Gevalt!
Jews who believe that Judah and Samaria belong to the Jews are now ministers in the new Israeli government. It must be the end of Israeli democracy. The barbarians are at the gate.
The last time we experienced such a carnival of drivel in the Israeli media-sphere was when Menachem Begin was elected prime minister in 1977. Yes, the same Begin who engineered the peace agreement with Egypt, but let’s forget about that for now. How did Begin, the former commander of the Jewish underground against the British occupation of the Holy Land, the fierce opponent of German reparation payments to Israel for what it did to the Jews of Europe, in other words, a hot-headed firebrand, gather the votes to defeat a deeper than deep state of Israeli socialists who controlled everything in Israel from top to bottom? Simple. He enfranchised the disenfranchised. He campaigned in the “south” sides of Israeli cities, and in the south side of the country where most of the Jews from Arab lands had been deposited. They were originally absorbed in Israel after being deprived of their considerable possessions and ejected by the rulers of the Arab nations in which they had resided for hundreds of years, after Israel’s War of Independence. For a year or two or three they lived in tents in refugee camps while a better situation for them could be created. Some managed to move to the large towns in the poorer neighborhoods where there was some manual and menial labor available. Most were relocated to the periphery of Israel, in what were called “development towns.” There they remained, silent, sometimes resentful, but definitely away from the center of power which at the time was in Tel Aviv.
These Jews from Arab lands were more traditional in a religious sense than their European cousins. Begin, who had a soft spot for any fellow Jew, plopped a yarmulke on his head and gave these Jews a voice and became prime minister in 1977. I don’t want to give the impression that Begin was the Messiah of the Jews from North Africa, but they sometimes treated him as such. It was symbolic, and important not just for the dis-enfranchised Jews, but for Israel itself. It needs to be emphasized that David Ben Gurion made the decision to absorb these Jews at a time when Israel was woefully unprepared to do so. After the War of Independence, Israel was a dirt-poor nation. Hence the tent refugee camps. Regardless, huge efforts in the thirty years leading up to Begin’s victory were made to provide decent housing, schooling, and fitful employment for these Jewish refugees. Scarce funds were invested in building schools and factories in the development towns. Progress was made, but the real solution came from other directions.
It was a long-held axiom that the Israeli army would be the great equalizer, the melting pot for Israelis of all backgrounds. It was successful in part, as boot camp and war and reserve duty will unite individuals like nothing else. However, if the melting pot preserves the existing hierarchy, with European Jews on top, then not much has been melted and its efficacy as a unifying force is limited. It was limited, at first. A significant step in the right direction was made when the first non-European chief of staff of the Israeli army was inducted in 1983.
There was another unifying force that picked up where the army left off. Love life. It turns out that in many cases light-skinned Jews were attracted to dark-skinned Jews, and vice-versa. In the early years this was seldom acted upon to the extent of marriage because of parental disapproval from both sides. After a generation or two the dam burst and a new reality set in. Dark skin married light skin and the offspring benefited from the best of both worlds, as did the country at large.
The final equalizer came as a complete surprise. Once the high-tech revolution in Israel got into gear, there was a need for gifted engineers. The fast-moving tech companies searched for talent wherever it was to be found, and it turned out that intellectual excellence was not restricted to Jews of European extraction. Soon there were Jewish CEOs of major companies, high tech and low, who were born in Morocco or Iraq, or whose parents were.
Ethiopean immigration is following the same pattern. It may take longer until there is full integration, but it will arrive. The point being that though the Israeli left and its anti-Zionist allies in the West are ever on the lookout for racism, scouring empty corn-flakes boxes for an abandoned dark flake to present as evidence of apartheid on the evening news, the fact is that within a generation or two, or at most three, all Jews are integrated. Since the Jews from Arab lands had no problem with their Jewish heritage, as they came into positions of power, they brought with them a laid-back, comfortable Judaism that began to encroach upon Israeli society. When these Jews saw Begin put on a yarmulke before he would quote scripture, they knew he was one of them. Except for the highly educated and sophisticated Iraqi Jews, they had no respect for or understanding of Socialism. The socialist Zionists may have built their development towns, but they did not know how to handle themselves with a Jewish prayer book. Some even did not fast on Yom Kippur. What kind of Jews were they?
