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Though the original petitioners may genuinely have been looking to find a way to marry a partner of the same sex, the ongoing litigation in the Supreme Court (SC) on the issue of same-sex marriage is no longer about their claimed rights, or even about them. It has become another attempt by the minuscule English-speaking elite, shaped largely by Western thought and mores, to retain the hold they have had over the country for the last 75 years.

The challenge this elite has faced over the last decade is unique. Their hold over setting and controlling the agenda has been put to the test by the Hindi-medium types. HMTs had learnt to get themselves elected decades back, but their aspiration was limited to becoming people-like-us, owning mansions and farmhouses and wealth in Swiss banks. Those elected now have not only not been to English-medium schools, they do not carry the baggage of not being able to quote Machiavelli or Shakespeare. On the contrary, they take pride in quoting the likes of Chanakya and Swami Vivekananda; they do not need to signal their arrival by being able to differentiate between vintage wines or Scotch whiskies they proudly prefer chaach.

In plain English, being liberal means being tolerant of others and their views. Our self-styled liberals are quite obviously not. Take Indira Jaisings article (The partisan council, IE, April 26). She argues that the SC is duty-bound to uphold the Constitution and the values espoused by it, but her arguments challenge this very Constitution and its principles. She doubts whether Parliament or state legislatures represent the will of the people because of our first-past-the-post system of elections challenging parliamentary democracy as provided for in the Constitution. She dismisses views not in conformity with hers as being regressive notions of marriage, rooted in religion and culture, thus questioning the fundamental right to freedom of views and perhaps, by implication, the concept of the social contract itself. Those having views that are different from hers are accused of polarisation. She even challenges the concept of marriage as a societal framework for procreation arguing that, in that case, pre-marriage fertility tests ought to be needed. This is sophistry at its most imaginative.

No sophistry is required to explain the arguments of the other side. Parliament and state legislatures together represent the will of the people to the best extent possible, and as provided in the Constitution. Together, they have the right to amend the Constitution or enact laws for their jurisdictions. The law is an expression of societys needs, values and thinking, depending on the levels of education, literacy, exposure, socio-economic development, etc. No law can be enacted divorced from social realities. Important changes to personal laws that have taken place in the past the anti-Sati law, widow-remarriage law, Sharda Act, Hindu Code Bill, etc, have all had legislative approval, even if they seemed unpopular at the time.

In the opinion of many, Indian society at large sees marriage as a solemn union of opposite sexes, with the likelihood of procreation, limited by choice or medical issues. No survey or opinion poll is necessary to determine this. The elected representatives are in touch with and responsive to what the people feel, otherwise, they would not be elected. They, more than anyone else in the country, know the pulse of the people. If society at large had felt strongly about same-sex marriage, no politician would dare oppose it. There are several laws enacted in the recent past that reflect a demand from society: The tightening of rape laws post the Delhi 2012 rape, for example.

For any group, no matter how liberal they imagine themselves to be, to think that they know better than all others, is righteousness at its worst. Maybe rural and small-town India think and feel differently. Unfortunately, holding the beliefs and feelings of an overwhelming majority in contempt, valorising it as intellectual superiority, seems to have become the forte of the liberal elite.

The demand for recognising same-sex marriage cannot be dismissed out of hand but neither can be the view that is opposed to it. Let everyone be entitled to their views. Let us respect our Constitution and let Parliament and legislatures debate and decide on the issue. There is little doubt that such debate will be informed by the will of the people and that parliamentarians and legislators will be compelled by the views of their constituents. To short-cut parliamentary democracy itself, ironically in the name of upholding the Constitution, is to pave the way for an unknown and dark future.

The writer is a former civil servant

First published on: 01-05-2023 at 14:47 IST

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Same-sex marriage and liberal elites conceit: Parliament must decide on the issue - The Indian Express

The Struggle for a Decent Politics: On Liberal as an Adjective, by Michael Walzer (Yale University Press, 176 pp., $30)

A prominent political theorist and longtime editor of the democratic-socialist magazine Dissent, Michael Walzer has been at the center of major intellectual debates and activist movements of the past 60 years. In his latest book, The Struggle for a Decent Politics, Walzer fuses his longstanding interest in pluralism and his decades of activism to craft a narrative of the liberal that stresses flexibility, uncertainty, and diversity. Through stories about visiting Israel in the 1950s, organizing against the Vietnam War, and marching against Brexit, Walzer offers a synoptic view of a career of political involvement. And his wider account of the liberal illuminates conflicts about politics today, challenging some of the dichotomies of our own polarized moment.

