The headline of this piece in Ha’aretz, depicting a TV satire on Lieberman, reads: “Israeli TV show depicts Lieberman as Darth Vader-esque dictator.” In my view, the clip depicts Lieberman as more Hitler-esque than akin to Darth Vader, despite the Star Wars music. The author of another article in Ha’aretz also seems to feel Israel is currently like Germany in the thirties. He also continues the economic theme I discussed in my previous post:
Lieberman’s “conditional citizenship” has clear economic significance. It is yet another blatant step on the way to sectarian conditioning of a wide variety of civil rights, from national insurance and health to work and freedom of movement. Thus the “conditional citizenship” proves to be a means of defending the welfare regime – denying rights from the Arabs is supposed to improve the relative economic situation of the Jews, but without harming the principle of privatization.
The left has no answer for this trick. On the contrary, “the Lieberman danger”, like the war in Gaza, supplied it with an excuse to renounce the social agenda and wrap itself in the political-legal agenda. Instead of trying to win over Lieberman’s supporters, the neo-liberal left (a unique Israeli combination of diplomatic dovishness and right-wing economics) related to them with the same attitude that it in the past treated supporters of Menachem Begin from the lower classes – it called them “Kahane supporters,” cut itself off from them and left them to their fate.
Lieberman provided the Israeli left with an excuse to ignore the lesson that the European left learned from the collapse of democracy in the 1920s and 1930s, according to which a welfare state is a sine qua non for the struggle against fascism and the theories of hatred that it disseminates. The neo-liberal Israeli left, which supports the privatization regime out of considerations of class, is blind to the fact that this regime, much more than any deep-seated hatred, is the fertile ground in which Lieberman’s roots sprouted.
Some comments are in order. The idea that “the welfare state is a sine qua non for the struggle against fascism” was not a a lesson learned by the European left in the ’20s and ’30s. As Tony Judt clearly lays out in his book Postwar, it is a lesson universally accepted by all sides of the Western European political spectrum after the devastation of the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, of all Western countries, only the US and Israel reject this consensus and espouse plutocratic corporate capitalism.
Moreover, the analogy between pre-war Germany and Israel ignores a huge difference between the two countries. With all its achievements, Israel will never be a world power. It’s just too small a country. It is and probably always will be a client state of the U.S. It cannot exist for one day without the support of the U.S. Unfortunately for Lieberman, Obama, not McCain, won. And Obama is the anti-thesis of Lieberman. Obama thoroughly rejects xenophobic nationalism. He is the first President since Johnson who is as close to being a social democrat as any American president ever will be. While Lieberman may be the king pin in Israeli politics, as I’ve often said it is the Obama administration who will call the shots.
Tags: Israeli Politics, US Politics