Journalist Roni Ben-Efrat: Building Israeli Opposition to Occupation

By Janet McMahon

Since the agreement of Meretz bloc members in the cabinet of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to expulsion of 415 Muslim Palestinians on Dec. 17, 1992, the Israeli left has appeared to the outside world as a co-opted monolith. That this perception is not totally accurate was exemplified by Israeli journalist and activist Roni Ben-Efrat on a visit to the United States last summer. Her criticism of the expulsion order and of what she calls the "Zionist left" is made even more trenchant by her rejection of the premises and strategies of the Rabin government, including its Meretz partners.

Key to Ben-Efrat's analysis is her understanding of the concept of "autonomy," the role of the "peace process," and of Rabin's repression of the Palestinians through the deportations and subsequent closure of the occupied territories, still in effect for adult male Palestinians.

Rather than being a way station on the road to Palestinian self-determination, Ben-Efrat argues, autonomy "was designed to ensure continued Israeli control over the land and to deny political and national rights to the Palestinian people."

Rabin's 1993 closure of the occupied territories "draws the map of the autonomy plan for all to see," she declares. "For the first time in history, Jerusalem is off-limits to residents of the occupied territories." This exclusion of Jerusalem has resulted in the creation of four "bantustans": the northern West Bank from Jenin to Ramallah; the southern West Bank from Bethlehem to Hebron; the Gaza Strip; and Jerusalem.

"The partition is intended to prevent any claim for a Palestinian state in the future," Ben-Efrat asserts.

Moreover, she told the Washington Report before the Sept. 13 signing of the PLO-Israeli peace accord, "Israel is not sincere but is actually using the peace process to break the Palestinian leadership, to break the morale of Palestinians in the occupied territories and thus crack the intifada, and to get the Palestinian leadership to agree to this very partial autonomy as the final resolution" of the conflict.

It is essential, Ben-Efrat maintains, that the Israeli peace movement "stop pressuring the Palestinians to accept this scenario." For, should Israel succeed in its goal, it then will be able to establish relations with other Arab countries–and their markets. "This," the Israeli journalist warns, "will be an irreversible act. Then Palestinians will be left alone and no one will really deal with their issue." Autonomy, she emphasizes, does not equal a two-state solution.

Indeed, stresses Ben-Efrat, the accord, "by legitimizing the settlements and the presence of the Israeli army in Gaza and the West Bank to guard these settlements, leaves the source of power in the hands of Israel. Furthermore, the West Bank will become a bridge for Arab-Israeli normalization, thus abandoning the Palestinian people with no strategic Arab hinterland. It is no secret that Israel expects the Palestinians through their recognition of Israel to pave Israel's way into the large Arab market.

"One of the most severe and worrying problems of the agreement," Ben-Efrat continues, "is that it sets the stage for Palestinian-Palestinian internal strife, rather than the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation. Rabin has made it clear to Arafat that he expects the PLO to impose law and order in the Gaza Strip. In Israeli terminology, this means putting down any kind of opposition to autonomy. While Israel is guaranteeing the Palestinians nothing, Arafat will have to establish his reliability each day to go one step further to a widened autonomy in the West Bank."

By allowing the Rabin government to define the nature of the peace process and the role of the opposition, Ben-Efrat says, the "Zionist left" has become part of the problem. The same Meretz bloc that was in active opposition to the Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir has succumbed to Rabin's threats that, if opposition from the left causes Labor to lose power, a Likud government will return and put an end to the peace process. The ironic and tragic result, according to the Israeli peace activist, is that "Labor is more dangerous than Likud to the Palestinians."

"Meretz," Ben-Efrat observes, "joined the government to draw Rabin more and more to the left, but Rabin is drawing them more and more to the right." She describes the expulsion order as "a red light" for the left, which Rabin used to test the degree of opposition from Meretz. The latter's acquiescence to the expulsions gave a "green light" to the Israeli prime minister. Thus the crucial question for the Israeli left, Ben-Efrat believes, is whether or not to support Rabin at all costs, as the lesser of two evils.

