War Diary: How the Netanyahu gov't's absolute power renders current protests pointless - opinion
The reality is that the silent majority of Israelis have either been neutralized by the government’s published justifications of the war or are not prepared to face the consequences of their inaction
A demonstrator uses a megaphone as people protest for a ceasefire agreement, near the US Consulate in Tel Aviv, in 2024.(photo credit: STOYAN NENOV/REUTERS)ByMORDECHAI BECK
A midrash relating to the Book of Esther tells us that when king Achashverus took off his ring, after hanging his prime minister Haman, and bestowing it on Mordechai, thus transferring power to him, he did something more meaningful and effective than 60 prophets were able to do with all their prophecies during the era of Elijah (Eicha Raba 4:25). Which is another way of saying that the sages of old recognized the fact that secular power can, and often does, outweigh all the good intentions of religious leaders, even if they are prophets. It does not mean that the secular powers are right, merely that their decisions are often more decisive than those of their spiritual contemporaries. You might say that the sages’ observation was more realistic than those of the spiritual leaders. They understood how mundane political power could limit that of other claims to decision-making in the public sphere.
I think of this wise saying when standing alongside my many fellow protesters, who oppose this government’s refusal to negotiate a deal with the evil hordes in Gaza who have kidnapped hundreds of Israelis and others. The slow process of releasing these defenseless people has resulted in more than 50 of them still being held in horrendous conditions, underground in the tunnels that were built especially for this purpose, and for the most part in total darkness, where those who are still alive are fed with starvation rations. As I join my fellow protesters listening to speeches describing the horrors of this entombment and the government’s defiance in not striking a deal, I am reminded strongly of this rabbinical saying and wonder why we are protesting at all when it is obvious that the secular powers have the upper hand in this situation and that nothing is going to loosen their hands from their fragile coalition (they have 61 out of 120 seats in the current Knesset). Perhaps, as retired general Yitzhak Brick has written, protesters need to be in their millions, not in their hundreds of thousands, before they can make a real impact. The reality is that the silent majority of Israelis have either been neutralized by the government’s published justifications of the war or are not prepared to face the consequences of their inaction.
The paradox here is that the secular powers in charge of running the war are exploiting their so-called religious caucuses who have joined the extreme right-wing government to keep Mr. Netanyahu and his acolytes in power. These minor religious parties have supported the government for two separate reasons. The Religious Zionists, led by fanatic right-wingers Messrs. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, are using the Likud-led government to fulfill their messianic dreams of a goy-free state. The Torah observant parties (so-called haredi Jews) back the government, all the while funding their archaic educational system and allowing their mature students to avoid army service, even though they are desperately needed. Both parties continuously threaten to leave the government and thus cause its downfall. But, of course, neither will take such drastic action while they are having their way and collecting their necessary funding. This situation has led to the current impasse, which even the mighty arm of the United States seems powerless to fix. Maybe Netanyahu is concerned with his image not only for now but for future historians when they evaluate his long term of office. For this reason, he desperately needs some way of showing that he is victorious. But in the meantime hundreds of Palestinians of all ages, not to mention the young Israeli soldiers, are paying the price with their lives for his obtuseness.
This is all the more galling when more and more evidence shows that at the very beginning of the war, Hamas was willing to swap the hostages for their own men locked up in Israeli jails, but Mr. Netanyahu thought otherwise. Moreover, his much vaunted claim that that he could, and will, defeat Hamas is daily betrayed by the facts on the ground, or even under the ground. The army has recently released figures to show that a mere third of the huge network of tunnels built by Hamas have been destroyed, strongly suggesting that Bibi’s hoped for “complete victory” is way off the mark.