(Israeli Arabs are a different story for a future post. For now, it is enough to point out that they may be the only homogenous, upwardly mobile Muslim middle class in existence, or to have ever existed except for Lebanon for a few short decades.)
Jewish usurpers, those who remain Jewish at any rate, eventually become the old guard. If they are too extreme, say Shabtai Zvi or Karl Marx, they either remove themselves from the fold or are removed. In house? It’s a bullet train from revolutionary to reactionary. What we are seeing today in Israel with protests against the “extreme” government and protests against judicial reform is the most flagrant, self-absorbed un-embarrassed and unapologetic reactionary eruption imaginable. Brought to you by the liberal and progressive left. It’s a head-scratcher.
Traditional Zionism from the late 19th century and early 20th century was in a sense the Jewish solution to the “Jewish Question.” The Jews were not welcome anywhere in Europe. This was the reality, and this reality was framed by Jew-haters as a problem waiting to be solved, a question waiting for an answer. Wherever the Jews were, every now and then the host populace would decide for some reason that Jewish heads needed to roll and roll they did. Through different degrees of cruelty, from laws directing Jews to live in enclosures within towns (ghettos) to the limiting of the professions open to Jews, up to the slaughter of entire communities, Jews in Europe were a problem to be solved. When the wind of liberty briefly blew through France and Germany, Jews were “emancipated” and allowed to attend and even teach at universities and were allowed to become doctors and lawyers. Many responded by leaving the faith of their forefathers to become more French or more German. Reform Judaism appeared in Germany to create a bridge between those of the Mosaic persuasion and their hosts, by making the Jews of Germany more German than Jews.
A few subsequent incidents of Jew-killing led Jewish thinkers of the day, surrounded as they were by “isms” of all types, and nationalist movements, to propose a national movement for the Jews. Zionism. It had finally become clear that the only safe place for the Jews was in a place of their own. The “emancipation” of the Jews had been for naught. The freer the Jews became, the greater the hatred against them. Until the greatest engineers of Europe, of the entire world, the Germans, built a machine the size of a continent specifically for the purpose of turning Jews into ash. That was their solution to the Jewish problem.
The Jewish solution to the Jewish problem was overtaken by the German solution. The Germans built a more efficient machine. By the time the German machine was running at full power, the Jews were well on their way to establishing a homeland in Israel. Three years after the end of World War Two the Jews would proclaim the establishment of the State of Israel as the national home for the Jewish people. Too late for the products of German efficiency, as ashen flakes spread over the expanse of eastern Europe. Those ashes fertilized everything the European murderers will eat from now to eternity. The Jews they hurried to the crematoriums are now part of their DNA.
The first Zionists wanted to become a people like other peoples. The world does not allow that possibility for Jews as Jews, anywhere. There is an eternal and irrevocable demand of the Jew: Justify your chosen-ness. Prove it. And though it would be easy to dismiss this demand as an archaic though tenacious and on-going appearance of Antisemitism, it can also be seen as a desperate wail of a soul-less World, yearning for the fulfillment of prophecies no longer believed. Why would we assume that there is any substance to this claim? It is because for two thousand years the Jews were downtrodden. Then, as if by miracle, the Jews returned to the Holy Land. It is as simple as that. For two thousand years the downtrodden-ness and helplessness of the Jews was held as Divine proof that the Jews’ covenant with the Creator had been superseded by those professing more enlightened beliefs. What, then, was to be made of the appearance of a Jewish State, in the precise spot where it was prophesized to appear? What is to be made of the world-wide obsessiveness with Israel, if a sinning nation, much less sinning than any of her detractors?
Israel, the Jewish nation, is by definition an in-your-face Nation. The Jews, having escaped total extermination, corralled themselves into a tiny corner of the world, loudly and forcefully claiming that even if it is an actual, physical return to the Zion of yore, it was not a fulfillment of some divine plan that for the most part had been forgotten except once a year at the dinner table on Passover, when at the end of the festive meal all cried: “Next year in Jerusalem!” The last thing the Zionists wanted to claim as justification for Israel’s existence was a God-given right to the land.
