-Caveat Lector- The war within http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,883685,00.html Israelis are not only in conflict with the Palestinians. They are also bitterly divided among themselves over race, religion and politics. As the country goes to the polls, Jonathan Freedland reports on how deep - and hateful - those divisions really are
Jonathan Freedland Tuesday January 28, 2003 The Guardian Everyone here knows that he will lose. Even he, the leader of Israel's Labour party on a last campaign swing before today's general election, knows it. To cheer up this basement room crammed with activists and, who knows, perhaps to lift his own spirits, Amram Mitzna promises that he will win one day - "if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow". The audience take the message well. They understand that Israelis have united in their despair at two years of Palestinian terror, rallying behind Ariel Sharon and making it impossible for a challenger like Mitzna to break through. But they are also used to defeat. Here, in the down-at-heel, southern town of Bet Shemesh, it has long been a lonely business working for Labour. This is Likud country. Bet Shemesh may be scarred by decades-old poverty and unemployment, but it's still hostile terrain for Labour. That sounds like a paradox - surely the poor should rally to the party of the left? - but it is explained by one of the countless social faultlines that marks Israel. They are part of an Israeli landscape that can be hard to see under the cloud-cover of national unity produced by the all-consuming conflict with the Palestinians. But look beneath and what you glimpse is a society riven along every possible line: secular against religious, religious against religious, European (Ashkenazi) against Middle Eastern (Mizrahi). These are Israel's other wars - and they have been laid bare by this election campaign. Take another look at Mitzna in that Bet Shemesh basement. He stands tall and impressive, in cobalt blue shirt and neat navy blazer. He has a distinguished, even noble face: modern rimless glasses, and an ancient, prophet's beard. He speaks fluently and well. Yet the key fact about him for many in this town - visible in the way he looks, dresses and speaks - is that he is not one of them. Instead, he looks the archetypal man of the Labour establishment - educated and Ashkenazi - which so many Mizrahi Jews continue to resent. This has been a Labour problem ever since Likud first toppled them from power in 1977, and they have still not cracked it. Jews who fled Yemen, Morocco, Iraq and the rest of the Arab world in the 1950s stored up decades of anger at their treatment by the embryonic Jewish state. They felt that they were patronised, herded first into tent cities and then make shift development towns; their centuries-old customs and costume were mocked as primitive. They were urged to shed their traditions and become "Israeli" - and in those days, in a state founded by Russians, Poles and Germans, that meant Ashkenazi. The collective memory is one of humiliation and Labour, the unchallenged masters of that period, bear the blame. By rights, those feelings should have faded long ago. Ashkenazim and Mizrahim now mix and marry freely; few Israeli families are not intertwined. Yet the pool of hurt remains, ready to be tapped. So the TV commercials aired by Shas, the middle-sized party of religious Mizrahim, include black- and-white pictures of a Yemeni arrival apparently being sprayed with disinfectant by an (Ashkenazi) immigration official. It is a deliberate bid to stir bitter collective memories and spur Israelis, even third-generation Israelis, to vote on ethnic lines. That's when the legacy manifests itself crudely. More subtle is the strange case of Ariel Sharon's escape from what looked like a lethal corruption scandal. A fortnight or so ago, the PM was haemorrhaging in the polls amid allegations of undeclared, million-dollar foreign donations. He was under police investigation. To stop the slide, he gave a televised address. By common consent, it was a disaster, with Sharon rambling and aggressive. Halfway through, he was pulled off the air by order of a high court judge, for violating the election law which bars on-air politicking outside the official campaign broadcasts. Instantly, and curiously, the slide was halted. It turns out that the judge's decision had helped Sharon, by confirming what many Likud voters have long believed: that the country's institutions, including the judiciary, are still run by the same condescending, leftwing Ashkenazi elite of old. The snobs had gagged the Likud leader; he was once again the underdog, leader of a party which has cast itself since the 1970s as the champion of the outsider. That used to mean Mizrahim, but now Likud's coalition of the excluded has stretched to include Ethiopian Jews and the million Russians who have come to Israel in the past decade. Ashkenazi they might be, but Likud's hold on these immigrants is now so firm that Labour is expected to poll just 4.5% of the "Russian" vote. (It helps that Sharon speaks fluent Russian.) Never mind that Likud has been in government for 20 of the past 26 years; it still runs as the plucky voice of the downtrodden. Of course, there are larger reasons as to why Labour is about to lose, with the battle against the Palestinians chief among them. The animating "flame" of Labour and the left has for years been the promise of peace, says former leadership candidate and outgoing Knesset speaker, Avraham Burg: "And along came Yasser Arafat and extinguished that flame." His rejection of the peace offer at Camp David in July 2000 - which Israelis still regard as extremely "generous" - shattered their faith in the possibility of peace. For at least two decades the left had argued that if only Israel ended the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and ushered in a Palestinian state, their conflict would be over. The way Israelis see it, former Labour prime minister Ehud Barak offered precisely that and it was thrown back in his face. And not just rejected, but accompanied by two years of the most murderous violence in the country's history, with Israeli civilians facing the regular threat of