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Feb. 17, 2012
An intent to shock
Gershom Gorenberg offers dire warning.
STAN GOLDMAN
“I write from an Israel with a divided soul. It is not only defined by its contradictions; it is at risk of being torn apart by them. It is a country with uncertain borders and a government that ignores its own laws. Its democratic ideals, much as they have helped shape its history, are on the verge of being remembered among the false political promises of 20th-century ideologies.”
This tortured confessional comes from Gershom Gorenberg’s brilliant new work, The Unmaking of Israel (Harper, 2011). Gorenberg, an Orthodox Jew and a liberal Zionist, is also an historian in Israel, the author of two other books on Israel and a widely read journalist in the United States. He’s lived in Israel for more than 30 years and has several children in the Israel Defence Forces.
Readers will share his anguish when they discover just how much Israel’s democracy and secular society is being attacked and abused. The chief abuser is the country’s government, no less. As but two examples offered by Gorenberg, it passes laws against establishing settlements and then breaks them by funneling huge sums of money from international donors into settlements, and it disobeys orders of the Israeli Supreme Court to return Palestinian land and gets away with it. When nongovernmental agencies criticize the government for its record on human rights in the West Bank, claims Gorenberg, the government tries to silence the critics by calling them “collaborators with terror.”
Gorenberg has amassed some astounding information about the “wild” West Bank, where, he writes, “the settlement project has turned occupied territory into a realm where, ultimately, there is no law.” To support his argument, Gorenberg asserts that settlers in the West Bank who are suspected of serious crimes against Palestinians (murder, assault, robbery and/or arson) either aren’t charged or an officer of the IDF orders the police to release a suspect and stop an investigation; that the chief of police of the Judea district reported his impression that someone high up in the Ministry of Defence has let settlers understand that “they were soldiers for all practical purposes” and not subject to the authority of civilian police; and that settlers who rob and destroy Palestinian olive trees believe that they have a right to because “G-d promised Palestinian land to Israelites.”
Gorenberg explains clearly how the friction between Palestinians and right-wing Orthodox Jews in the West Bank is having a corrosive effect on democracy in Israel itself. In a settlement near Nablus on the West Bank, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, director of a yeshivah is quoted as saying, “Any trial based upon the assumption that Jews and goyim are equal is a total travesty of justice.” Meanwhile, Jewish religious zealots in Israel’s major cities are showing a “shameful attitude” to Israeli Arab citizens, according to Gorenberg. He notes that they call selling property to Arabs “a sin” and that some right-wing government officials would like to expel Arab citizens outright. A fundamental democratic freedom – the right of a citizen to live in a place of one’s choosing – is under attack, asserts Gorenberg.
To the chagrin of secular Israeli taxpayers, however, the religious right continues to grow its power in the government and in the West Bank, while being financed by state subsidies and social welfare, writes Gorenberg. He argues that the religious right pursues its plan to “unmake” Israeli society into a theocratic state for religious Jews only, based upon strict Torah observance. Even the army is being politicized and right-wing religious commanders and soldiers have refused to carry out orders to evacuate settlers from Gaza, according to Gorenberg. This unity between synagogue and state and the resultant fracturing of Israeli society is one of the biggest threats to Israeli democracy, he argues.
The Unmaking of Israel is meant to shock readers into realizing that the hard-won democracy of David Ben-Gurion and the other founding Zionists is seriously under attack.
“What will Israel be in five years, or 20?” asks Gorenberg. “Will it be a ... thriving democracy ... or a pariah state, where one ethnic group rules over another? Or a territory marked on the map between the river and the sea, where the state has been replaced by two warring communities? Will it be the hub of the Jewish world, or a place that Jews abroad prefer not to think about? The answers depend upon what Israel does now.” And Gorenberg maintains enough optimism about the future to offer three prescriptions for a revitalized Israeli democracy.
For readers interested in more on Gorenberg’s perspective and his book, there is a recording online of CBC’s Michael Enright’s interview with Gorenberg in the second hour of the Jan. 8 Sunday Edition.
Stan Goldman is a longtime Vancouver resident, retired high school English teacher and Zionist.
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