There is a little two-storey duplex nearby that always reminds me of an area in Tel Aviv.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
It may be its pragmatic use of sandstone and cement brick, its smallish high windows, and its compact proportions. I like the house because I like Israel. I like its distinctive practical aesthetic, its frustrating complexity, its intense admixture of modernity and antiquity.
But it is getting harder all the time. Fundamentalists are intent on replacing Israel's progressive social-democratic dream with sectarianism, escalating a war on liberals, on women, and on the Palestinians.
No mere paradox, Israel has always been a cluster of belligerent opposites. A new democracy with its feet in millennia of religious dogma and ancient texts. A secular state founded for a persecuted religion. A refuge for a people that made refugees of another. An open economy constrained by a perennial siege mentality. A rule-of-law nation that is annexing adjacent territories. A once optimistic society now sliding towards despair, division and conflict. Exaggeration? It was in fact President Isaac Herzog who said so way back in March.
![Israeli President Isaac Herzog said the country was sliding towards despair, division and conflict. Picture Getty Images Israeli President Isaac Herzog said the country was sliding towards despair, division and conflict. Picture Getty Images](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/XBxJDq6WLub2UphQ8wEq23/07576a2f-01c5-4587-b390-631533942731.jpg/r0_70_3947_2289_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"The last few weeks have been tearing us apart," Herzog remarked in an address to the nation. "Israel is in the throes of a profound crisis. Anyone who thinks that a real civil war, of human life, is a line that we will not reach has no idea. The abyss is within touching distance."
Since then, that crisis in which hundreds of thousands of Israelis have clogged the streets of cities and blockaded airports to shore up the Supreme Court, has deepened.
The Netanyahu government wants to clip the Court's wings contending that it has unilaterally morphed into an unelected house of review. But even if the judicial activism complaint has merit, the most extreme right-wing administration in the nation's history is not the trusted good-faith actor required to sponsor such a dramatic re-centring of executive power. In any event, Netanyahu's opponents say the Court has disallowed fewer than 25 provisions on grounds of unreasonableness out of nearly 4000 bills passed.
These critics insist the Supreme Court is their only standing fetter on growing political excess in a system sorely lacking for other checks and balances. They have a point. Israel has no senate, does not have state governments with which to share authority, and uses proportional representation to elect representatives (MKs) to the Knesset enabling minor parties to gain a toe-hold with very small slivers of support.
In the lead-up to Labor's National Conference over the last few days, the Albanese government moved to head-off party disquiet over this worsening crisis by reverting to its previous descriptions of the West Bank as "occupied" territory and to the Jewish settlements there as "illegal".
America, which continues to provide defence aid worth billions, wanly expresses concerns over settlements in the occupied West Bank, but the absence of sanctions behind its words is read as approval.
The reaction from the Israel "lobby" in Australia was typically unrestrained.
The head of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, Colin Rubenstein, branded Labor's new position "one-sided" predicting it would make it "extremely difficult for Australia to present itself as a credible and effective advocate for a two-state peace".
To an objective observer, Labor's shift was not an attempt to be "one-sided" so much as to see both sides and to keep the possibility of a "two-state peace" plausible. It pointedly stopped short of official recognition of Palestine as a state - notwithstanding a strong call for it to do so from authoritative voices such as the respected former foreign minister Gareth Evans. No raging lefty.
Australia might well have gone this far which would only have brought it into line with regional powers with whom this nation seeks to be identified for other purposes - countries like Vietnam, India, Indonesia, China, Thailand, Malaysia.
Such an approach may even be strategically prudent in regional terms given the likely interpretation in Asian capitals that through AUKUS, Australia has reverted to the Anglosphere for its own security and for the projection of US power.
Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, depicted Labor's rebalancing as modest progress, adding "...we do acknowledge that the government has already made many small steps towards affirming Palestinian rights by shifting our voting in the UN, rescinding Morrison's decision on Jerusalem, restoring some of the previously axed aid to Palestine and most recently acknowledging the illegality of Israeli occupation".
The proposition being put forward by Israel's invariably well-positioned defenders is that even when its government has turned sharply rightward, and thus sharply away from a future co-existence with a Palestinian state, it cannot and must not be criticised.
MORE KENNY:
Such obsequiousness has backfired in the long run because it has only encouraged hardliners now in the ascendancy to defy international norms and pursue policies which make peaceful resolution unachievable.
America, which continues to provide defence aid worth billions, wanly expresses concerns over settlements in the occupied West Bank, but the absence of sanctions behind its words is read as approval.
Moderate Israeli media report an atmosphere of growing religious intolerance with billboards defaced because the models pictured are deemed immodest, and young women being forced to cover themselves with blankets on public transport. A plan for gender separation at natural springs is also being trialled.
Before the world's eyes, Israel is drifting from the democratic idyll in the Middle East - a frequently expressed justification for all that aid - towards becoming another authoritarian Abrahamic redoubt.
What the country actually needs right now is the kind of friends who care enough to be critical.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.