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rather than remain in our separate factions and let Bibi and his tycoon buddies carve up the
country and disassemble our Zionist institutions while we argue.

Current status of the struggle against the land reform

The scary thing is that we have met with tremendous initial success; following two months of
intensive lobbying, court cases, rallies, and media attention, we just succeed in the first round
against Bibi’s land reform. Last Wednesday (July 22), Bibi chose to withdraw his land reform
proposal from the Knesset floor, to avoid the embarrassment of it being voted down. This buys
him time to try to garner support before he submits it to the Knesset again. Stated mildly, Bibi’s
pissed off – he’s now threatening to fire MKs from his own party and punish others in his
coalition who went against him on this reform.

Why is it scary to be successful in politics? We now face the danger of getting carried away and
starting to think that politics is the only way to succeed in our attempts to change Israeli society.
However, we are trying to be careful to stay true to ourselves through this process – we, the blue
shirt movements, are educational movements, not political movements. We struggle to change
society by reaching people through meaningful long-term educational processes. We educate
towards equality, self-determination, and respect in every sector of Israeli society and in the
Diaspora. The political gains we have just experienced can only happen when a constituency
exists that cares about Zionist ideals and the Zionist revolution. As Labor MK Shelly Yechimovich
stated, “This [was] a rare instance of values defeating politics.” Only people who have undergone a
real Zionist educational process, at some point in their lives, will not respond with indifference or
derision when you talk to them about a century of collecting pennies from the Jewish masses.
Only a true connection to the Jewish People would move someone to keep fighting for the Jewish
People’s desire to create a moral society of our own after two thousand years of being expelled
from countless countries that we had prospered and flourished in during the generations before
the expulsion. When a society is driven by capitalist ideology, each man is out for himself, and the
rules of society are such that you don’t mind getting stepped on, and you don’t mind stepping on
others, as part of the game everyone’s playing to make their millions at any cost. The more this
ideology is entrenched in society, the more a coalition like ours will fall on deaf ears. Israeli
society and the Jewish communities in the Diaspora need the educational revolution we bring just
as much (or more) as the political gains we just achieved, as without this education our political
gains become fleeting and empty.

Inspired by a conversation with Eilam Gal, a founding member of the Coalition against Land Privatization
in Israel, July 2009