After Losing Hope for Change, Top Left-wing Activists
and Scholars Leave Israel Behind
They founded anti-occupation movements and fought for the
soul of Israeli society, but ultimately decided to emigrate. The new
exiles tell Haaretz how they were harassed and silenced, until they
had almost no choice but to leave
Shany Littman - May 23, 2020
Last December, when no
one knew that the coronavirus was lurking around the corner, Eitan
Bronstein Aparicio, 60, and his partner, Eléonore Merza, 40, left
Israel for good. They are both well-known in circles of left-wing
activists. He founded the organization Zochrot some 20 years ago,
she is a political anthropologist, and they co-authored a book on
the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe,” as Palestinians refer to the
events surrounding the founding of Israel). Ideologically,
politically and professionally, French-born Merza, the daughter of a
Jewish mother and a Circassian father, simply could not bear the
situation any longer. Although she was about to be granted permanent
residency status in Israel, she found a job in Brussels and the
couple moved there, with no plans to return.
In a phone conversation with Haaretz from the coronavirus lockdown
in Belgium, Bronstein Aparicio says he still finds it difficult to
believe that he left. “I look on it as a type of exile, a departure
from the center of Israel,” he explains.
Born in Argentina, Bronstein Aparicio emigrated to Israel with his
parents when he was 5, growing up in Kibbutz Bahan in central
Israel. “My name was changed from Claudio to Eitan – I carry the
Zionist revolution with me,” he laughs. He describes himself as a
“regular Israeli” who did military service, like everyone else. A
personal process that he terms the “decolonization of my Zionist
identity” led him to establish Zochrot (“Remembering,” in Hebrew) in
2001, an NGO that aims to raise awareness of the Nakba and of the
Palestinians’ right of return among the Jewish public. He has five
children: Three of them live in Israel, one in Brazil, and the
youngest, a boy who’s almost 4, lives with the couple in Brussels.
“There is one point on which I am completely in accord with the move
– namely, the need to rescue my son from the nationalist,
militaristic education system in Israel. I am glad I got him out of
that,” he says, adding, “People with a similar political profile to
mine have the feeling that we have been defeated and that we will no
longer be able to exert a meaningful influence in Israel. In a
profound sense, we do not see a horizon of repair, of true peace or
a life of quality. A great many people understood this and looked
for another place to live. There is something quite insane in
Israel, so to look at it from a distance is at least a little saner.”
Indeed, many of those who belonged to what’s termed the radical left
in Israel have left the country in the past decade. Among them were
those who devoted their life to activism, founded political
movements and headed some of the country’s most important left-wing
organizations: Not only Zochrot, but B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence,
Coalition of Women for Peace, 21st Year, Matzpen and others. The
individuals include senior academics – some of whom were forced out
of their jobs because of their political beliefs and activities –
and also cultural figures or members of the liberal professions, who
felt they could no longer express their views in Israel without fear.
Many came from the heart of the Zionist left and then moved farther
left, or looked on as the state abandoned principles that were
important to them, to a point where they felt they no longer had a
place in the Israeli public discourse.
They are scattered around the world, trying to build new lives with
fewer internal and external conflicts, very often out of concern for
their children’s future. Most of them shy away from terming
themselves political exiles, but make it plain that opposition to
the Israeli government is what drove them to leave, or at least not
to return. Some declined to be interviewed, from a feeling of unease
at leaving and because they do not want their private act to become
a model for others. Those who spoke to Haaretz would be the first to
admit to enjoying privileges that allowed them to move to a
different country, as none of them faces an uncertain economic
future or the prospect of engaging in menial labor. Still, a clear
note of pain runs through all the conversations.
Among the well-known names no longer living in Israel are the
curator and art theoretician Ariella Azoulay and her partner,
philosopher Adi Ophir, who was among the founders of the 21st Year,
an anti-occupation organization, and refused to serve in the
territories; Anat Biletzki, a former chairwoman of B’Tselem – The
Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied
Territories; Dana Golan, former executive director of the
anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence; planner and architect
Haim Yacobi, who founded Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights;
literary scholar Hannan Hever, a cofounder of the 21st Year who was
active in Yesh Gvul; Ilan Pappe, a one-time candidate from the
Arab-Jewish party Hadash and a member of the group of “new
historians,” who left the country over a decade ago and lives in
London; and Yonatan Shapira, a former pilot in the Israeli air force
who initiated the 2003 letter of the pilots who refused to
participate in attacks in the occupied territories, and took part in
protest flotillas to the Gaza Strip.
