At the Tel Aviv demonstrations against the government’s judicial overhaul, the best people in Israel can be found in the area staked out by the Anti-Occupation Bloc – the people of conscience who recognize that there’s no such thing as a democracy with a military tyranny in its backyard.
That’s all very encouraging. But it’s time to fold up the flags, switch out the slogans, and leave that corner. In 2023, fighting the occupation is tantamount to fighting the forces of nature. Just as floods and earthquakes cannot be defeated, the occupation, too, can no longer be defeated. It’s there for the long haul.
With more than 700,000 settlers (including in the occupied parts of Jerusalem) who will never be displaced and with an enormous enterprise devoted to its perpetuation, the occupation cannot be defeated.
Furthermore, the occupation has long ceased to be an occupation. To call what is happening in the Palestinian territories an occupation is to perpetuate it, just like babbling on about a two-state solution that will never be implemented and that no one in Israel ever intended to implement.
By definition, military occupation is temporary. After 56 years and with no end in sight, the situation in the territories can no longer be considered temporary. And if it’s not temporary, it’s not an occupation. The temporariness of the occupation has expired, and with it the possibility of defining it as an occupation.
Therefore, to talk about the occupation at the Kaplan Street demonstrations is anachronistic. To fight against it in the context of a struggle for democracy is irrelevant. The Kaplan Street protesters say they are fighting for democracy. Well, democracy is equality before all else.
This needs to stop. Stop fighting against settlement construction, dreaming about delusional withdrawal maps, and thinking in terms of “End the occupation.” There will be no end to the occupation.
Kaplan Street is the place, the opportunity, and the time to switch mindsets, reset the agenda and start something new, something much more hopeful and relevant. The fight for equal rights from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River should begin at Kaplan.
One person, one vote, as in the most modest of democracies. All of the state’s subjects – about 15 million people, from Metula to Eilat and from Rafah to Jenin, all of whom are subject to its rule – must be equal in their rights. Without this, Israel is not a democracy.
Leave the “Jewish” part of the state’s definition to Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies. There is no Jewish and also democratic. If the Kaplan Street protesters don’t understand this, then who does?
The fight against the antidemocratic legislation is important, but also dangerous. It blurs reality and idealizes it: If the bills are stopped, will Israel be a democracy? The true government coup was Israel’s transformation into an apartheid state, when the occupation became immortal. Next to it, the repeal of the reasonableness standard is nothing more than a pesky fly.
The real protest must, therefore, focus on that coup. Apartheid or democracy, that is the question; there is none more important, even if Moshe Radman, one of the freedom fighters’ important leaders and theorists, thinks that the whole issue is merely “the quality of life of the Palestinians.”
The anti-occupation section of Kaplan Street must be cleared out, replaced with new flags and new slogans everywhere. Instead of talking about the occupation, talk about equality, about universal suffrage, about a single democratic state. Instead of being against the settlements, be in favor of a state of all its citizens.
Is there any democracy in the world that is not a state of all its citizens? If not of its citizens, then of whom? God? Half an hour by car from Kaplan, people cannot demonstrate about anything, in any manner; they cannot defend themselves, protest, or resist.
This must be changed, before anything else. It must start at Kaplan. Without it, Kaplan is derelict in its duty. This is not a matter for one little corner at Kaplan; it goes to the heart of Kaplan’s raison d’etre. This is about the fight for democracy for all, for a democratic state – neither Jewish nor Palestinian, but democratic. Is there any other kind of democracy?