Who’s against who? Between the conflict and the social.

“Reoven, try to concentrate on the conflict.” The Israeli “left” begs me. “When we solve the issues with the Palestinians, we’ll have time to deal with our society’s problems.” The “salt” of the earth is guiding the “pepper” of the earth. Other demand: “Reoven, focus on social justice problems in Israel”. The latter have categorized me as the “Moroccan”, who should only deal with oppression of Mizrahim (Arab-Jews). They think that I (the Moroccan) can only understand in issues that have to do with inside oppression, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beyond me.
As we remember, through the years, Mizrahi parliament members were appointed only to ministries that had to do with social welfare (exploding the ministry of education). It was not for nothing that some “good souls” in the Labor Party were furious at Professor Shlomo Ben-Ami for asking to become the foreign ministry in the Ahud Barak government. General Barak is the same person who asked for forgiveness from Mizrahim in the name of the Labor Party and its past.
Around the world professor Ben Amy is considered to be a renowned Professor, in Israel he is just another Moroccan, another Moroccan who likes to get insulted.
To all the people above, this is my response; I’m a whole person who does not distinguish between the “conflict” [the Israeli Palestinian conflict] and social oppression. My world view is humanistic and universal. I always was and always will be on the side of the exploited, on the side of the oppressed. I’m a real leftist person, and not in the obscure and fake way that is perceived to be in Israel.

There has never been a real left in Israel. The “left” in Israel, led by parties such as Mapai and other Zionist-workers parties, has insisted even before the establishment of Israel on providing jobs only to “Hebrew workers” [Jews]. They put down the riots by Moroccan Jews in Wadi Salib in 1967, and have uprooted a whole nation from its land by building settlements after the occupation of 1967. The list of these acts never ends; I remember that a prime minister of the left said about me and my friends that we “are not nice.”

The act of separating between the “conflict” and “social issues” is created by the establishment to crumble and shatter class and social solidarity by creating oppositions. These opposing political groups only look as if they serve the need of different groups, but in actuality they only serve the establishment. The establishment creates misery and blames the victims. It’s the syndrome of the beaten wife; she is to blame for being beaten. For example, one way to do it is to present school teachers as enemies of the people for their struggle to better their condition of employment. So that the public will denounce the teachers and not the minister of education for cutting down the education budget and hurting the public and especially marginalized groups. The establishment creates and institutionalizes oppression and puts the blame on the victims. A deep analysis of the oppressed (Mizrahim, Palestinians, women etc) requires a wider view and focusing our attention on the oppressor and his methods.

From the establishment of the state of Israel, Mizrahim have been discriminated against and the gap keeps getting wider. Instead of giving a real and concrete answer to why resources to education, developments, and health, are given on an unequal basis, the establishments criticize the discriminated people. They [Mizrahim] are lazy, uneducated, not nice, etc; they are to be blame for their oppression. The Palestinians too, are terrorists who refuse to join the Zionist federation, and refuse to recognize their “wonderful” situation under the Israeli occupation, compare to their brothers in the rest of the Arab world.
The establishment is the establishment, sometimes wearing the mask of the left, sometimes wearing the mask of the right. Bibi Netanyahu, a good kid from Rehavya [an affluent neighborhood in Jerusalem], can use demagogical arguments and evoke the “old elite” [Netanyahu speaks a lot about fighting the old elite]. But Netanyahu is representative of the same lady with a different dress. The future in the Anglo-Saxon Hebrew of Netanyahu means privatization. You privatize the social responsibility of the state, which has a policy that hurts and oppresses people, and then you blame the victim. The leadership is occupied with corruption and on the way forgets the responsibility to provide and care for its citizenship.
It’s the same “invisible hand” that cuts government budgets, steals Palestinian land, steals lands from development towns and gives this land to kibbutzim, and benefits and helps a small number of families who own millions.
The interests of the oppressor are to crumble down our society to atoms and to awaken the whole public against another group. This is how one can blur the interests behind oppression. The stealing of land for the benefit of the few hurts the Mizrahi residents of Kiryat Malahi [a poor neighborhood], Palestinians from Sacnin who are Israeli citizens, and Palestinians in the occupied territories where Israel has been building the separation wall on the small amount of land that has been left to them.
The establishment has adopted a strategy of divide and rule. The captains of the state saw in Mizrahim a strategic threat. “They”, which means us, might unite with the Arab population because of our similar culture. Both publics are Arabs. One is an Arab-Jew; the other is Palestinian-Arab.
Amnon Dankner, at that time a journalist for Harretz, today the editor for Maariv, wrote in 1983 that he “does not have a sister” [name of an article], in the body of the article he remarked that “I refuse to see the other side (Mizrahim) as brothers.”
Mota Gor, a former chief of staff to the Israeli army, said about the Mizrahim that “we will screw them in the same way that we screwed the Arabs”.
Aryeh Glablom a senior writer for Harratz has wrote about the Mizrahim that: “as a nation their primitivism is on high record…..its education is on the border of ignorance…. they have no ability to receive any spiritual teaching…this is a lower level from what we saw in the Arabs…they lack any roots in Judaism…and are totally bound to the games of the wild instinct…..they posses unsocial elements….chronic laziness and hatred of work”. (Harretz 4/22/49)
This theory gave a “moral” authorization to oppress the Mizrahim in a heavy handed way.
Big parts of the Mizrahi public have adopted a false consciousness, that the Palestinians are the ultimate enemy. Because of the cultural closeness between the two, the Mizrahim were hoping that adopting a national ideology would separate them from the Palestinians.
For the establishment, the conflict provided many opportunities; it serves as a sleeping drug to hide the oppression of the Mizrahim. When the cannons thunder there is no time to take care of social issues. The never ending war has shifted attention from oppression and discrimination of the Mizrahim towards the national struggle to “survive”. It’s a national war instead of a class war.
There is a price to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The price to the Palestinians is the stealing of their land. The price to the poor residents of Israel is billions of dollars that are used to build settlements and the separation wall instead of founding education, health, and housing. There are those who suffer and those who laugh all the way to the bank. The settlers are teeming with fat budgets and bonuses.
Big sections of us fall into a trap of honey when we demand our government to become a welfare state. There is no need to look for such model in other countries, on the contrary, countries around the world should come and learn from Israel how to develop into a welfare state. The modal of a welfare system was built into the settlements for the last 38 years. This is where the dream of a social state came true. Enormous budgets were given to the population of the privileged. My suggestion: to copy the model that was used in the settlements into Israel itself.
To distort reality and to present the Palestinians as enemies of the Misrahim, frees the oppressor from any responsibility. The argument that the Palestinian foreign workers steal jobs from Israelis is a lie that the establishment distributes in order to deny its responsibility for eliminating job opportunities.
The voice of the system, trying to divide us all, will plead with me saying “the poor of your city come first.” But I answer: “I’m a kid from Mossrara.”[a poor neighborhood in Jerusalem] “I’m an immigrant from Morocco.” I declare that the poor of my city are the Ringworm Children, they are the kidnapped Yemen kids, they are illegal Palestinians workers who are waiting on the side road for someone to hire them, they are the Russian cashier that is being exploited at the supermarkets, and they are the Philippine immigrant who is taking care of an old Jewish man. The real enemy is the establishment. Our struggle should focus against the system of oppression and try to create a system that can insure freedom, respect, and welfare. The way to do this will be made by forces that will unite to protect humans from the system. There is no such thing as one answer to social issues and one to the conflict, there is an overall answer. Instead of profit we shall seek welfare, instead of charity- justice!!!

original article (Hebrew),
http://www.planetnana.co.il/ohalim/r_hevrati_mdini.htm