Thursday 7 November 2013

Why debating with Israeli's makes you sound like an arsehole.

- By Christopher Landau
A late night encounter

Last week I found myself in a depressingly familiar situation.  

It's 3am, I'm dressed as a French mime and I'm drunk. After stumbling out of a nightclub I catch a cab with a friend back to her apartment. I arrive in a shambolic state more arthritic zebra than lithe mime.

Here's where it gets interesting, or tediously familiar, depending on your perspective.

I had been told in advance by my friend, half-mindful half-naive of my own experiences, that she shared her apartment  with a former I.D.F (Israeli Defence Force) soldier. He was still up and sat in the living room as I arrived.

A large majority of Israelis share a reluctance to talk about the occupation in Palestine with strangers. A minority are vocal advocates for the cause. My late night protagonist fell into the latter category.

Many will often cite, justifiably,  the widespread ignorance of European critics they encounter as the main reason for this weary cynicism of 'outsiders'.

The hostility that young Israelis encounter when travelling after their military service is one contributing factor to the proliferation of Israeli-only hostels in Colombia, India, etc.

Two sides of the same coin

As it turns out, he was stationed in the same area of the occupied territories as I was. We had walked the same cobbled streets in Nablus's old city,  scrambled up and down the same Lunar hills and taken shade in the same olive groves.

He refused to tell me what unit he served with, so his exact role and duties were left to the imagination.

Most of the soldiers I had encountered in that area of the West Bank were primarily involved in suppressing demonstrations and launching nightly 'snatch' missions into Nablus and the surrounding villages and refugee camps.

The names of  the 'trouble' villages; Nabi Salih, Kafr Qaddum, Bil'in, and Ni'lin, the camps of Askar and Balata, were etched just as deeply into his mind as they were to mine.

One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter

As someone who has been debating with supporters and apologists of Israel for many years, I have now developed my own weary cynicism when forced into unwanted political discussions.

 Often this feeling is motivated by an overwhelming sense of futility.  

A debate of the occupation or the legitimacy of the systems of oppression utilised by Israel, based on evidence,  i.e. - what actually happened - is nearly impossible. For the same reason you can't convince a theist of the unlikelihood of God with physics. 

We inhabit different conceptual realities. Paradigms shaped by the narrative that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Most Israelis see themselves as the misunderstood victim and not the occupier and oppressor.

This self enclosed moral universe is a necessary product of Israel's colonial experiment. It makes debating them tricky though, because they are essentially in denial.

The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is of course illusory, even if it gets us through the day it remains ideology at its purest. But try telling that to someone when you're hammered drunk at three in the morning.

The Israeli paradigm

I really wanted to be polite and attentive but I quickly found that neither of us were up to the task.

Cognitive dissonance puts people on the defensive automatically, my protagonist used the limited facts in his possession and slotted them into the ready-made, unthinking,  pro-Israel mold that his socialisation provides.

Once he had sufficient information with which to identify and categorise me, he said the appropriate things for a former I.D.F soldier to say to a  naive, passive-aggressive, neck-beard, leftist twat.

His questions were incoherent but nonetheless emotionally potent.

He asked how I could support the Palestinians and criticise Israel when I wasn't from Israel and  couldn't  possibly understand the problem. 

He asked how I could judge Israel when the British and the U.S had done far worse things.

He asked why I would wish to live and work with the Palestinians but not Israeli's.

He questioned how I could espouse non-violence but refuse to condemn Palestinians for throwing stones 

and then he asked me: "What if Scotland were firing missiles at London?"

I stared at the floor for long periods of time. I mainly felt like walking out. In the end managing only curt  pithy responses to the many charges laid against me.

I couldn't escape framing every word that he said in the context of a cold-hearted fascism. Instead of treating him for what he really was, an average Israeli who just happens to be the participant in a greater political game.

 I don't mean that to sound patronising. Most people, even former Israeli soldiers, have not studied the conflict in any great detail. They know only the simplistic slogans, smattering of facts and euphemistic language they've been raised with.

His  agency is thus severely limited by all sorts of factors. His socialisation and education in Israel has conditioned him from an early age. His army buddies and perhaps even his family would no longer communicate with him if he thought any differently.

I have met many dissident Israelis who have been entirely ostracised from their families and friends for speaking out. Many have become unemployable, treated as traitors, outcast and alienated from mainstream society and those that they love.

My opponent was not merely a tool of the state, but a product of it. Israel's education system and civil society is highly militarised and propagandistic: "Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land" etc.

It's a heavy price to pay, but some still do speak out .There are increasing numbers of deeply committed Israeli activists joining the fight against Apartheid in Palestine as grass-roots Israeli movements against the occupation have continued to multiply.

The activists of B'Tselem [8], Anarchists against the Wall [9] and the former soldiers of Breaking the Silence [10] being a good example. 

This makes it even truer that directing even passive aggressive anger towards my protagonist rather than focusing it laser-like on the systems of power that placed him there, was childish and ultimately self-destructive.

Part of my brain wanted  to have that debate with him, perhaps even to share some of my experiences. 

But I knew the truth was that whilst he could listen to me, he wouldn't hear.

