Last Saturday night, a hooded murderer stepped into the "Bar-No'ar" center for gay youth in Tel Aviv, and started shooting indiscriminately. Two people were killed.
The attack received relatively little mention in America, and even here on DKos there were only 3 diaries, most of them derivative to the issue itself.
A week after, tens of thousands, mostly young and secular, came to a memorial ceremony in downtown Tel Aviv last night. Israel's octogenerian President Peres came, as did two ministers. Earlier, Prime Minister Netanyahu and opposition leader Livni came out in unprecedented strong solidarity statements with the gay community.
Yet, the killer still roams free and the police... I'll talk about the police below.
What to make of this mixed picture, and what can it teach us about cultural differences between Israel and the US?
According to Walla, Israel's leading news portal, the night after the attack online editors were deluged by hate-talkback celebrating the murder. (Hebrew link) After a frustrating night spent trying to filter those out, they decided to do the opposite and out the haters by letting their responses go through. But by today, as I browse talkback to attack-related stories on the same site, the haters are outnumbered, and strongly shouted at, by sympathetic commenters.
One thing that has made the change over the week, I think, is the unified public front of Israel's entire secular leadership from right to left. Even Netanyahu, of whom I am no fan, visited the attacked center on Thursday and said good words. So the haters and the wingnuts know that their opinions are not respectable, and vice versa.
(side note: now turn that around, and see what happens when the entire political leadership presents a unified anti-Palestinian front, sprinkled with the occasional ultra-racist remark - as has been the case pretty much continuously since fall 2000. This is why these people are called "opinion-shapers". What they say, and how they say it, does matter)
So where does Israel stand on gay rights? The terror attack left a certain sector of silly Diaspora Jews with a propaganda black eye. For years they have shoved Israel's supposedly admirable pro-gay record in the face of Israel critics - contrasting it with the (again supposedly) ferociously anti-gay Arab culture. In the wake of the attack, Ha'aretz commissioned a survey that found 46% of Israelis thinking gays are "perverts".
The survey also finds that 71 percent of the ultra-Orthodox population believe homosexuality is a perversion. So do 67 percent of the religious (Orthodox), 64 percent of the Arabs, 57 percent of the Russian-speaking immigrants, 44 percent of the observant (traditional) Jews and 24 percent of the secular population.
So Israel's Palestinians are somewhat better than its Orthodox Jews, and there is only one major sector whose opinions are comparable with the West - "non-Russian", predominantly Ashkenazi seculars. This sector is roughly 20%-30% of Israel's population, maybe even a bit less (btw, "observant/traditional" is codeword for mostly-secular Jews of Middle Eastern origin).
According to the pollster,
The level of homophobia in Israel is close to the level in Bulgaria...
...the timing of the survey- the week in which a murderous attack was carried out at a gay community center in Tel Aviv - should be taken into consideration. "It's possible that what we have here is a reaction to trauma and also that hate-filled people think this is not the moment to admit it," he said.
In other words, the 46% is probably an under-estimate, just like the talkback loonies were temporarily beaten back into their holes once the official wind became pro-gay in the attack's aftermath.
So the picture is very mixed, and not an extremely bright one. And the bright spots, too, are quite recent. Yossi Sarid, a retired progressive politician and now a columnist, reminded Ha'aretz readers that until the late 1980's Israel had a rather draconian anti-Sodomy law. In the early 80's when Sarid and his colleagues tried to reverse it, then-PM Begin ridiculed them from the podium and asked whether they also want to lobby on behalf of those who have sex with beasts.
Then came the 90's and the Amazing Dana International, and suddenly it seemed some Israeli gays could breathe more openly. I have a 30-something cousin who has lived for over a decade as openly gay, including quite a few years with the same partner whom he married in a civil ceremony. A friend's sister who is about 40, lives with her female partner and they have a child. Both couples live in the hyper-secular enclave of north Tel Aviv. On the other hand, I have two good friends in their early 40's, who found they could not live freely as gays in Israel and emigrated to the West. When they return for home visits, they are still closeted with respect to their families, esp. their parents.
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The Police
The Israeli police's behavior in the past week deserves special mention. It has certainly been a lowlight. The blood was still wet on the floor at "Bar-No'ar" Center, when the police said this is probably an "ordinary criminal incident". Soon after that, anonymous senior officers complained to the press about "irresponsible gay leaders" who talk too much about their community being routinely targeted. Then, in an completely unconscious stroke of irony, the police chief said that "we should not point fingers at any community". He meant, of course, the fingers pointing at Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox, whose politicians have been inciting against gays for years. He didn't mean his own officers pointing fingers at the very community that was attacked.
In short, we still don't know who the murderer is. He may turn out to be a deranged disgruntled loner (like, say, the guy who attacked the Seattle Jewish Federation in 2006). But we do know that Israel has a bigoted police, who doesn't seem to take this very seriously. And in Israel the police, like all the "security" apparatus, is much less easily subordinated to civilian leaders than in America.
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So what to make of it?
If there is one lesson I think can be learned at DKos, is in what ways Israeli culture is different from the West.