Others include political scientist Neve Gordon, who was director of
Physicians for Human Rights and was active in the Ta’ayush Arab
Jewish Partnership, a nonviolent, anti-occupation and civil equality
movement ; Yael Lerer, who helped found Balad, the Arab-nationalist
political party, and was founder of (the now-defunct) Andalus
Publishing, which translated Arabic literature into Hebrew; Gila
Svirsky, a founder of Coalition of Women for Peace; Jonathan
Ben-Artzi, a nephew of Sara Netanyahu, who was jailed for a total of
nearly two years for refusing to serve in the Israeli army; Haim
Bereshit, a BDS activist, who headed the Media and Cinema School in
Sapir College in Sderot and established the city’s cinematheque;
Marcelo Svirsky, a founder of the Kol Aher BaGalil Arab-Jewish
coexistence group and cofounder of the Jewish-Arab school in Galilee;
and Ilana Bronstein, Niv Gal, Muhammad Jabali, Saar Sakali and
Rozeen Bisharat, who sought to create a joint Palestinian-Jewish
leisure and culture venue in the Anna Loulou Bar in Jaffa (which
closed in January 2019).
'I remember vividly the period of the Oslo Accords, the euphoria.
There was a feeling that maybe there would be peace, but that
feeling hasn’t existed for a long time. It’s a state of constant
despair that keeps growing.'Eitan Bronstein Aparicio
The new “leavers” join those who left for political reasons many
years ago, among them: Yigal Arens, a Matzpen activist and son of
the late Moshe Arens, a longtime defense minister; Matzpen activists
Moshe Machover, Akiva Orr and Shimon Tzabar, who left in the 1960s;
as well as the filmmakers Eyal Sivan, Simone Bitton and Udi Aloni,
who left in the 1980s and ‘90s.
The word that recurs time and again in when one speaks with these
individuals is “despair.” Percolating despair, continuing for years.
“I remember vividly the period of the Oslo Accords, the euphoria –
which I shared,” Bronstein Aparicio says. “I remember years when
there was a feeling that maybe [the conflict] would be resolved and
maybe there would be peace, but that feeling hasn’t existed for a
long time. It’s a state of constant despair that keeps growing.”
Thus, after long years of activism, all the interviewees testified
that they had lost hope for political change in Israel. Many of them
are convinced that if change does occur, it will not come from
within Israel. “I think it could come mainly from outside,”
Bronstein Aparicio explains. “I have hopes for BDS, which is the
only significant thing now happening in the field. From that point
of view, political exile like this can have a meaningful role.”
Neve Gordon, 54, launched his political activity when he was 15,
attending demonstrations held by Peace Now. He was wounded seriously
during his military service as a combat soldier in the Paratroops.
At the time of the first intifada (which began in December 1987), he
served as the first executive director of Physicians for Human
Rights Israel. Subsequently he was active in Ta’ayush, which pursues
avenues of Jewish and Palestinian cooperation, and was a founder of
the Jewish-Arab school in Be’er Sheva. During the second intifada he
was part of the movement of refusal to serve in the Israel Defense
Forces.
Although his political activity has been extensive, Gordon may be
best known to the general Israeli public primarily for an opinion
piece he published in The Los Angeles Times in 2009, when he was
head of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion
University in Be’er Sheva. In the essay, Gordon stated his support
for the boycott movement and termed Israel an apartheid state. An
international furor erupted, and the university’s president at the
time, Rivka Carmi, declared that “academics who feel that way about
their country are invited to look for different professional and
personal accommodation.”
In the years that followed, Gordon’s department at BGU became a
target of systematic campaigns by right-wing organizations, notably
Im Tirtzu, which demanded its closure because of the political views
of a number of its faculty members. In 2012, Education Minister
Gideon Sa’ar (Likud) called for Gordon’s dismissal. At the end of
that year, the Council for Higher Education recommended that the
university consider shutting down the Gordon’s department if certain
reforms weren’t undertaken, but its decision was ultimately revoked
a few months later after a few changes were introduced.
In those tumultuous years, the professor says, he received a number
of threats on his life. Three and a half years ago, he and his
partner, Catherine Rottenberg, who was head of the university’s
gender studies program, together with their two sons, moved to
London after both received European Union research fellowships.
Gordon is now a professor of international law and human rights at
Queen Mary University of London.
It wasn’t the threats on his life that prompted him to leave, Gordon
says, nor the struggle against the higher education establishment.