A debate about liberalism broadly understood suffuses contemporary American political life. Some critics of liberalismperhaps most notably, Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failedargue that a liberalism of relentless autonomy has dissolved social bonds and led to an alienated misery. Others insist that liberalism should be defended from an onslaught by post-liberalism, nationalism, populism, and other supposed reactionary terrors.

Rather than conjuring some titanic clash between isms, Walzer offers a more parsimonious account of liberal as an adjective. Here, what is liberal is not the product of some grand ideology, nor does it necessarily lead to a single set of conclusions (as ideological narratives often do). Instead, it is marked by ambiguity, toleration, pluralism, and an acceptance of openness. That spirit of generosity is not the same as moral relativism: liberals oppose every kind of bigotry and cruelty. But it is marked by some acceptance of difference and an openness to correction. For Walzer, the liberal is not an ideology but an accent for an ideology; it is not who we are but how we are who we arehow we enact our ideological commitments. The liberal is thus compatible with a wide range of ideological orientations, and the course of the book is dedicated to exploring the liberal flavors of different ideologies (all dear to Walzers heart): liberal democrats, liberal socialists, liberal nationalists and internationalists, liberal communitarians, liberal feminists, liberal professors and intellectuals, and liberal Jews.

In this sketch of the liberal as not ideologically tethered, Walzer taps into a broader tradition. Judith Shklars liberalism of fear, which he cites as an inspiration, argues that the core of the liberal is the avoidance of cruelty. Helena Rosenblatts more recent The Lost History of Liberalism also broadens the valence of the concept by attending to diversity and even tensions within different liberal traditions. Walzer does not discount the possibility of liberalism as an ideology; he argues that liberalism in this sense (of free trade, open borders, radical individualism, and so on) has many resonances with contemporary American libertarianism. However, he also hopes to show how liberal as an adjective can be compatible with a variety of other traditions and political approaches. The liberal supports pluralism in numerous ways.

An acceptance of ambiguity and difference structures the books very narrative. Rather than assailing his readers with polemical points, The Struggle for a Decent Politics instead advances in a searching and at times tentative (that is, thoroughly liberal) way. The Liberal Socialists chapter criticizes predatory capitalism, profit-driven economic behavior, and a laissez-faire state. But it also offers a limited defense of income differentiation and many of the trappings of the market economy. A longtime member of the political Left, Walzer also writes that he has never understood the left critique of consumerism. The ability of a steelworker to afford a bracelet for his daughter is an achievement of the organized left, which too many leftists dont value.

Walzers sense of the liberal as demanding a check on power and a wariness about a politics of emergency is in counterpoint to the way that liberalism can sometimes be invoked in contemporary controversies. While Walzer uses the liberal as a way of tempering existential conflict, political actors since 2015 have at times appealed to some supposed crisis of liberalism as a way of justifying all-out political combatnorm-breaking, lawfare, and constitutional hardball.

In his discussion of liberal democrats, Walzer warns against this temptation to turn the legal system against ones political opponents. He argues that the losers of an election should not face imprisonment, exile, or death and applies that teaching to the case of Donald Trump. While criticizing the Lock her up! chants of 2016, he also raises doubts about prosecuting Trump: Even after the events of January 6, 2021 . . . I still thought sending him home was the right thing to doand then working hard to keep him there. . . . Lock him up is not a chant for liberal democrats during or after an election. It is better to say, even in the case of a Donald Trump: Thats not what we do. Embodying his emphasis on the provisional, Walzer wrote a blog post for his publisher in January (the month this book was published) saying that he was now more open to arguments on behalf of legally investigating Trump. Yet he remains conflicted. Walzers liberal is not one of absolutes.

Throughout his career, Walzer has interrogated the demands of human belonging and ethical commitments. For instance, his 1983 volume Spheres of Justice explores the demands of equality in different contexts. The Struggle for a Decent Politics takes up this theme. Throughout, it defends various social commitments not as opposed to the liberal but as supplementing it (and as being informed by its limiting demands).

