Interview with Matan Kaminer on J14 and the Israeli left

NOVANEWS

I met Matan Kaminer in Tel Aviv in January 2012, and we agreed to do an extended interview about the state of the left in Israeli society after the con­tro­ver­sial J14 social justice protests.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your back­ground?  How did you get involved in political activity?

I was born to an activist family.  My grand­par­ents were among the founders of the New Left in Israel in the seventies.  After they left the Communist Party of Israel (CPI) they were among the founders of SIAH (New Israeli Left) and then of SHASI (Israeli Socialist Left), which, together with the CPI and the Black Panthers, founded the Demo­c­ra­tic Front for Peace and Equality — as al-Jabha/Hadash.  My parents also took the path from SIAH to SHASI, and my father was involved in Yesh Gvul, a movement of con­sci­en­tious objectors to the occu­pa­tion.  He was impris­oned twice when he refused to fight in the First Lebanon War.

I became active in the Hadash youth group in Tel Aviv when I was fifteen.  This was mostly a reading and dis­cus­sion group — we didn’t actually do very much but it was formative for me intel­lec­tu­ally and polit­i­cally.  Then I was involved in the “Shmin­is­tim” movement of con­sci­en­tious objectors and spent 21 months in prison for refusing to serve in the IDF.  After that I travelled in South America and sub­se­quently became active in sol­i­dar­ity work with migrants and refugees, par­tic­u­larly from Latin America but also in general.  Last year I finished four years at Tel Aviv Uni­ver­sity, where I was also active in the Hadash branch, and I’m also a member of Ir LeKulanu, a municipal political front that also includes Hadash.

Talk a little bit about the origins of the current social inequal­ity in Israel.  Who put in place these programs?  And how are they linked to the occupation?

These are difficult questions, and I’m not sure I know the answers to all of them.  The regime in Israel-Palestine is cap­i­tal­ist and colonial.  It is impos­si­ble to under­stand con­di­tions in Israel proper — that is, ter­ri­to­ri­ally speaking, within the “Green Line,” or in terms of pop­u­la­tion cat­e­gories, among citizens of Israel — without taking the Pales­tini­ans into account.  Very broadly speaking, the past two or three decades have seen the regime move from a closed, pro­tec­tion­ist and devel­op­men­tal­ist model of growth to inte­gra­tion into global neo-liberal struc­tures, relying more and more on the export of security and related tech­nolo­gies.  To this you can add the finan­cial­iza­tion that we have seen in the rest of the world, making for a very pros­per­ous financial-military-high-tech bloc and for well-paid workers in these industries.

On the other hand you have the rest of the pop­u­la­tion, including the “old” service elites, which have seen a decline in living standards and life chances over recent years.  PM Netanyahu recently said that if you “deduct” the Arab and ultra-Orthodox citizens — the Pales­tini­ans in the ter­ri­to­ries were never part of this equation, of course — the economic situation in Israel is quite good.  This is not true, but it’s telling, because I think the regime is worried about the impov­er­ished middle classes making common cause with the “minority” poor.