The Organization for
Democratic Action
(Da'am in Arabic)
From Challenge
# 77 January-February 2003
The ODA (Organization for Democratic Action) is
campaigning for election to the 16th
Knesset.
At the head of the list stands Asma Agbarieh, 29. Born and raised in Jaffa,
Agbarieh is a graduate of Tel Aviv University (B.A. in Philosophy and Arabic).
She is a community leader in Jaffa and editor of al-Sabar (our sister
publication in Arabic). Agbarieh also heads the Legal Aid Department of WAC
(the Workers Advice Center).
In the second position stands Nir Nader, 37, of Tel Aviv. He is a graduate of
Camera Obscura, a film school. Nader has been a conscientious objector since
the Lebanon War of 1982. He is the coordinator of Video ‘48 and the editor of
Etgar, our sister publication in Hebrew.
These two represent the two main sectors in which the ODA seeks voters: the
Arab working class and the Israeli Left. Agbarieh and Nader have been taking
part in numerous election rallies and group sessions. The latter take place in
the living rooms of ODA supporters, Arab and Jewish. (Such meetings are called
“home gatherings”.) The issues under discussion are subtle and complicated. We
spoke with Agbarieh and Nader in order to hear how people respond to their
ideas.
Asma Agbarieh
Interviewed by Dani Ben Simhon
The ODA campaigned in the last two Knesset
elections, 1996 and 1999. What’s different this time?
We direct ourselves to workers as workers. When we ask
them to organize a home dialogue, we begin by explaining: “We aren’t
interested in you because of your family connections, or as members of an
ethnic group or religion. We don’t approach you as Palestinians per se. We
address you in your capacity as workers. Before we widen the circle of our
audience, we want to talk with you.”
This approach surprises them. Who in the world ever talked to them this way?
As part of the Palestinian national movement, Arab politics always remained
within the bounds of national identity. A crucial fact was forgotten: most of
the Arab population in Israel belongs to the working class. The problems that
this group has in the area of work and labor rights have never been on the
agenda of the Arab leadership. Through us, this is changing.
How do they respond to this angle?
It astonishes them, because they’ve never thought of themselves in terms of
class, rather as part of a clan, then of the national group. Suddenly here we
are, offering a new basis for identity and organization. We look on them as
partners for an idea, part of the team. We don’t ask them just to bring votes
to the polls, their families for instance. We ask them first to understand and
be convinced. “We are sitting with you,” we say, “and not with your family
head, because we believe in a workers’ party that’s open to all on the basis
of trust and common principles, and not on the basis of family or religious
ties. It’s the same in the party as on a building site, where people from
different backgrounds are organized together.” A young worker from Um al-Fahem,
an engineer by training, said to us, “That’s a great idea. Where have you been
all these years?”
Between idea and action, there is of course a gap. After our first meeting
with the workers, we ask them to continue the campaign in their village: to
pass out brochures, to put up posters and to organize election rallies. That’s
the hard part for them, because then they have to cope with questions from
their families and the community. They have to persuade them that there is a
need for building a workers’ party.
What questions, for instance?
I can put the questions into three categories.
The first: What’s the point in voting at all? Ever since the elections for
prime minister in February 2002 (when only 18% of eligible Arab voters went to
the polls –Ed.), there has been a growing trend to boycott the elections. We
say: “Rather than not vote, why not support a party that really represents
what you believe and want, especially when it comes to unemployment? If you
intend to boycott the elections in any case, you should at least give us a
chance, because you have seen us in action, and this is a way to strengthen
the gains we have made together so far.”
The second question that comes up in all the home gatherings is that of
“wasting votes.” We explain to the workers that in the coming elections, we
can’t guarantee that we’ll draw the 40,000 or more votes that are needed to
enter the Knesset. Now many of the people we talk to work in construction.
They work in teams. We point out that just as they are able to put up a
building through teamwork, so they can form a huge team of workers to change
their social situation. They accept the analogy.
We tell them it’s important to be realistic. They need to understand that
we’re still in the building phase. When you want to build a strong, high
building, you need a solid foundation.
The third question concerns the other Arab parties. Here the answer is easy.
The other parties have done themselves so much discredit in the last decade
that when someone mentions the party he voted for last time, the others argue
with him, asking, “What have they done for you?”
