[ It’s time for the Jewish left to understand that by aligning
its struggle with the Palestinians, it can be part of a majority
against occupation and apartheid.]
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THE ISRAELI RIGHT IS THE MINORITY — THE LEFT NEED ONLY REALIZE IT
 
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Meron Rapoport
January 12, 2023
+972 Magazine
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_ It’s time for the Jewish left to understand that by aligning its
struggle with the Palestinians, it can be part of a majority against
occupation and apartheid. _

Activists march in the radical bloc at an anti-government
demonstration in Tel Aviv, January 7, 2023., Photo: Ahmad Al-Bazz //
+972 Magazine

 

“Regime change.” This is how former Justice Minister Gideon
Sa’ar, himself a right winger, described
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reforms that his successor, Yariv Levin, announced last week to
radically disempower Israel’s judicial system. Levin’s proposals
include passing an “override bill
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that would prevent the Supreme Court from striking down Knesset
legislation it deems to be in violation of Israel’s Basic
Laws; enlarging
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Judicial Appointments Committee, enabling the coalition to appoint
judges of its choosing; and replacing
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legal advisors that serve government ministries and are answerable to
the attorney general with political appointees.

The new government’s justification for this overhaul, which has
generated broad opposition from large parts of the Israeli public and
even President Herzog
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is that it has the mandate of the majority of the Israeli public: the
judges are unelected, legal advisors are just advisors, and therefore
subordinating judicial authority to the executive branch is, in fact,
the foremost expression of democracy.

Some (a minority, it must be said) have argued that the sixth
Netanyahu government’s determination to destroy judicial oversight
is driven by the constant need to ramp up the occupation, to
dispossess the Palestinians from their land, and to strengthen
apartheid [[link removed]]. Many more believe
that Levin is actually doing the bidding of Netanyahu and Shas head
Aryeh Deri, in order to spare them their legal troubles, and right as
the High Court is about to stage a hearing on the suitability of
Deri’s appointment as a minister. The most widespread criticism,
however, is that the so-called judicial reform will dismantle
democracy and create a tyranny of the majority.

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a press conference
with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich at the Prime Minister's Office
in Jerusalem, January 11, 2023. (Photo:  Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90
 //  +972 Magazine)
Without going into, for now, the substance of these arguments (all of
which are correct in one way or another), almost no one has addressed
Levin’s claim that he, and the governing coalition of which he is a
part, represent the majority. This statement has been taken as a
given, even among most of the center left — which accepts the stance
that Israel has a religious, right-wing, settler majority, and the
question is how to protect the rights of the minority. But this
statement is simply incorrect. The Netanyahu government represents the
minority, and therefore its pretenses to governing in the name of the
majority and of democracy are, at best, turning a blind eye and, at
worst, racism.

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Minister of the
Interior and Health Aryeh Deri, Minister of Defence Yoav Galant,
Justice Minister Yariv Levin and other ministers during the swearing
in ceremony of the new Israeli government at the Knesset, Jerusalem,
December 29, 2022. (Photo:  Yonatan Sindel/Flash90  //  +972
Magazine)
Not simply ‘illiberal democracy’

In order to understand what is happening here, we need to look at
the guiding principles
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government itself, according to which “[t]he Jewish people has an
exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of
Israel” — that is, the right-wing government is drawing the
boundaries at the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
This erasure of the Green Line
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years, but this time it is clearer than ever that the right has turned
every inch between the river and the sea into its playing field. That
more and more powers over the occupied West Bank are being
transferred
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the military to government ministries, which themselves are headed
by extreme-right politicians
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settlements, is tangible evidence of this process.

As such, comparisons to Poland, Hungary, and Turkey, as made by former
Supreme Court President Aharon Barak last weekend
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are not relevant. Those countries’ citizens actually have voted in
the majority for leaders offering “illiberal democracy,” as
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban likes to call it. Yet none of
these countries directly rules, and professes victory over, a
territory in which millions of people live without the right to elect
people to the institutions that govern them. This is not “illiberal
democracy.” It is not democracy at all.

If the right’s arena is, therefore, the entire space between the
river and the sea, it is this area that needs to be subject to the
question of majority and minority. And here, at least in one key
respect — continuing occupation and apartheid — the current
government is in a considerable minority. The numbers are clear:
according to the calculations
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Arnon Soffer, a leading Israeli demographer, almost 15 million people
live between the river and the sea, of whom 7.454 million — 49.84
percent — are Jews and “others” (i.e. those who emigrated to
Israel under the Law of Return but are not considered halachically
Jewish). The other 7.503 million inhabitants — 51.16 percent — are
Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line, including Gaza.
Palestinians are, in other words, the majority — even if a small
one.

