Trump and Israel

By Joshua Schreier & Mira Sucharov

The Israeli government has expressed elation in reaction to Donald Trump’s electoral victory. Likud MK Yehuda Glick invited Trump to visit the territories to “see with his own eyes that settlements are the way to peace.” Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s justice minister, expressed hope that the president-elect would fulfill his promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

And Israeli Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, who has called for annexing parts of the West Bank, insisted that Trump’s victory signals that “the era of a Palestinian state is over.”

There are at least two lessons to be learned here.

First, while it may be disturbing to those who had pinned their hopes on a two-state solution, Bennett’s declaration makes clear what has already been obvious for some time: Israel already is governing a single entity from the river to the sea. Linking equality for Palestinians to an ever-distant two-state solution has become not only unrealistic, but also dangerous. Waiting for an imaginary state to materialize means that the struggle to bring democracy to the one state that does exist is being denied. Instead, we must push for all the area’s residents — some of whom are citizens and some of whom are stateless — to be granted equal rights, justice and protection of life and limb.

 Second, the fact that Israel’s leaders have so warmly embraced Trump, a figure whose victory was fueled by racism and xenophobia, underlines how this brand of divisiveness has long been a mainstay of Israeli politics. We suggest that the struggle to oppose Trump’s racism and xenophobia should proceed in parallel with the fight for justice in Israel-Palestine.

The parallels between Trump’s America and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel are many. In the lead-up to 1948, the forerunners to the Israeli army forced the majority of certain ethnic groups to leave, and after independence, Israel prevented those fleeing from returning. Israel has fashioned an immigration policy around religion and ethnicity, and since 2003 has been building and maintaining a wall to keep out undesirables. Mind you, Trump’s proposed wall between the United States and Mexico would follow a legitimate international border, whereas Israel’s West Bank barrier snakes through areas that Israel currently governs, in many cases separating Palestinian residents from access to land and livelihood.

Trump’s proposal to force all Muslims in the United States to register with a federal agency is especially chilling. But this, too, bears striking similarity to Israel. Until 2005, Israeli identity cards classified citizens according to ethnic origin; now the ethnicity/religion distinctions are contained in the records of Israel’s national population registry. The sticker system used by Israeli airport authorities signaling whether the traveler is Jewish or Arab, among other things, is by now well known. These parallels between Trump’s vision for America and contemporary Israel are important.

 Yet despite the parallels between the U.S. and its closest ally, millions of Americans, including the vast majority of American Jews, are rightfully angered and frightened by the U.S. election results. The Southern Poverty Law Center reports over 200 incidents of “hateful harassment and intimidation” since the election. These have included attacks on Muslims, Latinos, LGBTQ individuals and Jews. Meanwhile, Trump has been embraced by neo-Nazi groups and the Ku Klux Klan. Just as the U.S. starts mimicking Israel, most Jews have become deeply uncomfortable.

Let us be perfectly clear: We don’t advocate a turning away from America; Americans and those close to them must continue to fight for democratic values of equality and inclusion while actively standing in solidarity with those most vulnerable. Neither do we suggest a turning away from Israel. But being pro-Israel in an inclusive sense will mean a different form of engagement. It will mean direct pressure — in various non-violent forms — to demand justice and human rights. This won’t be easy for the many American Jews who are accustomed to expressing their identity in terms of automatic support for Israel. But when it comes to dignity and human rights, the time has passed for exceptionalism. Racism and exclusion are unacceptable everywhere, be it in friendly states or hostile ones, and we need to be consistent.

Coalition-building has become central among progressive groups in North America. Groups like Black Lives Matter, Students for Justice in Palestine and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights have linked the struggle for tolerance and inclusion in the U.S. and abroad. These groups already count many Jewish members or supporters. And those involved in specifically Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Center for Jewish Nonviolence and T’ruah have placed human rights in Israel-Palestine at the core of their Jewish identity. Obviously, we may disagree with each other on certain issues. But taking a unified stand against all forms of intolerance and hatred is far more urgent than the particular issues that may divide us.

Given the deep ties between the two countries, the fate of America and Israel — including the Palestinians under Israeli rule — are intertwined. To this end, American Jews have a crucial role to play.

