Travelling is never easy, thats the fun of it. When you don’t speak French and you are driving thousands of miles through Francophone West Africa in a fairly banged-out right-hand drive Ford Fiesta, the challenges that face you multiply. Luckily for myself and any other linguistically inept summer travellers, football is the universal language of the moment, there to get you a bit further along the journey with a quick succession of match-long friends.

Whilst yelling ‘Le Coupe Du Monde’ with a bit of cheer works as a great way to disarm even the toughest-looking of foreign officials, the best ice-breaker in the World Cup traveller’s arsenal is the cycle of naming teams or players in a slightly foreign accent untill both you and the local you are talking to come to an agreement about who exactly you will base your conversation on, and then exchanging sponteneous, barely informed judgements upon them through a combination of grunting and thumb-led indicators. The high number of World Cup players in the English Leagues also works as a great invitation to any local with ‘small, small English’ to engage the English traveller into a more lengthy conversation about our football – this is a great way to make a local friend of any age if they have the English.

These conversations may not help you get particularly ‘up close and personal’ with the native psyche, but they do serve as an easy mode for cultural comparison: a group of locals and a television is a potential learning curve for many a curious nomad. Some locals might have invited you into their homes to watch the next game or you may have heard the blare of vuvuzelas from a shop-owner’s set and decide to join them and often many of their only semi-employed friends huddled round a tiny set. It often feels as if the World Cup Song is a rallying cry of invitation to warm the heart of a weary nomad wherever he is. (It is also pretty unavoidable playing in nearly every TV or radio advert – and ringing as many African’s ringtone.)

Just as some travellers have used the world cup as an invitation to explore Africa itself, I think it is safe to say that every traveller all over the world, from any competing nation, and all those not, have reaped the benefits of using the World Cup as a tool in their travels. Whatever you think of globalisation, this ‘pro’ of making a global citizen is without flaw; it’s just a shame that it doesn’t happen every time I decide to go abroad.

Published on Thursday 8th July 2010 (here). Part of Geoff Kidder’s World Cup Blog 2010.

The strategy, it appears, is to politicise young people by giving them the ‘opportunities’ and ‘skills’ to help them speak. A workshop led by Professor Stephen Coleman of the University of Leeds was focused on moving participants’ understanding of politics beyond shallow opinions of it as an external process, towards politics as a form of internal expression about the world they want to live in – to help young people ‘find their voice’. Meanwhile, in a section called ‘Words Count’ a talented mix of rappers and poets expressed their disillusionment with current politics and attempted to validate their personal lifestyles and identities.

This personalised ‘politics’, however, is not worthy of the name. The repetitive celebration of individuated youthful expression resulted in an apolitical event whereby ‘young people’ spoke, but had very little interesting to say. As two participants, Billy Shields and Kieran Jordan noted, ‘90% of the weekend seems to have nothing to do with politics’. Like standing on the shore and shouting into the sea, young people – much to their own surprise – expressed their opinions, although directed at no-one in particular and met with no reply, no discussion, no challenge and no debate. In Professor Coleman’s observation, ‘“Counted?” is not participatory in terms of the public sphere of politics’. And I am inclined to agree with him. In effect, this is Politics 101 without engagement – a pretty pointless exercise.

Whilst the oldies moan that us young’uns don’t do politics anymore, I find myself moaning that the only thing on offer for those who at least want to try is patronising congratulations for ‘having a go’. If events like ‘Counted?’ continue to pass for youthful politics, that subaltern voice will stay subaltern, turned off and uninspired; As was displayed in their performances, their contributions will remain atomised and self-involved.

Whilst ‘Counted?’ hopes to be giving young people the opportunities and skills to contribute to our political system, if their contributions are not met with fierce challenge from the outset, how can they possibly be equipped to grow up robust in the face of problems that face them in the future?

There is a lot to be done to put some life back into politics. This is the task those coming to the political system have to deal with: the only way to do it is to learn by doing, not by practising doing or feeling able to do, but by actually doing. It is high time that we start considering political education as more than just public speaking classes. After all, there is only the fate of humanity at stake.

More information about the weekend’s events is available on the website.  The documentary film Counted, which accompanies the project is playing in London’s County Hall Debating Chamber until 22 May 2010.

Published on 20th April 2010 (here).

Today, it is all too easy to call yourself a ‘politically engaged person’ and to walk around without a care for the fact that a general election is on its way with no sense of a contradiction. The televised cross-party debates are set – not that anyone is looking forward to watching them – and the papers are publishing daily pre-electoral polls – not that anyone is at all inspired by any of the three horses in the race.

