The anger directed at the inauguration of a new cultural center in Ariel with
cultural figures announcing a boycott, is motivated more by the subconscious
knowledge of their misdeeds than by the moral consciousness they preach. In
projecting their past onto contemporary Israel, they seek to burden those born
today with their own inner demons.
Last month, more than 60 actors and
theater professionals announced that they will not perform at the new cultural
center. Their boycott was followed by a petition of the usual suspects of
far-left academics, artists and writers, who decided to voice their support for
the actors. The cultural figures wrote that “we will not take part in any kind
of cultural activity beyond the Green Line... We support the theater artists
refusing to play in Ariel, express our appreciation of their public courage and
thank them for bringing the debate on settlements back into the
headlines.”
What they really mean is that they won’t take part in any
activity in
Jewish places beyond the Green Line; some of them actively support
cultural endeavors among the Palestinian populace there. The complainers include
most of the country’s best-known writers and intellectuals, as well as the
fringe anti-Israel academics who garner the most attention abroad – Amos Oz,
Shlomo Sand, David Grossman, Ilana Hammerman (editor at Am Oved), Neve Gordon,
Oren Yiftachel, Anat Biletzki and Ze’ev Sternhell.
Another group of who’s
who protested outside the Habima theater in Tel Aviv. They included former
Ma’ariv editor-in-chief Dan Galezer, Meretz’s Haim Oron, former MK Zahava Gal-On
and head of Peace Now Yariv Oppenheimer.
The motto of this group is “do
as I say, not as I did.”
Few, if any, of the cultural figures involved in
these protests, boycotts and petitions live beyond the Green Line, but many,
perhaps a disproportionate number of them, live on land whose origins are not
exactly clean. Amos Oz grew up in Jerusalem’s Kerem Avraham neighborhood,
attended Gymnasia Rehavia and moved to Kibbutz Hulda, not far from the freshly
ruined Arab village of Khulda, in 1954. He was in the IDF’s Nahal Brigade and
fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars. He later settled in the Negev in
Arad.
Oren Yiftachel was raised on Kibbutz Matzuva, which was founded in
1940 and absorbed lands of the ruined Arab Christian village of Bassa. Yiftachel
writes that he was raised on a northern kibbutz “where socialism was not a curse
and social justice was not a mere theory.”
When he was hired by
Ben-Gurion University, he moved to the elite town of Omer in the Negev, where he
has campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the rights of the Beduin and serves as
cochairman of the human-rights organization B’Tselem.
Shlomo Sand was
born in Austria in 1946 but was raised in Jaffa, most of which had been
abandoned by its Arab residents in 1948. Haim Oron grew up in Givatayim, served
in Nahal and moved to Kibbutz Lahav, which controls 33,000 dunams in the Negev,
in the 1960s. The kibbutz was located on the border of the Beduin reservation
created by the state after 1948, and the Tiaha tribe claims Lahav was built on
its lands. Ze’ev Sternhell immigrated here in 1951 and served in four of
Israel’s wars from 1956 to 1982.
THE TRAGIC truth is that if you look too
far beneath the surface of the Ariel cultural boycott, you will find that those
who want to boycott Ariel are burdening it with their own past. Too many of
those who support the boycott are from a kibbutz which happily took over the
lands of abandoned Arab villages, or live in the Negev on lands the Beduin
claim, or served in the army at the time of the conquest of the territories in
1967.
How many of those who signed the boycott of Ariel live, even today,
in former Arab homes? How many received their wealth from agricultural land
underneath which was Bassa or Khulda or any number of Arab villages? Is their
boycott and activism, say on behalf of the Negev Beduin, merely a subconscious
way of atoning for what they know is an Ariel by another name in Israel?
Consider the facts. Ariel is located on 14,000 dunams of public land. According
to the municipality’s Web site, none of it was confiscated from Palestinians
(Peace Now claims that 2,500 dunams are private Palestinian land). Compare that
to the artists’ colony, complete with many figures who abhor the settlements, at
Ein Hod, which is located almost completely within the confines of an abandoned
Arab village.
Too much of the history of Israel has been based on a
simple mantra: I did it, I feel guilty, now you shouldn’t. I live on 30,000
dunams of land claimed by Beduin, now I believe the Beduin deserve “justice” –
just so long as that justice doesn’t mean giving them back Kibbutz Lahav or Omer
or Arad. I want to give back Ariel, but not my Arab home in Baka, and certainly
not Matzuva.
The question that should be asked is why a child born in
Ariel should suffer culturally because of what Ze’ev Sternhell or Oren Yiftachel
did? If the occupation should be ended, it should be for a good reason. But
those living beyond the Green Line shouldn’t be punished merely to assuage the
consciences and inner demons of those who want to consider themselves moral
paragons.
The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a
fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.