Galia Golan Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 3 of 6
How has Israel changed since the time when you first came there? I'm talking about the domestic political situation. What difference did the immigration of Soviet Jews make for Israel's domestic politics?
I think the changes came before. The changes came primarily with globalization. Israel joined globalization in the late eighties.
Israel has changed enormously. I immigrated in 1966, exactly forty years ago. It was a socialist country. It had a mixed economy but it had a very strong welfare state, a good deal of social justice. We had the lowest gap between rich and poor in the world, and today we have the highest, or the second highest, only behind the U.S. It has changed enormously. The welfare state has been dismembered. We have privatization running wild, which by the way, began with the Labour Party in the eighties. So, it has changed enormously.
On one hand, you're getting this individualism, liberal philosophy which is associated with capitalism and privatization rather than the old communal socialist attitude. It's not a positive change. And of course, you have the religious having even greater political power, which certainly hasn't helped matters. Then comes the Russian immigration.
I don't think the Russian immigration has changed things entirely; in other words, I can't really blame them for everything because the trends were there, and I do think globalization had a big effect. But there's no question that we're talking about a million people, a very large number of voters. Like most immigrants, they tend to vote with the party that's in power, but they are ideologically right-wing according to the polls. Today, they form the bulk of the support for Lieberman.
Tell our audience who Lieberman is.
Avigdor Lieberman is a Russian immigrant. He was, in fact, Bibi Netanyahu's chief of staff, so to speak, extremely right-wing. He set up his own Russian immigrant party, and now he's being fairly successful. He's extremely right-wing, he has openly racist views, he once said, "We should bomb the Aswan Dam," for example, and more to the point, he's the main supporter of an idea that has some support in Israel, of changing our borders. Give up the West Bank, that's fine from his point of view, but re-do the borders so that the Arab areas, or areas that are predominantly Arab, in the northeastern part of Israel would become part of the Palestinian state, and then parts of the West Bank where there are a lot of settlements would become part of Israel. He's talking about a population transfer, not by picking up the population but by changing the border, of course without permission of the inhabitants. This is a policy which he's advocating which is, I think, extremely dangerous and racist.
Has Israel's history of creating settlements in the occupied lands led it unintentionally and over time to become more and more like apartheid South Africa?
Unfortunately, yes. I hate to use the term, I find it repugnant. I like to think we're not there yet because our legislation inside Israel certainly isn't apartheid, but you have a situation where in the occupied territories there are roads that Palestinians are not allowed to ride on, the area is chopped up into segments with checkpoints everywhere you turn, all in the name theoretically of security but have nothing to do with security. Certainly in the occupied territories you look around and apartheid is taking place.
If Israel were to annex these territories, then you would have official apartheid, but one of the reasons Israel doesn't officially annex the territory is that it would bring in three and a half million Palestinians, and we already have a million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. So, that's the reason that no government, including the right-wing government, has ever annexed the territory. But by settling it and controlling it -- and "control" is the main word here -- it's controlling not just the outer borders but it's controlling movement from village to village or town to town. That's occupation.
The recent wrinkle is graduate students and people who are Palestinian who would study at Hebrew University, for example, are not being given permission to come and study, I guess for security reasons.
I think that's ...
Is that happening?
Well, no. Palestinian students who are citizens of Israel have no problem ...
No, but in the area ...
There sre not many who would come into Israel to study. The real problem is Palestinian students who live in Gaza and cannot get to the universities in the West Bank, or if they're there they can't get home to visit their families. That's the thing.
More recently, there's been an effort to limit people with American or non-Palestinian or Israel or Jordanian passports, in other words, Palestinians for the most part who had lived abroad and had, say, American passports -- there are a number of businessmen like this -- and now they are being limited. Very often they've come back, they've been living in Palestine, in the occupied territories, and today are getting deportation rules or they're not getting their visas renewed. This is a serious problem economically.
So, there are all of these things, but the major problem is that the movement within the occupied territories, and we're not even talking about coming into Israel to work because that's long since been finished, but it's freedom of movement within the occupied territories. I don't think people quite grasp how serious that is.
You were a product of Jewish idealism. You went to Brandeis, you've studied under Marcuse, you are a political scientist who studied power. The Jewish people experienced the Holocaust in World War II. What is the dynamic that is putting Israel on this path that you've just described, which goes against these trajectories and the insights that they offer?
It's strange, because you can have, particularly among American Jewish immigrants, people who are progressive in their thinking, who care about human rights, and they get to Israel, and that's all true and all well and good, except it doesn't apply to the Arabs! I've seen amazing phenomena of this type, this clear contradiction between what I would call progressive values and policy with regard to the occupied territories. I think it comes from this sense of victimhood which is predominant, and it's an amazing thing to me that after so many years that the State of Israel has existed, with our powerful army and our performance (until this summer) in a number of wars, that there would still persist this tremendous sense of victimhood, that we are the victim, that everybody hates us.
The fact [is] that we have two peace agreements, one with Egypt, one with Jordan, [yet] you still hear we're surrounded by enemies. And you say, "Wait a second, do a reality check here. Who is the enemy? What are we fighting here?" Any kind of criticism that comes from Europe is labeled anti-Semitism, and there is anti-Semitism out there, but there is this sense [of victimization]. It must be very, very deep. It's not just the Holocaust, it's a whole history. Even people who've been born and raised in Israel, who've been born and raised in what should be a secure environment, have this same sense.
One of the reasons is that the governments from the very beginning nurtured this insecurity, played on the Holocaust and how "everybody's against us," whether it's um-shmum or it's the goyim, or however you want to put it. Even your strong, healthy, mighty Sabra still has a sense that everybody hates us and that our very existence is in jeopardy.
Next page: The Peace Movement
© Copyright 2006, Regents of the University of California