In Liberal Nationalists and Internationalists as well as Liberal Communitarians, Walzer complicates some popular assumptions. While American newspapers are full of dire warnings about a nationalist threat to democracy or liberal democracy, Walzer instead defends the nation as a key liberal and democratic priority. The national advances the cause of social justice, according to Walzer: the home of democracy turns out to be, naturally enough, the home of social democracy. Conversely, he finds that a radical cosmopolitanismwhich den[ies] the value of national membershipmight in fact be illiberal in its dismissal of the importance of national, particularized belonging to many people. Rejecting isolationism, he hopes for the project of international exchange. Arguing that nations have a right to regulate migration (and even to prioritize familial, ethnic, and ideological kin), Walzer also thinks that they should be open to some limited number of refugees.

In his discussion of liberal nationalism, Walzer implicitly argues that the United States is not a liberal nation. Such nations are ideologically pluralist. Instead, as the great un-nation, the United States is a multinational, multiracial, multireligious country. As such, it is defined by its politics, and people who reject that politics are called un-American. Walzer instead endorses the idea that the American political order might best be defined by a kind of creedal patriotism; nationalism in America isnt patriotic.

However, the potential for a narrowly creedal definition of the United States to exclude some people might also suggest the benefits of cultivating some kind of liberal nationalism (in Walzers sense) to complement creedal tendencies. In American history, one of the greatest justifications for the abuse of civil rights and for the weaponization of government has been the claim that political opponents are somehow un-American, not merely in the sense of ethnicity but in the sense of being ideologically suspect. Indeed, at times arguments about ethnicity have intertwined with those about ideology, so that a group is read as being ideologically suspect because it is ethnically different.

A sense of pre-political belongingflexible, expansive, and pluralistcan help counteract the risk of ideological purges that threaten democratic stability and liberal politics more broadly. Far from excluding others, that kind of belonging could embrace complexity and heterogeneity as part of the American character. In The Omni-Americans, Albert Murray sketched one horizon for that belonging in describing The American as a composite that is part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian, and part Negro. The family trees of hundreds of millions of Americans suggest how a heritage could be compositewith distinct strands and ever-new assimilations. In a time of growing conflict over what exactly the politics of the United States demands, renewing that sense of a broader compact may be even more pressing.

While Walzer is forthrightly a man of the Left, his account of the liberal in The Struggle for a Decent Politics contains insights that might be valuable to people with other perspectives. Walzer reminds us that a spirit of temperance and openness can be in harmony with other commitmentsand that maintaining those commitments to others may be an important part of preserving the liberal, broadly understood.

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The Liberal in All of Us - City Journal

Last November, conservative commentator Ross Douthat penned a provocative column titled How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right. One of the master keys to understanding our era, Douthat wrote in the opening paragraph, is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses.

The populist rights attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.

Despite some terminological imprecision Douthat often writes of the Left when he really means liberals the argument speaks to something real.

While liberals of the Bush era worried about mass surveillance and government overreach, todays liberal mainstream champions the sanctity of institutions and views the likes of courts, security agencies, and misinformation regulators as a bulwark against the Right. As Donald Trump insulted his way into the executive branch, liberals bludgeoned Bernie Sanders and his supporters with bad-faith social-justice critiques and made prudish appeals to consensus and decency. The Republican affect, by contrast, has increasingly drawn on themes of dissent and rebellion, with a politics of trolling and an aesthetic of 4chan-esque vulgarity supplanting the comparatively upright style once associated with figures like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush.

Theres a certain elegance in seeing contemporary politics like this: censorious and oversensitive Brahmins sermonizing about institutional authority in one corner and a newly irreverent right pursuing a frenzied and paranoid style in the other. It isnt entirely wrong, but its not exactly right either. In its tidiness, such a narrative elides the important ways that the Right now engages in its own version of the very politics it claims to deplore. Conservatism, in this sense, has not so much traded places with liberalism as converged with some of its shallowest and most illiberal instincts.

