On May 27, 2022, as part of a panel about the Wall Israel built in the West Bank, I was asked to relate an Israeli perspective. The following is a lightly edited version of what I said.

I was asked to share with you how we experience the Wall on the Israeli side. While preparing, I asked some Israeli friends what they thought, too. The answer was simple, and matched my own impression: we don’t experience the Wall at all!

Most of us don’t live close to the wall, because it was built deep in the occupied West Bank, far from most Israelis. Actually, I grew up in Jerusalem, and the Wall passes through my home city. But it was never an issue for us. The government likes to say Jerusalem is “our united eternal capital”, because it is united under Israeli control. But Jerusalem is still divided: East and West, Arab and Jewish — and the wall does not cross through any Jewish-Israeli neighborhoods.

So in West Jerusalem, like in any Jewish town in Israel, we live a relatively normal life. The wall might as well be on another planet.

There is a pretty phrase in Hebrew: me’ever le-hararei hakhoshekh, literally “beyond the mountains of darkness”, meaning “in far-away lands.” It is often used ironically to talk about the parallel world half an hour’s drive away from central Tel Aviv: The world where the laws are made by military officers and it’s impossible to get a permit to build a new house or drill a new water well. The world where soldiers wake up a family in the middle of the night to take pictures of everyone, and remind them they are not free. The world where if you were born to the right nation, you enjoy full political and social rights; and if you were born to the wrong nation, not even your basic human rights are respected.

So it seems like the Wall is doing its job: the Wall is those “mountains of darkness”, turning our own military occupation into a far-away land, a place that has nothing to do with us, a place we can forget all about.

Thanks to the Wall, Israelis can violently dispossess and control another people without suffering the consequences: the inevitable resistance. But as we have seen again and again, recently too, that is not possible: One way or another, our violence comes back to bite us.

Separation and peace

When I was a child, before the Wall was built, I believed we needed a big wall. I remember saying things like “we can stay over here, they can stay over there, and with a wall they can’t come here and bomb us.” Or even that if we had a wall, whenever they attacked us, we could simply bomb their side of the wall mercilessly until they stopped.

In those years, it was hard to ignore the occupation, because attacks carried out by Palestinian resistance affected our everyday life within Israel. I remember the fear in those years. Taking a bus to school, worrying it would be the next one bombed… Being terrified of anyone on the bus who looked a little Arab…

I just wished that danger could be taken away, separated from my life.

I was not the only one. There was an Israeli “Peace Movement” which was very big for a while, in the nineties, and my parents were part of it too. And this was what that Peace Movement proposed: separation as a recipe for “peace”:

“We stay here, they stay there.”

“Two states for two nations.”

Many Israelis hoped that if we could just agree to split the country, we could stay separate, and Israelis would enjoy quiet and safety. Most of us were not so concerned what would happen with the Palestinians.

The meaning of separation

The word for separation in Hebrew is hafrada.

The word for separation in Afrikaans is apartheid.

Israeli politicians call the West Bank Wall things like “security barrier” or “separation fence”. I prefer the name “Apartheid Wall”. It makes clear what “separation” really means.

The State of Israel started building the Wall in 2002, but separation has always been part of how the State of Israel works.

Separation means there are “Jewish towns” and “Arab towns”, “Jewish schools” and “Arab schools”. In 1948, as soon as the State of Israel was founded, the Arab towns were placed under martial law and the Arab schools under control of the secret police, the Shin Bet. These systems of domination were loosened right before the Israeli military conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and it went on to apply the same martial law, the same secret policing, in the Occupied Territories.

Separation means there are people who have a right to a good, peaceful, happy life and people that should be happy if they get to live at all.

Separations means the moment you are born, your life is set on a separate path: will you have all the rights and privileges of the “chosen people” – or will you be treated as inferior, foreign, and dangerous?

When you turn eighteen, will you be given military training, advanced weapons, and a license to kill? Or will those young soldiers be licensed to kill you?

The air we breathe

West of the barrier, in the territories Israel took in 1948, we don’t experience the Apartheid Wall — but we experience apartheid everywhere. It is invisible, like the air we breathe.

It is the most normal thing in the world for Israelis: this is “our” country, our state, our army and our wall. The only problem is those people, who insist the land is theirs.

But we have a right to security, a right to take land, a right to take lives. And we have to, because we have to keep them away. Keep them down. And if that doesn’t work, we will have to deal with them somehow.

The idea of separation as the solution to the violence is not considered extreme. The extremists call for much worse “solutions”. Under the slogan of “Jewish sovereignty” they call to displace more Palestinians, and to kill all those who resist.

They are getting louder and more powerful than ever.

Their spokesmen have become regular guests in political talk shows. They have representatives in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and a recent poll gave their party almost 12% of seats. They are allied with Likud, the major right-wing party, and there is a good chance they will form a government together some time soon.

Meanwhile the moderates, the so-called Zionist “left”, call for more separation. In a system built on ethnic cleansing and separation, the moderates call for more separation, while the extremists call for more ethnic cleansing. And together, they demand that the world support our “security”.

Beyond the slogans

Separation, sovereignty, security… All of these slogans come down to one thing: we live on land taken from another people using deadly violence, people we try to keep under control by using deadly violence every day – and we wish to do this without experiencing any violence at all in return.

When I was a child, I believed the solution was as simple as a big wall. Tragically, it is not so simple.

It certainly does not help that the wall was built deep in the West Bank, splitting neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and separating villages like Bil’in from their agricultural land. It does not help that the wall twists and turns through Palestinian land not to maximize maximize Israeli safety, but to maximize land-grabbing.

But a better Wall would not solve the problem, either. Ultimately, our two peoples live together in one country, and there is no way any wall could cleanly separate us like I imagined as a child. And no amount of wishful thinking, no amount of guns, and no amount of walls will convince an occupied people to give up and accept a second-class status in their own country.

