The picture of Israel that emerged from a forum Sunday, Sept. 10 was of a country whose internecine battles loomed just as large as the conflicts with Hezbollah and Hamas.
The daylong forum, which was held at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and sponsored by the New Israel Fund, featured a variety of topics, including religious pluralism, gay life in Israel, Israeli feminism, peace and security and Arab-Jewish relations.
Keynote speaker Colette Avital, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, sounded guardedly optimistic about Israel’s future. Commenting on the war with Hezbollah, Avital suggested that the conflict had, paradoxically, achieved some goals.
“Crushing Hezbollah was not seriously envisioned,” said Avital. “Most answers are achieved not on the battlefield, but through diplomatic means.”
Having said that, Avital ticked off a list of some things she felt the war did accomplish, including the deployment of the Lebanese army, pushing Hezbollah off the border regions, and destroying much of the group’s long-range missile capability.
Avital articulated what she considered to be the foremost diplomatic challenges facing Israel in the near future — relations with the United States, courting moderate voices in the Arab world and forging new diplomatic paths with Iran.
Avital said the relationship with America was characterized by an occasional lack of “imagination” and that Israel has historically been too dependent on the whims of U.S foreign policy. According to Avital, mainstream media (including Israel’s) is too focused on “Muslim extremism” to the detriment of more moderate Arab regimes. “There are many moderate voices — including those of moderate Palestinians — that still exist, and that should be heard,” Avital said.
During the Q&A session that followed, Avital answered several questions about Israel’s relationship with Palestinians. When one audience member denounced the lack of attention given to Jewish refugees from Arab lands — hence ameliorating the Palestinian claim to the “right of return” — Avital declined to make a correlation.
“We do not think that the ‘right of return’ is applicable to the state of Israel, but let us not mix the issues here,” Avital responded. “I don’t think that the Palestinians should be held accountable for what happened to you in Libya or what happened to Jews from other Arab lands.”
Israel’s fraying social fabric was the topic of at least two of the discussion groups. Nidal Abed Elgafer, the legal adviser to the Shatil Mixed Cities project, which focuses on housing rights for Arab citizens, elaborated on the benefits and difficulties of living in a “mixed” city. Elgafer defines a mixed city as one containing at least a 20 percent Arab population. He thus focused on five cities: Lod, Ramle, Jaffa, Haifa, and Acco.
Elgafer, who identifies himself as a Palestinian from the state of Israel, specifically from the city of Jaffa, said that the mixed communities and cultures afford ample opportunities for “enrichment,” and that hatred due to sheer ignorance is mitigated by the proximity of Jews and Arabs.
Having said that, he noted some problems.
Prompted by an audience question, Elgafer commented that any inequities between Jews and Arabs are exacerbated by an educational system that is still largely segregated. Elgafer recalled growing up in Jaffa, and walking by the Weizmann School every day. When the school, consisting mostly of Jews, began receiving many applications from Arab citizens, the principal refused further admittance for non-Jews. The decision was protested, and wound up in Israel’s Supreme Court, which demanded the admission process be opened up.
The result, according to Elgafer, was that the school was split in two — a theme that he expounded on several times during his talk. Elgafer cited the neighborhood of Mirtzvi in Lod, which has built two walls, one separating it from the largely Arab neighborhood of Shanir, the other separating it from the predominately Arab neighborhood of Jawarish.
The impetus for these walls (which Elagafer and the Mixed Cities Project are fighting in court) was that the more affluent Mirtzvi neighborhood was concerned with theft stemming from the Arab neighborhoods.
Elgafer said that the United States benefits from zoning being a local issue, whereas in Israel planners have very little knowledge of the communities.
That disconnect was also highlighted in the talk given by Yisraela Goren-Gratzyani, the legal director of Yedid — The Association for Community Empowerment.
After commencing her discussion by making the point that the idea of Israel as a great society for everyone is a “myth,” Goren-Gratzyani explained that misallocation of funds was the crux of the problem.
She mentioned the train route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which cut through several mountainous regions — a set of circumstances Goren-Gratzyani said the city planners had failed to take into consideration. The result was a boondoggle that cost over $11 million and a trip that takes longer than a typical bus ride between the same cities.
In searching for a trigger point for what she considered the demise of Israel’s safety net, Goren-Gratzyani assigned a large portion of blame to Israeli politicians, who she said were hopelessly corrupt and had spent a total of “90 minutes” during the last 10 years discussing poverty and social welfare issues. In particular, Goren-Gratzyani singled out former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that he had fallen in love with American economic policy without bothering to see how it translated into Israeli society.
Goren-Gratzyani said that, ultimately, Israel has the financial resources to solve the problems, but that it was much harder “to have a discussion about poverty than it is to pick up a gun and talk about security issues.”