In the end, what tipped the scales was concern for the future of
their children. “I don’t see a political horizon, and I have two
sons, with all that’s entailed in raising sons in Israel.”
And you also landed an excellent job in London.
“True, but my job in Israel was better by a long shot. I really
liked the Ben-Gurion department, I liked the students and also the
faculty. I felt I had a community, and it was very hard to give that
up. Even when we got to London, we didn’t plan to stay. If we’d been
a young couple without children, I’m not sure we would have stayed.”
Gordon adds, “It’s not the easiest thing, to get up and leave at the
age of 50-something. There’s a feeling of personal failure and the
failure of a [political] camp.”
Was there a particular moment when the impossibility of remaining in
Israel became clear?
“There was no one moment. Over the years we experienced growing
extremism. It reached the point where we felt uncomfortable taking
our children to demonstrations, because of the violence. The
day-to-day racism is creating a place where I don’t feel I belong.”
The final blow, says Gordon, came when he began to feel it was no
longer possible to speak out freely against the racist situation he
witnessed. “The dialogue within Israel, which used to be open and
which I took pride in, changed. Things that people like me espouse –
support for the boycott movement, or terming Israel an apartheid
state – became illegitimate,” he says. “And then you are already not
only outside the consensus, but outside the true public discussion.
You become a curiosity. And then you say, ‘What do I need this for?’”
Did the country change, or did you change?
“To be fair, the change is undoubtedly both in me and in the country.
I also underwent a certain process. What I understood was that the
solution cannot be contained in Zionism.”
Haim Yacobi, Gordon’s colleague at BGU, and subsequently head of its
politics and government department, also left Israel. One of the
founders of Bimkom, which deals with issues of equality in spatial
planning and housing in Israel, Yacobi, an architect by training who
is today 55 years old, moved to England three years ago with his
partner and their three children, when he received a professorship
at University College London. Like Gordon, he says that he did not
leave because of political harassment: “If you look at the political
situation in Israel squarely, on top of the colonial project in the
West Bank and Israel’s becoming an apartheid state, then the
question that arises is what I want for myself and for my children.”
He adds, “For people like me – whose work is critical and political,
and who were also involved as activists – the politics of hope or of
despair is of very weighty significance,” he says. “To emigrate at
my age and status is to say: I am in despair, I see no hope. That
stems from my political analysis, based on how I view as a just
state and society. It’s not a decision that’s made overnight. We
didn’t leave Israel because of the price of cottage cheese. We were
exactly at the stage in which good bourgeois folks start to see the
fruits of their labors, and I feel that I was very successful in
what I did in Israel. It’s very frightening to emigrate at a late
age and to reinvent yourself.”
The final blow, says Gordon, came when he began to feel it was no
longer possible to speak out freely against the racist situation he
witnessed.
Yacobi notes that many of his colleagues in Israel, even among the
radical left, viewed his leaving as a betrayal. That reaction came
as a surprise, but didn’t make him change his mind. “The motivation
to establish Bimkom was my belief that change was possible. I am
less naive now,” he says, adding that the political violence in
Israel led him to realize that getting out was the only option for
him.
Although Yacobi says he felt wanted in Israeli academia, he agrees
that academic freedom in the country has been downgraded. “I think
that very problematic forces, politically, have entered and have
effectively become the police of the academic world,” he says.
Indeed, one of the disturbing things that emerged from the
conversations with academics now living and working abroad is the
decisive contribution of Israeli institutions of higher education in
forcing out scholars who espouse a radical-left political outlook.
The process was not always a blatant one, and even when it was, some
of the interviewees adamantly refused to talk about what they
underwent, for fear their former universities would react by trying
to damage their professional reputations.
A clear-cut case, which was reported widely, was the refusal of
Bar-Ilan University, in early 2011, to grant tenure and promotion to
Ariella Azoulay, who had been teaching at the institution for 11
years. Dr. Azoulay, 58, a scholar of visual culture, curator,
documentary filmmaker and one of Israel’s most influential
interdisciplinary thinkers, was hired by Bar-Ilan five years after
the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, when the university had an image
problem. This was an act with a pluralistic aroma: to employ a
lecturer with well-known leftist views at a university with a
religious, right-wing orientation where the prime minister’s
assassin had been a student. A decade later, deep into the Netanyahu
era, when right-wing organizations were compiling blacklists of
scholars who criticized Israel, Azoulay’s radical approach
apparently sat less well with the university’s directors.