Human beings suffering dispossession, occupation and apartheid will fight back, one way or another.

We have had the Apartheid Wall, the Security Barrier, for twenty years – but still Israelis do not have security. And we never will have security, we never will have peace, if we continue to practice apartheid, separation, and dispossession by force

Please help end Israeli apartheid and occupation. Thank you.

The science on emissions and climate change has been fairly accurate since at least the 1970s, and internationally known and acknowledged since the early 1990s. The UN’s climate framework, which makes clear what needs to be done, has been in effect since 1994. States have spent the three decades since essentially wasting time, trying and failing to make sustainability more immediately profitable than destruction.

It may have been possible at the time to save both capitalism and the planet, in theory. But this would require directly assaulting fossil fuel fortunes, making them unprofitable or even worthless by means of state intervention. Capitalism as a whole could have continued, perhaps, simply using different sources of energy and different avenues for investment. But theory aside, this was never practically attainable within the liberal order.

Despite the liberal pretension to enabling reasoned debate to set public policy, this kind of action was – and still is – deemed unconscionable, because the liberal system is in fact set up to allow those controlling massive wealth to protect their property. Wherever public power threatens private profits, the wealthy can mobilize their wealth in the legal, political, and public realm, and nip the threat in the bud.

These battles have gone on for decades while all of the “reasonable,” “serious” people insisted that only gradual, market-based efforts could ever work, pinning much hope on future technological innovations. But the market has other priorities, above all to make whatever profits can be made; rather than pave the way to a sustainable future, energy-related innovation has largely focused on better ways to locate, extract, refine, market, burn, and use fossil fuels – the market in its infinite wisdom has willed it to be so. And why should it not? As far as securing profits is concerned, juicing a tried-and-true source of revenue like fossil fuels is obviously a better investment than exploring avenues where profitability is just one of many open questions.

A world in flames

For decades, in other words, capitalism has been proving its inability to respond to anything but near-term profitability, while the political system supporting it has been proving its complete inability to temper this near-sightedness with reason or concern for the public interest.

And now we find ourselves in a world literally up in flames, with short- and long-term threats to civilization converging across all continents – and the liberal-capitalist system continues to display an utter inability to do what needs to be done.

The science, having been generally clear for half a century, is now more detailed and unassailable than perhaps any other area of science has ever been before.

Politicians, trapped in the mind-prison of Liberalism and the golden cage of capitalism, continue to mutter “but what do you propose?” And no wonder: any effective action would ultimately require pursuing the economically insane aim of preventing private firms and state enterprises from making profits from highly valuable natural resources, materials which are just lying there, waiting to be turned into money.

Whether fossil fuel reserves are owned by private individuals, corporations, or the state itself, denying their ability to do this would entail a massive showdown with vested interests, the kind of thing that prudent politicians generally avoid.

In this way, the intrinsic irrationality of an economic system predicated on infinite growth, along with the massive concentration of wealth and power it has promoted, now stand in the way of common-sense rational action based on an irrefutable scientific consensus.

Listen to the science!

If you did not already reject capitalism to begin with, you might at this point be irritated. I am obviously biased and presenting the story in a way that serves my pre-existing communist agenda. Be this as it may, the science is clear: just read the IPCC reports.

These reports, compiled by volunteer scientists based on thousands of studies, and approved line for line by hundreds of representatives from nearly every government in the world, spell this out as clearly as can be. In the crucial 2018 report, they call for “rapid and far-reaching transitions,” about which they say: “These systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of speed, and imply deep emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and a significant upscaling of investments in those options.”

On the pivotal topic of fossil fuels, they write: “Some fossil investments made over the next few years – or those made in the last few – will likely need to be retired prior to fully recovering their capital investment or before the end of their operational lifetime.”

The International Energy Agency – originally an oil industry lobby group – has since piled on, calling for an immediate global stop to investment in new fossil fuel supply.

How to strand an asset

If you believe this is possible within capitalism, without violating private property, let us think this through. Consider the fact that about a sixth of the world’s wealth is invested in fossil fuels. How do you suppose we are to retire these investments, across the globe, before they even recover the initial costs, let alone turn a profit?

Do you expect the owners of these investments – including fabulously wealthy individuals, royal families, democratic states, dictatorial states, and of course corporations bound to shareholder profits – to simply come to their senses now, after four decades, and voluntarily forfeit this wealth? The corporations in question are legally barred from doing so, while the individuals and leaders in question would be objectively irrational to do it – they would be, simply put, destroying billions and trillions of dollars in value.

Yes, I am a communist, and have been since before I started down the climate rabbit hole. Nonetheless, I truly wish this weren’t so. I truly wish capitalism could continue to exist without destroying the climate, if only to give the left more time to organize to overthrow it.

But unfortunately for all of us, whether left, right, or oh-so enlightened center, time is running out. The current state of things is utterly unsustainable, and if there is any way out still conceivable, even any way to significantly mitigate the damage – it is being blocked by liberal ideology and capitalist economics.

Seriously reviewing the science and the history of this crisis makes any other conclusion untenable.

I read the NYT Op-Ed Why, Despite Everything, You Should Have Kids (if You Want Them), by philosopher Tom Whyman, secretly hoping it would change my mind. It did not. Worse yet, it seems to espouse unrealistic expectations about climate change.

To begin with, I am not what you would call an avowed anti-natalist – I do not advocate for non-reproduction nor do I think having children is morally wrong as such. I am however one of those millennials Dr. Whyman mentions who do not want to bring new life into this world because in light of what the future has in store, it just seems cruel.

This conclusion is not an easy one. The desire to reproduce is one of the deepest drives shared by all living things, and I doubt how much rational discussion can override it. For myself, I once eagerly looked forward to parenting, and I hate disappointing my own parents’ desire for grandchildren.

