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One American Jew’s Hopes for the Israeli Elections

Published by

Brad Brooks-Rubin

August 3, 2008 in Israeli Politics, Personal Reflections and Brad. Closed

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.

The Haunting “Joke”

Published by

Brad Brooks-Rubin

August 17, 2006 in Israeli Politics, Personal Reflections and All Posts. 0 Comments

There is always one image, one quote, one moment from a war that sticks with you, even when you are thousands of miles away from the actual fighting. In this era of being able to see and hear so much of the fighting on TV, read so much about it in the news and blogosphere and on e-mails, we who are not in the middle of the fighting can basically choose to pay as much or as little attenion to war as we choose. For me, the one line that will stick with me from this war was actually not about Lebanon at all.

There were many haunting images and feelings, of course. The scenes of destroyed Lebanese villages, the sounds of Katyushas landing in Israel, Israelis huddled in bomb shelters. The muted, purposeful silence and paralysis of the Bush Administration. Those will stay for years, but for me, I still think about what I read in an article called “For Troops, A Sense of Moral Clarity,” in which Scott Wilson of the Washington Post interviewed a number of soldiers, past and present, about Lebanon. The answers were typical of the feelings 10 days into the war, answers that may be slightly different now. But one soldier’s thoughts hit me square in the eyes, and the bruise still lingers.

Two weeks ago, [Pvt. Alex Gronov, 21], a year and a month into his military service, was firing artillery shells into Gaza to stop rocket fire along what is now Israel’s second front. Those rockets, fired by the military wing of the radical Hamas movement that won the Palestinians’ parliamentary elections in January, are smaller and less accurate than those in Hezbollah’s arsenal. But many have fallen inside southern Israel since Hamas fighters captured an Israeli soldier in Hamas’s own June 25 cross-border raid.

To Gronov, the two fronts belong in different categories.

“This is actually war, not a joke,” said Gronov, a wiry 21-year-old from the southern city of Ashdod. “Hezbollah is far more serious, more dangerous. This is not a joke.”

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After The Israeli Election: Kadima and Hamas

Published by

Andrew Schamess

April 5, 2006 in Israeli Politics. 3 Comments

I know it’s been forever since I’ve posted here. There have been some big upheavals in my personal life: I’m leaving the medical group where I’ve worked for four years, and very likely starting a practice of my own. This is kind of exciting, but it may curtail my blogging for a while to come. Still, I couldn’t let the Israeli elections go by without some mention.

By giving Kadima a plurality of 29 Knesset seats, the Israeli voters did two things. They embraced a policy of continued withdrawal from occupied territories, relegating the advocates of complete territorial annexation to a marginal minority; and they endorsed the strategy of unilaterlism that Sharon originally devised and Olmert has maintained. They showed - perhaps not suprisingly - that security and stability are more important to a majority of Israelis than the respective ideals of the reclamation of Biblical Israel on the one hand, and a just and equitable peace with the Palestinians on the other… |inline

The End of the Sharon-Arafat Era

Published by

Andrew Schamess

January 12, 2006 in Israeli Politics. 0 Comments

I posted last week, just after Sharon’s stroke, that there was something fishy about the medical decision-making in his case. Turns out I’m not the only one who had questions.

Richard has been tracking the story. As I suspected, Sharon was placed on blood thinners - specifically, a heparin derivative called enoxaparin (sold in the U.S. as Lovenox and elsewhere as Clexane). What were his physicians thinking? The evidence in the medical literature is clear: anticoagulants don’t reduce the risk of death or disability after a stroke, and they definitely increase the chance of brain hemorrhage, which is what happened to Sharon.

On top of that, it turns out he had cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain condition that significantly increases the risk of bleeding. Evidently his doctors missed MRI findings that suggested this diagnosis - or covered it up for political reasons… |inline

Ariel Sharon has Massive Stroke

Published by

Andrew Schamess

January 5, 2006 in Israeli Politics. 0 Comments

I could have told you the problem wasn’t a patent foramen ovale… |inline

Blog Roundup: Good Posts on Israel and Palestine

Published by

Andrew Schamess

December 23, 2005 in Israeli Politics, Conditions of the Occupation, The Jewish Right and Politics. 0 Comments

I’m afraid I’ve been too busy to write much - and I still need to get the site spiffed up again. Luckily, there are a lot of terrific blogs out there, and other interesting sources of information. So if you’re looking for an Israel-Palestine news fix, here are a few things to check out…
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Amir Peretz Update

Published by

Andrew Schamess

December 12, 2005 in Israeli Politics. 1 Comment

I thought I’d check up on how things are going for Amir Peretz in the Israeli elections. The Jerusalem Post has him trading in his government-issued Mercedes (ahem) for an old Volvo and heading out to Jaffa, a Sephardic haven, where a crowd watched him make flatbread in a local bakery. He got mixed reactions…

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Archive for the 'Israeli Politics' Category

One American Jew’s Hopes for the Israeli Elections

The Haunting “Joke”

After The Israeli Election: Kadima and Hamas

The End of the Sharon-Arafat Era

Ariel Sharon has Massive Stroke

Blog Roundup: Good Posts on Israel and Palestine

Amir Peretz Update

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