presence here. So I see this process happening, and that's where settlers violence comes in. There has always been settlers violence almost from the beginning of the '67 occupation.
But what's very peculiar and specific to the current form of violence that actually started in the mid '90s is a violence that aims directly at grabbing more land than the political and military echelons intended at that moment. And especially so, it was from '95, '96, '97, there was violence meant to enable Israeli settlers to build all kinds of outposts that, even according to Israeli very, very lenient laws are against the law, and then to allow those outposts to take over more and more land. For many years, it was land for that they wanted to transfer to agricultural purposes. Then they realized, because agricultural purposes, you can have more land more land without Palestinians than if you just build houses.
But then they discovered it's not enough, and you need a lot of human power in order to work in those agricultural lands. And then it came, mostly in the last 10 years, the phenomenon of shepherds' outposts-- one family and five or 10 high school dropouts, who have a lot of frustrated hormones in them, go and take control and grab tens of thousands of dunams each. According to one of the best researches we have on the settlement policy, Israeli colonization policy, [HEBREW]. Some dozens of outposts have managed in the time of 10 years to take control of over 200,000 dunams and more by violence. So it's mostly violence, intimidating Palestinian farmers and Palestinian shepherds, while the Israeli authorities not only stand aside and don't do anything, like the police or the army, but actually collaborate with them, because this is just another tool of colonization. Apparently, but not truly, individual settler's violence is one of the tools that Israel has in order to proceed with the colonization of the area.
ATALIA OMER: And that, in many respects, goes back historically and how agricultural settlement participated in security discourse, and gaining more and more contiguous land going back to 100 years.
AMIRA HASS: Yeah, but before '48, they had to buy land. And they didn't succeed in getting as much land as they wish to. The war enabled them, of course, to get hold of the enormous land that belonged to Palestinians, who were expelled or were not allowed to return, and then to take land, to expropriate land, of the Palestinians who did remain in '48 Israel. So the aim is similar, but the methods change slightly.
But the violence of today, indeed, is in such a peak. The settlers now also take soldiers. So only when they attack soldiers does the Israeli chief of staff express his shock.
But this is such hypocrisy, because your own soldiers stand aside. And on the contrary, they assist the Jewish attackers when Palestinians and left-wing activists are being attacked. So they assist the attackers, and not only stand aside. And this is a long process. I mean, I've been following so many cases of such attacks that were well-documented with footage, with knowledge exactly from which outposts the attackers came.
But then the police shut down the file and say, no, the attackers were not found. Or it's been shut down because they say it's not of interest to the public, or because they accept the settler's narrative that he felt danger to his life. And this is about the person who had murdered a Palestinian on his own land.
I mean, there is not much room here for interpretation. It's so clear. The pattern is so entrenched, and has been going on for so many years, that there is not much room for interpretation here.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah. Thank you. Can you also maybe say a few words on where you see the influence of Christian Zionists, especially from the United States, on the ground in the colonies and the settlements?
AMIRA HASS: We know that-- I forgot where. I think some were indeed in one of those areas that have most suffered from settlers' violence in the Burin area. A group of Christian Zionists have even bought land. But I see it mostly in the self-confidence, this spiritual comradeship-- or if I can contaminate this word, this affinity between the Jewish nationalists and the Christian Zionists, and the feeling of the world is with us or history is with us that the settlers have.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, because of course, many people who populated the previous American administration were deeply entrenched in this kind of Christian Zionist worldview. And so--
AMIRA HASS: And we know that many settler-or right wing organizations get support and are financed by some of those groups, too.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, I just--
AMIRA HASS: It was also during the corona crisis when people were not allowed to enter. I mean, foreigners were not allowed to enter the country. But there was one group of Christian Zionists which was exempted and could enter the country. So it's just a side testimony to how dear they are for the Israeli system, the Israeli regime.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that we at least alluded to the realities on the ground in really important ways that contribute to their realities. So Yaacov, go ahead.
YAACOV YADGAR: No, I just wanted to ask Shaul to approach this issue of American influence on Israeli politics, because what happens to the Jewish American influence when this--
ATALIA OMER: I was going to ask this question.
[LAUGHS]
YAACOV YADGAR: [INAUDIBLE].
SHAUL MAGID: Well, OK, this is a fascinating question for a number of reasons. First of all, we all remember-- I don't know whether it was Danny Danon, or it was somebody else, that said on a hot mic that Israel should just give up on American Jews and just court Christian Zionists, because American Jews are liberal and they're against Israel, anyway. But a lot of us that follow this in America have always been wondering about the inflection point.