Whyman’s argument, as I understand it, is essentially that the optimism involved in having kids must be independent of our concrete expectations. To put his point bluntly, we might say “things may look bleak now, but who knows what the future may hold. Today’s kids may fix it all somehow.”

He acknowledges that his position runs the danger of deferring all hope to an unknown future, or worse, idly waiting for future generations to solve present problems. This is important. Yet I fear that his piece still feeds into the widespread unwillingness to confront the actual prognoses of climate science.

Because although the future is inherently unknowable, we currently have a better guess than ever before. Climate science, the biggest collaborative scientific endeavor in history, gives us a detailed outline of what to expect in the next decades.

Desertification and rising sea levels will displace hundreds of millions of human beings by the end of this century. Falling agricultural yields and increasingly chaotic weather will likely result in famines. Covid-19 is likely to be followed by even worse pandemics.

The ecological crisis these are part of entails not only terrible suffering for many, many people, but massive societal and political upheaval. In many countries, the political response to these changes is already taking the route Naomi Klein has termed “eco-barbarism”: violently maintaining a semblance of stability in an increasingly destabilized world.

To turn around these catastrophic trends, we need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half before 2030. Current government targets come nowhere close, not to mention reductions in practice.

It is not too late quite yet, and there is still much to be done. But we must confront the reality of what can be done and when, and also by whom: by the time children born today enter high school, runaway global heating could be locked in for good.

If we fail to reduce emissions in time, global heating will continue to worsen drastically throughout the lifetime of today’s newborns. Yet even if we succeed, global heating and its effects are bound to continue making things worse for years and decades before they get better. Children born today will live through the worst of it, an outcome they are simply born too late to prevent.

This is why deciding to bring new life into the world just seems cruel. But Whyman does get one important issue right: foregoing reproduction is no kind of solution, either.

As he writes, “it makes no sense to think of children as tokens of their parents’ carbon consumption.” Private consumption is only one driver of emissions – alongside military fuel consumption, for example – and no reduction in birth rates could put much of a dent even in consumption-driven emissions within a decade.

Ultimately, the fact remains that no matter how big the population is, the ways the world lives, eats, travels and works must be transformed in short order if we are to halt global heating.

What are we waiting for?

How then could a reasonable person hope for things to get better for the next generation? The main way seems to be techno-optimism: the belief that a future breakthrough may transform our dire situation. Whyman does not speak to this, but it is implicit in many positions like his own.

Indeed, if a new technology were to emerge, one which could provide clean energy or remove greenhouse gases on scale, at an efficiency far beyond anything presently available, rapid climate stabilization might suddenly become possible.

That is, however, a very big if. And as entrenched economic and political interests appear unwilling or unable to rapidly decarbonize our economies, it looks more and more like our collective survival strategy is beginning to hinge on just such ifs.

For those with a vested interest in business-as-usual, such beliefs are incredibly convenient. They suggest that decarbonization is not so urgent, perhaps altogether superfluous. Yet for the sake of future generations especially, this is a fatal gamble we should take care not to entertain.

Have children, don’t have children – that is your choice to make. But do not justify it by suggesting that maybe everything will just get better, somehow. For the younger generations alive today, and the ones after them, things are almost certain to get worse first.

If anyone is going to fix this mess, it will have to be those of us who are already grown up – and we are going to have to start fighting like hell.

Picture a ship.

It is full of people, but like most ships, those people do not have equal say on where the ship goes.

Suppose the ship is now steering straight into disaster: an iceberg, say. Obviously, the people responsible for the ship’s impending doom are those in charge of steering it – the captain, the navigator, and whoever else is at the helm with them and might sway them and save the ship and all of the people on it.

But what if the other people on the ship, say its paying passengers, are able to see the iceberg? What if, moreover, they are able to march up to the helm and yell at the damned captain that the ship must change course, immediately?

Compared to, say, a slave galley, on which most of the people are literally chained into place and unable to even see where they are being forced to take themselves, there is a clear moral difference. In the more Titanic-esque scenario, where the passengers are free to move around, and able to see the danger with their own eyes, they are not utterly passive victims like the oar-slaves on that galley.

Now suppose it’s not an iceberg. In fact, the ship’s passengers are in no danger. Instead, they are about to be accomplices to a terrible crime against others. Perhaps the ship is headed right into a school of endangered whales, and it is mating season, and they are about to break up the poor whales just as they were about to get it on, endangering the very survival of their species.

Here the blame is less easy to assign, especially assuming none of the humans involved are even aware of the harm they are about to do.

But what if there is a marine biologist on board, frantically warning them?

Clearly, in situations like these, where a social formation is involved in causing harm to itself or to others, there are a few factors involved in how we would assign blame and responsibility.

One is the distribution of power: free passengers are more culpable than enslaved rowers, those at the helm more culpable than their passengers. Another factor is the accessibility of knowledge: accidentally causing harm (or unknowingly failing to prevent it) is clearly a different matter from knowing and doing it anyway (or knowing and doing nothing).

I have a few different real-world situations in mind here.

One is the demonstrations in Germany against coronavirus mitigation measures: some powerful actors in these movements are intentionally endangering public health and promoting a white supremacist agenda, while many participants merely play the useful idiot. Yet everyone involved is able, if they were willing, to see the harm they are participating in. Nobody involved is entirely innocent, ignorant or passive as they may be.

Another situation is Israel’s apartheid regime over Palestinians. Israelis are by no means all equally empowered to do something about it, nor is everyone fully exposed to the reality of what they are participating in. At the same time, most Israelis are able to at least protest what is being done, practically all Israelis are exposed to at least some of the harm – and there is that shrill, frantic, overexcited marine biologist on the deck: the radical fringe insisting on bringing knowledge of the harm being done into the public perception.

