The loneliness of progressive Israelis

Unless they are won round, there is no hope

Nov 08, 2023

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Israelis demonstrating agaisnt Benjamin Netanyahu in March (CREDIT: Getty)

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Ever since an Islamist death cult ran riot in their country, thoroughly progressive Israelis have looked to their progressive friends around the world and asked: what the hell happened to you?

The supposed bonds of affection and solidarity that bind journalists to each other have meant that nowhere is this question asked with more urgency than in Israel’s liberal press.

Here’s how it works. You are assigned to cover a foreign story. You land in a new country and you look for help. In the case of Israel, liberal-minded western journalists, which is to say nearly every western journalist, turns to Haaretz, a progressive news site in a right-wing and often very right-wing country. Journalists help each other out. If you want to be cynical about it, you can say we operate what Tom Wolfe called “a favour bank” help you on the grounds that you will help me one day. But more often than not journalists tend to like each, and get on with each other, and are happy to exchange information.

A few days ago, Anshel Pfeffer, a Haaretz journalist, who must have helped scores of foreign correspondents in his day, posted a sad and revealing thread on Twitter “There were people out there who we had regarded as friends and colleagues,” he explained, who were “justifying, ignoring or relativizing the massacre of Israeli civilians.”

He started to think about his professional contacts and ask “why hasn’t this or that person who was always quick to ask for my opinion or advice got in touch?” These were men and women Pfeffer had met for lunch or a drink, and briefed on the state of modern Israel. In the cosmopolitan world of liberal journalism everyone can seem to agree with everyone else. We share the same values. We work on the same assumptions. We are all friends. Or so it appears until the shooting starts.

For when Pfeffer checked their social media, he found that they “couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge the humanity of Israelis” Hamas had raped, mutilated and slaughtered, and it was as if their victims had it coming.

The determination to relativize is leading too many to commit the gravest crime a journalist can commit. They are missing the story.

Israel’s war against Hamas is being run by Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition of right-wing, religious-right, and extremely right-wing parties. But it is being fought by young Israeli men and women who, to generalise broadly, oppose their corrupt and dictatorial leadership.

From January until the Hamas attack in October, the run-up to the war was dominated by the largest protest movement in Israeli history. Young and liberal-minded demonstrators fought the Orbanisation of Israeli society. Netanyahu, facing corruption charges himself, wanted to extend government control over the appointment of judges and impose restrictions on the ability of the judiciary to restrain the executive.

Israel has citizens’ army based on conscription and the availability of reservists. So many serving and former soldiers were enraged by Netanyahu moves from the Trump playbook, their officers warned that the right was endangering national security. As Major-General Tomer Bar, commander of the air force, said in the summer, "It is possible that at a time like this they (Israel's enemies) will try to test the frontiers, our cohesion and our alertness.” And so it proved.

One group exempt from military service are ultra-orthodox Jews, who are allowed to engage in religious study instead. Because Netanyahu depended on the support of the ultra-orthodox parties he was engaged in horse trading about extending the privileges their young men (and women) enjoyed.

The troops at the frontline are therefore even less likely to support the government as ultra-religious Jews, who support the government, have been given a free pass. Indeed the latest polls now show that after presiding over a national security disaster on 7 October only 27% of Israelis believe that Netanyahu is the best person to run the government.

The horror of the Hamas attack has united the country in a determination to fight. And yet many, perhaps most of the men and women doing the fighting regard their leaders with understandable contempt. How will this tension plays out will determine the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In an interview with Yashca Mounk on the Persuasion site Pfeffer explored the tensions. Nearly all Israelis have accepted automatically the need for a long war. And yet how can the troops have confidence in their political leadership when “what Israel has had in the last 10 months since the return of Netanyahu is a prime minister who has only one strategy: political survival?”

The collapse in confidence has only “intensified in the last few weeks with the public anger towards him over what has happened. He's not thinking strategically about anything but how to remain in power”.

Like other Israeli progressives, Pfeffer offers an explanation for the lack of support in the West, which I find convincing but which, I fear, misses the Palestinian dimension. Pfeffer’s argument is that the Western media class does not know how to deal with Israeli suffering and religious fanaticism.

“The type of cruelty with which Hamas terrorists came through the fence on October 7 and went from Kibbutz to Kibbutz; and inside the kibbutzim, from house to house, and shot entire families, literally marked Jewish communities down for extinction—it's something that parts of the world that are so well-meaning, well-intentioned and enlightened, can't conceive of. This is something that, from their perspective, happened in history—it happened in the Holocaust, it can't happen again. It certainly can’t happen when we're so used to seeing the Israelis as these stronger oppressors and the Palestinians as these victims lacking in agency. And that, I think, has led to a moral blindness.

“Now, obviously some people connect this to anti-Semitism. I think there is a connection, but I don't want to say that every person who has been afflicted by this moral blindness is anti-Semitic. But I think that people have a problem dealing with the idea that the Israelis are being targeted also because they're Jewish.”

All of this is true. The rational liberal mind set cannot cope with Islamo-fascism. It cannot accept that hate-filled ideologies have a life and malign purpose of their own. Liberals want to find the “root cause” and think that if only rich people, like Israelis, had the decency to behave better and root out the root causes of oppression, all would be well with the world.

But then I imagine and Palestinian reading this and asking me what on earth Israeli progressives have to complain about. A snub here, a micro-aggression there. A lack of sympathy from American TV journalists. A failure by the Guardian to acknowledge Jewish suffering, and the inability of the BBC to see Hamas’s ideology for what it is.

So what? Who cares?

The US, the world’s premier liberal power, is giving the Israeli government pretty much unconditional support, even though Biden can have no time for Netanyahu. When women and children are hiding from Israeli bombs in Gaza, Pfeffer’s concerns can seem absurdly trivial.

They are not for a reason which needs more discussi

on. If politics is downstream from culture, then in global left-wing culture Israel has lost the war. No Israeli voices have legitimacy now. When I look at the demonstrations here in London and across Europe, there are no left-wing or anti-war Israeli speakers. Jews are beyond the pale. To be an Israeli is to carry some kind of curse. It is an open invitation for the rest of the world to demonise and ignore you.

I am not remotely optimistic about the chances for a settlement. It’s perfectly possible that Israelis will react to the attack by building a fortress state. The demonstrations against Netanyahu were magnificent in their way. But they were protests against corruption and dictatorial power by one part of Israeli society against another part of Israeli society. The fate of the Palestinians did not enter into it.

But I do know that, if there is to ever be progress, moderate opinion in Israel needs to be won round, and the concerns of writers like Pfeffer addressed. If the Western left behaves as if they deserve to die, it opens the door to a future of extremism without end.