Where is the red line? Where is the red line for American Jews or liberal Zionists in America where, if it was crossed, their support for Israel would significantly diminish. And I remember in 2018, with a nation-state law, there was all this talk, oh, well, maybe this is the red line where American liberal Zionists would no longer be able to support Israel. But they were able to overcome that by saying, well, there's nothing really new here and it doesn't really have any consequences.
And now people are asking, well, what if Ben-Gvir becomes a minister in the Netanyahu government? Would that be a red line where American Jews-- or American liberal Zionists I should say, because there's a lot of American Jews that support Ben-Gvir. But American liberal Zionists would say ad kan-- this is enough, we can't go further. I tend to think that there is no red line.
I once asked moderate Orthodox, moderate Zionist-- he defined himself as a moderate Zionist, would there be a red line? Could Israel do something that would result in retracting your support? And he thought for about 30 seconds, and then said to me, no.
And it was actually quite honest, because I think it was a true answer. I think that liberal American Zionists are in a very, very difficult, defensive position. On the one hand, they're committed to liberal values, certainly in America. And on the other hand, they're committed Zionists, because of the Zionization of American Jewry over the last 50 years. And I think Israel is pushing very, very hard against trying to draw a wedge, in a sense, between those two things.
I think at the end of the day, if most liberal Zionists had to choose between liberalism and Zionism, I think they're going to choose Zionism. And I think they're going to choose the support for Israel. So I think if Ben-Gvir becomes a minister in the government, I think there'll be all kinds of handwringing and all kinds of op-eds and all kinds of stuff on social media. At the end of the day, that will remain.
And by the way, going to something that Amira said about the American administration, I think it's the same with the American administration. They may talk about being concerned about Ben-Gvir. They may talk about this, about that. They're not going to do anything.
And I think Netanyahu knows that. And that was the one thing that Netanyahu has been right about 100% of the time. He can always call America's bluff, and he will always win.
I mean, there was an article published today in Time of Israel where Ben Netanyahu said, I'm not going to bow down to American pressure on the Ben-Gvir issue. But there really will be no pressure. There will be a couple of tepid comments about this is not helpful this is not productive, we're concerned about this.
I don't think Biden is any different than any other president. I don't think that Biden is any different than Pompeo on this issue. I think that the American administration will not force Israel to do anything that it doesn't want to do.
I don't care if it's Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell. It's the same thing. And I think Israel knows that.
I think Netanyahu knows that. And I think American Jews are in a very similar place. Ultimately, they will sacrifice their liberalism for their support of Israel.
ATALIA OMER: Yaacov, do you want to [INAUDIBLE]?
YAACOV YADGAR: I guess my point-- with the danger of belaboring it a little bit one more time, I guess. My point would be that by way of anecdote-- I'm teaching my students. My main theme about Israel-- obviously, a main theme is how to judge Israeli democracy? Is it a democracy? Is it something else?
And one of the questions the students rightfully ask is, like, first of all, whose interest is it for Israel to be a democracy? And why ask the question in the first place, is it a democracy? And I think it's interesting to take this question into consideration.
If we follow the idea that the nation-state's reason to exist, it was under threat, is to express the nation's right to self-determination, then democracy is only an additional element of it. It's not a fundamental element of it. So we can reach at Viktor Orban-like notions of an illiberal democracy, which is not a democracy, but it's a popular sovereignty. That was I think it was meaning to say.
So I guess in this regard, yeah. I mean, Shaul obviously is pointing the finger at the core issue. If the support to Israel is a matter of one's national commitments, then Israel's failure to adhere to democratic principles or to liberal democratic principles should not be detrimental. Similarly, I don't think anyone would say that the United States is no longer the United States when it has a president who is willing to subvert the elections, if you manage to do that. There would be enough people to say, yes, yes, that's the due process.
SHAUL MAGID: Kahane said a long time ago that every country should be a democracy except Israel, because for him, Zionism wasn't [INAUDIBLE] a project of normalization. It was the creation of an abnormal state. That was basically the way he understood Zionism. It was the abnormality of statehood where Israel was the exception.
And although that's an extreme position, I think more and more people on the Israeli right are asking exactly the same questions as your students, Yaacov. They're saying, why democracy? What's so holy about democracy?
I mean, democracy is fine, as long as we're able to remain in control of the narrative and have control of the resources. But if somehow we wouldn't have control of the narrative and the resources, they'd be willing to abandon democracy, because as you say, or as your students say, the national project is about the self-determination of the Jews. And it simply doesn't really matter.
So I think we're moving in that direction in the Israelis. I think American Jews have a much harder time absorbing that, because for many American Jews, democracy is the raison d'etre of a nation-state. That's their experience. Go ahead. Sorry.