To the broad protest by senior academics who expressed concern that
Azoulay was a victim of political persecution, Bar-Ilan University
responded that its considerations had been strictly professional.
Still, her achievements were enough for her to get a job offer from
Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island – an Ivy League
university with a reputation as one of the world’s finest
institutions of higher learning.
A year and a half after she was denied tenure, Azoulay left the
country together with her partner, Adi Ophir, a philosophy scholar
and lecturer at Tel Aviv University, and a leading figure in the
Israeli left. Prof. Ophir was 61 at the time; Azoulay was 51. The
offer she received from Brown included a teaching position for him
as well. For the past seven years, the two have been living in
Providence, teaching, conducting research and writing books that
enjoy impressive international success.
Ophir is leery of the term “political exiles.” “Decisions of this
kind are a combination of many things,” he says in a Zoom
conversation from Rhode Island. “The trauma of [Azoulay’s] ejection
from Bar-Ilan was an important part of it. Before that we had never
looked for job opportunities abroad. Only when it became clear that
they were going to throw her out for political reasons. And also the
way the dismissal was received by academic colleagues – there was a
respectable letter of support, but that was all. Other universities
did not volunteer to hire her.
“But still, if she hadn’t received that incredible job offer [at
Brown], it’s possible that we would not have had the determination
or the strength to undertake such a dramatic move. The more
significant political fact is that since we got here we haven’t
considered returning. The moment a full life became possible in a
different place, the political and moral compromises that life in
Israel entails became intolerable.”
Is what happened to Azoulay typical of what’s going on in Israeli
universities and colleges today?
Ophir: “A rift opened at the start of the second intifada [in 2000].
We saw ourselves become increasingly anathematized. I was never
persecuted at Tel Aviv University, but there’s this constant feeling
of something growing all around, a kind of encrustation and it
signifies: These are the boundaries, you can’t cross them, those
ideas can’t be voiced now, you can’t deal with those things. Because
for anyone who does deal with them, it’s not clear whether his
doctorate will be approved, or whether his article will be accepted,
or whether his students will receive scholarships. In my case, at
least, everything was very minor, but there was a growing feeling
that we were simply no longer wanted in this place.”
From afar, he continues, “I started to see things I didn’t see from
there. In Israel, I had many reservations about BDS. I thought about
it from the viewpoint of my activity in academia, and I kept trying
to tread between the raindrops, as it were: to recognize the
legitimacy of the boycott movement without accepting its sweeping
formulation. But I came to understand that what I was trying to do
was protect myself and my space in the academic world.”
Ophir wasn’t always in that zone of consciousness. He grew up in a
right-wing Revisionist home before becoming a devoted member of the
socialist Zionist youth movement Hamahanot Ha’olim. In 1987, he
cofounded the 21st Year together with Hannan Hever, who became a
professor of Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
and is now living in the United States. Theirs was a protest
movement that called for refusal to serve in the territories and for
the boycott of products made in the settlements.
“Hannan and I spoke at the time about the refusal to serve in the
army in terms of self-fulfillment,” he relates. “We thought that
personal commitment to the State of Israel was to be expressed in a
refusal to serve in the territories. I was totally a Zionist. It
took me more time to understand what it means to be a Zionist.”
Ophir does not deny that the country he lives in, the United States,
is responsible for horrific wrongs. “In that sense, the United
States is a terrible place, and since Trump’s election it has become
a lot more terrible,” he says. “But when you oppose the regime in
the United States, you are not alone. You are part of a large mass,
active and creative. I can talk about it with students with absolute
freedom. In my last years in Israel I felt that when I talked
politics at the university, I was looked at like a UFO.”
Do you also feel less alone in regard to your views about Israel?
“For the majority of my colleagues, Israel is a lost case. And most
of the time, I am with them. A political exile is someone whose life
remained in the place he left, and whose life in the new place is
stamped in that context. I don’t feel that way. I feel a great deal
of pain together with a deep sense of pointlessness. Occasionally I
still do something on campus, small things. That is my ‘reserve duty.’
But the center of my attention and interest is no longer there. The
whole world is going from bad to worse, possibly toward its end. The
Zionist colonial project is a tiny blip within it.”
He continues, “It was a long process of separation. My mother died
after many years of dementia. The parting from her lasted 15 years.
The parting from Israel somewhat resembles that. Israel is something
that is becoming alien and remote. In large measure I replaced my
interest in political Israel with a growing interest in Jewish
thought and history. I found myself a small patch that replaces the
house in Tel Aviv. I’m enjoying being a Diaspora Jew.”
