Looking for a new legitimacy: internal challenges within the Israeli Left

ABSTRACT

Considering current Israeli society in terms of the asymmetric power relations and privileges experienced by its heterogeneous population, this paper aims at questioning the role played by Israeli left-wing parties and grassroots organizations since the failure of the Oslo ‘peace process’, with a focus on the aftermath of the legislative elections of 2015. In general, most of the political initiatives led by the Zionist Left can be seen to have lost the internal legitimacy they need in order to challenge the assumptions underpinning the power asymmetries. By taking account of those narrative identities excluded from the mainstream Zionist Left discourse, among which are the Palestinian citizens of Israel, Mizrahi Jews, women’s feminist activists and African asylum seekers, I attempt to problematize the ethnic, national, class and gender cleavages emerging in a situation which includes some complex instances of dispossession and marginalization. In a settler colonial context such as the one prevailing in Israel, I question whether the left-wing has been able to represent and to support the rights of the most marginalized communities and to face up to the neo-liberal and ethno-nationalist drift which is gathering increasing momentum inside the country. Deploying an approach that is contrary to the predominant narrative, which addresses the parties and the grassroots groups of the Israeli Left as types of activism based on a single and homogeneous platform, I draw attention to alternative socio-political initiatives that have often been silenced by the mainstream, such as those initiated by radical left-wingers, ’48 Palestinians, Mizrahim, feminist activists, and also more recently by African migrants and asylum seekers. In this way, the paper also deals with the necessity of providing a means of expression for the critical points of view emerging from the most marginalized backgrounds of Israeli society, a need which is underlined by a good number of my interviewees, and a need which, if fulfilled, could enable the building up of a new and broader legitimacy within the Israeli leftist political arena.

KEYWORDS:

• Left
• Zionist hegemony
• Israel
• political legitimacy
• grassroots activism
• marginality

Notes

1. In the end, and by means of a final anti-Arab incitement (Abunimah 2015), Likud won the 2015 elections (30 seats), followed by the Zionist Union (24 seats) and the Joint Arab List (13 seats).

2. In spite of being mostly explained by the spatial and societal dimensions (Cullen and Pretes 2000; Jussila, Roser, and Mutambirwa 1999; Rutledge 2005), I refer to the concept of marginality within the Israeli context to understand the way through which the Zionist hegemony has built up internal divisions and deep gaps among its citizens in relation to social, economic, ethnic, national and gender discriminations. This also concerns the notion of minority that requires to be problematized in relation to what happened in 1948, and, as Hannah Arendt stated, ‘the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people’ (Arendt 1951, 290).

3. With reference to both the fieldwork methodology and the political standpoints from which axes of power at the base of class, political, economic, ethnic, national and gender differences in defined historical moments and locations need to be analysed, I have mostly used the ‘intersectionality’ approach (Crenshaw 1989; Hancock 2007; McCall 2005; Yuval-Davis 2006, 2011) in order to highlight how various forms of inequalities are strictly intertwined within Israeli society and in the Israeli Left context as well. As regards my fieldwork, in the end of 2014, I have conducted more than thirty open-ended semi-structured interviews with representatives of what I have defined as marginalized communities and groups along with differing class, ethnic, national, age, and gender narrative identities, and who had been involved in diverse initiatives both in relation to the end of the Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and to the most challenging internal issues emerging from within Israel. In addition to the material resulting from my interviews, I have also used the documentation from conferences, initiatives and demonstrations organized by such political actors. If it was necessary to participate in some initiatives during my fieldwork in order to maintain the quality of information I was producing, I did this whilst maintaining awareness of my own background and my positionality towards the core of this study.

4. Israeli society has been historically composed of the hegemonic Ashkenazi elite and of other marginalized communities including the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the Mizrahim, the Russian-speaking community, Ethiopians, African asylum seekers and foreign workers.

5. By following the Palestinian call for the BDS – Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – campaign launched in 2005 (see note 9), Israeli Jewish activists have also decided to support this struggle from within Israel.

6. Founded in 1977, Hadash – the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality – has been based on the aim of uniting ‘most of the supporters for peace, equality, democracy and workers’ rights, Jews and Arabs, in order to create a political alternative to the government’s policy of occupation and exploitation’ (from their web site http://www.hadash.org.il/english/). It has represented the party for which Palestinian citizens of Israel have traditionally voted. In 2015 elections, it has participated in a new political entity, known as the Joint List, in partnership with the United Arab List, the National Democratic Assembly (Balad) and the Arab Movement for Renewal (Ta’al).

7. The research centre ‘Who Profits from the Occupation’ has conducted several studies on the multifaceted boundaries among the settlement industry, economic exploitation and control over population. Their analyses are available at the following web site: www.whoprofits.org/ (accessed 7 September 2015).

8. Although it has maintained a residual formal representation after 2015 elections, this party, which represented a central position within the Zionist Left in the 1990s, has effectively been crushed by the migration of most of its former supporters to either the Zionist Camp or the Joint List.

9. This debate is mainly related to the BDS campaign (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) that has represented an economic as well as political initiative, through exertion of strong international pressure. Considered as a primary challenge to be accomplished by many Israeli radical leftist activists since ‘it is a rights-based approach, rather than a solution-based approach’ (Barkan 2014), this struggle has been initially a Palestinian campaign, before it became international. Since its launch in 2005 by the Palestinian civil society, when its initial statement described it as a ‘call for a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law and Palestinian rights’, it has been founded on demands for equality for Palestinians and preventing participation in the mainstream peace negotiations that have only continued to delay the discussion of rights, which is needed in order to achieve a just conflict resolution.

10. In the 2015 electoral scenario, alternative options from the Mizrahi background have emerged for voters: Shas, the ultra-orthodox political party, has used a very powerful electoral message directed towards the large variety of ‘invisible Israelis’ (Diab 2015a), and Kulanu, a new political party founded by a former Likud member, has focused on socio-economic issues and in particular on the cost of living of the most marginalized people (Omer-Man 2015).

11. Being out of the scope of political interest of the mainstream Left, foreign workers’ rights have not been taken into consideration in the public debate at all, even if the numbers of such workers have increased in the past few years, especially those coming from China, Nigeria, Romania, Thailand and the Philippines.

12. Among the most significant works based on critical analyses of the current Israel and on perspectives of alternative politics, see those by Butler (2012), Tikva Honig-Parnass (2011), Smadar Lavie (2014), Ilan Pappé (2014), Shlomo Sand (2014), and Yehouda Shenhav (2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging (CMRB) of the University of East London.