ATALIA OMER: No, I just want to maybe interject a common question from Sidney Nestel. Isn't Ben-Gvir precisely a move away from the sanctity of the state or the sanctity of the Jewish people and the land? So if you want to reflect on this. But I also saw Amira wanted to jump in.
AMIRA HASS: No, I wanted to ask Shaul about what we hear about the younger generation of the American community that is detached more and more from Israel. Do you think that they'll change once they grow older?
SHAUL MAGID: That's a good question.
ATALIA OMER: If they have money.
[CHUCKLES]
SHAUL MAGID: Yes, right. No, that's a good question. Look, it's always the question of when young radicals become bourgeois, when they have children and need school tuition. I think it's a very good question, and I hope not.
But I do think that there's a younger generation of American Jews who were born after 1967, so all they know is Israel as an occupying force, and who have been radicalized through progressive politics in America-- Black Lives Matter and a number of other things. And they're translating that to Israel, and they're simply not buying the narrative. And they are being more marginalized by the American Jewish Center and the American Jewish Conversation-- organizations like IfNotNow and JVP and [INAUDIBLE], organizations that are non-Zionist organizations that are Zionist.
And time will tell whether that will happen. But I think that there's a fear in the American Jewish community, certainly the powers that be, that they're losing control of a younger generation on this question. And frankly, I mean, I teach Israel Palestine every year at Dartmouth. And my students are, by and large, Jews, non-Jews, whites, Black, Hispanic, Asians. They're not convinced.
They're not convinced of the narrative that they hear from the Israeli news services. And they're much more skeptical and much more critical. And it's a very good question.
I don't know what the answer will be, but it's causing a lot of anxiety among the American Jewish power structure about what to do with these people who are coming out being anti-Zionist or non-Zionist or what have you. And we'll see in a decade or two what happens to them. Well, also we don't know what's going to happen in Israel.
So I think for me, the more interesting question is really, like, what is the future, if there is a future, of liberal Zionism in America, whether it's going to choose liberalism or Zionism, because on some level, that's the inflection point. That's what Ben-Gvir might actually bring about, because American Jews don't understand Ben-Gvir. They don't really understand him.
They understood Kahane, but they don't understand Ben-Gvir. He's much too Israeli for them. His discourse is Israeli. His mindset is Israeli.
I mean, Kahane was an American thinker who tried to transpose American racial categories into Israel. And it didn't work in a way and Israel rejected him. But Ben-Gvir is really a neo-Kahanist in that way. He's not playing with American categories. It's a very somber-like discourse that American Jews are having a very hard time getting their minds around.
AMIRA HASS: But what's striking for me within the Jewish community in America is not that they are liberal Zionists, which might be. Now it is a contradiction like saying a democratic Jewish state. So it's an in-built contradiction.
But they still embrace the Israeli narrative about being in danger and attacked and the victim in the whole story. This is what strikes me. And being ready to give up on the natural, what I would say, Jewish repulsion from injustice, like all what we knew from 100 years ago about repulsion from injustice or the old sense that we had as Jews to feel injustice
SHAUL MAGID: Yeah, I think it's the weaponization of antisemitism as a tool that's trying to keep support of Israel alive, which is really what the IHRA document was about. I mean, I don't think we have a problem with defining antisemitism. We know what antisemitism is.
The problem is defining antisemitism in relationship to critique of Israel. And I think that's why those documents were written. And I was a signature on the Jerusalem document. It was the same kind of pushback on that.
So yes, what's happening is that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism-- which is something Jonathan Greenblatt, the president of the ADL said publicly. That is the equation that's keeping everybody within the orbit. And that's basically, in a certain sense, where it comes down. Anti-Zionism on the left is more dangerous than anti-Zionism on the right because-- I'm sorry, antisemitism on the left is more dangerous than antisemitism on the right because Zionism on the left is antisemitic.
ATALIA OMER: Yeah, which is-- yeah, it really illuminates the importance of looking at the context, the actual place Palestine-Israel within this deeper discursive framework. You highlight the global and international dimensions that really influence lives on the ground, Amira's neighbors in the West Bank, in really profound ways. So we reached the time to end the conversation.
Obviously, it generated more questions, which is, I think, a good thing. Thank you so much for making the time to be a part of this. Yeah. thank you Amira, Shaul, and Yaacov.
YAACOV YADGAR: Thank you.
SHAUL MAGID: Thank you. Thank you very much. Great to meet you all.
VOICEOVER 1: Sponsor: Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.
VOICEOVER 2: Copyright 2022, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.