Were there people who felt you were abandoning ship?
'A political exile is someone whose life remained in the place he
left, and whose life in the new place is stamped in that context. I
don’t feel that way.' Adi Ophir
“Yes – a good many, I think. Some said so openly. I thought they
should be leaving, too. But that’s easy to say: Not everyone gets a
golden parachute for relocating. Obviously there is an egoistical
element in what we did.”
Are there things you miss about Israel?
“Hummus?” Ophir laughs. “Just kidding. I miss my children and my
grandchildren. Very much. Sometimes I miss Tel Aviv. Sometimes I
miss traveling around the country – going to the desert in winter.
But there is hardly a place that I would walk across today and not
feel that I was walking on someone else’s land.”
Ariella Azoulay declined to be interviewed, but sent a written
statement: “I don’t trust the press and I don’t want to be
represented by it; I support the boycott and have no interest in
being interviewed for a Zionist newspaper. What I have to say about
the fact that I was born to be an ‘Israeli’ as a form of control by
the state over the body and mind of its subjects and citizens, and
about my refusal to identify myself in the ‘Israeli’ category, I
wrote in the introduction to my new book and I have nothing to add
to that.
“And in addition, emigration out of a feeling of the impossibility
of living in the place where you were born, because you serve to
keep out those who were expelled from it, is painful, and I have no
interest in sharing that pain with a Zionist audience that denies
the pain and the loss that the State of Israel inflicted and is
continuing to inflict, above all on its Palestinian inhabitants, and
in a different way on its Jewish citizens.” (Azoulay’s most recent
book is “Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism,” published last
year.)
Hagar Kotef, 43, found herself in an even more disturbing situation
with regard to an Israeli university. Dr. Kotef, who was active in
Machsom Watch and other left-wing movements, completed her doctoral
studies in philosophy at Tel Aviv University and at the University
of California, Berkeley. In 2012, she had an opportunity to come
back to Israel as part of a plan to integrate returning academics.
She was offered a teaching job in a prestigious program at one of
the country’s universities.
On the evening before her contract was approved, a right-wing NGO
launched a campaign against her employment by the university. As a
result, the rector refused to sign the contract, and the university
put forward new conditions for the appointment, notably a demand
that she sign a commitment relating to her political activity: Kotef
was required to undertake not to attend demonstrations, not to sign
petitions and not to speak publicly – or in the classroom – about
any subject not related to her academic research.
It was the summer of 2014. When Operation Protective Edge broke out,
in the Gaza Strip, Kotef signed an internet petition calling for
Israel to negotiate with Hamas. Minutes later, she received a phone
call from the university informing her that her employment was
terminated. Kotef took the case to the Labor Court and was
reinstated. “I started to work, but my job contract never arrived.”
Kotef and her partner, a physicist and brain scientist, started to
look for jobs in England. “It was clear that staying there [at the
university] wasn’t an option, and also that I wouldn’t find a job
anywhere else in Israel,” she says.
Kotef later found employment as a senior lecturer in politics and
political theory in the University of London’s School of Oriental
and African Studies. After teaching a semester there, she and her
family left Israel permanently: “The combination of what happened in
the university, the war, the violence in the streets, the fear to
speak out, the racism and the hatred simply broke me.”
A 2014 protest in Tel Aviv against the war in Gaza. The signs say "A
demonstration of hope" and "Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies."
Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
Even today, six years later, Kotef is still clearly shaken by the
memories of that period. “Exile is too highly charged a concept: I
don’t categorize myself as a political exile, because all in all we
left for a good job and a good place. But at the same time, we did
not leave by choice and it wasn’t a relocation.” Kotef admits
frankly that she did not find a way to continue her political
activity in London.
“I’m not capable of being an activist [regarding Israel or other
issues] here,” she adds. “A few years ago, my partner scolded me for
going to a demonstration: ‘We’ve already been expelled from one
country because of you, we don’t want to be expelled from another.’”
Do you feel guilty about leaving?
Kotef: “No. I lost hope that it’s possible to change things from
within, so I don’t feel I could be doing something if I were [in
Israel]. If anything, I feel guilty toward my family, toward my
parents, who were separated from their granddaughters, and toward my
daughters, whom I moved to this place. Sometimes I look and say it’s
lucky we’re not in Israel; and sometimes there is a feeling of loss.
London is a cosmopolitan city, but there is still a hatred of
minorities here, which Brexit exposed intensely, and we will always
be strangers here.