Recently, conservatives launched a crusade against brewing company Anheuser-Busch in response to an innocuous advertising collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Breweries have reportedly been targeted with bomb threats, and one right-leaning company has seized upon the situation to launch a service called Woke Alerts that will warn consumers when companies cave to the woke mob. The episode is instructive for several reasons, among them that the campaign so obviously mirrors the very sensibility it purports to be resisting. In effect, the Rights go-to reaction to what it imagines are woke mobs is to create woke mobs of its own.

The incident is merely one example of a wider zeitgeist currently reflected in mass campaigns to get books with black or LGBTQ themes pulled from library shelves, draconian legislation to discipline academics who teach particular subjects, heavy-handed regulation of free expression in public-school classrooms, and sinister directives to state agencies targeting transgender children and their parents. Woke capitalism has, meanwhile, become conservatisms favorite bte noire, inspiring absurd freakouts about everything from Disneys ostensible promotion of socialism to Pride-themed Oreo packaging. The related concept of ESG (Environmental and Social Governance) is set to be the subject of congressional hearings that will, like Woke Alerts, target investors thought to be undermining profits in pursuit of a woke agenda.

Conservatives, in effect, have recognized the socially liberal bent of modern America and they absolutely hate it. The result is a politics increasingly indistinguishable from the most exaggerated right-wing caricature of censorious social-justice warrior liberalism.

Another irony of this posture is that it has seen conservatives embrace a key premise of the shallow social-justice ethos that now pervades the upper echelons of some large corporations. True, they may hate it when leviathans like Amazon and Nike issue statements in support of Black Lives Matter or partner with transgender TikTok stars. But, in lockstep with the marketing teams at these very companies, conservatives accept the corporate alignment with various social-justice causes as something genuine rather than a branding exercise. On this, they agree with an influential section of American liberals: woke capitalism exists.

Yet the whole idea of so-called woke capitalism is absurd on its face. Large profitable corporations are, by definition, driven by cold-market calculus, not the pursuit of social justice in anything but the hollowest sense. Insofar as some corporations bend toward social liberalism, its mostly because theres a greater market share to be found there on major issues like trans rights and abortion, conservatism is very much a minority proposition in todays America and because it can be an effective inoculant when their owners and bosses are caught union busting, running exploitative workplaces, or contributing to climate change. Its a cynical and often nakedly hypocritical branding exercise undertaken by people thinking about their bottom lines and little more. If the Right is wrong to attack woke capital, liberals are wrong to celebrate it.

Its one thing to find fault with the moralism that pervades some liberal milieus, or to roll ones eyes in the direction of Wall Street banks or entertainment conglomerates trying to cash in on social-justice branding. The fact remains, however, that it is not oversensitive liberals who are crusading against Bud Light, trying to get books banned en masse, or enforcing parochial ideas about gender and sexuality through state legislation. In the narcotic haze of the culture war, it is all too easy to overlook the extent to which Americas conservative minority has become a mirror image of the very thing it purports to deplore: a shrill and inflexible mass that not only mistakes consumption for politics but demands protection, at all times, from facts, people, and ideas that make it uncomfortable.

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Conservatives Need a Safe Space From the Imaginary Threat of Woke Capitalism - Jacobin magazine

Liberal leaders never miss an opportunity to declare their commitment to diversity.

From college admissions to collective bargaining and beyond, the mantra for most Democrats has been the more diversity the better.

But that only goes so far.

When the opportunity arose for the Democratic-led FCC to approve a merger of what would become the largest minority-owned local television group, it has failed tragically.

President Biden's FCC and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have been instrumental in delaying bid by Korean American entrepreneur Soohyung (Soo) Kim to buy Tegna Broadcasting. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Over one year ago, Korean American entrepreneur Soohyung (Soo) Kim made an application at the FCC to buy Tegna Broadcasting in a deal worth $8.6 billion. Tegna is America's third-largest broadcast group, with over 64 television stations in 51 markets throughout the United States. Under Soo, Tegna would become the largest minority-owned broadcast station group in the country.

BIDEN'S FCC NOMINEE SUPPORTED BY GROUP THAT CALLED POLICE AGENTS OF WHITE SUPREMACY

Little did he know that despite the historical legacy of such an undertaking, not everyone would be cheering him on. In fact, Soo gravely underestimated the deep reservoir of bias, enmity and discrimination he would face as an Asian American entrepreneur that is until the liberal long-knives came out publicly against him.

