My new oped article is up at The New York Times:
“CLEARLY, there’s a war here, sometimes even worse than the one in Samaria,” the yeshiva student said. “It’s not a war with guns. It’s a war of light against darkness.”
We were sitting in the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Acre in Israel. The war he described was another front in the struggle he knew from growing up in a settlement in the northern West Bank, or Samaria: the daily contest between Jews and Palestinians for control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
The explicit reason that his yeshiva had been established in Acre was to serve as a bridgehead in that struggle, just as West Bank settlements are built to bolster the Jewish hold on land there.
Israeli politicians and pundits labeled the Oct. 3 burning of a mosque in Tuba Zangaria, an Arab community in northern Israel, and the subsequent desecration of Arab graves in Jaffa as a sudden escalation. But they were mistaken.
For several years, extremist West Bank settlers have conducted a campaign of low-level violence against their Palestinian neighbors — destroying property, vandalizing mosques and occasionally injuring people. Such “price tag” attacks, intended to intimidate Palestinians and make Israeli leaders pay a price for enforcing the law against settlers, have become part of the routine of conflict in occupied territory.
Now that conflict is coming home. The words “price tag” spray-painted in Hebrew on the wall of a burned mosque inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders transformed Israel’s Arab citizens into targets and tore at the all-too-delicate fabric of a shared democracy.
Indeed, the mosque burning represented the violent, visible edge of a larger change: the ethnic conflict in the West Bank is metastasizing into Israel, threatening its democracy and unraveling its society. …
Read the rest here.
So now it is abhorrent that Jews live in Israeli Arab towns…they are “settlers” too, (not, of course, like the settlers who set up the Yedidyah congregation in “south Jerusalem” in what was an Arab-owned area before 1948 in Jeruslaem who define themselves as “progressives”)
Thus, to be “progressive” is to insist that Jewish moshavim and yishuvim allow Arabs to move in, and, at the same time, insist that Jews stay out of Israeli Arab towns.
See what Israeli post-and anti-Zionists think about “liberal Zionists” like Gorenberg and Dr Bernard Avishai (who also lives in what was an Arab house before 1948):
http://972mag.com/a-sad-commentary-on-the-state-of-liberal-zionist-discourse/28443/
I think you’ve totally jumped the shark.
Yes, there are despicable racists who deface mosques in Arab towns. What does this have to do with the religious Jews who choose to join the “core group” in Acre? Are they breaking any law? On the contrary, they are fulfilling the Zionist dream by settling a neglected part of Israel. What does this have to do with the settlements?
The settlers and the Jews in Acre both started from the same Zionist ideology. You disagree with the right of the settlers to apply that ideology in Judea and Samaria. In your world view, then, the Jews in Acre should be viewed as the “good guys”, who decided to apply that ideology to an area that is unquestionably part of the Jewish state. If Jews in Acre make racist remarks, I expect this has more to do with their upbringing and their day-to-day frictions than with any influence from settlers.
Your “smoking gun” connecting the settlers and the Acre Jews is the fact that the former Israeli chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu “was a preeminent teacher of the pro-settlement religious right”? That’s it? Not anything he did or said, but the fact that many settlers look to him as a teacher? Your article is eloquent, but the underlying logic is specious.
“The ethnic conflict in the West Bank is metastasizing into Israel, threatening its democracy and unraveling its society”? On the contrary – the demonization of the settlers has metastasized to the point where everything – from racism, to rocket attacks on Sderot, to root canals – will be blamed on the settlers.
Written by someone who lives in the former Muslim- Christian quarter of Baka this article is self- serving hypocrisy at its worst.
At long last I have come back to look at Gorenberg’s insightful writing and I also see that Y Ben David is still railing the old familiar song ..”closed minds,closed arm space for hugging,closed doors “. Remember. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ” George Santayana .