The interview covers
Arthur's history with the organisation, explains the process of the recent Knesset
elections, and expresses his knowledge and understanding of the situation in
Palestine, as well as the international community’s shift in support from
Benjamin Netanyahu as he engages in further dangerous hardline rhetoric and
crimes against humanity.
Haneul Na'avi: Tell us a little about yourself.
Arthur Goodman: I’ve been handling lobbying for JFJFP ever since it was formed,
about 13 years ago. I grew up in a middle-class Jewish family and used to be
100 percent supportive of Israel. I had always assumed that Israel was right
and Arabs wrong, without much thought behind it—until my mid-50s.
Osama Silwadi/Demotix. All rights reserved.
One day, towards the end of the first
Intifada, I looked at a newspaper with a picture of Palestinian teenagers
throwing stones at Israeli soldiers across barren wasteland. I thought, “it
takes guts to throw stones at armed soldiers”. That had never occurred to me before,
but it shows how your psychological preconceptions can colour how you look at
things.
I thought afterwards that people must have a good reason, and it wasn’t a
comfortable thought. Eventually, I started reading the New (Israeli)
Historians, which was a painful eye-opener; that it wasn’t the Arabs fault, but
Israel’s, and the determination of most Zionists was to have as much control
over Palestine as possible, even though Palestinians were the majority when
Israelis arrived.
It went on from there through the expulsions
of the Nakbah and 3/67, with lots of violence. Here I am today, lobbying for
JFJFP now, and we are the biggest Jewish peace group with over
2,000 members.
HN:
On your website, there’s an article where you respond to the Financial Times
on the drop in international support for Israel after Operation Protective
Edge in 2014, which killed more Palestinians (over 2200 dead) than all the death
tolls since 1967 combined.
AG:
It’s not surprising. I think most people can understand what
they see, even through the propaganda. Every time an Israeli PM says, “We have no
partner”, and the next day there are more settlement expansions, people wonder what's going on. On top of that, Israel provoked four attacks on Gaza and two Lebanon wars, where it was obvious that most casualties were civilians.
HN: During recent elections, we had two parties—the Likud and
Zionist Union—fighting for dominion in the Knesset. Netanyahu won and is Israel’s
PM for a fourth term. How has the international Jewish community reacted
to this?
AG:
There’s no single reaction, because opinions in the Jewish community are not
monolithic. Some people on the right will be pleased, some on the left are not
pleased at all, and the biggest group in the middle will not know what to
think. The Jewish community has become more polarised. Those on the left are
for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, which is legally
legitimate. Israel is legitimate only within
them, and Palestine has a right to a state within all of Mandate Palestine,
which is a 78/22 split of the land.
HANEUL:
There have been calls to return to the 1967 borders by the international
community…
ARTHUR:
…and by many centrist Zionist Israelis. Though they would like to expand beyond them, it’s not worth it from their point of view because it would make it
difficult for Israel to remain a democratic country and maintain international
support. They realise that these two things are important, but the right-wing
doesn’t, and wants to continue expansion into the occupied territories.
HN:
For you, how much of the right-wing Israeli population helped win the
election? How does the Israeli electoral system work?
AG: It’s a proportional system with a threshold. As long as a party
gets over 3.25 percent of the vote, it can have some Members of Knesset. The votes beyond that threshold are calculated and the proportion of seats allotted.
This is why Israel has always had coalition
governments, because no party could get more than 50 percent of the votes, which
would in turn give them 50 percent of the seats. You can’t say that most of
Israel is right-wing; it’s split equally between the right wing, centre, and
centre-left. The remaining far-left and Palestinian parties are much smaller.
What happened is that a large majority of
right-wing votes went to Likud due to Netanyahu’s cynical ploy in the last days
of the election. Likud became the party with the largest vote with 25 seats;
Zionist Union received 22 or so seats. Ironically, if all of the Israeli-Palestinians
that voted for the United Arab List had voted for the Zionist Union, ZU would
have formed that government, but it didn’t happen that way. I don’t blame them
for wanting their own party, but it goes both ways. The Arab Union has got 15
seats, but one of the unspoken rules in Jewish-Israeli politics is that no
government will form a coalition with Palestinian parties. This is why Israel
is not fully democratic.
