Now
this kind of purity policing has percolated
to the very top of the national
administration and extended to the
censorship of the very idea of mixed dating.
Educators, politicians and writers in
Israel are not taking this lying down.
Israeli novelist Haim Be’er, for example,
told Haaretz the decision was a “dizzying
and dangerous act”:
“This
is none of Naftali Bennett’s business,”
Be’er said. “Tomorrow he will disqualify
‘Behind the Fence’ because [Hayim Nahman]
Bialik’s hero falls in love with a
Christian, and he’ll create a committee to
monitor relationships in literature.”
Zionist Union whip Merav Michaeli tied the
move to unequal restrictions on voting and
censorship:
Hordes
of Arabs are on their way to the polling
stations, Arabs are taking our girls — these
are two sides of the same coin. In a place
where people are disqualified, it’s clear
that books that represent them as humans are
also disqualified. In a place where people
with views that are unacceptable to the
government are marked, it’s clear that works
of literature and art are also censored.
Michaeli is right. The type of education
Bennett wishes to maintain is one of radical
and absolute separation, of irreconcilable
difference. And this is no simple
declaration of separate but equal. It is
difference coupled with domination, racial
supremacy and an all-out effort to segregate
and keep separate. It contradicts what
should be a core purpose of Israeli
education: to help students in Israel think
through the problems and possibilities of
relations between Israelis and Palestinians
in a profound and humanistic manner.
What is especially destructive and blind
about this kind of censorship is that it
extends far beyond reining in political
speech; it goes to the heart of the
imagination. One is now being told that one
simply cannot have certain thoughts,
especially thoughts that might well imagine
a life different from the one dictated by
the state.
Under these circumstances, with Israel
annexing territory, displacing people from
their home and lands, walling off huge
portions of illegally occupied land and now
walling off the imagination, we are
witnessing an anti-democratic regime
uninterested in world opinion or
international law. And that is precisely why
the country has invested millions of dollars
to defeat the boycott, divestment and
sanction movement, for it has become
effective where governments have failed. It
has raised the consciousness of the global
community and mobilized ordinary citizens to
break through the walls of disinformation
and prejudice that have protected Israel’s
government from scrutiny. There is no
rightward drift in Israel today; it is
moving full steam ahead with clamping down
on anything that it sees as a threat to its
purity, including love.
In
this new year, we need to propose and act
for another kind of imagining of the world.
David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett
Nixon Professor at Stanford University. His
most recent book is "The
Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in
a Global Age."
