A demonstration calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, Tel Aviv, November 18, 2023, all photos taken by Matan Kamine
Tibor S. T. Mesman interviews Mattan Kamine
文章信源：LeftEast
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Can you explain what the position and challenges of the Israeli left are after October 7, after the cycle of violence in Israel and the occupied territories intensified?
Whenever there is talk of the "Israeli left", it is first necessary to clarify what the left is. For some, especially those on the Israeli right, "left" refers to anyone willing to reach any kind of rapprochement with the Palestinians, and in recent years, the meaning of "left" has even been further extended to anyone who opposes Benjamin Netanyahu's continued rule, even if they are right-wing in any other position. But I think the term "left" means a commitment to civic equality and social justice on a global scale. In this sense, the majority of the left in Israel is actually Palestinian citizens, and they are most prominently represented in the Israeli Communist Party. As in much of Eastern Europe, the left wing in Israeli Jewish society was fairly small and politically marginalized even before the war began.
The Israeli left, including the Palestinian left and the Jewish left, has unequivocally and loudly condemned the crimes committed by Hamas on 7 October and has equally clearly opposed the brutal Israeli war in the Gaza Strip, which has been legitimized by genocidal rhetoric and deliberately targeted civilians, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands. Like everyone else, we on the Israeli left were caught off guard on the 7th. Due to the peculiarities of Israel's social geography (I will not go into it), leftists make up a large percentage of the victims of the violence, and among those killed that day were our left-wing comrade Haim Katzman, as well as the veteran activist Vivian Silver. But the events of that day did not change our firm belief that as long as the Palestinian people are not free, there can be no truly meaningful freedom or security for the Israelis.
How do peace activists and anti-militarist organizations interpret the current situation, do the groups provide a sophisticated analysis of the situation, but also support Palestinian self-determination, and do they put forward proposals and concrete actions, protests and initiatives?
It would be a bit tautophonical and superficial to say that all consistent leftists support the position I outlined above, because this is the standard left-wing position of countries around the globe. Of course, there are many people who have been associated with the left in one way or another in the past, who now claim to have "woken up" from the Hamas attacks, recognizing the true nature of the enemy, and so on. I don't know how to take these claims seriously: they smack of opportunism in my opinion. People on the left in their right minds know that Hamas is by no means a left-wing organization. Like other Islamist movements in the Middle East, Hamas's rise is the result of the utter defeat of the secular left, which is the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
The anti-Stalinist left during the Cold War is well aware, but many of our generation seem to have forgotten that what we need to do is support the national liberation struggle, not the political forces leading it at any given moment, and that is entirely possible. As many commentators have noted, Hamas's popularity is not due to the fact that Palestinians are particularly interested in Islamic states. Hamas is popular because it is seen as the only political force that poses a serious challenge to Israel's occupation and apartheid, in contrast to the compatulism of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas. Therefore, the only meaningful way to confront the hegemony established by Hamas among the Palestinian people is to articulate a position that is resolutely opposed to the occupation and, of course, to the current war, while proposing another vision of a country where people of different nationalities and religions can live in peace and equality.
As for the proposals, we are not yet in a position to present a detailed blueprint for the future. Over the past few weeks, the current call has been "cease fire immediately!" and now that a temporary ceasefire has come into effect, there have been calls to extend the ceasefire and ensure the release of all prisoners of war and hostages on both sides. The slogan put forward by the hostages' families is "all for all", which, to borrow a North American phrase, is a rather radical slogan, essentially a cancellationist slogan. Moreover, it makes sense to continue to engage with popular movements opposed to Netanyahu's government, even though many of these movements are still following the pre-war path of militarism and even chauvinism, believing that the government, not the military, is responsible for the Hamas attacks, and so on.
What is the position of the Israeli government and police against pacifist protesters and expressions of support for Palestinian self-determination?
In this regard, the situation has seriously deteriorated since the beginning of the war. Israel's leftists have been marginalized for years, and for Palestinian citizens, the security services have been lurking behind them, for example in the education system, with menacing. Palestinian parliamentarians have been sent to prison on political charges, and others have had to go into exile. But unlike in the occupied territories under military rule, within Israel, people can protest individually through social media and daily interactions, as well as in organized street protests.
Since the beginning of the war, repressive campaigns have emerged, primarily against Palestinian citizens of Israel, but also at dissident Jews. Hundreds, if not more, have been fired, suspended, slandered and physically threatened for making such mild statements as "there are children in Gaza", especially the Israeli police, who have published disgraceful photos of these evil "perpetrators", many of them young Palestinian women. The police under the control of the fascist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, also made no secret of their intolerance of the protests, with their head threatening to put anti-war protesters "on buses bound for Gaza." Four prominent Palestinian politicians were detained for attempting to participate in the vigil, while the solidarity protest in Tel Aviv that night (which I attended) was dispersed with brutal violence that I had never seen inside Israel.
At the compulsion of the High Court, the police allowed anti-war demonstrations in Tel Aviv on November 18. Despite the fact that the counter-protesters played loud music and tried to drown out the sound of the speakers, the demonstration itself went smoothly. After the demonstration, some of the counter-protesters almost beat the demonstrators, including my mother, who was not a young girl anymore. The police reacted reluctantly at the scene, and of course they did not arrest anyone.
