I'm a Jewish Israeli, AMA

[israelilefty]

Jewish Israeli here. I grew up in a different country but have lived and worked most of my adult life here, living a fairly normal everyday life in northern Israel. When I'm not working, I enjoy cooking and hiking, I'm religiously observant (but also feminist), I'm on the left of the political spectrum, and have everyday contact with people from quite a range of different perspectives - Israeli society is incredibly diverse.

I guess I see us portrayed in a kind of monolithic way in the English-language media, so I'm taking a deep breath and posting here...

Feel free to AMA, just remember you're asking a real person, not a government or military spokesman :) I'll try to answer from my personal standpoint. as long as it's asked in good faith.

They have history for this....

Sorry I thought it was obvious.

Here in the uk we don’t have the same issues with people moving into and creating a state and then the subsequent challenges of managing both incomes and indigenous people. So the set up is alien (by which I mean not experienced here).

We certainly don’t have areas that can’t be visited or work permits etc in the same way.

To be clear I am not “faux” anything, nor am I naive and I most certainly am not trolling anyone by asking questions on an AMA on life in Israel about life in Israel. It’s not AManything deemed acceptable by @yumyum33 @YetAnotherSpartacus and @Shroedy . Ask your own questions if you’re interested or if you have direct knowledge answer, otherwise you are just making yourselves look like censorshipRUs.

@israelilefty hello, i hope you have been keeping well
I have two questions to ask if it is OK please

1. How do you feel about the assassination in Lebanon yesterday? Are you worried about any retaliation that could affect you as you live closer to that border or are you quite confident that the IDF will be able to effectively stop any attacks? Also just to add that I pray you do keep safe and this whole nightmare is over soon

1. Two of the very right wing ministers have been making headlines for their increasingly inflammatory rhetoric; Ben Gvir and Smotrich. It seems that even Netanyahu disagrees with the recent ones which leads me to ask that can they be sacked if Netanyahu wanted to? Or can it only happen after the next election? I am wondering why they can't be removed after all the controversial comments they have made which I don't think is working in Netanyahu's favour right now, especially as the US has openly criticised it

Thank you 🥰

@TomeTome All Israeli citizens regardless of background can move around Israel freely. I can go to Eilat or Tel Aviv or Nazareth as I choose, and so can any other Israeli citizen (or someone visiting Israel), whatever ethnicity or religion. When I refer to Arab neighbourhoods in Haifa I mean those with an Arab majority, just like other cities have neighbourhoods with a certain ethnic character. Nobody is checking your ethnicity in order to go into the neighbourhood.

By contrast, in many ways the West Bank and Gaza Strip function as a different country, which was supposed to come into being as the State of Palestine during the Oslo Accords but those failed. There is separate Palestinian government (the PA in Ramallah, Hamas in Gaza). Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip hold Palestinian IDs and don't have Israeli citizenship. They need permits to work in Israel just like someone who isn't a citizen needs permission to enter and work in the UK. This is a vastly simplified explanation and the overall picture is severely complicated by the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, which is currently in limbo with some parts controlled by the Palestinian Authority and others by Israel - but it's a better comparison than imagining one state with "no-go areas". But I really recommend reading up on the history and conflict. It's complicated and way too much to explain in mumsnet posts.

About the numbers. Yes it is appalling. I wish there were fewer civilian casualties--and of course I wish Oct 7 had never happened and this war had never started. Sadly that's not something I can influence. At the same time, it's very reductionist to see the current war only from a tit-for-tat point of view. It's a bit like saying that the British bombed Dresden (25,000 casualties) simply as payback for Coventry (1,200 casualties) without considering that there may have been other military objectives. In the end, as I've said before on here, International law and not a Mumsnet forum is the arbiter of what is considered proportional or not in wartime.

