At dawn Saturday, a group of Eritrean workers laid sod alongside a path in Ramat Aviv to Yarkon Park between the Yitzhak Rabin Center, the headquarters of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit and the headquarters of a large military agency. By the end of the day, everything was green. Meanwhile, other asylum seekers from Africa, huddled in hoodies and armed with trash pickers, cleared litter from the park, for the enjoyment of its visitors. They are the ones who bear the burden of cleaning and beautifying Israel.
Early in the morning, on the fourth day of Ramadan, tens of thousands of fasting Palestinian laborers were already on the scaffolding of high-rises and on the roads and bridges they are building. They left their homes in the middle of the night, endured the long, difficult and humiliating passage through the checkpoints, rode with their exploitative contractors to their work sites, where they risked their lives working in unsafe conditions and returned to their homes in the evening, exhausted, hungry and disrespected. They are the builders of this country, they are the ones who bear the burden of this country, perhaps even more than all those who are recognized as doing so. No one thinks to thank them for anything.
When former Shin Bet chief Nadav Argaman told journalist Ilana Dayan that the state “belongs to everyone who shoulders the burden,” he wasn’t referring to them. Not the Eritrean street cleaners nor the Palestinian builders. His remarks were addressed mainly against the Haredim, as usual here, the ultimate non-sharers-of-the-burden.
When Israelis say “bearers of the burden,” they mean Shin Bet agents like Argaman, the new John Locke of the democratic protest; they mean generals; soldiers, but only from combat units and preferably elite units, who are compensated in the extreme. To them have been recently added people in high-tech, who are rich in the extreme. Anyone who doesn’t fall into one of these categories does not bear the burden, and according to the Argaman Theory, the state does not belong to them.
The state doesn’t belong to its ill and disabled citizens, who, owing to their disability, shoulder none of the burden and are themselves a burden on it. It doesn’t belong to the hundreds of thousands of anonymous workers who toil away under harsh conditions in manufacturing and services, and no one is referring to them when they talk about those who bear the burden. It also doesn’t belong to the tens of thousands of unemployed people who were fired or left by the wayside, nor to the weak who were left behind for various reasons. It doesn’t belong to the nurses and the physicians, the hospital orderlies and the medical technicians of the health system, all of them no less dedicated than Kfir Brigade soldiers. No one is talking about them when they talk about shouldering the burden. Nor about the truck and bus drivers, the street and shopping mall cleaners, a great army of unknown soldiers who make the country possible, earning neither glory nor gratitude.
Nor does the state belong to its Arab citizens: No one even considers calling them bearers of the burden, even when they risk their lives on construction cranes or the cabs of freight trucks on the roads and die doing menial work for the glory of their country. The way Argaman tells it – Argaman, who has won admiration here on a scale reserved for a rare few, a shining star in the firmament of the protest – in this country, rights are dependent upon the fulfillment of obligations, as the fascists always like to say, and of course it’s the Argamans who define the obligations.
How is it that even in the liberal camp so many are convinced that the state belongs only to the privileged and the powerful, the ones who are capable of fulfilling its sacred duties, preferably by serving in an elite military unit, and not to the weak, the exploited, the disabled, the poor, nor the Arabs and the Haredim. As the pro-democracy protest grows, the spirit of Sparta breaks forth, even among those purporting to be Athenians. The Argamans must be told: The state, like any state, belongs to all its citizens, including the weak, the poor, the disabled, the Haredim, the Arabs and even the parasites. No Shin Bet agent will decide to whom this country does or does not belong, nor will the fulfillment of the obligations that he specifies be what defines the rights of citizens. Once that’s clear, we can begin to talk about democracy.
How is it that even in the liberal camp so many are convinced that the state belongs only to the privileged and the powerful, preferably those in elite security units?