Up to now, Soo's business career has been the stuff of American Dream novels. Born in South Korea. Immigrating to the United States at the age of 6. Learning English by watching "Sesame Street." Studying hard to gain admission to Princeton. Working his way up on Wall Street to become a successful investor, and ultimately founding his own hedge fund under the unassuming name, Standard General.

Self-styled "public interest groups," a few representatives of labor unions and lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren coalesced to oppose the application. (Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images)

Today, Soo Kim can claim major investment successes in retail, real estate, gaming and media. Even so, putting together significant debt and equity financing to take the publicly-traded Tegna private is no small feat for any entrepreneur minority or not.

With a solid plan to improve local news and faith in the fairness of the regulatory process, Mr. Kim believed the merger would be approved by the FCC within the customary 180-day window in which the agency acts.

But not so fast.

While Soo Kim is no stranger to opposition, and has had his fair share of contested deals, the Tegna merger marked the first time the entrepreneur had encountered the federal government's stonewall of silence.From the moment Standard General's plans were announced, a collection of self-styled "public interest groups" and a few representatives of labor unions coalesced to oppose the application.

Together they, along with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., prevailed upon the FCC to see things their way. According to the Wall Street Journal, Pelosi acted after receiving substantial campaign contributions from a Democratic donor who was interested in derailing the Standard General deal.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks to the media at the U.S. Capitol, Oct. 25, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Things have been anything but normal since.

AMERICA'S TIKTOK CHALLENGE IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK

For the better part of a year, the Democratic-led FCC has successfully delayed an up or down decision on Mr. Kim's merger application. It has extended the period of review, made repeated requests for the same set of documents, and even refused to meet with the principals involved in the deal to discuss conditions or concerns.

In what could have been the coup de grace after a year of regulatory run-around, an FCC bureaucrat, acting under delegated authority from the FCC chairwoman, referred the merger to an internal administrative law judge for further review.What makes this last act of merger malfeasance so problematic is that the FCC knew Mr. Kim's financing commitment for the deal had been extended several times, but would come to a hard stop on May 22. Referring the merger application for a hearing normally takes up to a year and in most cases means the kiss of death for any deal.

The commission's patent disdain and disregard for commercial and financial realities in the industry it regulates is appalling.

When Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, learned of these shenanigans, they raised the red flag.In a joint letter to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, Cruz and Rodgers wrote the following:

"The Media Bureaus decision to send the transaction to an ALJ hearing violates Commission rules and precedents in several ways.

"First, to keep the Commission accountable to Congress and the public, a full Commission vote is required for certain matters, particularly those involving novel issues and/or significant legal or policy consequences. Designating a multi-billion-dollar transaction such as the Standard General-TEGNA transaction for an ALJ hearing is precisely the type of serious decision for which commissioners must take responsibility. The last time the FCC referred a major transaction to an ALJ, the decision was made at the Commission level, and the FCC should not have departed from that precedent.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers speaks during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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"Second, the Media Bureaus HDO relied on novel interpretations of the Commissions public interest standard and appeared to ignore if not contradict the Commissions precedent that an increase in retransmission consent rates, by itself does not constitute a public interest harm.

"Third, under Commission precedent, the Media Bureau should have provided the full Commission 48 hours notice before issuing the HDO on February 24, 2023. It did not."

Cruz and Rogers have not been the only ones to cite the FCC's departure from precedent and procedure. There is a long and impressive list of local legislators, civil rights leaders, acadamic scholars and trade associations that have written in support of the merger, including the American Enterprise Institute and American Consumer Institute.

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There has been a travesty committed by Democratic leaders in this Standard General-Tegna deal. While they have consistently given lip-service to media ownership diversity, their actions speak louder than words. In a completely private transaction that does not burden taxpayers, involve public funds or harm competition, liberals have shown an amazing amount of hubris and hypocrisy.

When it comes to media ownership and meaningful participation in America's economy it appears the FCC Democrats have built a rampart with the sign: "Minorities need not apply."