1. I'm not a military analyst so I don't have anything to say about the assassination itself. But here in the north we have been on high alert since the beginning of the war and there's a reasonable expectation that we'll get hammered by Hezbollah rockets at some point. There's not much you can do other than wait to deal with the situation if and when it arises. For me, the only thing I did last night was to close the thick metal shutters that protect the window of my reinforced room, so if we had to go there in the night I wouldn't have to worry about closing the window (we didn't have to). There are already snacks and water and flashlights etc since Oct 7.
2. Ben Gvir is a provocateur and a populist - incendiary racist rhetoric is his modus operandi and gets him a lot of attention, far beyond the weight of his small party. He could be sacked but then Netanyahu would no longer have a majority for his government and we would go straight to elections which according to all polls Netanyahu would lose. So, unless he wants his political career to end, Netanyahu is currently stuck with Ben Gvir. In my opinion Ben Gvir has been a disaster as a politican and is a disaster as a public figure. I cannot wait for him no longer to be part of the government.

@israelilefty thank you so much, that makes so much sense. Netanyahu is in quite a pickle now but it's all of his own making, as he is the one who formed the coalition with the likes of Ben Gvir so he could keep his seat as PM. Is that correct?

And Ben Gvir is aware that for this reason Netanyahu won't sack him and Is therefore continuing his inflammatory rhetoric knowing there won't be any repercussions for him. When are the next elections due in Israel?

By contrast, in many ways the West Bank and Gaza Strip function as a different country, which was supposed to come into being as the State of Palestine during the Oslo Accords but those failed. There is separate Palestinian government (the PA in Ramallah, Hamas in Gaza). Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip hold Palestinian IDs and don't have Israeli citizenship. They need permits to work in Israel just like someone who isn't a citizen needs permission to enter and work in the UK. This is a vastly simplified explanation and the overall picture is severely complicated by the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, which is currently in limbo with some parts controlled by the Palestinian Authority and others by Israel - but it's a better comparison than imagining one state with "no-go areas"

The difficulty is if we don’t consider West Bank and Gaza as part of your country and their residents as equal to any other person then we would have to see Israeli military control in those areas as wholly unacceptable, or why would they have any right to be there? The Oslo Accord wasn’t accepted so I’m not sure why it keeps coming up (not just here but elsewhere to). We nearly had an agreement but it wasn’t adopted really doesn’t mean anything. It’s a bit like an engagement that is broken, it doesn’t mean there should have been a marriage, in fact it usually means quite the opposite.

@TomeTome I feel like anything @israelilefty says you want to pick holes in. They answered your questions so why not leave them be?
It's up to you how you see things and similar for @israelilefty but if you are acting in good faith and @israelilefty is the one living there your views are rather limited as Is how much further this can go.

They are not personally responsible for what has and is happening in Israel.

@stomachamaleon I think I’m asking and responding to what most people think when they read @israelilefty posts. When people give you information it’s fine to explain how it comes across and give the expert an opportunity to clarify. I honestly think it’s why it’s such a good place to get a very niche view on what has happened. If we just rerun the discussions and opinions that can be read elsewhere it’s fairly fruitless. The idea that anyone thinks OP is anymore personally responsible than anyone else is ridiculous.

I love this clip from Israeli Sesame Street

https://twitter.com/Claire_V0ltaire/status/1735500689449578843

@TomeTome "The difficulty is if we don’t consider West Bank and Gaza as part of your country and their residents as equal to any other person then we would have to see Israeli military control in those areas as wholly unacceptable, or why would they have any right to be there? The Oslo Accord wasn’t accepted so I’m not sure why it keeps coming up (not just here but elsewhere to). We nearly had an agreement but it wasn’t adopted really doesn’t mean anything. It’s a bit like an engagement that is broken, it doesn’t mean there should have been a marriage, in fact it usually means quite the opposite."

Yes! That's exactly the point! The West Bank and Gaza are not part of Israel! They are territories occupied by Israel in 1967 at the end of the Six-Day War - a war in which a coalition of Arab states tried to destroy Israel, but instead Israel made significant land gains. In future these territories are supposed to become a Palestinian state after a successful peace process. This is where everyone agrees - this is even the official ISRAELI position (even though Netanyahu doesn't act that way).

The issue is not diagnosing the problem, it's finding a solution. Since then there have been various peace processes to try to create a Palestinian state on those territories, alongside Israel. Those peace processes have failed. The reason everyone keeps referring to Oslo is that part of the Oslo accords were actually implemented, so right now we are stuck in what was meant to be a brief interim stage, with Palestinian control over the large Palestinian cities in the West Bank eg Ramallah, Nablus, Bethlehem, but Israeli control over areas in between.

