July 23, 2023
A last “Mapai WASP” grasp?
Yisrael Medad
The sociological acronym term ‘WASP’, to describe a one-time dominate group, a hegemonic “Establishment”, of American society, culture, and politics first appeared in the New York Amsterdam News on April 17, 1948, with author Stetson Kennedy, himself a descendant of signers of the Declaration of Independence, writing: “In America, we find the WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) ganging up…on whatever minority group happens to be handy — whether Negro, Catholic, Jewish, Japanese or whatnot”.
Here in Israel it has been used in various forms such as “White Ashkenazi Socialist with Protektsia”. My suggestion is “White Ashkenazi Secular Protektsia-Privileged”. Several pundits have seen in the anti-judicial reform protests “a secular middle class fighting to preserve Israel’s essential character”, a “secular uprising”. In a March 12 oped, I focused on what I saw as “a cultural class hegemonic conflict over issues of tradition, identity norms and values – all based on the restoration of social order.”
Ehud Barak seemed to confirm this sociological analysis when, on March 28, 2023, he was interviewed at Chatham House in London. He spoke of a certain type of people that would oppose the Netanyahu government. For him, ‘solidity’ was their defining characteristic and they would almost all be from the military. That has an eerie echo, unfortunately, of another time period in the post-1918 Weimar era.
Barak has been free in his remarks. He termed President Yitzhak Herzog a “Chamberlain”. Back in February he made a public call for nonviolent civil disobedience (a call he made earlier in November even before the government was formed). And thanks to a May 9th podcast Amir Oren conducted with Gilad Sher, we now know that already in mid-December, before the judicial reform was announced, a meeting took place at Yossi Kutchik’s office.
The former director general of Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s Office was joined by, among others, Gilad Sher, Dina Zilber, Yigal Shiloah, Dan Halutz, Orni Petruschka, Shikma Bressler, Amos Malka, Yehuda Adar and Eran Shwartz. A smaller meeting had already been convened on December 14, a few days earlier. Others who joined a WhatsApp group of protest leaders includes Ehud Olmert, Moshe Ya’alon, Roi Neumann, Moshe Radman and Yishai Hadas. All fit the definition of a Mapai WASP.
A few days prior to Yariv Levin introducing his judicial reform program on January 4, on December 3oth, Barak said: “the new government led by Benjamin Netanyahu [was] working to bring down Israeli democracy…it bore ‘the signs of fascism’.” Moreover, he added, “Israel’s citizens [might] have to stage “a non-violent revolt” to bring it down…[it] was sworn in legally but is clearly acting illegitimately.” The protests did not originate with judicial reform.
A key to understanding the ferocity of the protests and the extreme rhetoric on the precipice of encouraging violence is, as Barak has done, to claim the reform is aimed to “change the system of government” Ha’Aretz, Jul 7). Yet the actual change was made back in the early 1990s by Aharon Barak. A second is the defining of the coalition as the camp of “fascism” who seek a “dictatorship”. That mumble-jumble of a glossary permits laying siege at government ministers homes, blocking major inter-city highways and transportation systems, burning tires, employing dangerous high-decibel noisemakers and seeking to destroy Israel’s economy.
As the Jabotinsky Revisionist movement was castigated as fascist from the late 1920s, so, too, is today’s governing coalition. The coterie of protest managers employ PR marketing techniques of shallow sloganery with scare graphics. Their appear to seek to guarantee the shedding of blood on the streets, as when former MK Miki Rosenthal warned in a July 6 Channel 13 interview that policemen acting aggressively might get beaten up.
The protest leaders, in their words and posters, are revving up mobs by convincing them that the elected leadership of the country is a group of fascistic thugs that will turn the country into Iran or Nazi Germany. The law must be into their own hands lest Israel lose its democracy. Sadly, too many people take this demagoguery seriously and worse, there have been no police investigations into sedition and incitement to violence by the government’s policies opponents.
The anti-reformers demand that non-elected bureaucrats in government service, such as the current Attorney General of Israel, be free to champion a loyalty to, above all, a professional, ethnic, social class and an ideology of values. This approach came to the fore with the democratic empowerment of “Second Israel”, the classification Shlomo Avineri introduced in his 1973 “Israel: Two Nations?”. It became popular after 1977, that is, when the Mizraḥi, Ḥaredi, and national-religious Jews marginalized by the Mapai apparatus, the “First Israel”, and partially later joined by Russian and Ethiopian immigrants, dislodged the Mapai WASP demographic base.
The demand by the government’s reform critics that they alone can redefine democracy so as to justify their anti-democratic machinations is what truly approaches fascism. Israel’s WASPs seek support and justification in the words of Aharon Barak, that those who get to make decisions of authority in Israel is the “enlightened community”.
Dan Avnon, already in his 1996 “The ‘Enlightened Public’: Jewish and Democratic or Liberal and Democratic?”, pointed out that the concept, “expresses a liberal worldview…[and as] the ‘enlightened community’ test will necessarily be received within the wider community as an expression of a subjective worldview, [it’ll be] acceptable [only] to parts of the Jewish public in Israel”.