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Another liberal diversity lie: FCC Democrats won't give these minorities a fair hearing - Fox News

Part of the SeriesStruggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Why are liberal Israeli protesters working with Israeli police to rip down Palestinian flags whenever anti-occupation activists attempt to raise them in the context of the widespread anti-government protests in Israel?

Theres a structural reason why the occupation of Palestine is absent from the mainstream liberal agenda of the protests, says Israeli academic and left-wing activist Idan Landau: The leading figures and speakers in these protests are routinely members of the legal, economic and military elites, all of whom were and are intimately implicated in maintaining the occupation.

The anti-government protests, which will likely reignite this week in the lead-up to Israels 75th Independence Day, have been led by Israeli liberals upset with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahus far right nationalist coalition and its attempt to curb the powers of Israels judiciary.

Israeli democracy, which has always excluded Palestinians under military occupation, has been in accelerated decline over the last couple of decades. Israels far right has grown to extremely worrisome levels, with todays government of Benjamin Netanyahu being nothing short of a band of religious and racist zealots; in fact, some of them have even openly supported pogroms against Palestinian people.

Indeed, as Israeli academic and left-wing activist Idan Landau stresses in this exclusive interview for Truthout, racism and extremism have spread to a wide range of the population, especially among the youth.

Biden promised Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid to maintain the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.

Landau is a professor of linguistics at Ben-Gurion University and writes a political blog (in Hebrew) on Israeli affairs. He has been imprisoned on several occasions for his refusal to serve in the Israel Defense Forces reserves.

C.J. Polychroniou: Israel has been moving further and further to the right over the last couple of decades to the point that todays government is beyond extreme. It is indeed a government pushing a hard-right agenda unlike anything that Israel has seen before. How do you explain Israels far right shift, and especially the fact that the overwhelming majority of young Jewish Israelis identify as right-wing?

Idan Landau: A combination of factors, none of which is new, but all increasing in impact over the years. The major current shift is the sheer disregard to civilized rules of conduct; the liberal masks are falling off, like the ceremonial respect to the supreme court, or the ritualistic reference to the two-state solution. These were hollow rhetorical practices for a long while now, but up until the recent government, there were forces in the leadership (like Yair Lapid and even Naftali Bennett) who adhered to them. [Finance Minister and head of the Religious Zionism Party] Bezalel Smotrich and his kin simply dismiss such niceties, and the world, mostly exposed to Israeli politicians rather than to a deeper cross-section of the Israeli public, is shocked to learn of the deep-seated racism and rising populism within the larger Jewish population.

Public education in Israel has rapidly sunk into a nationalistic propaganda mire. Historical events and narratives inconsistent with official Zionist ideology have been gradually expunged from textbooks.

So, what are these factors? First, increasing religiosity, which in Israel translates to a particular xenophobic, all-the-world-is-against-us, Holocaust-driven self-righteous version of Judaism. One reason has to do with demographic trends: 35 percent of the Jews in Israel define themselves as religious; over a third of them (13.3 percent) are Orthodox Jews. This last group boasts the fastest growth in size in developed countries, 4 percent a year (due to their preference for larger families), and they alone are expected to comprise a third of the entire population of Israel by 2065. This shift is more dramatic in younger ages: By 2050, a third of the pupils in Israel will be educated in Orthodox schools. Polls repeatedly and consistently find that the most racist and nationalistic portion of the Jewish population is exactly those Orthodox Jews.

Second, public education in Israel has rapidly sunk into a nationalistic propaganda mire. Historical events and narratives inconsistent with official Zionist ideology have been gradually expunged from textbooks, often to absurd degrees. For example, Israeli pupils have no idea about the green line Israels only internationally recognized border because all the geographical maps approved for schools by the ministry of education have purposefully been purged of the green line. So they grow up without knowing of the distinction between Israel and the occupied territories, they know nothing about the fact that nearly 3 million Palestinians are subject to military law, nothing about land grabs (by the state or by settler outlaws), nothing about the fact that most of the military roadblocks are not placed on Israels border (the green line) but deep inside Palestinian territory, etc. Add to that the compulsory military service, which is the most effective agent of indoctrination in Israel, driving Jewish youth to see Palestinians as an undifferentiated mass of enemies, to be controlled, confined, checked, punished and subdued and the product you get by the end of this assembly line is a perfectly loyal devotee of Jewish superiority. With all that baggage they go to the ballot, and thats how you end up with extreme right-wing parties in power.