It appears evident that the coming UK election lacks the excitement or intensity of last year’s stateside whirlwind. Without even the pretence of a British Obama it is tempting to write off mainstream politics as irrelevant, and take a ‘none of the above’ position; this would achieve nothing beyond feeding a pervasive anti-political cynicism.

For those of us who believe that both politics and ideas matter there appear to be few alternative channels for our democratic energies without naively voting purely for the sake of it. But it is exactly because we have no simple outlet to voice our frustrations that finding new ways of intervening in public discussion is paramount. The fact is: this election, more than any since 1997, is a crucially important turning-point which will see the biggest influx of new MPs in living memory. 2010 will change the game and bring ‘a new breed’ to power; for this reason cynically rejecting the election as a meaningless charade will just not do.

Whilst the highest hopes of some is for a hung parliament – to keep the Tories out or to at least dethrone New Labour – in effect, this is a call in support of slow stagnation. It is time for an outlook revitalised by prospect of progress and democracy’s capacity to bring about social change; look at the coming ballot papers as an opportunity for voters to make history, rather than just observe it.

To this ends, the Institute of Ideas will be holding a Pre-Election Summit - The Battle for Politics – on 20th March in the hope that we can move the discussion away from cynicism of events on the political stage and into finding new ideas that we can support. We would love you to join us.

Published on 11th March 2010 (here). Creative Commons License (see original publication for details)

Defense Minister Ehud Barak was quoted on Thursday as saying he does not view Iran as a threat to Israel’s existence, a view that would seem to depart from Israeli statements of the recent past …“Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel.”

I am reminded of an article in Prospect just as valid as the day it was written:

Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran’s warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions of the Pasdaran revolutionary guards, inevitably described as “elite,” who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war, but who have actually fought only one—against Iraq, which they lost. As for Iran’s claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last year’s affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went the other way, with roughly 25 per cent of the best-trained men dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the once rumbustious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire.

Defense Minister Barak’s moments of sanity should be an example to all . To quote a President, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”.

memories of a land far, far away

whilst listening to:

back home

where the party is at

what could be better…

A Tel Avivian Street Artist questions Netanyahu's Intentions at Election time playing on Austin Powers imagery

To sum up the last few weeks of Israeli Politics: when there are no ideas at stake, politics is a simple power-sharing game – contemporary Israel is a living testimony to widening divide between the cowardly ruling oligarchic elite and the populace in Western societies. It should come as no surprise then that the election without policy discussion resulted in a popularity contest without a winner.

Israeli President, Shimon Peres, has given Likud leader Bibi Netanyahu an extra two weeks to form a coalition having been unable to do so for just over a month. Having tried to entice Livni’s Kadima into a National-Unity Coalition, give the election ‘kingmaker’ (Lieberman) a seat as future Foreign Minister and sorting out how to get around the fact that a right-wing coalition would actually want to be right-wing and would collapse the instant that pragmatism was brought into decision-making Netnayahu has had a hard time recently.

Whilst more commentators than I dare to list (or link to) concluded from the Israeli Elections that Israel had sided with the right, in reality this doesn’t appear to be true. The real result of the 2009 Israeli Election was that the public chose no-one.

Recent events quite aptly reflect this.

• One State Solution – A single, bi-national state federal and democratic, secular and pluralistic to both Jewish and Palestinian Citizens
• Two/Bi- State Solution – Two Seperate States; one Jewish, one Palestinian. Palestinian Territories in Gaza and the West Bank unite under the new Palestinian State.
• Three/Tri-State Solution – One Jewish State in Israel, One Palestinian State in the West Bank and another in Gaza.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy have published an evaluation of ’solutions’ worth reading. You can find it here.

After the First Lebanon Invasion of the 1980’s, the Israeli left grew popular bolstered by the Avoda (Labor) Party and pressure group, Peace Now, favoring a Two State Solution to the problem of the Israeli-Palestinian Split. This position fast became adopted across all parties and platforms as they started to converge on the centre of Israeli Politics. In fact, all but the extremists (on both left and right) are resistent to the idea of a seperate Palestinian State.

This Two-State Solution is effectively in action in all but name – Israel’s ‘border’ checkpoints have been built to last and there are significant efforts to provide Palestinians their own source of governance through Palestinian Authority (PA) which will hold elections later this year. Furthermore, with former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, spearheading the Quartet’s (US, UN, EU and Russia) mission to help prepare the Palestinian People for Statehood it is not unfair to note that every country in the world has a Foreign Policy set towards the Israei-Arab Conflict aimed towards the creation of ‘Two States for Two People’. Despite all of this, it is a legitimate question to ask why, despite all this action, there is not yet an independent Palestinian State?