Memories that warm you up and tear you apart

Nonetheless  unbidden memories  flashed  through my mind as he continued to admonish me. As I stared even harder at the floor, I began to revisit that tiny slice of reality on the streets of the West Bank that I had myself experienced.

I remembered her vividly. Not older than a few weeks, the smallest child I had ever seen lying amongst a pile of purple blankets. Cooking to death on the floor of a plastic tent.

Her heart was beating unnaturally fast and her mother's desperate expression as we  watched her  baby struggle for life was hard to endure. But there is no safe place to put a new born baby when you destroy her home three times in a single year and drive her family into the desert.[1]

I remember walking up the concrete staircase of a home in mourning. The wails of the women getting louder with every step. A house drowning in sorrow for a young man vaporised by drone strike a day previously. Another victim of the grotesque siege of Gaza, the corrupting logic of occupation. 

What about that old man mauled by the dog in Sheikh Jarrah. Beaten, arrested and imprisoned for 'provoking' the animal. Or the boy talking with his father as he picked up the booby-trapped grenade  planted by some still unknown settler, the horrific injuries to his stomach.

Interviewing countless families and friends of kidnapped children and young men. Meeting many of their mothers and joining in solidarity and pain. Thousands held indefinitely without charge and on hunger strike, hardly making the news.[2]

The kidnapped children taken to Israel's darkest places, tortured into betraying their families.[3]

The acid and faeces thrown at the children of Al- Khalil.[4]

When the soldiers attacked with dogs at Kafr Qaddum.[5]

When they ambushed us and dragged Rachel into the humvee by her hair. Or when they beat Ebbe and the girls.[6]

What happened on Land Day.[7]

Or what still happens every single day in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

Apartheid. 

When it's darkest we see the stars

I don't tell him any of these things of course.

Nothing good would have come of saying that resistance is not only inevitable and necessary in Palestine, it is legitimate.

That whilst I personally subscribe to the Gandhian  philosophy of dynamic non-violent resistance (Satyagraha) I would never patronise somebody enduring occupation by proselytising my views of how they should or should not resist.

That International law recognises the right to resist your occupier. That all Israeli actions in the West Bank are in violation of the International Court of Justice, the UN General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council, which regards Israel as the 'Occupying Power'.

That the very deployment of my debater to Nablus puts him within the 1967 green-line and thus in breach of international law, theoretically subject to criminal prosecution. 


The role and duties of the soldier in an occupying force has remained largely unchanged for millennia. The work is brutal and alienating. 

Avraham Shalom, director of Israel's Shin Bet (secret police) from 1980-86  recently said:

"The future is bleak ... where does it lead? To a change in the people’s character, because if you put most of our young people in the army, they’ll see a paradox. They’ll see it strives to be a people’s army ... involved in building up the country. On the other hand, it’s a brutal occupation force, similar to the Germans in World War II. Similar, not identical. We've become cruel to ourselves as well, but mainly to the occupied population, using the excuse of the war against terror.”

 I should have treated this man with more compassion. For as Einstein expresses more eloquently than I:

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” 

It is not my debater's fault that he was born into the role of oppressor. Reflexively defending Israel is simply axiomatic. Whilst this certainly does not expunge him of moral responsibility, it at least puts his world-view into appropriate context.

What I describe is similar to countless debates in the eighties and early nineties between pro-apartheid South African's and European critics.

The supporter of Apartheid is telling you that you don't understand South Africa like they do, that Nelson Mandela is a terrorist and that the A.N.C means to wipe the Afrikaans people off the face of the earth; the only way to have security is enforced separation and mass internment, the maintenance of a police state is necessary to keep the black-majority under control and the theft and occupation of land is justified by past collective suffering.  

Just as ending South African Apartheid required a plausible and achievable vision of the future for supporters of that despotic regime to accept change, keeping a genuine dialogue open with Israeli's is equally as important.

If Israeli's truly believe that there is no forgiveness possible, they will refuse to change. 

Many white South Africans said that the lifting of Apartheid liberated their consciousness as well as the bodies of their black countrymen.

 I'm obviously not yet strong enough to distance myself from past events, my own experiences, and to always act on this principle. 

Which is unfortunate because until the occupation ends, I'm sure to encounter many more such situations. 

 And like an arsehole I'll probably be sat there, in silence, staring at the ground.

- C



REFERENCES 




[1] http://www.jpost.com/National-News/IDF-demolishes-small-Palestinian-Bedouin-village-in-Jordan-Valley-326286 

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/may/07/israeli-court-rejects-palestinian-prisoners-appeal

[3] http://dci-palestine.org/documents/systematic-and-institutionalised-ill-treatment-and-torture-palestinian-children-israeli

[4] http://palsolidarity.org/2012/02/settler-violence-broken-glass-on-shuhada-street/

[5] http://972mag.com/idf-soldiers-release-attack-dog-on-unarmed-palestinian-protesters/38136/

[6]  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEQSs3Y2lgE

[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVuxQJw-6TI

[8] http://www.btselem.org/

[9] http://www.awalls.org/

[10] http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/