Just by making that knowledge more accessible, activists increase everyone else’s culpability. This might be one of the reasons why everyone else hates them. (This applies to a lot of other situations as well, of course – think of the exuberantly toxic hate against Greta Thunberg.)

At the same time, this is only a matter of degree: anyone on that ship can quite easily find out what is going on in the water. Most can mount some form of protest against it. Hence, everyone is already culpable to some degree – though of course a few key figures are vastly more culpable than most, and the least empowered members of society, those with the least access to power and knowledge, are hardly culpable at all.

And so our ships plow onwards, towards disaster. Whether or not we want to, and whether or not we know it.

On the night of Thursday, 12 June 2014, three Jewish Israeli teenagers, students at two illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, were kidnapped and murdered while hitchhiking home. Until their bodies were found 18 days later, they were only publicly known to have been kidnapped.

Israel immediately levered this event for a massive military operation across the West Bank. The entire occupied territory was put under lockdown (for Palestinians) and masses of soldiers swept its towns and cities, refugee camps and villages, searching for the killer but also acting to dismantle Palestinian resistance organization and infrastructure. This naturally led to many clashes, and five Palestinians were killed during this operation, hundreds arrested – including members of Parliament – and dozens more injured.

The public mood in Israel during the operation was increasingly tense and vindictive, with a noticeable rise in far-right agitation online and on the streets. In the Leftist circles I was part of in Tel Aviv at the time, we were increasingly worried about where this was headed, and some of us began talking about how to organize to push back or at least defend ourselves and our Palestinian comrades, allies, and neighbors.

On July 2, the morning after the funeral for the three youths, a group of Jewish fascist terrorists, led by a 29-year-old settler, kidnapped and murdered a 16-year-old Palestinian boy, citing revenge. Hostilities between Israeli military and Palestinian resistance organizations continued to escalate. The Israeli public was palpably hungry for more violence.

Escalation to war

On July 8, Israel launched “Operation Protective Edge,”¹ now focusing its attacks on the Gaza Strip rather than the West Bank.

At the time, I was a member of Da’am Workers’ Party, a small extra-parliamentary splinter party which had gained a brief burst of newfound popularity and membership following the social protests of 2011. As soon as the operation began, we started organizing demonstrations against it. In Tel Aviv, we were one of just two organizations (alongside the Coalition of Women for Peace) regularly organizing demonstrations against what was rapidly becoming a war.²

The volatility of Israeli public mood continued to escalate, and standing against the hostilities was an exercise in isolation. The so-called “Zionist left” didn’t dare question the justifications for the massive violence being doled out on the Gaza Strip – the world’s most densely-populated territory, its infrastructure still crumbling from the previous rounds of aerial bombardment and the closure of its borders by Israel and Egypt since 2007 – while rockets were being fired out of the Strip against Israeli military and civilian targets.

With the organizations of the supposed “peace camp” nowhere to be seen, many Tel Avivis nonetheless came out to the demonstrations organized by our marginal radical organizations, including prominent members of the Zionist-left Meretz party, without their leadership’s blessing.

But violence was thick in the air, and I recall standing with a small group holding handmade signs at the side of the road, with drivers often stopping to yell abuses at us and some even coming out, red-faced and nearly frothing with rage, to physically threaten us or rip signs out of our hands.

The bubble begins to burst

My comrades and I continued to figure out how to handle the increasing threat of right-wing street violence, and the escalation continued. Tel Aviv felt different than before. Once a seemingly impermeable “bubble” in which open opposition to the occupation and its eternal wars was a non-issue (unlike almost anywhere else in the country), and in which armed Palestinian resistance was rarely ever felt, we were now subject to the sirens and tense waiting of rocket warnings.³

The anti-war demos continued, at first every few days, then settling into a weekly time slot on Saturday evening. I remember ending every weekend with the cathartic togetherness of the demo and beginning each new week with a throat soar from shouting and a head echoing last night’s rhythmic chants.

Not more than two weeks into the war, we experienced something new. A failed rapper cum online far-right influencer organized a group of thugs to “counter-demonstrate.” When they first showed up in mid-July, Police seemed not to have any idea how to handle the situation, allowing them to stand right next to our demonstration, waving Israeli flags and threatening us with the flagpoles, excitedly chanting the classic Israeli fascist slogan of “death to Arabs” along with the more immediately threatening “death to Leftists.”

And then a rocket siren went off, and chaos broke out.

Before the demonstration began, we had been instructed to make for a nearby underground parking lot in case of a rocket alarm. But once the siren really came, people were immediately reporting that fascists were guarding the entrance and threatening those of us who came close. Almost all of the police present had suddenly evaporated. Many of the demonstrators did too. The rest of us huddled next to the imposing stone façade of the newly-renovated national theater, Habima, while our bravest comrades formed a human chain protecting us from the flag-waving thugs who remained above ground, surging forwards and trying to come at us. We heard a boom above and saw the golden trails of Iron Dome missiles and a small poof of the explosion.

It was one of the most surreal scenes I have ever experienced, and perhaps my most fearful memory to date.

Soon, police came creeping out of wherever they had been hiding. Many of us wanted to leave, but simply going off one by one was dangerous to do within sight of the thugs. Police tried to separate the two groups and allow us to leave as a group and disperse separately, and off we marched. But on foot and on motorcycles, the fascists followed us, ultimately routing us and causing us to scatter off in all directions in small groups.

Comrades of mine ended up barricaded in a nearby café, in which the fascists assaulted them and left one friend and comrade of mine with stitches in his scalp.

Routine under fire

The war went on for more than a month after that, and my memory becomes somewhat less clear and vivid regarding the weeks that followed. The tension, fatigue, daily weed smoking, and increasing trauma were a deeply disorienting combination. I would often sit in the one café near my home I could count on being a Zionism-free space so as not to be alone, trying to work, failing, nursing a perpetually sore throat.