A Two State Solution's unsolved problem: how to carve up Jerusalem?

The consensus upon a Two State Solution has been a long process ongoing since the 1980s. Attempts to enforce its doctrine through the Oslo Accords and the Camp David Peace Talks in 1994 and 2000 have stalled. Recent attempts to revive the ‘Roadmap’ towards a peace agreement, specifically through Arab-endorsed talks in Annapolis in November 2007 have been as yet unfruitful. The effect of all this inaction is that a generation of Israelis and Palestinians have grown up believing peace to be unachievable, the domestic political rhetoric of old is rejected as useless. Politics in both communities has been disconnected from the prospect of change, electorates are disengaged, scaremongering and escalating fear is the dominant means of understanding relations between Israelis and Arabs – as seen in fear of a genocidal Iran and claims of Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza.

The cumulative effect is a change in the direction of policy. It is within this context that a One State Solution has been suggested as a genuine alternative to circular negotiations and stalled talks. It is with the above in mind that the following article is worth consideration. Writing eloquently in the New York Times Libyan Leader Muammar Qaddafi has put his intellectual weight behind a One State Solution in the International Community:

…everywhere one looks, among the speeches and the desperate diplomacy, there is no real way forward. A just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible, but it lies in the history of the people of this conflicted land, and not in the tired rhetoric of partition and two-state solutions.

Although it’s hard to realize after the horrors we’ve just witnessed, the state of war between the Jews and Palestinians has not always existed. In fact, many of the divisions between Jews and Palestinians are recent ones…

This seemingly fresh take on the situation is worth investigation (I SERIOUSLY RECOMMEND READING QADDAFI’S WHOLE ARTICLE!). The current of his thought is worth watching, and worth endorsing.

Theodore Herzl on the Streets of Tel Aviv. Translation: "don't want, fuck off"

From the Dreyfus Affair of Theodore Herzl’s time up to the anti-Jewish sentiment on display at protests against Israel’s recent Operation ‘Cast Lead’ in Gaza across the world, Zionists fatalistically claim that the problem of prejudice against Jews has always existed and therefore it can be assumed that it will always exist.

The eternalisation of the problem of anti-Semitism is the Zionism’s reason for being: ‘if I cannot live as a Jew safely anywhere in the world then I must have a nation where I can be safe, a Jewish Nation is needed.’ Thus Zionism’s political identity is born from seeing itself as a victim to the uncontrolable, unstoppable prejudice of the world around it. Israel, a state ordained by the UN, is a direct product of sympathy for the victims of Holocaust in Europe.

Using this context, a recent study by political psychologist Daniel Bar-Tal, written about in Ha’aretz argues that:

“Israeli Jews’ consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering. The fighting in Gaza dashed the little hope Bar-Tal had left – that this public would exchange the drums of war for the cooing of doves.”

As such, the recent electoral rise of Yisrael Beitaynu’s (Israel Out Home) Avigdor Lieberman on the anti-arab position “no loyalty, no citizenship’ becomes understandable, as does the country’s doommogering about the prospect of a Nuclear Iran.

Likewise, on the other side, there is an Arab tendency to cite the ‘Jewish Conspiracy’ controlling everything from American Foreign Policy to Starbucks is rife and dangerous. Claims of Israeli Ethnic Cleansing of it’s parallel Palestinian population seen in the ‘Nakbah’ (disaster), the War from 1948-9 which resulted in the State of Israel’s creation, and in recent actions in Gaza are instrumental in drumming up fear and incite action across the pan-Arab world.

Faced with these claims to victimhood on all sides it is important to keep a level head, something Daniel Bar-Tal fears is a virtue threatened by the psychological effect of Israel’s seeing existential threats around every corner.

For outsiders to the whole affair it is also important to treat all claims of imminent doom – on both the Israeli and Arab sides – with cynicism. The worth of Critical Enquiry – as Edward Luttwark has made clear in his questioning of why a position on the Middle East is considered important in any country’s Foreign Policy protfolio – is essential in any reading of Israeli-Arab Relations past, present and future.

When you get to the polling station and there are 33 small slips of paper, each containing the abbreviation of a different party’s name, a last-minute personal crisis about whether to vote for the party you thought you were going to vote for is understandable. And that was a dilemma that faced many of Israel’s 5.2 million voters on Tuesday.