For instance, in one of the home gatherings, a worker said: “I was born with
the letter vov on my forehead (the letter on the ballot of Hadash –
Ed.), and that’s how I’ve voted till now. In the coming elections I didn’t
want to vote at all. Hadash controls my village council, but it doesn’t do a
thing. The streets are full of potholes, sewage flows in them, and nothing
happens. The party members only worry about the ones close to them.”
We have an advantage here, in that most of the participants know WAC
(the Workers Advice Center), in which many of our members are active. They
know that by strengthening us they will strengthen themselves. We see this in
the financial contributions at the end of each home gathering.
How optimistic are you?
We’re not in the clouds. We know we’re in a phase of
building. Big impediments stand before us. The Arab street, at least the part
of it with any integrity, is fed up with politics and politicians who lie and
do nothing. There’s an enormous camp of opportunists, people who buy and sell
votes. It’s no secret that elections in the Arab sector are corrupt. A clan
head goes to the polling station with a hundred identity cards and votes for
his entire family. Somebody pays him for those votes, whether in money or
favors.
Arab workers need to see a change, but what do they see? A
corrupt Arab world with no real workers’ organizations. The Palestinian cause
in tatters. And the wider world? Big capital running amok, with no restraint
from the side of the workers. We know all this, and within this reality we are
doing our part towards organizing the Arab working class. We stress positive
developments, like the rise in the number of conscientious objectors or the
worldwide movement against globalization. Will we succeed? To some degree,
yes. But our success will also depend on developments within the Left beyond
our little corner of the Middle East.
Nir Nader
Interviewed by Michal Freedman
How does the Israeli public respond to the ODA
campaign?
Our work has begun to bear fruit, partly because of initiatives we’ve taken,
partly because of broader political and social processes. We’ve invested
effort in the Israeli street during the last few years, and the public has
begun to show interest. I’ll give examples. In October 2000 we resumed the
publication of Etgar in Hebrew. We’d stopped it after the Gulf War of
1991. The Israeli Left was in thrall to the American program for a new Middle
East. The first Intifada had awakened it, but the Oslo agreement put it back
to sleep. Seven years later came the second Intifada, and that’s when the new
Etgar made its debut. It was the only leftist journal in Hebrew. We
publish it in coordination with Challenge, which is going into its
thirteenth year, and the Arabic al-Sabar. It has a growing list of
subscribers. It’s gathered a team of volunteers who take part in the writing,
editing and graphics, and who then go out and sell it – for example, at
demonstrations. Through it our positions have entered the dialogue among the
radical public. We cover a lot of issues: conscientious objectors, the
campaign against globalization, the Palestinian arena, the Arab world, Islamic
fundamentalism and the fundamentalism of the White House. For many long
months, we were a lone voice in the Israeli media against America’s war
mongering.
We’ve also been doing a lot of community work in Jaffa, and this has attracted
volunteers in art and education. They come to see how we work with the kids,
and they’ve become interested in our angle of vision. We’ve become known as an
organization that doesn’t just sit back and analyze reality but goes out and
works in the field day to day.
You mentioned broader political and social
processes. What do you have in mind?
The Intifada of October 2000 reshuffled the deck. The political arena changed.
From 1993 until then, the Israeli Left had hitched its wagon to the Labor
Party, which followed the Oslo line. The Left stood behind the Oslo Accords
and the PA (Palestinian Authority – MF). Then came the Intifada and the
fall of Barak. Labor entered a unity government with Sharon. This amounted to
an admission that Oslo had collapsed and that the PA was no longer a partner.
The entire Left, including Meretz and Hadash, suddenly found themselves
without a program, without an alternative agenda.
Many people shifted to the right, but some refused to buy the notion that the
war against the Palestinians was a war of “no choice”. These included the
conscientious objectors. They were ostracized from the rest of the society,
but they took their stand. They’ve gone to military prison for repeated terms,
but not only that: they’ve had to confront the chauvinism and racism of most
Israelis toward the Palestinians. Their refusal is the most effective method
available today to combat the Occupation.
There’s also the economic crisis. Leftists are concerned about the deepening
poverty. They see unemployment reaching deep into the middle class. They are
paying more attention to our analyses concerning the twofold roots of the
crisis: world capitalism and the Occupation. Our success in placing Arab
construction workers lends the ODA credibility: we don’t just talk about
fighting for workers’ rights, we go out and do it. We say to our listeners,
“If you are serious come and join us.”
