-Identity crisis in Israel-

As a Jewish woman from Britain, Susan
Nathan had undertaken aliyah (immigration
to Israel) in the late 1990s, in order to
contribute to the Zionist dream of a Jewish state.
Nathan established herself in Tel Aviv where
she taught English and worked for a number of
progressive social organisations. It wasn’t until after the intifada of 2000 that she began to realise that something was wrong.
   The more Nathan learnt about this situation
the more troubled she became on a personal and
political level. She began to question herself in
terms of where she stood in Israeli society and
what her contribution was to this “chaos”.
   In 2003 Nathan put her principles into practice
and moved from her comfortable and familiar
environment in Tel Aviv to Tamra, an Arab town in
the north. To this day, she is the only Jewish person amongst the 25,000 indigenous Arab townspeople.
   She is determined to demonstrate that Jews and
Arabs can live together whilst still keeping their
distinct identities. “You can show that you can be
yourself and stay with others,” is how she described it.
   Nathan’s book The Other Side of Israel is being revised and will be re-released shortly. The book
has received world-wide attention and Nathan is a
sought-after speaker, especially in Europe and lately in the Middle East. She is working on another book about Israel which has an unusual focus related to the decay of the ‘health’ of Israel.
   My own confrontation with Israel’s apartheid
structure fi rst occurred in Haifa when I inquired before I was to meet with Susan Nathan.
   Israel’s bus network is perhaps superior to
anywhere in the world. So I was surprised to find
that the first bus to Tamra – a town of 25,000
people – left Haifa just after midday and that there
would be no bus to take me back at the end of the
day.
   There was a bus early in the morning that took
the residents of Tamra out, and one at the end of
the day that brought them back. I took a taxi there
and back and this was a considerable expense.
   Nathan began the interview by telling me
that she felt traumatised about being part of an
“ethnocratic” regime and the moral, social and
physical destruction that this creates.
   She said that Israel had become an unhealthy society and that “…you don’t learn compassion and tolerance for others outside your community if you live within an ethnocratic society”.
   She felt that this ethnocratic regime lies at the
heart of Israel’s problems and has been its greatest failing. She added that Israel had made a mistake “…to concentrate on its victimhood in order to justify its exclusion of others”.
   Because of this, both Arab and Jewish people
inside Israel are malfunctioning politically, socially
and economically.

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explained that a Jewish person who is focused
on the Zionist vision need never worry about
the Palestinians, or come into contact with them.
They can ignore the Palestinians. Nathan stresses
that the international community must see what is
happening to the Palestinians inside Israel, and to see the extent of the apartheid system and systematic destruction of the Palestinian identity.
   On the international level, Nathan mentioned
that she is constantly asked to speak at conferences about peace but she wants to talk about the apartheid in Israel. She goes back to the issue of victimhood – that this includes Israel’s Arab population.
   She says that people inside Israel seem to have
an inability to look beyond history, and that this
failure is linked to victimhood. She goes on to say
that there is an unhealthy ‘suffering’ competition
going on and that this is wrong as the whole world
“focuses on our suffering” – largely because of the
strategic element of Israel.
    For Jewish people, Nathan explains, there is a constant feeling of one’s identity being under threat, and this has come from an upbringing amongst generations of refugees, and a constant state of transience. This threat has been deeply internalised.
   Young Israelis however have never experienced
this and they are the new Jews… “tough, blonde,
serving in the army – not the oppressed outsiders,
but lords of the country”.
   Nathan said that the “naked power” she felt as a
Jew coming to Israel – as part of the majority finally, not a minority, was a very powerful experience.
   In a recent speech at Haifa University Nathan
analysed the identity issues that Diaspora Jews and Israeli Jews grapple with.
   “Identity, of course, means different things to
different people, and the way in which it is formed
is a matter of debate.
   “Does it come from being a citizen in a nation
state, where one can relate to a flag and a national anthem, developing a sense of pride in one’s citizenship, a feeling that one belongs in, and is valued by, one’s country?
   “Or does it derive from something else? From the feeling of ‘being different’, being on the
‘outside’ – an identity which is predicated on being
in opposition to, rather than in harmony with, the
values of the country in which one lives?”
   “I have always felt that my very existence is a
political statement – this may in part explain why
an allegiance with the state of Israel was formed
inside me at an early age. My loyalty to this state
– a feeling that is hard to articulate but which I
felt very powerfully – derived from the sense of
security that it offered me. It was a country where
I had no need to explain my needs or myself; a
place that might be a refuge for me should my life
become intolerable in Europe.
   “Throughout my childhood and much of my
adult life, the feeling of always being on the edge
of disaster was part of my environment, and I
internalised it at a very deep level. But little did I
realise that I was committing myself emotionally to a state that was perpetuating the same discrimination that my own family had suffered from...

