What Happened To Our Hopes and Dreams?

“when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes: The Sign of the Four

I started writing this blog in September 2018 with the first post titled “Hope and disappointment, what happened to our dreams?”. That was nearly six years ago and much has changed since. In the wake of the judicial “reform”, October 7, 2023, and subsequent events, I thought it would be appropriate to review the topic of our dreams and hopes from a political viewpoint when we made aliya (immigration) to Israel from South Africa in the early 70s, fifty years ago, in light of the current circumstances.

After 313 days, more than ten months of war, Israel is undergoing an existential crisis. There are two simultaneous existential threats to the country, an internal undeclared civil war between the ultra-orthodox and the secular, and the ongoing, hundred-year war with the Palestinians, exacerbated by the Iranian enemy, currently being fought on multiple fronts simultaneously. As I write this, the country is nervously awaiting a Hezbollah/Iranian response to the targeted assassinations of the previous week. In this post I will not write about the ultra-orthodox-secular rift, leaving that for a further post.

When it comes to the hundred-year war with the Palestinians, Israeli tactics have consisted of a dual policy of targeted assassinations and escalating kinetic retaliation – attack us and we attack back tenfold harder. The objective has been to deter, punish, take revenge, and attempt to eliminate Palestinian resistance terror and violence against the Jewish state. It’s also been political theater to some extent. The government of Israel has had to demonstrate to its citizens that it is taking action in response to Palestinian violence and that the Israeli response is not only commensurate with the Palestinian violence but that it exceeds it by orders of magnitude.

When we made aliya, immigration to Israel, from South Africa, there was a push and a pull. The push was leaving behind an oppressive, discriminatory society, the pariah of the world, closed to Western modern thinking. One small example, demonstrating how conservative and closed off South Africa was from the world, was the fact that television was only introduced in 1976, about 30 years after North America and Europe. At the time South Africa was firmly in the grip of the apartheid government with no prospects for the end of systemic, legalized racial discrimination and oppression.

The pull was that of living in a free, progressive, democratic Jewish country where we would experience true democracy with the ability to fully express ourselves as Jews in our own country. In the early 70s, Israel was still viewed as the underdog. A small country that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, threatened with annihilation by its neighbors, the miraculous victories of the Six-Day War and the existential Yom Kippur War were recent memories. While a very small number of religious right-wing settlers had started the settlement process in the West Bank, it was still viewed as a small, fringe movement unlikely to have any national impact or be a barrier to any future peace process.

On the first night after the cease-fire in 1967, An Israeli lieutenant colonel oversaw the bulldozing of the Arab neighborhood next to the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, to create large plazas for crowds to gather and worship. In those first postwar hours, Israel seized real estate in occupied land for its use and forcibly displaced residents, creating a precedent that has continued for the last 57 years throughout the West Bank. On that first night after the Six-Day War Israel acted in violation of international law as it continues to do today.

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Within three weeks, the Knesset passed laws allowing the government to expand the city limits of Israeli Jerusalem to encompass the Old City and an additional swath of occupied land and to extend Israeli law to those areas thereby annexing them, illegally, to Israel. At the same time, Israel conferred permanent residence status on Palestinians living in those areas, but not citizenship. While in theory East Jerusalem Palestinian residents can acquire Israeli citizenship, and a small number have succeeded in doing so, in practice the government makes it extremely difficult for them to acquire citizenship and requires that they swear an oath of allegiance to the state, which is not required for any other class of people acquiring Israeli citizenship

In the hope of reducing international objections, Israel insisted that this wasn’t annexation, just a local municipal change. But as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) points out, the Geneva Convention forbids changing local laws and institutions in occupied territory. And the Knesset’s passage of a 1980 law formally declaring the “united, complete” city to be Israel’s capital made annexation explicit and removed any remaining ruse of temporary occupation in East Jerusalem.

The first civilian settlement in the West Bank was established in September 1967 in what was known as the Etzion Bloc (Gush Etzion), between Bethlehem and Hebron. The Etzion Bloc had been the site of four kibbutzim, which were conquered by Trans-Jordanian and local Arab forces on the eve of Israel’s establishment, in May 1948. These Israeli civilian settlements violate the fourth Geneva Convention and violate international law. Since then Israel has established many more settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem in a blatant effort to ensure that a viable Palestinian state cannot be created.

Israel has no provision for absentee voting for citizens who are not resident in Israel at the time of elections, with the exception of foreign ambassadorial staff or others who are abroad on formal missions for the state. However, 740,000 settlers living outside of Israel in East Jerusalem and the West Bank vote in Israeli elections, are covered by Israeli national health insurance, and in nearly every respect live as if they were inside Israel. None of that applies to Palestinian communities living cheek by jowl with Israeli settlers in the same territory.