The weekly demonstrations continued, as did fascist and anti-fascist organizing. The Police seemed to get its act together, and began to keep the two sides well-separated in clearly fenced off areas, and to instruct officers to do their job even during rocket warnings. But the police was by no means friendly to the anti-war demonstrations.

The first time I was ever arrested was on August 2. We were going to demonstrate in the same place, Habima Square. When we began to arrive, the square was still full of families, with a bouncy castle or some such activity set up by City Hall. But the square was fenced off from all sides by police, entrances guarded by paramilitary policemen armed with submachine guns. This was a startling sight, but I don’t recall feeling physically in danger, only distinctly oppressed.

When we began to arrive, as the families were still leaving, those of us wearing political shirts or bearing signs or megaphones were told we were not allowed to enter the square, and that the demonstration was being called off because it was too dangerous for people to gather there due to the rockets. (Apparently families with small children are less at-risk for rocket fire than Leftists. Who knew!)

We changed shirts, put away our signs, and trickled into the square nonetheless. Incredibly, there were hundreds of us there, likely over a thousand. When the police figured out what was going on and started asking us to leave, we all sat down and started calls of “Democracy!” against the blatant repression. But slowly and surely, the paramilitary policemen herded us out of the square, mostly by physically pushing us out, illegally declaring our demonstration illegal.

At some point, when we had been herded to a side street behind the theater, a police thug decided I wasn’t moving fast enough (or perhaps recognized me from holding the megaphone at the previous demos) and announced I was arrested, twisting my arm unnecessarily and painfully and whispering “son of a whore” (ben zona) again and again in my ear as he dragged me into the police car.

The arrests were legally unwarranted, and also outright stupid – one arrestee was the legal correspondent for a major news website – and 12 of the 14 arrestees were released after a few rather entertaining hours at the police station. (The other two were released in the morning when the police failed to convince the court to extend their arrest.) The police took the opportunity to force us to agree to stay away from the two main demonstration sites for two weeks, and at this point I frankly welcomed the break.

The arrests, rather than shutting down the demonstration, turned it into a powerful march that loudly toured central Tel Aviv.

The “Peace camp” reemerges as the war draws to a close

At this point, we in Da’am were involved in organizing a bigger rally against the continued war, with the uneasy support of Meretz and Peace Now (the foremost parliamentary and civil society representatives of the “peace camp,” respectively.) Two such rallies were held, with many thousands of participants, but as I recall I missed the first of them (which I was deeply involved in organizing) because it was in one of the two squares the police wanted me away from.

The tension and the rise of Israeli fascism continued. At some point during August, a comrade of mine was almost beaten off of his bike in the hip, bohemian, uber-liberal Tel Aviv neighborhood of Florentin simply for wearing a shirt with some Arabic on it (as I recall, it wasn’t even a political shirt.) It took me at least three years after that to wear a political shirt in public in Tel Aviv again, and doing so again was a very big deal for me.

After one of the war’s later demos, possibly the second big rally, we had to disperse in groups to keep safe from the roaming gangs of fascists. I remember having to actually hide and run through alleys and a construction site adjacent to the Tel Aviv Cinematheque while a car with a massive Israeli flag mounted on its roof patrolled a nearby street, together with a handful of other demonstrators who for the most part I had never met before. That night is still one of the first associations in my mind when I unexpectedly see an Israeli flag (a terribly often occurrence in Leipzig, Germany, where I now live.)

The war ended after 51 days, on August 26. It left over two thousand Palestinians dead, the majority non-combatants even by the Israeli military’s own accounts. The dead included almost 500 children. As has long been the norm in major conflagrations in Palestine, the Israeli casualty counts were miniscule in comparison: 73 dead, only 6 of them civilians.⁴

Aftermath

The fascist groups which surfaced or grew during the war did not go away. Neither, at first, did the anti-fascist structures we had set up before and during the violence. In September, the American-funded, settler-led anti-miscegenation gang Lehava tried to come for a tour of Tel Aviv, and me and another comrade managed within hours to organize dozens of antifascists to block them. We successfully prevented them from even disembarking from their bus. It took them another two years to try it again. (Which leads to the story of my less glorious and more traumatic second arrest, a story for another time.)

However, within weeks, the groups we had set up before and during the war disintegrated due to personal drama between two central organizers, on the backdrop of overwhelming burnout and unprocessed trauma.

To my mind, and in the understanding of many of my comrades in Israel, the summer of 2014 was a watershed moment. The Tel Avivi bubble had been popped. There was no longer a safe space to be publicly Leftist in Israel.

I have lost touch with almost every single comrade I fought alongside in that summer. Some have retreated to rural communities or to a less political life. Many have emigrated, myself included. The experience of 2014 and the change it has brought about is one of the main reasons.

Israeli fascism ascendant

Our opponents’ fortunes have been different. That failed rapper who organized the thugs who first attacked us in July 2014 went on to become a public figure, with almost half a million followers on Facebook and recurrent television appearances. The centrist, center-right, and far-right parties involved in the government that oversaw the carnage now utterly dominate the political stage. The “peace camp” has essentially been wiped out of existence.

Worst of all, the fascist Kahanist settler organizers and politicians, in 2014 still at the margins of Israeli politics, have since become active players in national politics. PM Netanyahu has repeatedly struck deals with them to ensure their shared base’s votes don’t get lost to their (growing) marginal party, even illegally promising them a seat at the expense of his own party in one of the elections in 2019 to cement their electoral merger with the less openly genocidal far-right/settler bloc.

I have tried here to capture some of what happened in that pivotal year, and some of how it felt on the front lines of the internal Israeli clashes in Tel Aviv. My memory is admittedly blotchy now, almost six years later, and my account is by no means a comprehensive review of the political and military events of that summer, let alone a political analysis thereof. Many details have been kept vague to avoid getting anyone in trouble. The English-language Wikipedia seems to have a very thorough article covering the war, its buildup, and how it unfolded.