The big-name traditional parties – the right-wing Likud party led by charismatic Bibi Netanyahu, the governing party Kadima (meaning ‘forward’) headed by inexperienced but eager Tzipi Livni, and Ehud Barak’s long-standing, tough-talking Labour Party – have been badmouthing each other through the nation’s media outlets from the moment that Operation Cast Lead in Gaza came to an end. Meanwhile, a plethora of ‘Google parties’ (parties so small that in order to find out who they are you have to Google them) and ‘poodle parties’ (those old favourites that everyone knows and that will probably join the government coalition irrelevant of who wins), have been praying they will benefit from the fallout of inter-party temper tantrums. Such is the nature of Israel’s peculiar proportional representation electoral system, the real test of how the country voted does not come from the election itself but from the 42-day period of negotiation afterwards in which a governing coalition of parties is formed.

In ‘the briefest and most nonchalant electoral season Israel has ever experienced’ (1), interrupted by a war and slap-bang in the middle of the most promising talks to date for the release of the kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, this election has been characterised by bouts of pre-pubescent bickering. Each of the major candidates has tried to sell him or herself as ‘not the other guy’ in their inescapable advertising campaigns. Kadima’s stickers read, ‘Bibi? I don’t believe him’, while Likud’s reply is ‘It’s out of her league’ (a reference to Kadima’s female leader, Livni) (2). Labour’s campaign slogan, ‘At the right moment, Barak’, pictured all three of the major candidates in order to play on voter’s insecurities about the other prime ministerial potentials.

The end result was an election campaign devoid of policy, but filled with personality. ‘When it comes to the Israel agenda, war and peace conquers all’, Gil Hoffman of the Jerusalem Post told me. And in this field, reputation, a leader’s clear-headed and stalwart attitude, is the only hallmark a candidate can offer; the ‘security and defence’ card has been played a great deal in the battle between Labour and Likud candidates in particular. Add to this the fact Israel has not had a cross-candidate public debate in over a decade, and you can see why deciphering the ideological positions of those asking for one’s vote is tough work.

‘I tried to find out what all the parties stood for, but I still don’t know. None of them really speaks to me so I am not voting’, said a 20-year-old Tel Avivian. She wasn’t the only one who was confused. Just four days before the election, polls revealed that 29 per cent of respondents were undecided on how to vote – and over half of these were under 25 (3). Having already factored this indecisiveness into their campaigns, Kadima used the rhetoric of Obama’s US victory to try to snatch young votes, pushing a ‘Believni’ campaign and upping the presence of its activists on the streets right until polls closed at 10pm on Tuesday night.

The influence of American politics was also clear in the rhetoric of the ‘king-maker’ of this election, Avigdor Lieberman, founder of the right-wing, anti-Arab party Yisrael Bietaynu (Israel Our Home). Under the slogan ‘No Loyalty, No Citizenship’, and waging a diplomatic civil war against non-Zionist Arab members of the Knesset, he claimed: ‘What we are suggesting is no different to the pledge of allegiance to the American flag.’ (4) Fanning mistrust amongst Jewish Israelis against their Arab neighbours, Lieberman has proved controversial. He has also won many hearts and minds, however, especially in school mock elections around the country. Perhaps, for new and future voters, 15 years of stalled ‘peace talks’ have made a martyr of any hope that there will be a satisfying settlement with the Palestinians or with Israel’s own Arab population (5).

To those on the left, the idea of a ‘Biberman’ right-wing coalition – between ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu and Lieberman – is a fate worse than death. ‘Lieberman is a fascist’, said Noam Lekath, a 20-year-old working with Amnesty International. The same sentiment has been articulated by many others I’ve spoken to, including political commentators and volunteer activists for the Israeli Communist Party, Hadash, and the Israeli left-wing platform, Meretz.

So, what now? Livni, having gained the highest number of seats according to both exit polls released last night and provisional results released at 7am on Wednesday morning, will be given the chance to form a governing coalition; but she will need to mediate some heated internal party feuds as well as trying to win political support from other parties. From the opposition benches, Netanyahu would try to plot Livni’s failure in the next 42 days, offering a right-wing majority of between six and eight seats the chance to hold out and form a coalition of its own, ‘leading Israel how it should be run’. The race may have reached the finish line, but it certainly isn’t over yet; and even after a governing coalition is formed, will it survive the full four-year term?

Joel Cohen is a former spiked intern and is currently on a UJIA gap year programme in Israel.

Published on 12th February 2009 (here). © spiked