Israel’s ‘change government’ is creaking open the gates of exclusion

As the influence of progressive voices becomes clearer, and reforms unveiled, the new government has given OSCAR KASPI-CRUTCHETT hope for Israel’s future

IN A WORLD DOMINATED by conservative forces, progressives engage with politics through critique. Painfully aware of all the injustice in the world, they are quick to point out what is missing, call out the wrongs and name who or what is being left behind. Living in opposition, they are most comfortable in the role of the critic.

In Israel especially, that readiness to criticise is misunderstood as a sign of insufficient patriotism or simply a whiney disposition. They defend themselves by arguing that it is they who are the real patriots in daring to criticise the country into improving itself. While heart-warming, this is not the whole story.

When a political faction is denied power for too long, it grows resentful. As its needs are ignored, and its priorities dismissed, its temperament descends into the purely negative, into a swamp of unshakeable pessimism.

After years of fruitless elections, cutting betrayals, false-hopes and fizzled saviours, the Israeli Left has retreated into a protective cocoon of cynical hopelessness. I see this everywhere and I see it in myself. There is a saying that whilst the Right falls in line, the Left falls in love. Our hearts have been broken one time too many, and we’ve resigned to a hardy sphere of low expectations and permanent critique, sheltering us from the pain of yet another dashed hope.

For some, the years of defeat have mutated forgivable readiness to criticise into a complaining, paralytic nihilism: the settlements are too numerous, the world detests Israel, the country is irreparably evil, everyone is a sell-out, there is no hope, the country has gone to the dogs.

I have had it with such moaning. I am ready to leave the cocoon.