COURTESY of the Israeli foreign ministry and the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, seven journalists and columnists from Business Day, the Sowetan, the Mail & Guardian, the Citizen, Die Burger and the SABC visited Israel on a fact-finding mission.
For me this visit was a chance to explore the Israeli narrative, given the dominance of the Palestinian narrative in the national, international and African National Congress discourse. I now realise that much of what I thought about Israel was based on ignorance and assumption. I returned home on Friday understanding why Israel feels assaulted by a world that is blatantly partial and hypocritical. Why Israel is always held to the highest standards of democracy when every other country flouts them intrigues me.
Sometimes I think the world is jealous of a small country that has turned a desert into a garden, adversity into prosperity . Those who are prejudiced against Israel for ideological reasons do us a disservice when they portray the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in black-and-white terms. It has parallels in the way SA is portrayed in the international media — constant protests and police shooting at people demanding access to water, sanitation and housing . That is not all SA is about. It is the same with Israel, constantly and popularly portrayed as Holocaust survivors who have now turned on disempowered Palestinians. The nuanced nature of the two narratives are lost.
An interesting statistic about the numbers of Jews that have fled Arab territories since 1948, rarely reported upon, caught my eye in an Israeli newspaper. In Algeria there were 140000 Jews in 1948, by 2008 none; in Morocco there were 250000, today there are about 6000. For more than half a century there was a flight of more than 850000 Jews from Arab lands, which, in effect, means that more Jews were forced to flee Muslim persecution than the approximately 762000 Palestinian Arabs who left their homes in the newly declared state of Israel.
Add to this the successive wars against Israel after 1948, by Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967, the Yom Kippur war in 1973, and the constant destabilisation by terrorist incursions, then Israel’s socioeconomic and military strength is quite astounding. The 4,5% growth rate and declining unemployment on the one hand, and a stagnating peace process on the other, create a schizophrenia among Israelis that makes them almost too nervous to enjoy their prowess.
Prof Meir Litvak, from Tel Aviv University, and a Harvard graduate, gave a sobering overview of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which according to him should be viewed within the context of a declining and fragmented Arab world and the concomitant rise of Iran and Turkey, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The proactive Hezbollah, supported by Syria and Iran, and the reactive Saudi Arabia and Jordan, seem to work against each other in the context of the peace process. Turkey is increasingly ingratiating itself with the Arab world. Using Israel as the “whipping boy” to get closer to other Arab countries, Turkey has alienated its former ally. All of this is made worse by Iran’s acquisition of nuclear capabilities, an incentive for Egypt and Turkey to do likewise. The prospect of the proliferation of nuclear capabilities in an unstable region, combined with Iran’s aggressive foreign policy , bodes ill for peace in the Middle East.
The peace process is thus hampered by a structural crisis. On the one hand, Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition has no room to manoeuvre and he thinks he will not survive if he listens to the US. On the other hand, conflict among the Palestinians seems far from abating, as their differences have ceased to be only ideological. They are wracked by deep enmity and distrust, making any semblance of unified representation impossible.
In the meantime, neither the Israeli public nor the leadership has the drive to change the situation. The wall of separation has come to symbolise the deep social, cultural and political barriers between two peoples who share a common territory. Complicating matters, Prof Litvak adds, is that in trying to keep his coalition together at any cost, Netanyahu has damaged Israeli relations with the US, which are at their lowest point in 30 years. What to do?
- Kadalie is a human rights activist .