The settlers, in their settlements are subject to Israeli civil law. However, their Palestinian neighbors are subject to military law and a justice system administered by the IDF.

So for all intents and purposes, Israel has annexed parts of the West Bank while hiding behind a fiction of temporary occupation. It is, to all intents and purposes an uncomfortable truth that it is permanent. Not only is there a de facto annexation of the West Bank, but with the investment of billions of state funds in infrastructure, including roads, schools, university, defense, water, electricity and telecommunications, there is an obvious, official, unstated intent to never withdraw.

A startling fact to consider is that the overwhelming majority of Israelis, at least 85%, were either born or immigrated to Israel post 1967, and so do not know of any other status for Israel except as an occupying power in the West Bank. This has become a normal state of affairs with most Israelis living their daily lives insulated from and ignorant of both Israeli policies and living conditions in the West Bank. Furthermore, a majority of Israelis have been convinced both by their governments and by the media that the world is intrinsically antisemitic and against them, armed conflict is inevitable, and overwhelming force alone is the proper response.

The South African experience has given rise to the term “apartheid” being used in a number of contexts other than the South African system of racial segregation. A system of apartheid is an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination by one racial group over another. It is a serious human rights violation which is prohibited in public international law. It has become commonly accepted by a number of human rights organizations, including Israeli NGOs, that  Israel enforces such a system against Palestinians through laws, policies and practices which ensure their prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment.

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Palestinians try to cross from Bethlehem to Jerusalem for the last Friday prayers of Ramadan

There are those who wrongly compare the Jewish return to the land of Israel to European colonialism of the nineteenth century. But unlike France and Algeria, or Portugal and Mozambique, or Germany and South West Africa, Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories border each other—within those territories there are armed and popular Palestinian groups that lay claim to all of Israel. The militant Palestinian groups have the broad support of the local population with two thirds fully supporting the Hamas led attack of October 7th. Jews and Palestinians both rightfully claim the same narrow land as their own and both have legitimate cases to make as to their rights for self-determination in the same area.

Since the Gaza incursion started, more than 330 soldiers have been killed, 10,036 Israeli soldiers have been classified as wounded, many with life altering injuries, with 34% suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Israel’s economy has suffered as tens of thousands are called up for months of reserve duty, the deficit rising and government military expenditure exploding despite billions of military aid from the USA. And, to add insult to injury, more than 150,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes in the North and South without any target date for when they can safely return home. 

Israel is experiencing an international legitimacy crisis since its tanks rolled into Gaza. Its international standing has plummeted; the International Court of Justice has ruled that it might be guilty of genocide and that its West Bank occupation is illegal; the International Criminal Court is considering requests for arrest warrants against PM Netanyahu and Defense Minister Gallant; boycotts and talk of arms embargoes grow; and the country is starting to endure near Russia-level shunning as Zionism has become a dirty word on college campuses threatening Jewish students. Slowly, but surely, a siege mentality is settling in. After October 7 there were alternative choices to the massive force deployed in Gaza, and at several junctures since then there were exit ramps that the government blew right past, refusing to cut losses and indifferent to opportunities, giving the impression of blood lust fueled revenge. All driven by a prime minister who increasingly looks to his own personal benefit rather than the good of the country. This is what incompetence, cynicism and idiocy look like.

Zionism has been  transformed from an ideology that sought to liberate the Jews from the degradation of exile and discrimination and to put them on equal standing with the other nations of the world, to a state ideology of ethnonationalism, oppression of others, Jewish supremacy, expansionism and apartheid.

Will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant, and increasingly racist aspects of its current vision as it is embraced by so many of its Jewish citizens? Will it ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders had so eloquently envisioned it – as a nation based on freedom, justice, and peace? To quote from Israels declaration of independence, which has no legal standing or binding impact, “The state of Israel will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of shrines and holy places of all religions; and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”

I personally think that post October 7, especially given that there is no strategy or plan for a long-term settlement with the Palestinians, there is unfortunately no hope or prospect, in my lifetime, for Israel to in any way approach the lofty promises of its declaration of independence. Our dreams and hopes of an Israel at peace, where we could escape the oppression from our South African youth seem to have been dashed on the realities of a pariah state, an Israel forever at war with the Palestinians and others in the region. So too, our dreams of a liberal Israeli democracy, with equality for all the inhabitants of the state, have been replaced with the reality of an ethnonationalist, hard right wing country, trending towards a theocracy, that will oppress, persecute and maltreat the Palestinian population of millions in its midst for the foreseeable future.