Left and right must reign in the extremists

Left and right must reign in the extremists

By Gil Troy
Canadian Jewish News
February 16, 2006

Inboxes throughout the Jewish world are receiving a heartbreaking video titled “The Skull crushers of Amona.” Filled with bloody scenes from the Feb. 1 evacuation of nine illegal homes in the West Bank, the video ends by sneering that Israel’s police were “only following orders.” Meanwhile, Israel’s leading left-leaning newspaper, Ha’aretz, featured Gideon Levi’s column under the headline: “They didn’t use enough force.”

Although the sequence of events that led to mounted police officers clubbing protesters, and injuring 200, remains unclear, it’s clear that both sides behaved abominably.

The settlers and their supporters must take responsibility for a culture of lawlessness and treasonous rhetoric that threatened to explode during August’s Gaza disengagement – and did not, thanks to both the settlers’ and the security forces’ exemplary restraint. Alas, it bore its poisonous fruit in Amona, though fortunately on a smaller scale.

Still, no matter how contemptible the protesters’ violence was, Israel’s security forces deserve more criticism. Israel’s police and army, which do an admirable job daily, remain human institutions, meaning they are imperfect. But just as parents must exercise more self-control than their children, higher standards apply to the state and its agents than to protesters. Violence must be a last resort – after negotiations, after appealing to opinion leaders, after cutting off supplies. Better to wait it out than to smash people’s heads – not because of the PR issues, but because of the moral ones.

The Amona episode particularly rankles, because it occurred as Israeli democracy was demonstrating remarkable maturity. The restraint both sides showed during the disengagement showed how individuals can disagree vehemently with the state, and how the state can stand firm, without violence erupting. More recently, the smooth governmental transition after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s stroke illustrated Israel’s democratic maturity. That all this occurred as the Palestinian Authority stumbled toward civil war – and as the Palestinians elected Hamas and many Muslims rioted against Europeans because of 12 cartoons that some Danes drew – highlighted once again Israel’s moral stature amid Middle Eastern barbarism.

The pride the democratic West should take in Israeli democracy, however, should not obscure some snakes slithering in the democratic Eden. Israel should be embarrassed that too many former Gaza residents remain unsettled months after the disengagement. The Israeli left and Israeli government failed miserably on both pragmatic and moral grounds. Anyone hoping for further evacuations should have worked to ensure a seamless transition for all 8,500 Gaza evacuees. But just as too many on the Israeli left are too myopic to see the civil liberties issues when right-wingers’ rights are trampled, too many Israeli leftists are so blinded by anti-settler hatred that they could not bear to embrace their fellow citizens, who paid a heavy price for the government’s policy reversal.

At the same time, too many Israeli rightists are flirting with treason. It’s time for rabbis to ban all inaccurate, hurtful, and disgusting pogrom and Nazi analogies when criticizing the modern sovereign Jewish state of Israel. Surely we can us other words to criticize a government without delighting the anti-Zionists who are busy Nazifying the Jewish state and the Holocaust deniers who wish to downgrade the Shoah from a unique catastrophe into a normal wartime event. It’s time for settlers to stop praising themselves as the state’s most idealistic, patriotic, exquisite citizens while tolerating a culture of hooliganism, disrespect and intermittent violence vis-a-vis that state, its leaders and its security forces.

When Muslims inflamed by the Muhammad cartoon controversy kidnap Europeans in Gaza, burn embassies in Beirut, demand beheadings in London, we love to lecture “them” about civility, democracy, mutuality and the need to accept others’ differences, no matter how painful that might be. Perhaps it’s time to start preaching that same sermon to Israel’s extremists, on both sides, who put Israel’s tremendous achievements at risk and have forgotten that the keys to civility include acknowledging complexity, humanizing opponents, and injecting a little humility, self-criticism, and self-control into our politics and our rhetoric.

The time has come to start crossing boundaries and stop trading insults. The time has come to seek social consensus and a debate with restraint and integrity, rather than seeking vindication and a discourse that demonizes fellow Jews.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today, which will soon be released in a revised and expanded edition.

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