The Beginning of Activism

Roni Ben-Efrat was born in 1952 in the village of Kfar Mordechai in central Israel. After graduating from Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1976, she began her career as a teacher. In the late '70s, she became active in the new Israeli feminist movement's struggle for abortion rights.

She describes herself in retrospect as "socially active,'' since feminism at that time "would not relate to the political situation, and therefore could not be relevant." The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon crystallized Ben-Efrat's political activism and her commitment to "a just solution to the ongoing Palestinian tragedy."

Now, after more than a decade of political activism, she believes that "in a state like Israel, you cannot isolate the problem of women and discrimination from a country which is chauvinist and militarist. The issues of women and peace have to go together.''

As part of her new commitment to the peace movement, she began to study Arabic. A few years later, she joined the staff of Hanitzotz Publishing House, with which she still is affiliated, and began reporting on human rights violations in the occupied territories for the left-wing Hebrew biweekly Derech-Hanitzatz.

As a correspondent in the West Bank and Gaza, she "could see the intifada coming," she recalls. In response to its eruption in December 1987, she became a founding member of Women in Black– "the only grassroots movement still standing in the street"–and of Women for Political Prisoners.

"My work as a political activist and journalist was abruptly interrupted in February 1988, Ben-Efrat relates, "when our paper was closed down under administrative law" on charges of having illegal contact with a Palestinian organization, the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DPFLP). Ben-Efrat and five other editors were arrested in April 1988. A Palestinian co-worker was placed in administrative detention, and four of the five arrested Israeli Jewish editors were tried and sentenced to prison. Ben-Efrat received a nine-month term.

Amnesty International and PEN "adopted" the prisoners. In addition to the pressure applied on the Israeli government by these and other human rights organizations, she says, "we also gave the government hell."

Upon her release on Jan. 25, 1989, BenEfrat was faced with the challenge of rebuilding the institutions her government had sought to destroy. At that time, before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf war, the Israeli left was united behind a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Ben-Efrat and her colleagues at Hanitzotz Publishing House decided to publish a Hebrew-language (Etgar) and an English-language (Challenge) magazine to "encompass the peace movement" at home and abroad. As a result of the collapse of the Israeli peace movement during the Gulf war, however, only Challenge, with subscribers in the U. S., Israel and Europe, now is being published.

While the "Zionist left's" failure to stand up to Rabin enabled him to expel over 400 Palestinians–"the first such mass expulsions in [the] non-wartime history of Israel"–the expulsions also resulted in what Ben-Efrat describes in a recent Challenge article (Vol. IV, No. 2) as "a new kind of coalition."

"Two conditions had to be met," she writes. "It had to be a coalition of Jews and Arabs," and it "had to deliver a new message: we won't support Rabin at any price. "

The resulting Arab-Jewish Committee Against the Expulsions (AJCAD) brought together for the first time Israeli leftists and Islamic activists. Notes Ben-Efrat, "Rabin ironically provided us with this means of acquaintance and understanding."

AJCAD's first project to protest the expulsions was the establishment of its own "Protest Camp" directly opposite the prime minister's office, which served as a focal point for opposition to the expulsions and as a gathering place for the wives and children of the expellees.

Another project in which Ben-Efrat is active is the creation of a "Mothers' School" in the Galilean village of Majd El Krum, where Palestinian women can resume their education, often interrupted at a young age, and thereby be better able to help their children with their own schooling.

Ben-Efrat believes that, like white South Africans, most Israelis won't accept change until they have to. In order to hasten and promote this change, she urges the Israeli left to build Jewish-Arab organizations and to work' with Arabs inside Israel.

Are Israelis really listening to activists like Roni Ben-Efrat, who has demonstrated by personal example her willingness to go to jail rather than be swept along by the hard-liners within both the Likud and Labor parties? One who is listening is her own son, a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces. Like many Israeli soldiers, he does not object to serving in the army, but is not willing to oppress others. He recently was jailed for 56 days for refusing to serve in the Israeli-occupied territories.