No Country for Jewish Liberals by Derfner Larry

Author:Derfner, Larry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Just World Books
Published: 2016-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

The late 1990s, the period of Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, was a time when Israeli society split into the elites and the amcha, the salt of the earth. The division was whipped up by Netanyahu and Aryeh Deri, leader of the Mizrahi ultra-Orthodox Shas party, and went into high gear after they both came under criminal investigation and sought to rally public support to their side. (They, Avigdor Lieberman, and Likud fixer David Appel were suspected of trying to corrupt the office of attorney general; only Deri was indicted, and the charges against him were later dropped.) The late ’90s were also a time of high unemployment and deepening poverty and inequality, which Netanyahu dealt with like the good Republican supply-sider, trickle-downer he is: He slashed away at the welfare state. Nevertheless, the poor remained loyal to him. Writing again now for the Jerusalem Post (the chief executive I’d called a liar was gone, a couple of friends at the paper convinced the new editor-in-chief that I hadn’t sabotaged the computer system, and to some extent I swallowed my pride), I went out to cover the story of poverty in Israel. I found myself torn between sympathy for these people because of the hardships of their lives and antipathy for them because of the hatred I kept hearing toward leftists and Arabs. (I also wrote a lot about Israeli Arabs, who dominate the ranks of Israeli poverty, but the Arab poor are a separate issue that I’ll get into later.)

They didn’t look bad, the 30 or so development towns in the “periphery”—like Beit Shean and Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee up north and Sderot, Ofakim, and Yerucham in the Negev down south. The streets were clean, the beige and pastel tenements and private houses were generally in decent shape, and inside the families kept them very nicely. There wasn’t hunger or much alcoholism, drug abuse, or violent crime; you could walk the streets at night without a worry. What hit you, though, was the stagnation in the atmosphere. The only “action” was in the beauty parlors, little restaurants, and candy stores where people sat around killing time. It seemed like everyone played the lottery. There were virtually no good jobs in these towns; the textile factories that once kept them going were closing one after another, victims of globalization, and the residents lived too far away from the job-rich center of the country to commute. Hardly anybody had a college degree, the only books seemingly being read were holy ones, and the schools were lousy; just about anybody with ambition left for Tel Aviv, or Haifa, or Jerusalem, or America, or someplace where they might have a future.

Yet with all that, the main political struggle in the development towns, and in the inner-city neighborhoods likewise dominated by poor Mizrahim, was between Likud and Shas. The left-wing Meretz party always fought the hardest against poverty, yet the Jewish poor hated them. It was Meretz that led the fight to

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