Why do we need a peace process rather than Israel just withdrawing and ending control unilaterally? Look at Gaza. In 2005 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. The next year, Hamas was elected government. The Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and since then they have fired thousands and thousands of rockets into Israel (aimed at civilians). Netanyahu's policy was to turn a blind eye towards Hamas and hope that improving the economic situation in Gaza would quell extremism and ensure calm. Oct 7 showed that this did not happen. Israel isn't going withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank, because if the same experience was repeated, the whole country would immediately be vulnerable. Perhaps you would want to say "well, just give it a go", but this is the Middle East not Europe. Hamas has huge popularity ratings in the West Bank. It's not reasonable to assume that some kind of peaceful democratic Palestine would emerge.

We need a peace process and that needs both sides to be on board. In the past years, this hasn't happened and while Israel shares the blame, it's also the fault of the Palestinian leadership for refusing the various deals on the table. One of the big obstacles is Palestinian rejectionism: the refusal to recognise the right of the State of Israel to exist in any form, including as a separate state alongside Palestine. This is the position of Hamas.

There are also issues that make this difficult from the Israel side. By now Israel has (illegally under international law) established settlements in the West Bank. There were Israeli settlements in Gaza and during the 2005 disengagement, Israel abandoned the settlements and forced the settlers to return to Israel. This would be harder to do in the West Bank as there are many more. But still, there are ways to address this issue, including land swaps (Israel keeps some of the big settlements that are next to the Israeli border and the Palestinian state receives equal land that is currently Israeli).

It's not easy to have a successful peace process. At the moment leadership on both sides is very weak, and trust by each population of each other is at an absolute low, and on both sides there are MANY people for whom it's way easier to fantasise that the other side will just disappear than to imagine living in peace with them. Yesterday the EU was talking about imposing solutions (not sure if just for Gaza or for the entire conflict) but that's also a problematic solution, since the entire mess in the Middle East, not just in Israel, was created by the West imposing solutions... A real solution needs to come from the ground.

(Why not have a single democratic state of Israel-Palestine? See all my responses above - it's not realistic and it's not the will of the people on either side).

I wish this were typical of the way most Arabs and Jews thought about and portrayed each other. There are lots of great initiatives in Israel promoting good relations and trust between the communities (Abraham Fund Initiatives, Standing Together, Hand in Hand schools...), and there are lots of practical examples of coexistence, but these are set against a huge amount of ingrained distrust and racism.

If Palestinians do not want to be confined to Gaza and the West Bank and to have a state independent from the rest of Israel (which it sounds like they voted for when given the opportunity to vote on it) then how is that going to work?

The problem of what to do about “settlers” and their feelings about having to move on from land they have moved onto is confusing from the outside. Are they a particularly powerful and popular group among Israelis? Do they own the land in any way? I don’t really have a grasp on the level of infrastructure in the country. Is there no “land registry”? Does it work both ways or is it always Palestinians who are pushed out of their homes? What happens to the people who used to live where the settlers are? (Apologies if I’ve used the wrong descriptors for the different groups. I am trying really hard not to be offensive or skew the discussion but I’m aware some of the terms may have history that isn’t understood in the same way by different readers.).

Conflict in the Middle East affects the entire world and I don’t think we can sit back and watch thousands of people being killed. I literally don’t know anyone who supports Israels response to the attack on 7th October, though I read that on MN and the media here in the uk. It is clear that Europeans are a huge part of the problems now faced in the Middle East. There is a growing appetite here to “do something”. If the bombing is going to continue I can’t see the international community not trying to stop it with force if there is no other way and personally I think that will be disastrous.

Yes I know. That is why the program was made. My point is that some people are trying to teach kids this lesson

Some people are working on trying to make things a brighter future starting with the children

I just thought people here should see this as an example. To help understand that not everyone in Israel has the same opinion of Arabs and that some people are trying to teach children co existence

I think land swaps would be a good idea so that Gaza is not in the peculiar position it is now of being so cut off by Israel (understandably) needing to secure its border. Gazans should to be able to interact normally with the world around them, not trapped and shut off.