I hope this account will be able to shed some light on what happened to the radical Left in Tel Aviv, and how Israeli politics in general have shifted in these past years.

Footnotes

1. The English name is hardly related to its Israeli counterpart, tsuk eytan, which translates as something like “Steadfast Cliff”.
2. To the best of my knowledge, the only reason Israel never officially titled the operation a war was to avoid paying the legally mandated war compensation to the many businesses which suffered damage during the hostilities, especially in the southern periphery around the Gaza Strip.
3. We were not, however, in much immediate danger: Israel had at this point deployed its Iron Dome system, handily capable of intercepting the mostly primitive Palestinian rockets; due to Tel Aviv’s financial and cultural importance, it was covered extra well, with two interception missiles visible for every rocket alarm; Due to its distance from the Gaza Strip down south, the system had plenty of time to effectively protect the urban center, unlike the southern periphery.
4. Notice how Israeli violence overwhelmingly harms civilians and Palestinian violence harms soldiers almost exclusively – in contrast with the Israeli narrative by which Israel surgically “neutralizes” so-called “terrorists” while the latter are hell-bent on harming civilians above all.

The Jewish Left has always been critical of Zionism – the movement for a Jewish nation-state. As the old Yiddish song “Oh, you foolish Zionists” demonstrates, Leftist Jews in Europe wanted to stay here and build socialism. Their opponents preferred to emigrate to Palestine – which proved a better choice in terms of the movements’ survival.

But nowadays, a new generation of Leftist Jews is coming to Germany, myself included. We grew up in Israel, but there we feel increasingly marginalized, suppressed, and persecuted. Many of us have a better time here in Germany.

I was born and raised in Jerusalem, in a liberal Zionist family. As cosmopolitan people with Palestinian friends and a desire for peace, we have often felt marginalized in Jerusalem, even hated.

When I was 19, I moved to Leipzig, Saxony, for university, hoping to get away from it all. In my first years in Leipzig, I became increasingly critical of Israel, deepening my factual and theoretical understanding of the conflict and its history via the Internet. After five years in Germany, I moved back to fight for a better future there.

The struggle left me in shambles. Physical violence had a great part in it, but I am lucky in that the damage from my time there was only psychological — and financial, due to the crushingly high costs of living. Starting in 2014 I experienced multiple clashes with right-wingers, and two rough arrests; in that horrible year, it stopped being safe to demonstrate for peace in the liberal bastion of Tel Aviv. Fascist thugs had begun to regularly assault anti-war demonstrations. Me and my comrades tried to establish rudimentary antifascist structures, based among other things on the experience of our German counterparts. We always looked at Germany and its Antifa with jealousy.

It was becoming clear to me that Israeli democracy — limited, flawed, and based in racist exclusion to begin with — was becoming a pseudo-democracy along the lines of Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey. Personally, I no longer felt able to keep up the struggle. So ultimately, I made the painful decision to emigrate again. I decided to return to Germany, and German antifascism was in fact among the reasons I bet on this country for my future. I headed back to Leipzig, a city I always loved, and in which some of my best friends still lived.

“Anti-German” antisemitism

I also knew that it would not be easy here, either. Saxony has a high concentration of fascists. Leipzig, its biggest urban center, is itself is an antifascist bastion, but also deeply “anti-German”.¹ And for me, an “anti-German” Left, which sweepingly forbids public opposition to Israel and Zionism, is also an antisemitic Left – after all, again, Leftist Jews are necessarily critical of Zionism.

Jewish Leftists like myself, from Israel and elsewhere, simply have no use for uncritical support of the Israeli state, which violently oppresses millions in our names, and has been actively cozying up with antisemitic, revisionist governments such as those in Hungary and Poland.

A Left hostile to any and all questioning of Zionism is ultimately hostile to all Leftist Jews.

I can understand why many German Leftists see Israel as the representative of all Jews: Israel presents itself as such, with the support of practically all major (bourgeois) Jewish organizations. Moreover, there are no longer many Jews in this country which one might have to listen to and reckon with — less yet publicly presenting a dissenting view on Israel like the US-based “Jewish Voice for Peace” or “IfNotNow”.

But by identifying Israel with Jews writ large, one abstracts away from the reality of political diversity among Jewish people and the many political disagreements among us. And so, the Germans valiantly fighting “against any and all antisemitism” (gegen jeden Antisemitismus) are neither friends nor political allies to us Israeli Leftists, despite all we have in common otherwise. Instead, with their unconditional support of the Israeli regime, they make themselves allies of the Israeli Right and therefore allies of racists, sexists, and warmongers; friends of homophobes, nationalists, and ardent anti-Leftists.

When I have called out German Leftist support for Israel online, emphasizing my perspective as a Jewish-Israeli Leftist, my critique has been brushed off with a rejection of identity politics — it doesn’t matter that I speak as a Leftist from the country in question, as these Germans already have the true and correct position.

But at the end of the day, this sweeping and unquestioning support for the “Jewish state,” even if its proponents loudly reject identity politics, is itself rooted in identity politics. Within the unique contours of German politics it enables one to avoid appearing antisemitic, without actually touching on the necessary conditions for Jewish life and full Jewish participation in public life in Europe. The anti-German position is only even comprehensible within the discourse of and among Germans. When applied to Israelis, it means we are only allowed to be Zionist nationalists – only allowed to be right-wing.

But exactly like German Leftists, we too want to fight for a better world, and have an urgent need to stop fascism. Just like them, many of us have come to adopt a Leftist, critical position opposed to nationalism among our own people. But the uncritical “anti-German” position vis-à-vis the Israeli regime, come as it may from a critical dissociation from historical and contemporary German antisemitism, forbids Leftist Jews from critically contending with the discriminatory state of affairs in Israel — at least in public. This “anti-German” ideology essentially forbids solidarity with all those who struggle within the “Jewish state” for liberty, equality, and peace. That this can be considered a Leftist position is itself remarkable.