Finally, I would like to talk in more detail about the repression of academia, both because this is where I work, and because I genuinely believe that academia plays a real role in inculcating ideologies that can be progressive or regressive. Clearly, right-wingers believe this, otherwise they wouldn't have targeted critical academics, which they have been doing for years. I am an active member of the Equality in Academia organization, a membership-based organization that has made it one of its main goals to protect academics and students from such oppression.
But since the beginning of the war, we have had to face a large number of attacks, which our comrade Yara Shah Gharapur recorded in a report. Perhaps the most obvious of these acts was the attack on tenured professor Nadella Sharhoub Kewlkian by the leadership of the Hebrew University where I worked, as she signed a statement calling the assault on Gaza genocide. Unable to fire her, they "called for her resignation" in the media and then sent an email bombardment to the whole school.
Anti-war demonstrators demand the release of Gaza hostages at a rally in Tel Aviv, October 28, 2023.
How do you see the level and quality of public discussion and media coverage?
The current state of public discussion in Israel is depressing. In the public sphere, things may have changed slightly better than in the early days of the war, when genocidal rhetoric was everywhere, but today Tel Aviv balconies still hang signs like "Symbol of Victory: Zero Lives in Gaza." Most of the media are complicit in this bloodthirsty rhetoric of revenge. The main exceptions are the independent website Local Call/+972 and the venerable liberal newspaper Haaretz, which has excellent coverage of the war but has a relatively small audience. But even Haaretz's main tone of its op-ed was endless complaints about the betrayal of the so-called international pro-Palestinian leftists, a gesture that my comrade Itai Snier wrote many satirical articles about.
What do views within Israel tell us about the global strategy of the Movement for Solidarity with Palestine?
I believe that the global left, and the Solidarity with Palestine movement in particular, still have to face what happened on October 7. The violence perpetrated by Israel since then, while greatly intensified, is similar in nature to the violence perpetrated against Palestinians over the decades. This is the psychopathic instrumental "rationality" of the Frankfurt School's analysis, that is, the "rationality" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where it is reasonable to take the lives of civilians "cleanly" from the air, because any other means would result in more loss of life, or more importantly, loss of life.
But in my opinion, October 7 is a completely new event. It is a complex and chaotic combination of three events: a shocking and unexpected military strike by a clearly disadvantaged country against an arrogant giant; This is not exactly the same as the anti-colonial violence of the 20th century, which Fanon deeply analyzed, and there is something unprecedented in it, and we need time to catch up intellectually.
As I have already mentioned, the nuanced approach of previous generations of leftists to the national liberation war has in some ways been replaced by simplistic Manichaean thinking, as if many people had argued that any criticism of Hamas was seen as equivalent to support for Israel. Those who support this position argue that "this is what decolonization looks like", so if you have any objection to that, you must be against decolonization. This dualism should be familiar to Eastern European leftists, who have been repeatedly told that any criticism of any effort in the war in Ukraine is tantamount to support for Russia's invasion. Many veteran writers, including the Left East, have abandoned this logic, and the same can be done with Hamas. When the Palestinian cause of liberation is carefully distanced from the atrocities committed in its name, it does so in no way detracts from the justice of the Palestinian cause, but in fact strengthens it.
Anti-war demonstrators demand the release of Gaza hostages at a rally in Tel Aviv, October 28, 2023. Placards read slogans such as "Immediate ceasefire!" and "There is no military solution".
It is especially important to make this clear that the largest genocide against Jews (and others) in history took place here in Eastern Europe. Palestinian solidarity movements are often adept at distinguishing between anti-Israel and Jewish-hating, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Since the Nazi Holocaust, and even since the post-Soviet Jewish migration in the 90s of the 20th century, Israel has become the largest center of Jewish life in the world outside of the United States. Most Jews today have some sort of personal or family connection to Israel, and this is especially true for Eastern European Jews. So in the region, there is only a small distance between legitimizing violence against Israeli civilians and legitimizing violence against local Jews in countries around the globe, and that distance can be crossed at an alarming rate, as we have seen in the events of Dagestan.
In Eastern Europe in particular, leftists should make it clear that solidarity with Palestinians in no way means hostility to Jews or Israelis individually or groups. On the contrary, we should make it clear that the only way to achieve lasting security for Palestinians and Israelis and, given that the region is a literal powder keg, is indeed the only way to achieve lasting security for the entire world, and that is to fight for the liberation of the Palestinians.
About the Author:
Matan Kamina is a political activist and anthropologist. He has been active in Israel's conscientious objection movement and in solidarity with Palestine, participating in national and municipal election politics and organizing immigration and refugee campaigns. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan on settled farmers in the Araba region of Israel and immigrant farm workers from Thailand, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Fellows Association at the Hebrew University. Matan is a member of the board of directors of Academic Equality, an organization that promotes the democratization of academia and society in Israel, and a member of the editorial board of LeftEast.
Tibor S. T. Mesman is a researcher at the Central European Institute of Labour in Bratislava, an alumni member of the Budapest working group on public sociology "Helyzet" and a member of the editorial board of LeftEast. His research spans interdisciplinary areas such as industrial relations and the sociology of work.