Appreciate that this would be a huge undertaking and that the West meddling wouldn’t help, but also appreciate that leaving it to two groups of people with such terrible history between them to sort out won’t help either.

A mediation process by specially trained international negotiators (not governments) involving the ME countries would be great. But maybe that sounds like what the UN has already tried to be.

Also some mutual overseeing of what’s taught in the schools and shown on children’s TV on both sides so that the history and views of both sides are acknowledged and respected. Ideally this could be left to specially trained educators on both sides who are happy to work as a joint unit and put ALL the children first.

It would all have to be done by trained neutral people who respect the past but focus on the future and who are not trying to gain any power for themselves.

@TomeTome What do you mean by "If Palestinians do not want to be confined to Gaza and the West Bank and to have a state independent from the rest of Israel"?

These are the "options":

The two state solution, which is the official position of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the international community, and has been the goal of all peace talks until now, proposes the creation of a Palestinian state on the land that Israel has occupied since 1967 (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), with mutually agreed land swaps. This is the option I support because I think it is the only realistic option for Israelis and Palestinians to have security and stability. I remind you that the decision to create 2 states in historic Palestine, one Jewish and one Palestinian Arab, was decided by the UN in 1947 - it's not just some new idea.

There are of course many Palestinians who want to have a Palestinian state that is on all of the area of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The problem with this is that currently 9 million Israelis live there too, and the vast majority of people (on both sides) who imagine a single state on the land between the river and the sea imagine just THEIR state existing without equal rights for the other national group, who they would rather would just disappear. So if you want to convince me that a single state is the right direction, you need to convince me that it will be a place where Jewish Israelis can continue to live safely and flourish alongside Palestinians (and vice versa). The track record in the world for this kind of binational state is not good. Such states, created when two peoples who don't really want to share a state are forced together, tend to be unstable and fall apart in bloody civil war. Such a state also does not reflect the will of either Israelis or Palestinians who overwhelmingly want to govern themselves. Therefore I don't find this option convincing.

The other option is to continue the conflict and not reach an agreement. This is what has been the default for the last nearly 60 years. I emphasise that this is also a political choice and both sides are responsible for it.

Nobody is talking about a land swap in which Gaza becomes Israeli. You can't just permanently uproot 2 million people and put them in another part of the country. However the various peace plans have proposals for corridors connecting Gaza to the West Bank (eg a secure road). It's a solvable issue. It's also possible for Egypt to open its border with Gaza.

Yes, the mediation process is what's been tried time and time again.

Absolutely agree that education is one of the places to start, but it has to go hand in hand with concrete steps to increase trust on the ground.

Just wanted to thank OP for such a great AMA! I appreciate how much time you have taken to respond to these questions, it must be difficult at times for you to defend the actions of a right-wing government when you yourself are left-wing. It's almost like the whole situation is impossibly complicated and not purely a right/left issue 🤪

My question for you is do you have guards outside schools and synagogues like we do in the UK and elsewhere in Europe? When I was last in Israel I remember having to go through security at nightclubs, major bus stations etc but that was at a time when suicide bombers were a big and regular problem so not sure if that's still the case. We also had to pay a security fee at any restaurant we went to, so there were clearly guards there too. Is that still the case?

I don’t think are only two options, a two state solution as outlined by OP above or continuing the conflict. Presenting those as the only options is why there is a growing feeling that there will need to be an intervention from outside the region.

It’s never going to be sustainable though is it, to have 2 million people locked away in a corner forever with its land borders blocked and its sea ports blockaded by its neighbour. The option of one corridor in and out is better than nothing but it’s still not conducive to a normally functioning society which has good relations with that neighbour.

I’m looking on from the outside and I find it unsustainable so I can only imagine what it must be like for the people in Gaza. (Infinitely worse now than ever of course)

I don’t know what the answer is - appreciate it’s an utter mess that’s extremely difficult to solve - but imo that’s not it.

@TomeTome so what's your solution?

I'm all ears ...

@stomachamaleon To start working towards peace instead of continuing the slaughter. What about you? What would you do to reach a better place for all?

Well that doesn’t sound intimidating at all.

What do you think should happen?

I have no idea but in my view, it must include the ongoing existence of the state of Israel as one element.

Your thoughts?