The message that arises out of this uniquely German position, intentionally or not, is an ur-antisemitic one: we Jews ought to live “down there” [i.e. in Israel], and if we have a bad time there and come here, well, we should at least keep our mouths shut about it.

I do not accept this. I want to take back the place in German society violently taken away from my grandmother and her family (along with their lives, in most cases.) I want, despite it all, to live my life here in Germany, because I somehow feel well here. And I will fight for a future without racism and fascism, a future where people of all backgrounds can live well and participate fully in society – both for us here in Europe, and for all those “down there” in my home country.

Dear German Leftists

I hope to find allies who recognize that the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against other forms of hatred, exploitation, and discrimination, are all based on the same awareness of injustice and the same aspiration for a just world.

Dear German Leftists, allow your Jewish, Israeli, and also Palestinian comrades to speak up!
Learn to understand the complexity, and stop looking for sweeping, simple answers to the conflict!
Struggle against all injustice everywhere, and stand in solidarity with all those who struggle for the same goals!

You can indeed radically criticize the Israeli regime without being antisemitic – and such critique is urgently needed.

Recommended reading

There has been some excellent writing in English on the topic of the “anti-Germans,” which has contributed greatly to my own understanding of the issue. I highly recommend these pieces:

• Karin Louise: On “Germania”, Heimat, and Belonging in the German Left
• Crimethinc: Nationalist Antinationalism by Rolling Thunder

Postscript (in German): on the illusion of a “Zionist left”

In a followup post, yet untranslated, I responded to the question of whether the so-called “Zionist left” in Israel resolves the contradiction between Leftism and Zionism — supposedly meaning some of the Jewish Left would not be excluded by these forces in the German Left. I explain that while there is indeed a left wing within Zionism, it has little in common with Leftism (Socialism in the broadest sense), and the parts of it which seek to actually unite Leftist and Zionist ideology are politically marginal today and share little with contemporary European Leftism. To this followup post (in German) >>

Notes

1. The “anti-German” movement, which grew out of the Left, positions itself as unquestioningly pro-Israel, due to an understanding of antisemitism in which any opposition or critique of Israel is suspect if not outright condemned.

In these troubled times, with hope and despair both our frequent companions, I’d like to share a bit about my experience in the hope (haha) that it might benefit others, might help you take better care of yourselves and of those around you.

Hope and motivation

I’m a highly political person who has also always been a highly sensitive person with a vivid imagination. If you’re anything like me, you’ll know what a difficult combination these things can be – I’m frequently off visualizing where our world may be headed, or what I know is going on in parts of the world less fortunate than mine, and it can be deeply troubling, to say the least.

In the last few months I have had the privilege of being paid to write regularly about the climate crisis, and this has had the unsurprising side effect of making me aware of more and more details regarding the unfolding tragedy, while also making it much harder to ignore that knowledge and enjoy any kind of blissful ignorance.

In my writing, I have found it important to tell the truth but also give hope – things may seem bleak, the prospects of improvement slim, but there’s a lot of important work to do nonetheless, and hope is an important motivator.

Considering the worst

Then I read an article titled “Deep Adaptation” and had a bit of a crisis. This is an article which dares to delve into the possibility that all is, in fact, lost, and the climate collapse can no longer be halted.

A note about the Deep Adaptation piece:
You really don’t have to read it. If you want to anyway, and you’re sensitive like me, be careful and take good care of yourself. Don’t read it on a bad day. Brace yourself for bad news and troubling thoughts. I won’t even link to it, so as not to tempt you to peek in (it is very easily googleable). Make time to read the whole thing in one go.

The Deep Adaptation piece raises an interesting point about hope: hope makes you dependent, and hence fragile. Your emotional wellbeing becomes contingent on events turning out this way or that, shifting your focus to the future (and often, to things beyond your control) and setting you up for a major psychic hit if they do not.

When I read the piece, I thought this point was logical, but hard to accept. I was still very emotionally invested in hope at the time, of course. It was only a few weeks later that I really appreciated the validity of this observation.

Turning point

In early December, I started getting very anxious.

The UK general elections were coming up, and from a climate policy perspective the two outcomes couldn’t possibly be farther apart. Labour proposed to set into motion the first “Green New Deal” type package of eco-socialist policies in a major economy – the only approach to halting climate collapse I find plausible (for reasons best explained by Naomi Klein). The Conservatives promised to plow ahead with Brexit, removing EU environmental regulations and most likely spelling a massive setback to the UK’s impressive sustainability gains.

Considering we have, at best, a decade to set massive policy shifts in motion to avert runaway climate collapse, I held this election to be the last chance to start doing so in the major economies before it’s too late. I further worried and hoped that the results would embolden, respectively, the Right or the Left the world over, setting the stage for the possibly even more crucial US elections in November.

The global stakes, as I understood them, could hardly be higher, and I was very anxious.

The morning after the elections, still oblivious to the awful results but knowing a Labour victory was unlikely, I braced myself for the bad news. Before going online, I took some time to meditate, and told myself that if Labour lost indeed, it would only mean we were the same place we were the previous day, heading in the very same direction, and nothing had changed. In other words, I let go of my hope.

Surprisingly, I managed to take the bad news quite well. More surprisingly, my mood only improved over the rest of that week. Not only was I free of the anxiety over an election I could not vote in, I was suddenly free of hope.

I still consider the Johnson victory a disaster, I still consider the upcoming US elections crucial, but my perspective has shifted deeply.

Beyond hope

I am no longer dependent on hope. I am not anxious to see who the Democratic nominee will be nor whether they beat Trump.