Of course, racism and political systems engage in a feedback loop. Not only does racism promote systems of injustice and inequality, but the need to maintain and expand these systems cultivates racism in its turn, because one must dehumanize ones victims in order to go on functioning within and in the service of such systems.

Like elsewhere, the Israeli left is not a unified movement. Is this the reason why the Israeli left is marginalized?

I dont think so. Even if you manage to pull together all the leftist forces in Israel (by which I dont mean anti-Netanyahu, but people truly committed to justice for Jews and Arabs), you will still end up with a negligible minority. All those human rights groups that have some international visibility BTselem, Breaking the Silence, etc. employ no more than 500 people altogether.

The left is inclined to periodic fits of self-flagellation, or finger-pointing toward internal elements declared guilty of its impotence. I find these practices a boring nuisance.

The sad truth is that the bedrock of the left the simple principles of justice, equality, freedom, the sacred value of human life are in themselves unpopular amongst Israelis. Unpopular in the sense that they are all deemed inferior to grander principles, deriving from the privileged rights of Jews in the land of Israel. Whatever the organizational faults of the fragments of the left are, they are overshadowed by the powerful opposition they all face from the Israeli consensus.

Without the cloak of a functioning, independent legal system that can investigate war criminals and put them on trial, Israeli military officials will be exposed to prosecution at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

This opposition operates in various ways. The public legitimacy of human rights organizations is gradually eroded by relentless campaigns of defamation, all of which originate in the government itself. So-called GONGOs (government-operated NGOs), such as Im Tirtzu and NGO Monitor, are entirely dedicated to persecuting leftist activists, academics, artists, etc. Municipalities constantly bar their institutions from hosting events or lectures by political dissidents. The Israeli counterpart of Fox News, Channel 14, now ranks second in ratings. This is Netanyahus home base, an outlet that spews out naked propaganda and fake news every single day. Large chunks of the programming are aimed at demonizing human rights groups, Arab members of the Knesset, or generally, any critic of Israeli policies. A frequent sight these days (which was not so common a few years ago) is street gangs using Leftist! calls as an abominable insult, chasing and beating demonstrators that simply stand in solidarity with Palestinians.

In addition, mainstream liberal Israelis that dormant mass of people who just want to go on with their convenient lives with no disturbances would go out of their way to condemn the radical left, to dissociate themselves from any struggle that dares to include the Palestinian perspective, and would insist on fighting for democracy with no representatives of the most immediate victims of this democracy, namely Arabs (inside Israel or in the territories). I believe that it is this mainstream hostility toward the vision of the radical left that is chiefly responsible for its marginality; it becomes more and more difficult to just get these messages through, to win precious prime time on TV and even report daily atrocities occurring in the territories, let alone express nonconsensual views.

Of course, one has to remember permanent anomalies of the Israeli left, that go years back. A major one is the extreme weakness of labor unions, a reflection of a hyper-capitalist market based on short-term jobs. Unions normally provide the infrastructure necessary for long-term protests, but they are completely absent from major struggles for human rights in Israel, and in fact, the biggest union (the Histadrut) is dominated by the right-wing Likud party. That is, it sides with government.

Massive protests forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to suspend his divisive judicial reform plan. Do you think his plan to undermine judicial independence by controlling the composition of the countrys Supreme Court is really finished?

Not at all. The upcoming weeks will be quite critical. Netanyahus coalition will not survive retraction of the reform; and his only chance of avoiding conviction (and jail) depends on keeping this coalition together and passing the reform. So its all or nothing for him. Meanwhile (and this is obviously not a coincidence), the borders are heating up with military clashes, invasions to Palestinian cities are intensified, terrorist attacks too. All this chaotic ecosystem, with a populace under a growing sense of insecurity and stress, surely plays in Netanyahus favor. Drastic changes in the regime are more easily implemented in such times, as we know very well from the historical record. I will not venture any guesses here, whether were stepping into a constitutional or a military crisis, but the game is far from over, in my opinion.

How do liberal and left groups relate to the occupation in their protests and opposition to the far right?

