In the wake of the resignation of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over a corruption scandal and following her win in the Kadima Party elections, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is attempting to form a new government coalition.
Israeli
public discourse artificially differentiates between “the political,” i.e. what
should Israeli policies be towards the Palestinian people, and questions
related to social and economic policies. In this discourse, “peace” and
“security” become the primary variable defining the political realm, excluding fundamental
social and economic questions. It is not surprising, then, that the primary
elections of the Kadima Party focused largely on peace and security.
In his analysis
of the Kadima primary elections, Uri Avnery states that “Mofaz presented
himself not only as Mr. Security, but also as a genuine right-winger, a man who
opposes both peace with Syria
and peace with the Palestinians.” On the other hand, his contender, Tzipi
Livni, writes Avnery, “presented herself as the personification of the peace
effort, the woman who conducts the negotiations with the Palestinians, who
prefers diplomacy to war, who points the way to the end of the conflict.”
It is true
that Avnery recognizes these representations by Kadima contenders are nothing
more than images created by public relation consultants. Still, he claims that
“the important fact is that the Kadima voters, the most representative group in
the country, accorded victory—well, a tiny victory—to the candidate who at
least pretended to favor peace.”
Avnery concludes,
“in Israel, 2008, the forces are divided equally between the ’Right‘ and the ’Left‘,
and the ’Left‘ won this time by the smallest possible margin.”
Understanding
that the term “Left” in Israel
qualifies one’s position to be somewhere on the spectrum between peace and security, many experienced
activists for peace came to the same conclusions. Some of them hope that Tzipi
Livni as chair of the Kadima Party, and perhaps the next Prime Minister, will
lead the country back to the peace process. Others sing songs of praise to her.
In an
article disseminated by email, Gershon Baskin of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and
Information says “we need you [Tzipi Livni] to succeed. If you do, your
success will be the success of all of us, and if you fail, your failures will
impact our lives negatively for years to come.”
For Baskin,
Tzipi Livni is more than a hope for peace, a success for the Left, but the very
embodiment of true Zionist values, values that were forgotten during 40
corrupting years of occupation. He claims, “It is hard to imagine why a sane
person would even desire to be in your place. But those of us who grew up in an
ideological movement and were educated that we have a ’mission‘ in our lives,
can understand the notion of ’din hat’neuah’—the judgment and
determination of the calling of ’the movement‘ […] For you, it is not ego, for
you it is the drive of mission and commitment, that is how you were brought up
and it is obvious from the kind of person you have become.”
The
different approaches of Baskin and Avnery are unambiguous. While Baskin goes on
with his ode to Tzipi Livni, Avnery is conscious of the risks. As a key
activist in the Israeli peace camp, Avnery knows that Livni may betray all
expectations the day she becomes Prime Minister, but he counts on the
assumption that the public who voted in the Kadima Party primaries represent
Israeli public opinion. Moreover, he claims it will be up to the peace camp to
mobilize the public and demand that election promises will be fulfilled.
However,
both Avnery and Baskin contribute to the almost ontological separation between “the
political” and “the social”, and therefore to the marginalization of Israeli and
Palestinian disempowered populations, their desires and their political agency.
Since 1992, the peace process, which was accompanied
by neoliberal socioeconomic policies, substantially contributed to the growing
socioeconomic inequalities in the Palestinian and Israeli societies. The combined effect of a peace discourse voided of any social
dimension, with neo-liberal policies that undermined social welfare networks,
made peace appear as a relevant concern only for the wealthier population or
individuals who had made unscrupulous gains during the process. Impoverished
and marginalized communities developed resentments against the concept of peace
and peace organizations.
While the ruling socioeconomic elites in Israel
benefited from the peace process and its parallel economic growth, many
Palestinians and Israelis experienced accelerated impoverishment, a dismantlement
of the social welfare net and heightened social marginalization.
According
to a report prepared by Dr. Shlomo Svisrky for the Adva Center, only
those already in Israel’s
top twenty economic percentiles benefited economically during the era of peace while
the remaining 80 percent of the population began to earn less.
This social reality was reflected in the voting patterns expressed during
the 2006 national elections in Israel.
As we move from poorer to richer areas, support for the peace process rises,
whereas it declines for groups that oppose the peace process. In the 2006
elections, voters in poorer areas tended to support parties that reject the
peace process and even call openly for ethnic cleansing, while in affluent
areas there was a growing support for parties fully committed to the peace
process.
The peace
industry that evolved during the process contributed to the disenfranchisement
of the poor in the Palestinian and Israeli societies and to their exclusion
from a political discourse limited to peace and security issues.
While the
political negotiations were monopolized by the US,
Europe entered into the peace process by promoting
second and third track negotiations.
The history
of the basic document in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Declaration
of Principles signed in Washington on
September 13, 1993, reveals the relation of power that exists between Europe
and the US.
In 1993, Second track negotiations mediated by the Norwegian government were conducted
by intellectuals in the suburbs of Oslo , but when a draft agreement was finally
approved by the parties and the negotiations came to the hands of the
politicians, the venue moved to Washington.
Since then,
the venue for further political negotiations was the United States. Europe
was relegated to people-to-people negotiations, promoting dialogue and a so-called
culture of peace.
Europe poured
millions of Euros into the region, taking on the role of an adherent to Washington’s policies
while transforming the Israeli and Palestinian struggle for justice in the
region into futile and limiting NGOs. Rights based approaches replaced the
struggle for rights, reporting on human rights violations came instead of the
popular struggle for those rights, petitioning the Israeli High Court of Justice
replaced popular mobilization.
Under the
umbrella of well-financed projects that created a new social class of peace
professionals, “peace” became a hollow concept. However, Israel’s thanatopolitics, (which includes
home demolitions, targeted assassinations, and checkpoints manned by cynical and
abusive soldiers) which was challenged by the popular mobilization of the first
Intifada, could be restored in its full glory in the era of the peace industry.
At the
Kadima party primary elections, Shaul Mofaz, executioner of Israel’s targeted assassination policy,
was defeated by a minor margin and for technical reasons. His victory would
have meant beginning a new military offensive against the Palestinian people—after
all, Mofaz’s only experience is with death and military offensives. However,
the victory of Tzipi Livni does not mean the implementation of new policies
towards peace. It means the industry of peace was saved. The Quartet can send
their delegates back to the region and peace professionals can promote their
reports and policy papers. In the meantime, the Israeli politics of death will
continue to undermine any real possibility of peace.
On the
other hand, Uri Avneri’s assumption that the Kadima party represents Israeli
public opinion is wrong. Kadima represents the white middle class in Israel
and its expectations. The Israeli white middle class is tired of wars and
brutality. For the impoverished, social and economic brutality is a matter of
everyday life.
The current
state of affairs is one where the social and economic realities are excluded
from the political discourse. Meanwhile, the neoliberal agenda with a
concomitant peace and security discourse takes center stage and ignores the
realities of most Israelis. Disenfranchised Israelis, left outside the debate
by neoliberal policymakers, have largely rejected the peace discourse. The task
of the Left should, therefore, be to work towards breaking this mode of
exclusion by creating a new concept of peace in which social inclusion as an
inseparable component.
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