It is reasonable to assume that at least 95 percent of Palestinians
are opposed to the Israeli occupation and its apartheid rule over the
occupied territories. In addition, recent surveys show at least 30
percent of Jews support the idea of two states, entailing an end to
Israel’s military rule over Palestinians (31 percent as per the
last survey
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which did not take into account Jews who support a single democratic
state between the river and the sea). With these statistics, we reach
a figure of around 65 percent of those living between the river and
the sea who are opposed to the current circumstances of Israeli
occupation.

 

Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta attend the final hearing at the
Israeli Supreme Court regarding the state’s plans to expel over
1,000 residents from the area, Jerusalem, March 15, 2022. (Photo:
 Oren Ziv  //  +972 Magazine)
The right claims
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Soffer’s statistics are inflated, and that only 3.4 million people
live in the West Bank (as opposed to the 5.8 million according to
Soffer’s count, which is based on figures from the Civil
Administration and Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics). But even
if we adopt the right’s data, which is based on hypotheses and not
on official statistics, we still arrive at a clear majority of around
59 percent who are opposed to the occupation.

From the moment the right indicates that the entirety of the area
between the river and the sea is subject to Israeli sovereignty, it
must be responded to in kind. If the right wants to promote the
override bill in the name of democracy and majority rule, it needs to
address the plain fact that a clear majority between the river and the
sea opposes its policies, the settlements, annexation, and quite a few
aspects of Jewish supremacy — certainly as it pertains to matters of
(Jewish) religion and the public sphere, but also in other areas.

A new consciousness for the Israeli left

Recognizing that the Israeli right actually represents a minority in
the territory it rules over and treats as its own is important, not
just in order to burst the right’s bogus and hypocritical bubble,
but also to create a new consciousness for the Israeli left — to
shift it from identifying as a minority to understanding itself as the
majority. This applies especially to the Jewish left, since most
Palestinians within the Green Line, and even more so Palestinians in
the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, do not feel that
they are part of the minority between the river and the sea, and
certainly not within the Middle East.

This shift from a minority to a majority consciousness has, first and
foremost, a psychological effect. The Israeli left, in particular the
Jewish left, currently feels under siege, condemned to life as an
eternal minority and to guaranteed defeat. Some blame this supposedly
preordained loss on demographics, others on the populism that is
rising worldwide, and others still claim that 55 years of occupation,
and perhaps also over a century of Zionism, were all but destined to
bring Israel to where it is today. But if the left were to understand
that it is actually part of the majority of those affected by, and
opposing, the policies of the Israeli government, it would receive a
boost to its self-confidence — and thus also to the belief that it
can change the current reality.

But it is not only a matter of psychology. Turning its gaze to the
entirety of the space between the river and the sea will also change
how the Jewish left defines itself. As soon as the Jewish left begins
seeing Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line as its partners in
the struggle to end the occupation, it will also begin to reformulate
the boundaries of the political community in Israel.

Indeed, this is the primary difference between the right and the
center left in Israel today. The right is clear on who belongs to its
political community, and it draws strength from this cohesiveness. The
moment that significant parts of the Jewish-Israeli center left
understand that partnering with Palestinians will grant them an
instrument of power against the right, it will be possible to redraw
the boundaries of this political community on civil foundations,
rather than foundations of ethno-religious segregation, as they are
drawn today.

Recognizing that a firm majority between the river and the sea is
opposed to the Israeli occupying regime does not necessitate a joint
struggle. The situation for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, who are
under siege and ruled by Hamas, is clearly different from that of
Palestinians in the West Bank under direct Israeli military
occupation, and of course different from that of the Jews and
Palestinians within the Green Line who have Israeli citizenship. The
struggle will therefore look different for each of these groups. But
it is also possible to determine points of collaboration and
coordination.

Nor does this mean that the goal is necessarily a single state between
the river and the sea. A huge majority of Israel Jews do not accept
this idea, nor do the majority of Palestinians on both sides of the
Green Line. But what it does mean is that we need to look ahead to a
shared future of Jews and Palestinians in this land, because the fates
of the two peoples are irreversibly intertwined.

_[MERON RAPOPORT is an editor at Local Call.]_

_A version of this article first appeared in Hebrew on Local Call.
Read it here
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_+972 Magazine [[link removed]] is an independent, nonprofit
media organization of Israeli and Palestinian journalists that relies
on the support of readers like you._

_Through our groundbreaking reporting on the ground and critical
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* Israel
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* zionism
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* Israeli left
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* Jewish Left
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* Palestinians
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* West Bank
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* Gaza
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* Green Line
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* Occupied Territories
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* apartheid
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* Single state
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* Two-state Solution
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* Israeli government
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* Israeli democracy
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* Arab-Jewish partnership
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