bloody death on buses, in restaurants or shopping malls. "Most people are frightened, psychologically they are in shock," Mitzna tells me after he has given his Bet Shemesh pep-talk, and as he sets off for a tour of similarly beleaguered towns in the south. "And when people are in shock, they stick with what they know." And that's Sharon: if peace is impossible, Israelis figure, then better to have a man of war in charge. Polls suggest 70% feel that way, but underneath that blanket of consensus on the Palestinian issue churn a thousand other hostilities. They are not directed against Israel's Arab neighbours - but against each other. And thanks to Israel's strict system of proportional representation, which promises even the tiniest interest group a place in parliament, an election gives all these enmities a chance to rise to the surface. Enter Tommy Lapid, a former journalist and TV pundit who has been the star of the 2003 campaign. His Shinui, or Change, party is set at least to double its current six-seat presence in the Knesset today: some polls forecast an even stronger performance, perhaps edging Labour into third place. Lapid says little about the central issue, merely promising to be to the left of Sharon and the right of Mitzna on the Palestinians, preferring to deal with the battle within. He has managed to stir two civil wars at once, running against both Mizrahim and ultra-orthodox, or "haredi", Israelis. He wants to speak for the forgotten, secular "middle class" he says, but most believe that's code. "It's the revenge of the Ashkenazim," says a senior strategist for the leftwing Meretz party. Addressing a Jerusalem hall packed with the young and non-religious - all torn jeans, goatee beards and body piercings - the white-haired Lapid is tired and hoarse after a furious campaign. But he soon cranks himself up to full throttle, railing against the haredim "who don't serve in the army, don't work and don't pay taxes". Under him, all those exemptions will go: they will no longer be able "to live off the fat of the land". He promises not to sit in any coalition that includes haredi parties (though critics say he reserves his strongest bile for Shas, the Mizrahi religious party - proof, they say, that he is little more than an ethnic bigot), to seek the abolition of the ministry of religious affairs and to end the subsidy for students at theological seminaries, or yeshivot. This Jerusalem crowd, used to living in a heavily religious city, lap it up. "It has no social basis, it has no agenda, it's just a mood," says Tom Segev, one of Israel's most acclaimed historians, of Shinui. "They show a hatred for the religious which borders on anti-semitism," he adds over tea in his Jerusalem apartment, gazing at a heartstopping view of the Old City. He's thinking of Shinui's claim that the haredim are parasites - an age-old attack on Jews. "It's quite ugly, actually." Not that the religious parties don't give as good as they get. Some have branded Lapid a Nazi, an extra- hurtful slur given that the 71- year-old is a Holocaust survivor. But they have more enemies than just Shinui. Shas, for example, has pitted itself against Russian Israelis in a singularly vicious example of intra-ethnic warfare. In a breathtaking commercial, Shas's spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, denounces the wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union for its inclusion of so many goyim, or non- Jews. Over pictures of pigs in a sty and of new immigrants heading into churches, Yosef complains that the country is losing its Jewish character. It's all part of a wicked plan by the secular establishment, he claims, to bring in a million more goyim, who will then drown out the Mizrahi community Shas seeks to represent. In this clash of Mizrahim v Russians, both sides are fighting not only the other but themselves. Four different Russian parties are competing against each other, while Shas is at war with a breakaway faction, led by a centenarian rabbi, Yitzhak Kaduri. Supporters of the two sides brawled in the street on Saturday night - but only after the Sabbath was over. Watching an election, with its built-in tendency to fragment, may not be the most reliable guide to any society. The Balkanisation on show in the Israeli campaign of 2003 is so intense as to be almost comic: one party's election broadcast consists solely of a specially recorded monologue by the notorious Russian anti-semite Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The tiny party responsible provides no Hebrew subtitles, leaving most Israelis unable to imagine even what narrow segment of the population this is meant to reach. Still, this campaign does suggest that the national unity created by the intifada, though wide, is not all that deep. Under the surface all the old tensions remain; if there was a let-up in the war with the Palestinians, they would soon break open. "The orthodox and secular hate each other, the Ashkenazi and Mizrahi hate each other," says 17-year-old Mickey Zakai, one of the crowd at the Shinui rally. "You have so many groups here, it's not really one Israeli nation." He wasn't even including the Arab-Israelis, who make up one-fifth of the population and will vote with everyone else today. They have been having their own campaign within the campaign, trading posters and ads in Arabic - rendering them as obscure to most Israelis as the message from Zhirinovsky. They will elect perhaps 10 members of the Knesset today, but one thing is certain: not one of them will sit in government. So does this all add up to a country tearing itself apart at the seams? "Calm down," says Burg. "Moving from a melting pot to a multi-ethnic, multicultural, civil society is a difficult transition." It takes time for people to learn to respect difference, he says: "Everyone has been insulted, but not everybody has yet had the chance to do the insulting." They need to get it out of their system. "You cannot expect that, in a 55- year-old country, everyone should feel the oneness they feel in Britain or France or Germany. Give us some time." Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003 Forwarded for your information. 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