What Are Israelis So Happy About?

What Are Israelis So Happy About? Partners for Progressive Israel executive director Ron Skolnik, in his latest column for Jewish Currents magazine, tries to explain puzzling polling results which consistently show a majority of Israelis optimistic about their lives and satisfied with the direction of the country, despite their massive support for last summer’s social protest movement. The following are selected passages of Ron’s article: If things in Israel are so bad, how can they be so good? That’s the paradoxical question that formulated in my brain as I perused the surprising results of a string of public opinion polls commissioned and published by Israel’s newspapers on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. They found that the vast majority of Israelis are happy with their lot and generally pleased with the national situation. … In March of last year, I had written for my organization’s on-line publication that “Israel’s part-fence, part-wall barrier has not only added security . Psychologically, it has severed the average Israeli’s sense of responsibility for what goes on under the Occupation on the other side: Out of sight, out of mind, as it were — except when spasms of violence temporarily upset the general equilibrium.” The Rosh Hashanah poll results substantiated this analysis — that with terrorism down over the past years, thanks in large part to the improved security cooperation of the Palestinian Authority forces in the West Bank, Israelis are happy to push the difficult question of war and peace to the back burner. Pessimism about peace prospects therefore does not translate to pessimism overall because Israelis have essentially tuned out the “Palestinian problem” as a day-to-day concern. … Israel polls obsessively to gauge support for the various political parties. These polls, too, have recently made it clear that pessimism about peace is doing little to dampen Israeli optimism. To the contrary, Israel’s two main opposition parties were experiencing a reversal of fortune that was very much the result of the public’s inward focus. Labor’s star was rising with a new party chief, MK Shelly Yachimovich, who is closely identified with Israelis’ bread-and-butter concerns, while Kadima continued to sink under the leadership of Tzipi Livni, who has branded herself as a sober alternative to Netanyahu in the diplomatic arena but has failed to stake a claim as a populist economic leader. (No surprise here: As director-general of the Government Corporations Authority between 1996 and ’99, Livni helped to propel the much- reviled policy of privatization during Prime Minister Netanyahu’s first term.) … What, then, should we make of conflicting data about the domestic scene, which showed wall-to-wall support for social-justice protests alongside an equal amount of sanguinity and well-being? Scouring the polls for statistical clues about this, I found little that would reconcile the seeming contradiction — until an otherwise unremarkable editorial on the Israeli YNet News website offered a promising new perspective. Writing over the summer in support of the nascent protest movement, columnist Yehuda Nuriel suggested that it was as much about reviving Israel’s familial sense of national solidarity as it was about the principles of social democracy. “[H]ere is the Zionism we almost lost,” Nuriel gushed, explaining that the protest encampments had allowed “Israelis from all walks of life [to] meet . each other, like relatives who had never met.” Interesting! The idea that the masses of Israelis who had supported the social-justice protests had been less motivated by a sense of fairness and equality than by a more tribal need to reconnect with “kinfolk” in a spirit of self-defense rang a bell for me. During the days of the yishuv, Zionists had endured the difficult struggle for statehood by invoking such principles as arvut hadadit (mutual responsibility), derived from the old Talmudic injunction, “Kol Yisrael arevim zeh b’zeh,” “All Jews are responsible for each other.” Throughout the decades, Jewish Israelis have prided themselves on their ability to overcome their differences and come together as a nation during time of war. I recalled the words of a leading Israeli peace activist, who analyzed the wave of orchestrated incitement against the country’s human-rights organizations that ratcheted up significantly after the 2009 election of Netanyahu. Israel’s right-wing government, she argued, was well aware that it was directing the country towards a confrontation with the rest of the world. With the Jewish state again facing pariah status, the right knew that Israel could get by only if it felt united in purpose and resolve, and the way to achieve this, the activist reasoned, was to scapegoat a small minority of citizens by branding them as agents of foreign governments and inimical to Israel’s security interests. … Ron Skolnik’s entire article can be read online at the Jewish Currents website. .

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