Photo by Oren Ziv / Active Stills
When Daphni Leef says that we are talking about homes and Bibi is talking about real estate, when teachers who oppose the latest reform say that education is not a business, when physicians are calling out to save the future of public health care, they are all calling to remove public services from the jurisdictional realm of business logic.
In the face of the Israeli instinct to stop talking, protest, and most of all, to stop thinking as long as the canons are firing, the leaders of the protest and its participants are trying to establish an equation that grants the same level of importance to the social-economic situation and that of the state of security. The official placards of the silent march declared: Prime Minister, you are responsible for welfare, health services, education and also security. This is a new and important position in the public discourse, but it remains within the same old debate – what is more important, security or welfare – while continuing to keep them separate.
As Pierre Bourdieu taught us, debates over priority setting within the boundaries of the current field only fortify its existing borders and predominant perceptions. In order to break through the boundaries of the debate, it is imperative to revisit the (relatively forgotten) work of a groundbreaking woman, Jane Adams, a sociologist, social activist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who worked in the city of Chicago in the 1920s.
One of Adams’ brilliant observations was the distinction between the logic of warfare, which linked to men’s life experience has characterized male thinking and practice, and the logic of welfare linked to the life experience of women, which correspondingly has characterized female thinking and practice (it is important to note that these definitions derive from existing gender practices and divisions, and not from an essentialized division between female and male nature).
Adams’ insightful connection, relevant to our times, is between the logic of war and economics, and the logic of (male) politics prevalent in the public sphere. As in war, business is conducted in order to achieve victories, to defeat competitors, to identify opportunities for action, and the like. As in business/war, male politics deals with battles and struggles: one fights unemployment by forcing people to take unsuitable jobs through the Wisconsin Program; one fights violence through police violence. Now, under the pretense of the protest, politicians want to continue fighting – fighting inefficiency and market concentration, among other things with the help of the continued war against organized labor and the sacrifice of many workers on the altar of lowering prices; fighting bureaucracy through the monstrous Building Committees Law (Law on Planning for the Expedition of Residential Construction) and sacrifice of the public interest.
The Israeli discourse is so solidly locked into the economic/military perspective, that it interprets every failure as the result of insufficient fighting. The Minister of Finance, Yuval Steinitz, is constantly enlarging the hammer that will be used to burst the real estate bubble, the Knesset is occupied with the passage of increasingly violent laws as part of the war against violence, and every education minister tries to fundamentally reform this miserable, reform-battered system. If we adopt Adams’ logic, we can see that the problem is that economic/military logic is not relevant for most (if not all) realms of our lives.
Adams points out that most of the public sphere is, essentially, an extension of the private sphere -of the home economy. Sanitation, education, health, construction, care of the elderly – all of these and more are realms that in the past were managed by the family, through women applying a logic of welfare. Therefore, the failure of the large American cities (of her day) was not the result of improper business/military management, but rather, due to the application of an economic/war logic to life realms that should be subject to the (female) logic of welfare.
In many sense, the present protest, and particularly, the calls against privatization of public services, apply a similar logic to that of Adams. When Daphni Leef says in the (second) protest that we are talking about homes, while Bibi is talking about real estate, when teachers opposed to the latest Ministry of Education reform say that education is not a business, when doctors cry out for the rescue of public health care, they are essentially calling for the removal of public services from the jurisdictional realm of business logic.
Years of privatization have proven the failure of economic/competitive logic in the provision of public services. Now, a chain of economic crises is also proving the failure of this logic in ensuring economic stability. The present protest is rooted in this understanding, and it points to these failures in a manner that is clear and important.
The recent security events must lead us to draw the connection lacking in the discourse, between economic logic and the logic of war, and to take another step forward. The time has come to point out the failure of this logic in ensuring both the personal and national security of the human collective that shares this geographic space. The time has come to recognize the fact that all of the wars that we are waging here: the war against drugs and poverty, alongside the war against terror and the war on public opinion, have failed and are sentenced to failure, not because we did not fight hard enough, but because the military/economic logic does not work. It does not succeed in bringing personal security and welfare either to the citizens of Israel or to the Palestinians. Like the neo-liberal economy, it continually enters repeat-loops of crisis, in which the participants in the game try to benefit, while most of the population loses.
In conclusion, and against all those who say that we tried to make peace but it didn’t work, I suggest rethinking all of the attempts made to establish “peace” agreements, that were born out of this same problematic thinking. Our leaders set out for Oslo, Camp David, and dozens of other ineffective forums not in order to identify the solution that would lead to maximal welfare for the greatest number of people who share the same geographic area. The Israeli and Palestinian leaders set out to achieve gains “for their peoples” while striving for a minimum number of concessions.
In other words, the peace agreements were conducted like business negotiations in which each party tries to maximize profit at the expense of the other (and mainly in which one large and aggressive corporation tries to impose its will on the other). How can one reach a peace agreement and shared life when the guiding logic aspires to gains made at the other’s expense?
A transition to welfare-thinking is not simple, nor is it entirely clear. It will have to entail a rethinking of all of the most fundamental assumptions of both present and desired perceptions of reality of both parties. Perhaps it will necessitate and lead to the replacement of war generals with people, and in particular, women, from civil society. Meanwhile, it is possible to try it out on the last security crisis, and instead of aspiring to restore the Israeli military’s power of deterrence, it will aim to restore normality and personal security to residents of the south of Israel and of Gaza. It is interesting what would happen were this the goal of the region’s leaders.
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Guy Shani is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.
This article was first published in the Hebrew website Haoketz