Avnon is correct. Will the Mapai WASPs, however, be true liberals and yield to the democratic choice the electorate made? Will they be loyal to state or to class? Or will they continue to grasp?
The writer is a researcher, analyst and an opinion commentator on political, cultural and media issues.
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July 4, 2023
Media blindsiding, rampant anti-Israel bias in the media
Media blindsiding, rampant anti-Israel bias in the media
July 4, 2023, Jerusalem Post
Media all over the world have consistently misrepresented Israel over time. As a result, an erroneous anti-Israel narrative has become mainstream.
It has become quite tricky, difficult and even very challenging for a media consumer to get relatively fair, objective and factual news relating to Israel, and not only from the foreign press.
Just recently, a senior Israeli newspaperman write that “71% of Palestinians say they support ‘armed struggle’ against Israel – code for violent attacks”. As any dictionary informs us, “armed struggle” is when someone who is carrying a weapon, usually a gun, intends to use it to cause injury and more usually, death. A fifty-year old Fateh pamphlet entitled “Political and Armed Struggle” makes it starkly clear: it is “waging a battle with arms”. Why did the writer feel it necessary to tone down the term and just use “violent attacks”?
Moreover, the terminology is, in a sense, disguising the ferocity of the actions and their intent. The 1964 PLO Charter’s Article 9 reads “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine” and Article 10 terms that as “Commando action”. Death of Israelis, of Jews, of tourists in Israel is the path to freedom of “Palestine”.
The media has for decades sought to employ is own semantic instrumentalities to interpret the Arab attempt to eliminate Zionism and to serve, if unwittingly, the cause of pillorying and coloring Israel’s policies and actions to the detriment of the actual events occurring and Israel’s responsibilities for them, if any.
In a June 29 piece penned by Isabel Kershner, the New York Times sought to “explain” Israel’s “expansion of settlements”. In it, she wrote: “supporters of the settler movement…view the West Bank, which they call by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria”. Those geographical names, of course, besides rooting Israel’s historical connection to this land, were in use all throughout the period of the British Mandate for Palestine as well as most maps for the past few centuries. The 1947 United Nations partition proposal, in the section delineating the Jewish state’s borders-to-be, Judea and Samaria were employed. But, yes, those are Biblical names.
On the other hand, Kershner used the term “West Bank” without any addition. In fact, the NYTimes, like many other newspapers, do so freely without providing any commentary. Do the readers know the origin of that name? Who coined it? When? Did she consider that, perhaps, her readers would become more enlightened if she had added, in parallel, that the “West Bank” is a 1950 Jordanian linguistic invention when, in April that year, it annexed it, doing so illegally? And that, in fact, it was a naked occupation which other than Great Britain, and perhaps Pakistan, no other country recognized Jordan’s rule over the territory including not one Arab state.
Incidentally, nowhere in her background piece did Ms. Kershner see fit to note that Article 6 of the 1922 League of Nations Mandate included a guaranteed right of “close Jewish settlement” throughout the territory to become the reconstituted Jewish national home which at that time extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, with undefined territories east of the Jordan River in abeyance temporarily.
In another case, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken was interviewed by Richard Hass of the Council on Foreign Relations on June 26. The media widely, and even prominently, highlighted his words that he had told both Israel’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister that, basically, “if there’s a fire burning in their backyard, it’s going to be a lot tougher, if not impossible, to actually both deepen” potential diplomatic agreements with Arab countries as well as existing ones. Many media outlets played those words as a bashing for Israel.
Since June 29, I have been searching the media for a report on whether Blinken spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the fires burning in his backyard. Or reports on why he hasn’t made that call. In the context of international diplomacy, it would be nice to know if Israel is treated as an equal to other American allies or whether Israel is subjected to a negative extraordinary treatment. If readers are not provided with all possible angles, the media is not only channeling the news for its consumers but blindsiding them as well.
A June 20th Voice of America radio report dealing with “Palestinian refugees” misleadingly informed that “Almost 900,000 Palestinians living in the West Bank are classified as refugees, meaning they were displaced from their homes in…1948.” In truth, as the CAMERA organization pointed out, perhaps there are maybe 10,000 Palestinians living there who were displaced from their homes in 1948. Numbers aside, do the media ever note the numbers of Jews who were displaced, even ethnically-cleansed from their homes at that time?
There were Jews living in Gush Etzion, Dead Sea area as well as the environs of Jerusalem and the city who were turned into refugees at that time, not to mention the Jewish communities and Hebron, Gaza and Shchem who had to flee already in 1929. Residents of Nahlat Shimon and Shimon HaTzaddik neighborhoods in the city’s eastern section were forced to become displaced after Arab attacks during December 1947-January 1948. That background, of course, would provide context to the ongoing Sheik Jarrah hullabaloo, a media circus in its own right.
These are but a few of the examples of the large and small media failings when reporting and commenting on the Arab conflict with Israel. They pile up and pervert the media’s consumers’ understanding and appreciation of the complexity of the issues by simply hiding, misstating and twisting words, terms and events.
The writer is a researcher, analyst and an opinion commentator on political, cultural and media issues.
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MEDAD'S WORDS 