As I mentioned, the occupation is entirely absent from the mainstream liberal agenda of the protests. This is to be expected, given that the leading figures and speakers in these protests are routinely members of the legal, economic and military elites, all of whom were and are intimately implicated in maintaining the occupation. So most Israelis felt not the slightest dissonance to see in these demonstrations Moshe Yaalon, former chief of staff and defense minister, who was in charge of major war crimes during the invasion of Gaza [in] the summer of 2014, warn against the risks to democracy implied by the recent legal reform.

The occupation and the rights of Palestinians hardly make it to the front line in these developments. So even if the protest succeeds in toppling down Netanyahus coalition, the emerging political order in the aftermath is not likely to address these fundamental issues.

Notably, legal experts (including former judges of the supreme court) constantly focus on the pragmatic harm of the reform: Without the cloak of a functioning, independent legal system that can investigate war criminals and put them on trial, Israeli military officials will be exposed to prosecution at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In short, their plans to travel abroad are at risk. The issue of whether or not they are war criminals that should have been indicted in Israel is not even discussed. Other absurdities involve ex-Shabak officials (Shabak is the Israeli Security Agency, its domestic secret service), whose careers were founded on secrecy, extortion and sometimes torture, expressing concern over the anti-democratic nature of the reform. All of that takes place within the liberal camp in the protest, which is by far the dominant one.

So for the most part, the occupation does not concern the protest. Yet there is a consistent representation of anti-occupation groups within the protests, which I think is quite important. They insist on raising Palestinian flags, which is considered a provocation, so both liberal demonstrators and cops would often approach them and violently tear down the flags. Yet they raise them again and again, together with signs like There is no democracy with occupation, and these are gradually being tolerated; the liberals learn (its always a painful process for them) that the mere visibility of Palestinian people or symbols in the struggle for democracy is, perhaps, somehow relevant. The pragmatic pretext (You weaken the protest, you drive away potential supporters) was seen to be false. As it often happens, the radical left has to turn its efforts from calling for justice and equality to fighting for the legitimacy of expressing such calls in the public arena.

Some activists report that their spontaneous encounters with liberal demonstrators on the street, their solidarity against the police (whose violence does not distinguish radicals from liberals), do make the liberals rethink Zionist dogmas, understand what state violence looks like, and gradually broaden their concept of democracy to include non-Jews. That may be true, but its hard to tell what the long-term consequences will be. In point of fact, Israeli Arabs are almost entirely absent from these protests; being second-class citizens in their own country, they recognize well enough that this protest does not challenge the inherent ethnocratic nature of the Jewish state, but is rather an internal conflict between Jewish elites over the distribution of power amongst themselves.

By that I dont mean to underestimate the dramatic and even historic significance of such an unprecedented mass protest against a ruling government in Israel. I just want to point out that the occupation and the rights of Palestinians hardly make it to the front line in these developments. So even if the protest succeeds in toppling down Netanyahus coalition, the emerging political order in the aftermath is not likely to address these fundamental issues.

One argument that the left has not been able to communicate vividly enough, Im afraid, is that the legal reform has two prongs: One is to undermine the independence of the judicial branch; but no less important is the creeping annexation of area C in the occupied territories, as evidenced by the appointment of Smotrich a far right extremist who openly advocates the dispossession and transfer of Palestinians to be in charge of the COGAT, the administrative agency regulating the lives of all Palestinians under Israeli control. Smotrich plans, and has already started, to execute far-reaching changes in area C, which were previously hindered by appeals to the Supreme Court and by intricate legal proceedings, sometimes lasting years.

A politically biased supreme court, controlled by a right-wing coalition and incapable of overriding parliamentary bills in violation of international law, will no longer impede these very grave crimes (it never really prevented them, but the Israeli fascists are both greedy and impatient). To my mind, the reform is just as much about insulating prospective war crimes from internal judicial inspection as it is about saving Netanyahus political career. The big challenge of the left is to make the greater Israeli public see and understand these links (and others) in this unfolding regime change.

Is it possible to see what the future holds for Israel?

It is hard to make out details in the darkness, you know.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Continued here:
Even as They Protest, Israeli Liberals Reject Solidarity With Palestinians - Truthout