Instead I feel more focused on the here and now, on the immediacy of the tasks at hand. For me, these are to learn as much as I can about our collective situation – how we got here, where exactly we stand, and where we are headed; to share that information and help make it accessible to more people; to take care of myself and the people around me, as we all go through these terrible times; and to keep alive, and further develop, positive visions for a better world – because if anything matters at all, there will be a point where at least some of the people in this world are regrouping and organizing a new society out of the rubble of the old, and these visions could be an important source of inspiration.

Being free from hope makes it easier to focus on these tasks, to consider them in their immediacy, to carry through on them, one step at a time, without worrying about ultimate outcomes.

It also gives me more strength (or perhaps resilience) when dealing with the continuing onslaught of horrible news. In recent weeks this has included the unfathomably huge fires ravaging Australia and annihilating hundreds of millions of animals, and just today the news that Trump has essentially started a war with Iran.

I still feel, I still experience the shock as news arrives or details emerge. But I am no longer hanging on to the hope that things will stop getting worse. The bad news affirms my basic expectations, and hard as that sounds (and it is hard) I feel better able to handle it from this position of acceptance.

Be kind to yourselves, and to each other. And even if you give up hope, never give up the fight. If nothing else, let’s not let the bastards get away with it without a fight.

While many of us were off ignoring electoral politics, politicians were cozying up with corporations and transfering ever more assets, power, and decision-making into their hands.

Meanwhile fascists were working their ideas into mainstream centrism and setting up slick suits to sell their old top-down bullshit as rebellion, actively feeding on the common sentiment — actively stoked by the far left — that mainstream politics was bullshit.

Does this mean we should abandon the Anarchist tradition? No, because this attitude of disengaged faux rebellion was never more than a bastardization of that tradition (at best). Anarchism means “challenge the powerful by building independent power from the bottom up” not “abandon power to the rich”.

Anarchism means actually taking away bourgeoise electoral politics’ monopoly on power, not playing make-believe and expecting our wishes to manifest, The Secret-style. It means a ton of hard work organizing with your neighbors, not retreating to the Internet and its bubbles. (And I’m probably more or less the worst example in this respect — this is self-crit first and foremost.)

Revisiting parliamentarism

As for the way forward, if anything I think it’s the traditional Marxist focus on capturing state power that needs revisiting at the end of this decade, not Anarchism’s rejection of parliamentarism.

Capturing state power is a doomed endeavor in this neoliberal era; the state is far too vulnerable to being disciplined by the markets (i.e. by the 0.001%) whenever politicians dare to glance to the left for more than a second. Recall the fate of SYRIZA, the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left, which came to power in 2015 to fight the lender powers and was forced to submit within the year, finally losing power to the current right-wing government four years later.

Our concern should be giving governments under the thumb of finance capital something else to worry about — us — while also supporting and defending whatever gains are won for working people and building independent structures resilient to all of that, so we can hang on while capital and reaction do their worst.

I suspect what we should be aiming for is not setting up far-left parties and candidates as a central strategy (that is, parliamentarism), but organizing outside of parliamentary politics while actively engaging with it.

This means challenging the parliamentary left in whatever way makes sense in your given context, while offering support and solidarity against capital and reaction; uniting behind the candidates most friendly to our cause, but not unconditionally; taking seriously the proposition that elections aren’t “choose your fighter” but “choose your enemy” — and fighting like hell to get an opponent who might give a shit, so that we can keep fighting.

Post originally located at https://write.as/meemsaf/anti-parliamentarism-has-failed-and-needs-to-be-reinvented/

Here’s why:
There are two basic positions Jewish people have put forward regarding our liberation in a world dominated by those who have marginalized, exploited, and harmed us:

• Position A says we must band together with other oppressed people everywhere to dismantle the systems oppressing us.
• Position B says instead we have to gather together, away from gentile oppressors, and set up our own system to protect and promote our interests.

A is obviously a Leftist project, B is at the very least a rejection of basic Leftist aspirations — equality, fraternity, and liberty — as it rejects the notion that Jewish people can or should make common cause with their non-Jewish compatriots to attain equality.

Furthermore, Position A (Jewish Leftism) rejects the nation state, identifying it as a site of our own oppression and the oppression of others.

Position B (Zionism) meanwhile embraces the nation state (be it as a Good or as a Lesser Evil), operating on the assumption that someone has to be on top, so we should at least create a space where it’s us.

A tiny bit of history

Before the Holocaust, Zionism was the minority political movement within Jewish communities, while Jewish Leftism was vibrant and widespread. (Of course, there were also non-political Jewish people who pursued neither, in some places seeking to quietly assimilate among the majority without organizing politically with other Jews as Jews.)

But Jewish Leftists in Europe tended to stay and fight while Zionists generally fled to Palestine and elsewhere. After the mass murder of our people, much of the Jewish Left was physically gone, the survivors scattered and disorganized, while Zionism came out stronger than ever, both because its centers of power (mainly the Yishuv in Palestine) were thankfully spared from the annihilation, and because in the carnage of the War and Holocaust, many people (of all backgrounds, everywhere) gravitated towards nationalistic thinking.

Answering the Right’s question

The Jewish world has since been overwhelmingly dominated by Zionist thought and organization, to the point that for many in Israel and abroad, going further Left than progressive liberal Zionism has not been seen as an option at all. But the left flank of a right-wing movement is still right, not left.

Whatever values and ideas may be added on in a specific ideology, stream, or movement, the core of Zionism remains right-wing. The basic question it answers is the antisemitic/nationalist “Jewish Question” – should Jewish people live among non-Jewish people?
Zionism answers as antisemites do: NO.

We can have compassion for those whose world view was formed through the 20th century, and understand why they adopted such a reactionary, self-hating point of view as Zionism, but we still have to reject it.

We still have to say, our answer is YES. Wherever we live, there we belong!