This is not a conflict with ‘sides’ in the sense that it is portrayed in the U.S. media, nor in the way that I somewhat characterized it in my original fundraising publication, which is available on this site. The information-rich, dense, detailed, diverse meetings we’ve had in the first couple of days introduced our group to many more facets of the conflict, but we were still left with a fundamental issue: how to approach a resolution with those holding fundamentalist beliefs. Many secular Americans (and obviously many others further engaged either religiously or politically with the aims of the Israeli state) will point to the notion that a state for the Jewish people is necessary to their survival and ongoing security. This implies that non-Jewish people are the source of the threat to the security of Jews in the region and fuels an overly simplistic and frankly dangerous narrative of purely ideologically driven “us vs. them”.
I was waiting for speakers and information that would help break this binary notion that is, to me, so much of the source of trouble and confusion around this state and its issues. My hopes were answered with the meetings we had with some prominent Mizrahi Jewish activists today. I have heard over time of different sects within Judaism, but had only a very vague notion of the distinctions and history of each, which all intersect today in Israel. For a full overview of these sects and histories, start here and explore (since I am already up late and want to get to my story!). Personally, I tend to view global issues through a lens of critique of capitalism, and have a rather cynical way of suspecting that money is the puppeteer behind many seemingly ideological battles. While there is sincere ideology at play here as well, this was still a part of my thinking.
Due to this, I was so happy and grateful to have a chance to talk with Reuven Abergel, one of the founders of the Israeli Black Panthers. Having studied and admired the BPP in America, I was both confused and fascinated by the concept of the party here in Israel. Emerging in the 1970’s, they sought to address the conditions of the Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews living in Israel as compared with the conditions of their Ashkenazi (European) counterparts. Reuven offered a story of interlocking and mutually reinforcing power systems at play in Israel that should seem strikingly familiar to anyone familiar with U.S. social movements or others internationally. While the idea of an exclusively Jewish state is inherently racist, as is the ‘separate but equal’ aspiration currently in play, a second layer of inter-Jewish racism that is partially economically based plays out inside the former structure, causing yet more complication and division.
We visited in Ashdod, a fairly large city in the north, 20 miles south of Tel Aviv. The central downtown of Ashdod looks much like the other major cities in Israel proper: Western advertising, secular culture, strip malls and what I found to be a very suburban Southern California or Florida vibe. As you move outward toward the industrial areas at the outskirts of the city, you find what you do in most major cities: a degradation in economic activity. While we drove to these areas, another activist named Marcella told us, “Even though there are 250,000 people living here, there is no hospital and no university. This is because it is a worker’s town.” Looking around Israel, according to Marcella and Reuven, the industrial workers tend to be almost exclusively Jewish minorities or in some cases Palestinians.
Another geographical aspect is the concentric circles design of the most intentionally designed areas in Israel. After “settling” the Palestinian land and cleansing it of non-Jewish Arabs, the expansion pushes out from that center, leaving the elite living within a buffer zone of “others”, descending in class as the expansion moves outward towards the line where the “other other” resides (in the case of Ashdod, the further out the closer to Gaza). This serves a dual purpose: first, it creates a psychological barrier for those more elite in the center and makes it convenient for them to ignore the problems of poverty just outside their line of sight (sound familiar?) and second, it creates a literal physical barrier between potentially dangerous areas and the rich. If Hamas decided to fire a rocket far enough to reach Ashdod, it would more likely hit the more expendable population on the outskirts than the crucial urban core. This is the way the political geography was described to me and it fits with what I saw both there and in the U.S.
Reuven shared a quote that summarizes the platform or inspiration behind the Black Panthers here well: “They [the state of Israel] violently expelled 500,000 Muslim and secular Arabs and then imported 500,000 Jewish Arabs.” This obviously provoked the question of solidarity among many Mizrahi Jews during the early years of the state of Israel and building up in the escalating violence of the Six Day War in the late 1960’s. He sees class as a deciding factor both locally and globally and characterizes the state itself and its force as the problem. The groups we talked with there are some of many Israeli and/or Jewish groups who partner with Palestinians to work to end the occupation and violence of the state.
So far, this type of approach to the conflict is the most promising I’ve seen simply because it breaks the intractable binary we are so accustomed to hearing about from the media. It also links up with a more class-based analysis of war in the context of the globalized capitalist economy, which is arguably the engine of this entire occupation. In order for the U.S. and Israel to develop and sell weapons in perpetuity (since capitalism demands growth), they require a demand. To bolster the demand the state and industrial complex require fear, divisiveness, and in this specific case, racism and institutionalized discrimination. But without workers, who builds the weapons factories, the housing for the workers in the factories, who feeds them, clothes them, provides the basic services for the labor class, etc. and how could such a system survive without the participation of this supposedly expendable group?
An accompanying podcast of the talks with Mizrahi Jews to come, please stay tuned.
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