   Nathan says that both peoples have a missing
identity – there are gaps or holes in their identity.
She believes that this has serious consequences on the individual level and hence on the social level.
   Some of these consequences are that people
don’t internalise the values of democracy and
hence are not able to visualise themselves living
a democratic lifestyle. For both peoples, cultural
values are weakening, which adds to the confusion
about identity. There is for many a fear of expressing one’s culture.
   For Nathan the question of identity also involves
asking about its source. Is it taken from national, state, economic or other indicators? If Israel is in fact a refuses to recognise itself as such, then where is the possibility for an additional identity – beyond the dominant Ashkenazic (European) ideal – to embrace the whole society and not exclude its minorities?
   The issue of unemployment is also tied up
with identity. In Tamra, despite many of the
youth having gained access to tertiary education,
the unemployment rate is 40%. Nathan said that
the streets of Tamra are “…packed at night with
the bright, young youth, many of whom have
managed to overcome the barriers to gaining a
tertiary education only to be excluded from the
employment market because they are Arabs.
   “In addition to this, there are particular industries
that they, by virtue of their background, are barred
from for ‘security’ reasons.”

Transfer is always a hair’s
breadth away...
life with no psychological security is disastrous

   Arab Israelis are barred from serving in the army
and people not serving in the army are excluded
from much of the employment market.
   In Palestinian society “…education is everything
but the question is what will this achieve ... (if)
a graduate can rarely get beyond the position
of a teacher? ... Palestinian academics are a tiny
percentage and have to walk a thin line between
the Palestinian and Jewish communities and also in compromising their ethics”.
   Nathan said that such a high unemployment
rate as found in Tamra is typical in every Arab area within Israel and that this, with all the issues related to it, is breeding a future intifada within Israel.
   The occupation is within the state and not just
in the West Bank and Gaza, as there is no freedom of speech for Arabs within Israel. Above all, says Nathan, transfer “…is always a hair’s breadth away…life with no psychological security is disastrous”.
   Nathan told me that government polls indicate
that 64% of Israelis believe that Arabs should be
‘transferred’.
The term ‘apartheid’ came up frequently in
our discussions, as it does in Nathan’s book. She

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   “It is precisely because of my personal history
that I find myself in conflict with my Jewish/
Israeli identity and the politics of my country’s
government.
   “The irony of the Palestinian dispossession
inside the state of Israel – its ‘internal refugees’
– has not been lost on me, the child of refugees,
always unsettled, always insecure.”

   To address the discrimination Israel imposes
upon its Palestinian citizens and upon its far greater number of Palestinian non-citizens, Nathan believes that it is important to turn away from focusing solely on ethno-nationalistic interests and instead start from the humanitarian focus. She believes that if enough people come to this realisation change is possible.

   “My chosen way of life means that I confront
my society and take responsibility for policies
that are allegedly perpetrated in my name and are
arguably supposed to benefit me and my fellow Jews worldwide.

It is because of my personal history that I find myself in conflict with my
Jewish/Israeli identity and the politics of my country’s government

   “My strong sense of my Jewishness, and culture
and humanness are what enable me to live within
the culture of another without feeling that I lose
any of my own identity.
   “As Jews, we have a history of demanding social
equality and egalitarianism, and yet there is to me
an evident contradiction between this demand and
our retreat into separation from our fellow citizens
and neighbours, the Palestinians.”
   “An essential part of what it means to me to be
a Jewish citizen of any country in the world, but
especially this one, is my total commitment to the
notion that a truly democratic state is based on
justice.
   “Justice is not obtained by violence or military
force – one cannot achieve true democracy
by means of oppression, by destruction, home
demolitions, targeted assassinations, locking people up or killing them.”
   “I am not challenging the right of the state to
exist, I accept it, but I am challenging the particular
way in which political Zionism has permeated
every spectrum of life here. The state of Israel is
not the center of Judaism; God is the center of
Judaism.”
   Nathan describes herself as “still very much a
child of the Holocaust” and she has memories of
people trying to trace relatives through posting
signs up around the place.
   It bothers her that Germans could not see what
was happening to the Jews, and she doesn’t want it to be like that in Israel.

Susan Sophia is an Australian who has worked
in the social justice field for more than 20 years.
She interviewed Susan Nathan at Tamra Village in
March as part of a research project.