Interview with Ralph Schoenman, author and political analyst
Israel struggles to satisfy its people, who are in demand of economical and social reform, as they continue to camp out and protest.
Press TV talks with Ralph Schoenman, an author and political analyst, to shed more light on the issue.
Press TV: What are the protests in Israel about? Are they mainly against the economic and social policies or rather against the regime?
Schoenman: It’s a reflection of the understanding of the broad masses of people, as much as 90 percent of the Israeli population, that the government is not theirs, that 20 families own the financial and economic heights of this economy, that the expenditure has been corrupt and basically designed to expand military control over the region with vanishing little interest in the wellbeing of the population itself.
In fact, what it represents is a profound understanding and shift on the part of large sections of the population, that this government and this Zionist state is pitting the population against the survival interests of hundreds of millions of people in the region, at the cost of their own day to day survival and wellbeing.
20,000 participating in a tent city, something like 90 percent of the population supporting these demonstrations, over a hundred thousand people in Tel Aviv, eruption of demonstrations in 11 cities across the country with slogans and banners, Mubarak, Assad, and [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, and looking at to Tahrir square as an inspiration, the Arab spring, the Egyptian popular uprising serving to galvanize and inspire these Israelis, who are opposing the rotten Zionist financial structure, which is of course an instrument of imperial control of the region [which] pits the population against the interest of the people of the world.
Press TV: The anti-boycott law, the attacks on aid flotillas, the Gaza siege, the war crimes charges raised after the Gaza offensive and the regime’s disregard even for the decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court have all sparked controversy inside Israel and abroad. Is the Israeli regime losing its legitimacy among Jews as well as the international community?
Schoenman: Yes, it a major shift within the Zionist state because this global economic crisis of capitalism in which the Israeli social crisis is really but a component. After all the Israeli state is an adjunct of US capitalism and imperialism. It’s an attack dog in the region, and the purpose of the colonial settler state was to secure imperial interest and to threaten the aspirations of the Arab masses, of the people of the region for their self-determination. And this opens the way as we saw for Nazareth and in Haifa, where Palestinians and Israelis and Jews were joined in these demonstrations together, a very significant development reflecting the fact that the population understands increasingly.
[There] is 90 percent support for this that its interest is incompatible with those of the Zionist state and it’s apparatus, [and] that the 20 families are not an accident. They reflect the nature, not merely of Zionism, but of late capitalism in its period of terminal decay.
It’s opening the way for a common cause of struggle between the workers whether be it Jews or Palestinians in common cause for a de-Zionized state.
This is a remarkable development within the Zionist state. It consistent with the inspiration and legitimacy it received from the Arab masses themselves, from Tunisia to Bahrain to Yemen to Egypt and beyond.
It opens the door but it has to clearly be understood that these are class questions, struggles against capitalism, exploitation of which the Zionism state is a course of instrument no longer to be accepted by the population at large as these developments advance with great speed.
Press TV: Where do you think these protests are going to lead to?
Schoenman: Well, I would point out that the apparatus of Netanyahu confronts the financial hierarchy, because the finance minster has already resigned in protest against even the verbal concessions that Netanyahu felt compelled to make about increasing the availability of an affordable housing and reducing the prices on basic staples food which are out of the reach for the masses of people.
90 percent of the populations are in support of these protests and these strikes. The Mizrahim or the so-called oriental Jews, something like 60 percent of the population, have always suffered extreme exploitation. After all, if you speak to a Jew from Yemen or Iraq or from Egypt or from North Africa, they look like Gamal Abdel Nasser, they have the wedding customs, the food customs, the mores of their Arab brothers and sisters. They are Arabs with Jewish religious convictions as opposed to Muslim or Christian religious convictions. And they have always been subjugated within the dominated Zionist apparatus.
Press TV: Is the revolution, if we could say, going to lead to a similar result like we have seen in Egypt? Is Israel prone to face that kind of crisis?
Schoenman: I think what has come to the fore and what is important about this manifestation of huge fundamental protest by the Israeli workers is that they see that their interest are not compatible with that of the Zionist apparatus.
They are making a common cause with the protestors, with the workers. They understand the class nature of these events, and as struggle advances in its estates, [they] exploit them with oppressive apparatus [to] enforce itself even against the settler population itself. The common cause will be important, the de-Zionized state, that the state whose citizenship is not determined by ethnicity or religious affiliation, but by the right of the working people to own the means of production.
And to have control over these will assert itself in the politics of struggle against the state in which Palestinians and Jewish workers will come together for a struggle against Zionism and imperialism, and in collaboration with their brothers and sister in Egypt in Yemen, in every country within the region, within Bahrain, within Syria, within Lebanon, everywhere.
