view from central park: tehilla r. goldberg

Widening gap between left and right in Israel

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It’s amazing these days how controversial Israel has become. It’s hard for me to watch. Like a dear friend who is being thrown under the bus, I admit I take it personally.

I lived in Israel through the Gaza disengagement in 2005 when thousands of Israelis, mostly a right-wing demographic, were displaced from their homes, their communities destroyed. The wound of this displacement, the sense of exile that these Gush Katif communities felt, ran deep.

A tikkun leil learning program at a religious Zionist synagogue on the following Shavuot was dedicated to studying sources that would help the displaced cope with their sense that Zionism had failed them. There was a sense of crisis. Some leaders of that community even abandoned religious Zionism and embraced the more haredi, anti-Zionist point of view. The crisis was terrible. The hostility toward the government of Israel was profound.

Internally, the gap between left- and right-wing communities widened frighteningly far.

I detest labels, but for clarity’s sake, since it is the colloquial way of describing different ideologies, I’m using them. At the time of the disengagement, the left was smug. It had won. It succeeded in dismantling what in its view were detested settlements. While the right-wing community was bleeding, the left-wing community was celebrating. It was painful to watch.

There were rumblings that Ariel Sharon, the prime minister at the time, only executed the Gaza disengagement to deflect the legal problems dogging him at time.

Now, a right-wing Israeli government is in power, democratically elected. Not to compare the current disappointments of the left-wing community to a disengagement, but the left is now the vulnerable demographic that needs to cope with a government in power not to its liking. Decisions that feel like an anathema to the left-wing is the reality. Specifically, the appointment of Avigdor Liberman as defense minister has unhinged some people.

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