Visiting scholar of The Shalom Institute and Sydney Jewish Writers Festival guest author
Dr Yoaz Hendel arrives next week from Israel. As Chairman of the Institute for
Zionist Strategies he is dramatically rethinking the political discourse in
Israel and shattering typical stereotypes about right-wing and left-wing. In
these difficult times, he brings some fresh, new ideas to a stalemated conflict.
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| Dr Yoaz Hendel |
TimesofIsrael.com wrote about the journalist, commentator,
analyst, author and former Director of Communications for Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. Excerpts of the article are below.
Yoaz Hendel is undoubtedly a right-winger, having served as
an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and today chairing the
Institute for Zionist Strategies, a right-leaning think-tank. His interest, the
overarching theme of his voluminous writing and commentary, is Israel itself,
its many identities, social fractures and shared future.
Left-wingers, he believes, are too quick to surrender
both their particularism and self-criticism; right-wingers are too eager to
cling to unexamined tropes and unthinking maximalist positions. The Jewish
people’s future as a nation will depend on Israeli society’s ability to resist
these centrifugal forces pulling it apart.
“Jewish kingdoms have a tendency to collapse not from
external pressure but from internal pressure,” he told The Times of Israel in a
recent conversation. “The second Jewish kingdom [under the Hasmoneans] stood
for 80 years.” Israel, he notes, is already 65.
Hendel is one of the most active and visible of Israel’s
political journalists. He is a ubiquitous presence in Israeli media. He may be
the most widely-read right-wing voice in the country.
“Yoaz has an influential and unique voice in Israeli
mainstream media, a voice that is not heard that often,” says Yaakov Katz, a
former Jerusalem Post military
correspondent who co-authored a book on the Iranian nuclear crisis with Hendel.
Slim, talkative and earnest, Hendel doesn’t seem to fit his
resume. He served for years as an elite Flotilla 13 naval commando, and then
for several years in undisclosed operational roles in the defense
establishment. He holds the rank of major in the IDF reserves. He rarely adds
the appellation “Dr.” to his name, so his readers are unaware that he holds a
PhD in Hellenistic and Roman-era guerrilla warfare and intelligence gathering,
including in the militaries of the Hasmonean Jewish kings commemorated on
Hanukkah. And he rarely speaks of his service at the prime minister’s side, a
relationship that imploded after Hendel turned to prosecutors over sexual
harassment allegedly perpetrated by a member of the prime minister’s inner
circle against a subordinate, an act that led to the sacking of the senior
official — and a falling out between Hendel and Netanyahu’s closest aides.
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| Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu with Dr Yoaz Hendel |
His latest passion, which he tackles with the same energy
evident in his military record and his media presence, is the Jerusalem-based
Institute for Zionist Strategies. Since taking over as chairman in May 2012,
Yoaz has shifted its focus to a complex, assertive effort at undermining the
assumptions of Israel’s current political debate.
“If there’s one thing
you need to know about Yoaz, it’s that he breaks up monopolies,” an influential
journalist said of him recently. “He wants to break up the religious monopoly
of the rabbinate, the left’s monopoly on human rights, the right’s monopoly on
Zionism.”
It’s a comment that summarizes succinctly Hendel’s political
mission.
“The IZS tries to turn the State of Israel into both a more
Jewish and a more democratic country,” Hendel explains, riffing off the common
assertion that there is a tension between the two.
“We’re unflinchingly nationalistic. We have no doubts about
our identity, even in a world that doubts the right of a Jewish state to be
Jewish,” Hendel says.
“We believe the state was born primarily to be a home for
the Jewish people, but at the same time we strive to make it more democratic.”
Democracy is not optional, he insists. “Jews have never
lived in peace with each other without an external law.” Democracy is that set
of rules required for Jews to live together.
“The Zionist movement
can’t be built on the denial of the other. My purpose isn’t just to teach the
world [Israel’s side of the story], but to teach the Israeli as well, to teach
parts of the left that not every statement that ‘smells’ nationalistic signals
the end of democracy, and to teach the right that a national identity can’t be
built on hate.”
One of Hendel’s first major steps when he took over the
chairmanship of the institute was to establish “Blue and White Human Rights,” a
group of self-identified right-wing activists who perform actions usually
considered the sole purview of the far left, such as standing at roadblocks in
the West Bank to ensure that IDF soldiers perform their duties according to the
rules of the army, Israeli law and international norms.
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| The right -wing Blue and White Human Rights group monitors IDF soldiers at roadblocks. |
The left’s “monopoly
on human rights” has been damaging for Israel because it has given credence to
the idea, not least on the right itself, that the right is somehow less
responsible for or less interested in human rights, he argues.
We say that morality doesn’t belong to anyone. If anything,
morality is on our side more than theirs, because some of the human rights
organizations use human rights discourse for political ends, to oppose Israel’s
existence. We deal with human rights without making them dependent on narrow
politics.”
Most observers of Israeli politics believe the Israeli right
is a triumphant political force that has ruled the country for the better part
of the last two decades and faces a fractured, confused opponent on the left. But Hendel refuses to celebrate. The right, he argues, has failed Israel. Its electoral victories
are not a function of its political message. In fact, he worries, the Israeli right barely has a political message.
As he seeks to break the left’s monopoly on human rights,
Hendel devotes perhaps even more effort to liberating what he calls the
“paralyzed” discourse on the right when it comes to the Palestinians.
The abysmal electoral failure of the left over the past two
decades has created a strange mirror effect on the right. Since the right appears to be unable to lose an election, “it feels no
need to speak to the mainstream or the center.”
“I don’t want to see
Likud fail to form the government” in an upcoming election, Hendel insists,
“but I also want Likud to stay in the Israeli mainstream. Without the liberal
nationalist voice, without the appeal to the Israeli mainstream, which is
patriotic but liberal, wants peace but understands its limits, Likud will turn
into Jewish Home,” its more hawkish coalition partner.
“Unlike others on the
right, I think the status quo is damaging to Israel. We have to start finding
our own answers as to how things should develop.” Instead, he says, the right
has allowed itself to be dragged along by events.
Don't miss Dr Yoaz
Hendel in person at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival at Shalom College,
UNSW.
- Secrets and Lies with
Prisoner X author Rafael Epstein and Michaela Kalowksi on Saturday 23
August from 7:30pm.
- Israel: Dreams,
Observations,Visions with Helen Gottstein, Michael Kagan
and Dr Hilton Immerman on Sunday 24 August from 11:15am-12:15pm.
- Spinning Israel's
story with Bloodline author Alan Gold, Debbie Whitmont and
Yair Miller.
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