One American Jew’s Hopes for the Israeli Elections at semitism.net

My introduction to Israeli elections came in 1992, when, as a fairly uneducated and certainly naïve 19-year old volunteer on Kibbutz K’far Menachem (about midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv), I watched the elderly founders of the kibbutz cheer the election of Yitzhak Rabin. Now, they seemed to declare, we can rest easy, the country is in the proper hands. At that point, I understood about as much of what they meant and had experienced as the chickens I oversaw in the lul (or, chicken house), but their belief in the power of the election, in the power of the government – at least what they believed to be the right government – was inspiring. That inspiration stayed with me and led me to study the country and the conflict that government was supposed to end more through my next three years of college, ultimately bringing me back to Israel in the April 1996, to volunteer for the Labor Party (although this election featured direct voting for prime minister, our work focused primarily on the election of Shimon Peres to be Prime Minister). The memory of the kibbutznikim and their passion for the future, rooted in so many dreams from the past, drove me to cash in my savings from my post-college jobs, crash in a Tel Aviv youth hostel, and show up at the Labor party offices to say I was there to help. I lucked out and was hooked up with a small group of volunteers who spent our days driving around the country, distributing the materials and the message of hope and strength that we believed Peres stood for. In the end, Israelis decided they did not want those materials (they occasionally told me so with spit or a car door opened into my hip as I stood at an intersection with a banner) or the message. Even though I was an outsider, I nevertheless felt that I was a part of a real national debate, national discussion. For example, I will never forget my partner from Labor picking up an Orthodox hitchhiker in our decked-out Labor-mobile. One would have expected an intolerable level of hostility among us; it was somewhat surprising he took the ride in the first place. But although there was some hostility, it was less at a personal level and more about the fervor of the disagreement on the deeply-held views about the country’s future. The conversation flew from the moment his door closed, and although my college Hebrew studies caught about 25% of what was said between my partner and our passenger, I felt comforted by the notion that this was what an election could be: a moment for the country to speak with itself, to engage, to choose. I have never been quite so engaged with American elections, and although I spend a lot of time thinking about them – probably never more than this one – I am admittedly never quite as engaged as I am with an Israeli election. Perhaps it’s these early experiences; perhaps it’s a notion that election results somehow “mean” more, impact the direction of the country and the future more directly in Israel than in the U.S. (although George W. Bush has gone a long way to dispelling that one); perhaps it’s a comfort in engaging with problems at a distance, rather than the ones closest to home. So, with the Olmert announcement last week that he will not seek to continue to lead Kadima, again I find myself reading the Israeli papers more closely than the ones at home. But I keep thinking back to those kibbutznikim from 1992, most of them likely deceased by now, and all of the activity and energy I experienced in 1996, and wondering whether that energy, that sense of real possibility will be the tenor of the next several months, either within the Kadima primaries or in a likely general election. Now that I have a “real” job and two kids (and debt), I know I can’t pick up for a couple of months and volunteer again. But I know what my hope is for the election, from afar: to believe that Israel is taking the moment to speak with itself, to engage, to choose. Not just a leader, but a national identity. I think not of the debates over whether to engage with Hamas, how to continue with the Syria track, what the pace of settlement evacuation should be, if anything. I think instead of the issues that I have been thinking about over the past few weeks in the Israeli press: n the head of the General Security Service indicating that Israel’s policy of deterrence through force may not be working; n the government failing to live up to a special commission’s recommendations as to how to take proper care of Holocaust survivors, leaving many of them impoverished and voiceless (including Ha’aretz calling for survivors to block the entrance to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem); n settlers threatening both daily retaliation — and a libel lawsuit — against the Israel Defense Forces because the settlers claim the IDF falsely accused them in the media of a knife attack; n the continued criticism of human rights group B’tselem for distributing cameras to Palestinians so as to capture IDF abuses (with only tepid criticism of the soldiers themselves); n the “citizenship law” (preventing Palestinians from the West Bank who marry Israeli citizens from obtaining residency permits in Israel, thus denying them unification with their spouses) continues to be extended; n Only 46% of Israeli seniors in high school passed the matriculation exams. All of these articles made me shake my head for one reason or another, and think that a new election might bring a moment of real change. I realize that many of these seem like mere policy issues: how can we educate kids better, or what are the best means by which to deal with external threats. But all of them touch on much deeper issues of what Israel is, both for its own citizens and for the Jews of the diaspora: who is an Israeli; how does Israel build a future for its children, what kind of social welfare system – and not merely welfare on the financial level — is appropriate in 2008; who is the IDF, and what is it protecting and defending? And why? I am not an Israeli, and I don’t believe the answers I have come to over the years (by building on my earlier experiences to then spend time living in Ramallah, in Haifa, in Jerusalem, and working on a lot of Israel/Palestine-related issues) to the above questions are necessarily the right ones for Israel, even though I hope they are. In the end, all I hope is that another 23 year-old American Jew is flying to Israel now to engage in these debates, to see them first-hand. I hope he or she will leave behind what they have picked up in Hebrew School, from their Israel on Campus Coalition or AIPAC publications, or from their attendance at Students for Justice in Palestine events. I hope they travel around the country and attempt to engage with as many Israelis – Jewish and not — as possible, and I hope they find that these questions being posed, these issues on the table, as I know many of them already are on this site and so many others. Ultimately, I hope we allow ourselves to see this election from afar beyond Olmert and Fayyad, beyond “negotiations,” beyond “final status.” But that we see it for what it can be, what we hope our own to be: a real conversation that leads to a real choice. .

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One American Jew’s Hopes for the Israeli Elections

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