Ultra-Orthodox children hold makeshift gallows as part of a protest against the haredi draft, in Jerusalem in 2024. (credit: RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS)
The haredi paradigm
A good friend of mine, Rabbi Jeremy Rosen, just published the following note regarding the Israeli branch of the haredi community. He writes of “a huge swathe of haredi opinion that rejects the use of the term “milchemet mitzvah” [“religious war”] to describe wars today.” This justifies their refusal to allow their army-age sons (forget about their daughters!) to join the Israel Defense Forces. He goes on to describe how this situation has developed:
“This is an emotional issue because the haredi world, almost annihilated by the Holocaust, was so determined to rebuild itself and recreate a community of thousands of dedicated scholars at almost any cost. But the scenes of haredi hooligans abusing soldiers who may be risking their lives to protect them, or supporting the army in wartime, are shocking. This simply reflects the extent to which a whole community has been utterly spoiled and indulged. Many of the older generation of leaders have been so traumatized by the Holocaust that they are still mired in a mindset that has long lost its moral authority. I pray and hope that the mood change we have seen within the haredi community in the aftermath of the October 7 war will be the start of a new era.”
Rabbi Rosen’s optimism is infectious, although how exactly it is to come to fruition is difficult to understand. The haredi members of the government, for example, have no justification for sitting in the Knesset, let alone being part of the government. They do not believe in the Zionist state, nor in any of the trappings that go with the state. Only when it comes to receiving huge dollops of money to support their medieval system of education do they line up to shake the coffers of the state they disavow.
Against this it must be said that the secular opposition within Israel is at a loss to present a viable alternative. One of the central issues of today, even while war is waging, is the status of non-haredi, regular education. In his classic tale “The Sermon,” Haim Hazaz, an early exponent of modern Hebrew literature, has a kibbutz member say, “When a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist.” This, in a nutshell, is the paradoxical situation in contemporary Israel. Is military might alongside hi-tech excellence in a whole range of areas a substitute for the moral perfection and spiritual purity that traditional Judaism always sought? Can we find a balance between a liberal democratic modern state and a meaningful and joyful tradition steeped in our profound and marvelous texts?
Down on the farm
For the past few months, I have been volunteering to help the farmers around the Gaza Strip gather their harvests. Many of the farmers and their families have still not returned to their destroyed domiciles, while most of their foreign workers from Thailand, India, etc., have ceased coming, and the work they have been doing has been neglected. Thus every week, a bus load of us intrepid pensioners, in the main, haul ourselves out of bed at an unearthly hour to take a trip to one of the many agriculture settlements to pick or pack or weed or sort the various fruits and vegetables that need to be prepared for markets in Israel and abroad. We are sponsored by Leket, a food recovery organization with branches throughout the country. Ours is a small group out of a total of some 50,000 volunteers from across Israel who offer this help weekly.
This past month we visited Netiv Ha’asara, a moshav that is situated 100 meters from the border with Gaza. By the way, a moshav is a group of individual farmers, as opposed to a kibbutz, where the members’ life and livelihood are shared. Netiv Ha’asara is a beautiful settlement, its walls decorated with signs and motifs extolling peace. Each house is individually planned in a variety of stylish designs. Yechezkel, one of the older members of the moshav, took us around the farm (after we had spent hours thinning out the strawberry patches) and explained to us what happened on the fateful day of October 7, 2023.
“We knew something was about to happen,” he told us. “For days, we heard banging and other noises from across the fence. We told the army to prepare for something, but the army dismissed our fears. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ they said. Then on the morning which was both Shabbat and Simchat Torah, we heard knocking on our door. I thought it was our grandchildren who live next door to us, but my wife held me back and told me in no uncertain terms not to open the door. She was right. What had happened was that failing to get through our settlement’s sturdy fence, the Hamas people had used hang gliders to cross over the fence and land inside the settlement. When they failed to enter our houses, they began to shoot at anyone they saw. A neighbor’s wife and child were walking outside, and one of the terrorists shot them dead just for the sake of shooting them. It was terrible. All told, 17 of our people were killed that way, indiscriminately. Luckily for us, we have a small defense group who were able to repel the attacks, but only after they had killed so many of us.”
Again we heard – as we had heard a number of times in these settlements – of the army’s lack of preparedness and indifference to the warnings that they had received. October 7 has become an ominous day in the history of our state, and in many ways it stands as a reminder of what has gone wrong and continues to go wrong. This is the day that has changed us forever.
It is with great despair to report that few, if any, members of the current government have seen it necessary to visit these homes, destroyed by this government’s negligence, let alone arrogance. But as we say in our daily prayers: “He humbles the haughty and raises the lowly, freeing captives and redeeming those in need...” .■