How are you waging the campaign?
We have a team writing position papers in Hebrew and
Arabic. Our official status as a party gets us ten minutes of national
television on each of the three Israeli channels. With the help of Video ‘48
and other volunteers, we’ve filmed a one-minute segment in Hebrew and Arabic,
which will be broadcast thirty times. Our election jingle will also be
bi-lingual. It’s based on the letter kuf, which those who vote for us will put
in the ballot box. The jingle goes kol ha-matzpoon (“the voice of
conscience”), qu’ah li’lumal (“power to the workers”).
What do you discuss at the home gatherings?
I usually give a short introduction explaining the dead end in which the
country finds itself politically and economically. I say that Israel adopted,
from the first, a colonialist attitude toward the Palestinian people and the
Arab world, with a double standard smelling of racism. The Left also had that
attitude. Now we see where it’s led, and the choice is clear: do we go toward
a new kind of Oslo agreement or something different?
In the economic sphere, Israel adopted the rules of the free market. Here too
the Left kept quiet, maybe because most of its members belong to the upper
middle class. But when the world economy declined, Israel was among the first
casualties: its only real economic growth in the nineties came from high-tech.
We’ve met some of the high-tech “refugees” at the home gatherings. We talk
with them about capitalism as a system that has failed to meet the needs of
humanity. We talk about the anti-globalization movement. We point out that the
ODA sees itself as part of that. Our approach is not at all strange to
leftists in the rest of the world, but here it strikes people as an
innovation, because the Israeli Left was always pro-American. Much of it still
is. That’s why our stand against Bush’s war with Iraq raises eyebrows here.
The most important thing differentiating us is our alliance with the Arab
workers. To Israeli Jews at the home gatherings, we offer a whole different
way of seeing things: we look through the eyes of the most
discriminated-against population in the country. We also offer them a chance
to join our community work in the Arab cities and villages. This attracts
people who are looking for something they can do, something concrete. Even if
we don’t make it into the Knesset this time, I’m sure lots of them will be
joining us in our work.
What sorts of questions do people ask?
For example, why we work so much with the Arab population. As middle-class
Jews, usually Ashkenazi, they find it hard to connect with the work we do
among Arab laborers. The group we are addressing on the Jewish street has no
contact with Arabs in everyday life. Many find it easier to identify with the
foreign workers, because all they need to do is empathize. When it comes to
Arabs, the question takes on a political hue. It carries the whole burden of
the conflict.
We answer that there has to be an immediate turn toward understanding the
oppression and the hardship in the lives of the Arabs, that we have to work
together with the Arabs to build a common platform uniting political and
economic issues – otherwise, there will never be peace. The Arabs in Israel
have a deep distrust for the Jews. This is justified, since the establishment
has implemented racist policies from the beginning. All the “co-existence
projects” have failed, because they were based on Arab acceptance of Israel’s
superiority. We hold that there can’t be co-existence without equality. We
call on Israeli Jews to correct the inequality as a step toward building the
foundation for a normal life.
Another question that comes up at every meeting with Jewish Left is why not
vote for Hadash: it also works among both populations. This question leads to
a second: Isn’t it a waste to vote for us? Hadash will get enough ballots to
cross the threshold, but the ODA might not this time.
Now the fact is, many of our members used to be in Hadash.
We took part in its committees and institutions until 1992. But Hadash
supported the Rabin government and Oslo. After Rabin’s death, it supported all
of Labor’s candidates for prime minister. Because of that, Hadash could no
longer claim to represent the opposition to the US and the Zionist
establishment. In the present election campaign, this tendency has only
increased: Fearing failure if it goes alone, Hadash has made an alliance with
Ahmed Tibi, whose political loyalties are very dubious. (See article, p. 10.)
It has nothing left that can be called progressive. By voting Hadash, we say,
you are wasting your vote. By voting ODA, you are helping build an
alternative.
We also stress that our election campaign is one arena out
of many. The Knesset is important, but it’s not the only place to be
effective. The Left has become accustomed to being part of the regime, so it
thinks exclusively in terms of government. That’s why it adopted the fatal
formula of voting for the “lesser evil”. The ODA believes it is time to roll
up our sleeves and build a new alternative from the bottom up, even if this
takes years. n
