A dear man has left us. If there is a gap between us, he was the bridge. His endless contrasts were our whole. Mizrahim and Ashkenazim. Leftists and rightists. Arabs and Jews. Charlie Beaton was the most Israeli that might be, and yet, he did not fit any mold, any stereotype, any stigma. They say regarding these, one of a kind. one of its kind. And I’ll add: they don’t make these anymore.
Did not sit on any pattern. Charlie Beaton, photo: Kimchi Moti
A local Robin Hood
At that famous meeting, he was not. The one with the “they’re not nice” ones. But when you think of the Panthers, you think of him first. He didn’t want to be nice, and he didn’t follow the path that his biography told him: Mizrahi, son of Love who was a member of the Harut movement. But Charlie Beaton was a real rebel without intending to rebel at all. A local Robin Hood, he would steal bottles of milk and discarded goods from factories, and distribute them to needy families. “A social worker without certificates,” his wife once said of him. He was a simple humanist with the scent of the past, a humanist whose plight of others brought him out of his peace.
A local Robin Hood. Charlie Beaton, photo: Gil Ohion-Contact
He never identified as a communist, but found himself in Hadash. He was shaped in his adulthood as an authentic social leftist. A true socialist from below, not an armchair socialist, of the humanities faculty, of gallery talks, of symposia at the Tsava club. A man who nevertheless came from a social struggle , confronted the regime, got into trouble with the law, then came to the Knesset and shouted: I’m a stray cat.
So how did he not roll into Likud, branches, neighborhoods? How did he not jump on the speeding locomotive established by Shamir and Begin, the one that opened up politics to the periphery and neighborhoods, and that created competitive and democratic channels of progress that brought regarding the great social revolution and raised the political and class status of the eastern middle class?
From left to right: Knesset members Avraham Ravitz, Geula Cohen. The 12th Knesset, photo: Sahar Yaakov
Because he willingly stayed with those left behind. And he also saw, socially, how he causes bigger problems for the establishment precisely on the left. The bourgeois Mapai was afraid of Charlie, which Marx knew as the Histadrut and party establishment never dreamed of knowing. And he did not like what Shas was doing, which he once called a “cork” blocking the liberation of the Mizrahim.
A boundary breaking idealist
And there was this thing: belief in peace, in dialogue between nations, in partnership. He was one of the first to go to meet Arafat – as a Knesset member. I think it was before it was prohibited by law. He was not naive, he was simply a boundary-breaking idealist – and that was his role. A fact that later he recognized the futility of negotiations with that generation of Palestinian leadership. He got sober before getting sober and moving to the right was in fashion. Then he also recognized Deri’s value, which had changed.
But he too has changed. Charlie Beaton never stopped learning and shaping himself in the face of reality. He was not anti-establishment for anti-establishment’s sake; He simply worked ahead of his time – both in daring, both in hopes – and in disappointments. And even though he was always there before us, you never heard him say “I told you so”. He was not interested in being right. He was already busy with the next thing. Of blessed memory.
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