“But I prefer to live and raise children in a place where my
foreignness sometimes generates antagonism, rather than in a place
where I am part of the side that is racist toward the other. There
are moments when I ask myself what we have done, but I don’t feel
that it was really our choice.”
“I did not have a golden parachute of work in academia like some
others had,” says Yael Lerer, 53, a translator and editor who
spearheaded attempts to draw Israelis and Palestinians closer
together from a civic and cultural point of view. Lerer, who moved
to Paris in 2008, was a central activist in the Equality Alliance,
an Arab-Jewish political movement out of which emerged Balad (acronym
for National Democratic Alliance), later serving as the party’s
spokesperson, parliamentary assistant to MK Azmi Bishara and as
Balad’s first election campaign manager. She founded Andalus
Publishing in 2001.
Although Lerer has lived in Paris for more than a decade, she says
she feels she never left Israel. “I come and go. I haven’t sliced
myself off from Israel. It’s just that my day-to-day life has become
more pleasant. My French friends complain about racism in that
country, but we are talking a whole different scale from Israel.”
' I prefer to live and raise children in a place where my
foreignness sometimes generates antagonism, rather than in a place
where I am part of the side that is racist toward the other.'Hagar
Kotef
The political persecution she experienced in Israel sometimes also
makes it difficult for her to find work in France; to make ends meet
she has to supplement her earnings from translation and editing by
working in real estate (“which I really hate”). “There are projects
that interest me but that they don’t let me do, because when I’m
googled in France the first thing that appears is that I am one of
those Israelis who forged an alliance with the terrorists,” she says.
“There was incitement to murder me and I was slandered. I was
offered a job in television, but someone vetoed it, because they
didn’t want to get in trouble with the Jewish community. Research
institutes that approached me also backed off at the last minute for
the same reason. So I can work mainly in things where I am not
up-front [about who I am].”
In 2013, Lerer returned to Israel for a time and was a Knesset
candidate on behalf of Balad, in the 12th (and unrealistic) place on
its list. While taking part in a panel discussion ahead of the
election at Netanya Academic College, she was the target of a
violent attack by rightists. The other panel participants did not
come to her defense, she says.
“It was almost a lynching,” she recalls. “It’s a lucky thing there
were security guards. I’d always thought that even if I received
hate messages and threats of murder, it would only be on the web,
but that in real life no one would do anything really bad to me.
Suddenly I understood that I could no longer count on that. I
understood that Israel had become a dangerous place for me.”
Rozeen Bisharat and Saar Székely, who are life partners, despaired
of Israel at a younger age than the other interviewees, but even so,
they felt they had to leave fast. “The best point to emigrate is in
your early twenties,” says Székely. “But I was already 33 and Rozeen
was 32, and we had the feeling that in another minute it would be
too late.”
Székely, who is Jewish, and Bisharat, who is Palestinian, were among
the owners of the Anna Loulou Bar in Jaffa, and were political
activists in different ways. Bisharat was involved in the student
organization of Hadash, and during the social justice protests of
the summer of 2011, erected “Tent 48” on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel
Aviv, in an effort to simultaneously raise awareness of the Nakba.
Székely was an activist via political performance art. They left
Israel two-and-a-half years ago.
What prompted their departure, they say, was the question of whether
it was possible to effect change. “When you try to exert influence
or to change public opinion, it depends on whether you believe that
it’s still possible to change things,” Székely says. “It’s a
question of optimism – and that’s what we ran out of in the period
before this.”
Hope waned for Bisharat after the protest movement ended and was
severely battered in the Gaza war of 2014.
“For years I thought it was possible to generate change in Israeli
society, to bring people content they hadn’t been exposed to,” she
says. “But having a different opinion started to be considered
treason. Automatically, if you don’t agree with the state’s way, you
are a traitor. And I, as a Palestinian, was told: ‘You don’t like it?
Go to Gaza.’ There’s no one to hold a discussion with. Not even in
Tel Aviv. Part of my leaving was a desire to liberate myself from my
role as ‘a Palestinian in Tel Aviv.’ In Berlin I am from the Middle
East, or part of the Arab world. I am not a gimmick the way I was in
Tel Aviv, but one of hundreds of thousands of other foreigners.
Berlin gives me access to the Arab world, I can meet Syrians,
Egyptians and Lebanese, I can be Middle Eastern. Tel Aviv today is
far more white and European than Berlin. My real cultural exile was
in Israel.”
Quelle |