HN:
What exactly was the platform of the Zionist Union?
AG: It was for greater redistribution of income from the well off to
the less well off and middle class. Income distribution in Israel is the most
unequal of all OECD countries. This happened over the last ten years as a result
of Likud policies, especially Netanyahu’s.
How would that have gone for the Arabs in
Israel? I’m not sure, because one fact of Israeli life is that Israeli towns
get more resources from the state than Arab ones. There was another part about
negotiating with Palestinians, but not precise. Their leader, [Yitzhak] Herzog
even stated that he wanted to keep hold of the Jordan Valley—but overall, there certainly
is a difference in policies on negotiations between Likud and ZU.
Another aspect of discrimination is between
the Ashkenazi (European) and Mizrahi (North African/Spanish) Jews. They have
always been less well off than the Ashkenazi, even earning less in the same professions.
HN:
The international community is changing its perspectives on
Israel—Sweden recognises Palestine as a state, Spain no longer sells weapons to
Israel, and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats said that he would recognise
Palestine because of Netanyahu’s callous remarks.
AG:
Part of the lobbying I do is to write to his office in order to make that party
policy. I also plan to write to Edward Miliband…and probably to the
Tories. There was a debate in Parliament last November, where the FM, Philip
Hammond, interrupted when his Middle East minister was talking—waffling around.
He stood up and said, “What my colleague means is that the settlements are an
impediment to peace and they are intended to be so”. That was extraordinary to
hear.
HN: The US president, Barack Obama, has changed his point of view on Palestine. If he
lifts the diplomatic shield from Israel, what will result from future meetings in the UNGA?
AG:
It will be a very big and important change. I think that Netanyahu’s ultra-cynicism
by frightening members of the right-wing has given politicians the cover to say
what they’ve wanted to say for years—they want to stop giving Netanyahu
protection in the UN Security Council and start talking seriously about sanctions due to the occupation. Few people really believed that Netanyahu
was willing to negotiate. He says a lot of things, but you can’t believe many of them. The one thing that is certain is that he wants to take over as much of the West Bank as possible without taking too many Palestinians with it. That’s the one constant in his career.
HN:
There’s a massive worldwide movement through the Boycotts, Divestment and
Sanctions campaign, mainly through the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, JFJFP,
and many others. How will this impact Israel’s economy and policy-making in the
future?
AG:
It won’t affect it very much, and it’s just begun. It’s at the pinprick stage.
Regarding pension schemes, there are only three or four of them, but there must
be thousands in the western world. You have even fewer officials ban contracts
from G4S and Veolia, who still work in the Occupied Territories.
However, even if the movement grows, it
won’t impact Israel directly. All it will mean is that an Israeli entrepreneur
or company will have to step in for Veolia or G4S, and that will be difficult.
It would be another warning shot, but a better more direct method is if people stop buying Israeli goods, which we support, as well
as campaign against organisations that support Palestine’s occupation
directly.
The real thing that would hurt Israel
economically is if the EU and US suspended tariff concessions that Israel
receives in trade. That is huge money, and one-third goes to the EU and another
to the US. If those tariffs were suspended, that would bring a heavy cost, and
even Netanyahu couldn’t deny that. However, we lobby for things that are more
feasible—accurate labelling of goods from settlements to help consumers
determine if they want to buy them. We also support the banning of Israeli
goods in the EU on the basis that, because the settlements are illegal, the
EU shouldn’t help them prosper.
HN:
How do you feel about this, coming from a Jewish perspective?
AG:
I would like, just as everyone else in JFJFP, Palestinians, and many, many
other Jewish people, for Israel to become a more normal country. We would like an Israeli government that
accepts that they cannot expand beyond the 1967 borders and accepts a Palestinian
state. Conceding all but 22 percent of their land was a huge compromise for
Palestinians, but they made it. They made it in 1988 and Israel never
reciprocated, but I do believe that it will take pressure from the outside to
achieve this.