It is easy to conclude that at least the minority of Israelis that are secular, are really Western in culture. Our material culture, indeed, is almost indistinguishable from the West. But in fact, in our more basic culture, most of us are more like the rest of Israelis - and even the Arabs - than like Northern Europeans or North Americans.
In some ways this is good, for example Israeli culture (like the rest of the Middle East) is much more informal and egalitarian in its nature than Western. What I mean is not a belief in the democratic regime itself (about that in a moment), but the basic notion that social justice is a right and not a favor granted by the upper classes to the lower. The Middle East has this notion (see e.g., the Bible or the Quran); the West, esp. the Anglo-Saxon West, does not.
On the other hand, we really have very little democratic tradition. The vast majority of Israelis, including the secular ones, are first- to third-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Two regions not known for their solid grasp of democracy. Most Israelis don't flinch at Arab citizens being discriminated against (this is not seen by Israeli Jews as a "social justice" issue) - and yet in the same breath we claim that we have a model democracy. Because see, we don't really know what a true democracy is.
The West has embraced democracy gradually, after bloody and bitter experience with the "alternatives". Because of that experience, the choice of democracy and the awareness of what it requires, is strongly ingrained. Israelis improvised something, most Israelis think it is democracy but they never really stopped to inspect it and compare to the original definition. At the same time, our own traditions learned in family and social circles teach us precious little about what democracy is and how to sustain it. The Israeli secular quasi-Western lifestyle is driven less by an inherent similarity to the West, and more by imitation. Whatever is cool in the West, especially America, eventually becomes cool for secular Israelis.
So when in American movies being gay became "interesting" instead of "shameful", we eventually followed suit. But this type of changes are very superficial. Rather than an understanding that gay rights are human rights and therefore a democracy should grant gays equality, most secular Israelis adopt tolerance towards gays as a current fashion accessory (just like being a "leftist" was fashionable in the 90's). When push comes to shove the tolearnce can go away very quickly. The old social traditions and pressures, still alive and kicking, do not make Israel a very gay-friendly place. Add macho-pressure of the military which makes it particularly difficult for gay men. All in all, not nearly as gay-friendly a culture as imagined by some Americans and Diaspora Jews.
One last comment which initially slipped from the diary: as I said, the initial callous attitude to the attack by many Israelis has been replaced by public displays of sympathy and solidarity. The responsible reaction by many political and public leaders has helped bring this change around.
But on Israel's main front, the Occupation and its conflict with Palestinians, most of the very same leaders have been as irresponsible as they come. For 9 years the Israeli public has been fed a constant diet of hate and fear. We don't have an alternate reality to know what would have happened, had Israeli leaders acted more responsibly - but it is plausible to assume things could have gone much better.
Moreover, hate and fear when encouraged, tend to go out of hand. Over the decade,violence and hate speech has seeped into other facets of Israeli life, including domestic violence and school violence. Whether last week's murderer had an ideological agenda or was just plain nuts, he was surely affected by the hate-and-fear filled atmosphere stoked by the very same leaders who now wonder how such a thing could happen in the middle of Tel Aviv.
------------------- Epilogue ------------------------
I couldn't really host the thread for too long yesterday, and was quite surprised to the point of amusement to find this statement by a commenter:
...exploiting the murder of innocents in tel aviv to make points about the occupation is beyond the pale.
The commenter then went on to defend this assault on numerous comment threads.
Hey... I don't even know where to start. The connection between the crisis of the past decade and an increase in violence in all walks of Israeli and Palestinian life is not my invention. It has been discussed, documented, lamented, etc. in progressive and even mainstream circles in Israel.
Like most Israeli progressives, I also believe in a deeper connection between the 42+ year old Occupation regime and many ills of Israeli society; but that was not, I repeat not the point I made in the (updated) diary's final paragraphs. Rather, I was laying the blame for much of the present decade's disasters, upon the irresponsible rhetoric of Israeli leaders. For good measure the same can be said for many Palestinian leaders.
So in short, perhaps the connection I made rattles the nerves of some hyper-sensitive Diaspora Jews. But last I checked, the reality of life and death in I-P does not revolve around Diaspora-Jewish political sensitivities (which are often rather strange); and if it does, that may be part of the problem.
Finally, I sent this diary to Yossi, a fellow anti-Occupation activist with whom I'm personally acquainted. He is also an attorney and an openly gay man living in Jerusalem. I did not send it because of the above-discussed connection (which was, and still is, a side- and rather obvious, as far as I'm concerned, comment). Here's a shortened version of his answer:
Hi Assaf,
I think the perspective you chose is very correct.... Israeli "democracy" is superficial, rootless and fragile.
It seems beyond any doubt to me that the escalation of homophobia into an act like this is related to the nurturing of a culture of hate and fear in society...
One of the things that bother me most is this recent mainstream hug our community received this week, how lasting it is - a hug with a lot of opportunism and political spin - and the wind may change at a moment's notice. Yossi, a friend of mine, wrote about it today [that's another Yossi - AO].