Month: December 2009

Mondoweiss, December 31, 2009

This is the third installation in a seven-part series. See Mondoweiss for details.

“It used to be that service wasn’t a question,” Tom Mehager, 32, says, explaining that he grew up in Gilo, a settlement just east of Jerusalem. “But then there was the moment.”

It was a split-second decision in 2003. Mehager was on reserve duty, deep in the West Bank. “I was at a roadblock east of Ramallah, near to Jericho,” he recalls. “The road connected one Palestinian village to another. It didn’t even lead to Israel.”

When Mehager, a staff sergeant at the time, asked his commander why they were erecting the roadblock, his commander replied that it was collective punishment. Mehager’s choice was “crystal clear,” he says. “I refused. And I spent four weeks in a military jail.”

Mehager joined an organization comprised of other soldiers that had objected to service. From there, he branched out into working with human rights NGOs. And he began to question the Zionist narrative.

“My father was born in Iraq. All my family names are Arabic. I’m Arab,” Mehager says. “From the Zionist point of view, I’m supposed to be the same as a Jew from Holland. But I really feel connected to Israeli Arabs. [We] speak the same language.”

Zionism creates another paradox, according to Mehager. “The guy from Holland has rights in both Europe and Israel. The Palestinian who is born here has no rights here or anywhere else.”

Though Mehager feels that Israel’s contemporary problems stem from the country’s Zionist roots, he points to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, a cultural Zionist and an advocate of a binational Jewish-Arab state, as an early visionary who foresaw a solution. Mehager also admires left-wing politician and activist Shulamit Aloni, who famously supported and echoed former President Jimmy Carter’s statement that Israel is an apartheid state. Like Aloni, Mehager disputes Israel’s claim to being a moral army, “The ‘moral army’ is a lie.”

“But I’m not a pacifist,” Mehager adds. “I would join the army again if we weren’t occupiers anymore.”

Mehager maintains that his criticisms are a form of patriotism. “If we recognize the full rights of the Palestinians,” he remarks, “I could be a Zionist.”

This series was printed in its entirety in the Fall 2009 print edition of Zeek, Israelology, which was distributed to J-Street conference attendees.

Mondoweiss, December 29, 2009

This is the second installation in a seven-part series. See Mondoweiss for details.

Urban planner and activist Jesse Fox is less encouraged by some of the changes he sees in Israel’s cities. He points to the growing rifts in Jerusalem as a dark harbinger for the country’s future, “The Arabs are excluded. The Orthodox and the secular wrestle each other for control… I’m concerned Israel will devolve into tribal warfare, like Lebanon.”

Fox also sees trouble in less obvious places, like the gated communities in Herzliya Petuach. “It’s a trend towards creating bubbles,” he remarks.

Though it seems like Israelis who depart the so-called bubble of Tel Aviv for nearby Yafo are moving towards integration, Fox, 27, resident of Yafo and student of Arabic, says, “The rich people who come shut themselves in. They are aliens to both the Arabs and the poor Jews that live in Yafo. Gentrification isn’t coexistence… it’s a continuation of a war for territory.”

But there is a bright spot in Tel Aviv-Yafo. “Look at Ir LeKulanu,” Fox says, referring to the local political party City for All. “A year ago, they were agitating against developers. Now they’re on the city council.”

Fox calls Ir LeKulanu a “red-green movement.” While Ir LeKulanu bills itself as an “urban non-party group,” not as a communist party, it does seek to move the city out of developers’ hands and deliver it back to the people.

And in tackling issues related to development—such as sprawl, increasing dependence on cars, and the resulting pollution—Ir LeKulanu naturally addresses environmental concerns. This focus, Fox says, is the way to achieve “sustainability in a Zionist context.”

And this new vision is slowly catching on, according to Fox, “The planning institutions in Israel are trying to move away from building the American/Israeli dream – single family, suburban homes with lawns and driveways – and toward denser, more compact cities, and that’s positive.”

Fox, who immigrated to Israel from the United States nearly a decade ago, explains that his vision of Zionism is an Israel that is deeply integrated into the Middle East—via culture and resources. “The way forward for the whole region is through joint environmental action,” he comments. “We need to think about resources or in ten years we won’t have anything… We need to share water with the Palestinians and our other neighbors.”

Friends of the Earth Middle East, an organization comprised of Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian environmental activists is, Fox says, a spearhead for sustaining the region’s environment and fostering peace. FoEME’s cross border projects help both sides to “see that the people on the other side of the border exist… What this organization is doing is profound.”

This series was printed in its entirety in the Fall 2009 print edition of Zeek, Israelology, which was distributed to J-Street conference attendees.

Mondoweiss, December 28, 2009

This is the first installation in a seven-part series. See the above link for details.

It was the avocadoes that made Sivan question things. The moshav she grew up on had three varieties—Haas, Fuerte, and HaNatoush. “HaNatoush,” Fridman repeats. “The abandoned.”

As a child, she didn’t understand why avocadoes would bear such a name. But when she rode horses through the fields, she noticed other abandoned things. There were stone remains of a village. They reminded her of the Old City in Jerusalem. “You don’t realize that they’re sort of new,” Fridman recalls.

When Fridman was 14 and attending school on a nearby kibbutz, she learned about the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. “I thought it was a kind of avocado. It was a shock to realize these lands were ‘abandoned’ in 1948.” Fridman became aware, too, that Palestinians hadn’t left their land as willingly as the agricultural nomenclature might imply.

Upset about this part of her country’s history, Fridman looked up the property records of her moshav. She was happy to learn that some of the land was purchased from Arabs in 1933, including the plot her parents’ house was built on. “These lands were legally owned,” she says. But some were not.

For Fridman, the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors, “coming to terms with everything was a process.”

Her understanding and definition of Zionism changed. But it wasn’t abandoned. “Being a Zionist is something primal for me,” she says. “It’s who I am; it’s who I was raised to be.”

Today, Fridman, 29, is a counselor for a program that brings Jewish volunteers from the Diaspora to Israel to work with needy populations in Tel Aviv and Yafo, the adjacent Arab city.

Some of these visitors end up staying, becoming “immigrants, not olim,” Fridman emphasizes. Though she dislikes the term “aliyah” because it implies exclusivity, she is not ashamed she has facilitated immigration. “I don’t think we [Jews] shouldn’t live here. But the meaning of Zionism isn’t to build settlements,” Fridman says. “The meaning of Zionism is to fight for how you want the country to look.”

Fridman points to Tel Aviv, hotbed of activism and host to organizations like that she is employed by, which emphasizes pluralism, social justice, and Judaism’s humanistic values. This is the future of Zionism, she says. “The new kibbutzim are in the cities.”

The series was printed in its entirety in the Fall 2009 print edition of Zeek, Israelology, which was distributed to J-Street conference attendees.