Israel/Palestine – by Slavoj Žižek

In Udi Aloni’s movie Forgiveness, one of the Holocaust survivors who is committed to a mental institute built on top of a Palestinian village tells his psychiatrist the following story: An old legend holds that righteous Jews murdered in exile will roll in underground tunnels in order to be forgiven and resurrected on the Mount of Olives when the Messiah comes. (The legend is based on the double-meaning of the Hebrew word mechilot: “underground tunnels” and “forgiveness.”) Then Zionism came along and inverted the symbolic tunnel into a concrete settling (aaliyah) in the land of Israel/Palestine. Although the Zionist movement acted as a secular-national emancipatory/colonialist  body, it was founded on the grounds of theological structures — just like its sister movement, Christian colonialism. Thus the saying: despite the fact that secular Israelis don’t believe in God, they still believe that he gave them the holy land. But in parallel to this secular current with its religious subconscious, a theological reversal was taking place in the religious current of the settlers. That is to say: even though the settlers are convinced that God gave them the holy land, they don’t believe in him at all. Only those who emptied God of his holiness could take the secular-Zionist project to a perversion so extreme that all divinity is believed to be in the holy ground (the Holy Land). In that way, the Jews of the land of Israel, religious and secular alike, united in their libidinal passion for the Holy Land. And by filling that land with holiness, they depleted holiness from God and humankind.

Today in Gaza, the Israeli military is fighting not only in underground tunnels, but also against the natives of the land. They are fighting not only against Hamas, but also against Palestine itself. They –alongside the West– are fighting against a nation that they have tried to expel from the land for almost 70 years now. They are fighting not only because of these tunnels, but also and precisely to conquer the land within which the tunnels were dug. The refugee camps in Gaza are living evidence of this enormous land robbery, the original sin. Since 1948, there’s been an attempt to divide the Palestinian people, to deprive them of all national consciousness; there’s been an attempt erase their memory, as if memory were the inalienable property of only Judeo-Christian thought. It was assumed that afterwards they could be branded with a new, divided consciousness as Arab-Israelis, Arab-Jerusalemites, fundamentalist Gazans, West-Bankers, and exiled Palestinians without the right of return. But we in the West didn’t anticipate that the Palestinians would still see themselves as one people. And yet, despite the attempt to erase their collective memory, they are reunited again. That’s the real reason for the missing fourth beat [i.e., Israel’s refusal to release the fourth and last batch of Palestinian prisoners in March 2014 as guaranteed during US-backed peace talks], and that’s the main reason for the war and the killing. All of the rest — footnotes.

And so it was discovered that the more we attempted to expel them from on top of land, the more the Palestinians united to burrow underneath and wrap themselves in it, like a Jewish prayer shawl. While we thought they were digging themselves a grave, they thought they were digging an opening for life. This is the essence of tsumud [Arabic word for the fidelity of Palestinians to their land], and it’s bigger than all of the factions — bigger than Hamas and Fatah, bigger than farmers and urbanites, bigger than secular and religious alike. In the context of tsumud, it doesn’t really matter who you are. Because at the end of the day, you are Palestinian, a child of this land.

Most Palestinians are willing to share the land — many, not any more. But no Palestinian will give up on it. The attempt to expel them from the face of the earth was an attempt to erase them from our consciousness. But they migrated to the belly of the earth and the heart of our consciousness. They are the children of the land, the land where they are buried and resurrected inside of tunnels. Tunnels in which they roam as living-dead refugees, looking for an opening to roll up and reincarnate into their homes and villages.

When they are used to smuggle food, tools, or a bride and a groom, the tunnels can function as a manifestation of life. Or, when armed militants emerge from them, they can be conduits for death. They can be tunnels of salvation here on earth, salvation of life as such. Or they may become apocalyptic salvation, salvation by weapons and destruction. We can help to define the future meanings of the tunnels. We can help determine whether through their gates will come the messiah of peace and justice, or the angel of death. They are very heavy on us, the gates of Gaza. Maybe if we open them together to life, themechilot (underground tunnels) will become mechilot (forgiveness).