Reflections on conflict and intolerance

Quick quiz - who said the following last week: "If hundreds of thousands of migrant workers come here now, they will bring with them a profusion of diseases: hepatitis, measles, tuberculosis, AIDS and drugs."

If you guessed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, you're way off the mark. It wasn't Rush Limbaugh either.

To answer correctly, you need to pan 5,800 miles eastward to Jerusalem where the man in charge of Israel's borders and immigration, Interior Minister Eli Yishai of the Shas party, said precisely those words on Israeli TV's widely viewed "Meet the Press" program.

For those who follow developments in Israel closely, these remarks should not come as a surprise: Shas officials, led by spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, have made a career of comparing women to donkeys, and homosexuality to the plague, and of blaming assimilated Jews for the Holocaust.

What is disappointing, therefore, is not Mr. Yishai himself, but the fact that his party continues to be courted by Israel's mainstream leadership. Indeed, even before this year's elections, Prime Minister Netanyahu made sure to name Shas the linchpin of his future coalition, and later awarded Mr. Yishai the honorific of "Deputy Premier" in addition to his weighty ministerial portfolio.

It is often claimed that Shas plays the role of kingmaker in Israel due to the idiosyncratic nature of the country's electoral system and its delicately balanced public opinion. In other words: Both Labor (when it was a force) and Likud have had to woo, and tolerate, Shas because it could tip the balance between a hawkish or dovish government - since it was ready to sit in either. With Israel so evenly split between the "peace camp" and the "national camp", it was argued, Shas held all the cards.

This argument still holds a small kernel of truth - though much smaller than in the past. But it is equally important to recognize the fact that, notwithstanding the clicking tongues of the secular media, Shas' periodic outbursts have never managed to produce a broad and sustained public outcry - certainly none which was strong or long-lasting enough to force an Israeli Prime Minister's hand. The voter is not likely to punish Mr. Netanyahu for his continuing embrace of Shas.

How can one explain the indifference, this "collective shrug of the shoulders"?

At last week's J Street conference, I was privileged to chair a panel at which three Israeli Knesset members discussed Israel's domestic problems within the context of the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict: Kadima MK Meir Sheetrit, Labor MK Amir Peretz, and New Movement-Meretz MK Nitzan Horowitz.

All spoke well - about poverty and inequality, the second-class status of women, the undercurrent of hostility towards the gay community, amongst other issues. But Horowitz's comments were the most pointed, throwing light on the two-fold connection between 61 years of conflict and 42 years of occupation and Israel's internal woes.

The occupation, Horowitz explained, was a breeding ground for fear and intolerance - a state of mind that had long since seeped over the Green Line into sovereign Israel. But "the situation" was also an energy-drain - an omnipresent consideration that forced Israeli society to devote almost all its attention to the conflict, and left little capacity to tackle critical questions such as civil rights, religious freedom or the environment.

Seen in this context, the begrudging indulgence of Yishai's remarks becomes less astounding: Bit by bit, hostility towards "the other" had become little more than a "nuisance" in Israeli society - much like noise pollution in a big city. Over time, you became used to it - and even if you didn't, there was little you could do about it.

As we mark 14 years since the tragic assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, it is worth noting that Israel's slain Prime Minister was quicker than most politicians to perceive the corrosive nature of the occupation and what it was doing to Israeli public life.

Although I can no longer find the text, I clearly remember watching Rabin on TV, as he explained that the ongoing conflict was intrinsically linked to rudeness in the supermarket, to angry driving on Israel's roads, to the accelerating pace of spousal abuse, and to the frightening rise in political violence that the country was witnessing - violence that eventually took his life on 4 November, 1995, the 11th of Heshvan, Tav Shin Nun Vav.

Ron Skolnik
Executive Director
Meretz USA