The most urgent task for the New Jew and the Gentile world then was to secularize the story. Though most of Israel’s founders at least had a primary school education in Jewish chederim, or religious school, they went out of their way to read the Creator out of this return to Zion. They were aided in that by what seemed to be the great absence of the Creator during the Holocaust. Who could argue that there was an almighty God watching over the Jews at that time? Originally, the Jews defined themselves as the beneficiaries of the Creator’s largess in rescuing them from slavery in Egypt. The Exodus from Egyptian slavery was their mark of distinction, their raison d’etre. This new Exodus was out of the bondage of the ways of the “Old Jew.” In a sense, these Zionists were fighting for the right of Jews to be (as) Gentiles. The idea of Exodus becomes topsy-turvy. If topsy is the old Jew, today represented by the non-Zionist “ultra-orthodox,” (a subject for a different post), then turvy is the new Jew, devoid as can be of all things topsy.
In some ways these Zionists succeeded. Some of their children and grandchildren became so like Gentiles that they didn’t see the need for living as Jews or living as Israelis and they left Israel for dimmer pastures such as Berlin. Who would have thought it possible, descendants of Holocaust survivors waltzing in Wannsee? It is amazing and disturbing to hear some of Israel’s top politicians and cultural personalities make strong statements on issues in which they no longer have an existential stake. Like I said, topsy-turvy.
In the gap between topsy and turvy appear the religious Zionists. They bought into the turvy New Jew’s socialist enterprise, while retaining their obligation to topsy Old Jew’s religion and beliefs. Being between topsy and turvy, they were seen as wishy-washy. In the Jewish game, you choose sides. By trying to sit astride both saddles, the religious Zionists found themselves un-enfranchised. When they did join the governing coalitions, they were thrown a ministry or two, usually the Education Ministry if nothing else. It was considered a minor ministry in Israeli political terms, but for the religious Zionists it was a calling. Thanks to those years controlling the ministry, secular Israeli children were provided a basic Jewish education. Judaism 101.
While disenfranchised, the religious Zionists initiated and have sustained the “Settlement Enterprise.” In doing this, and unwittingly, they committed the primal sin in Israeli politics: over time they enfranchised themselves. It was small-time at first, a Wendy’s to the Topsy’s Macdonald’s and to the Turvy’s Burger King. They did not create it alone. Enough of the Turvies who were governing Israel at the time felt an admiration for the settler’s enthusiasm and pure Zionism, and a nostalgic remembrance of when they too were infused with the will to create new Jewish homesteads, that they provided government funding and military protection to the far-flung outposts. That is a fact: the first settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (sigh) were established with the active support of Labor (leftist) governments. Eventually any remaining leftists who held some sympathy for the settlement movement moved on or passed away, and the leftist political parties moved farther to the left and farther away from relevance.
What is becoming clear is that the religious Zionist ideology is ascendant, is spanning generations, and has the tools to bridge the modern world with observant Judaism. It is also becoming clear that because of its viability, friend and foe alike see it as being on the cusp of disrupting the present power structure in Israel, if not already having done so. At the very least, the religious Zionists are now enfranchised.
It is easy to understand the Israel left’s disappointment with the latest election results: they are out of power. It is just as easy to understand the disappointment of their progressive allies in the West. The Zionist project has been de-secularized. When looking down from the visitor’s gallery in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, yarmulkas are seen in abundance. What next, they ask? Bulldozers on the Temple Mount? Massive expansion of the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria? Maybe so, at some point, some of this or all of this. If these things or similar things happen, it will be because they were encoded in the Zionist idea from the start, regardless of its secularist wrappings. That is because the real encoding of the Jewish DNA happened long before, at the covenant of the parts, between the Creator and Abraham:
Returning to the gallery at the Knesset. Who is looking over the members’ shoulders, and seeing these yarmulkes propagate throughout the chamber? Everyone is. That is fine. Jews under the world’s magnifying glass is nothing new, and whereas the normal work of this parliament is done by a show of hands or pressing an electronic button, there is an election of a higher order going on as seen from the gallery. The first step of the Redemption was for the Jews to return to Zion. The next step, which is gathering momentum now, is the return of Judaism to the Jews. It is as natural a progression as it is inevitable. If you are in the gallery, and look long and hard down at the gathering, with no hate in your heart for Jews, then you will see, or feel, the soul of the Jewish nation turn to you and say: “Brother, hold my beer and watch this.”
Discussion
For my non-Jewish friends. You are my main audience. If what I have conveyed above is true, that Israeli society is becoming more Jewish in a religious sense, and that it will affect Israeli government policy in the future, what are your thoughts?
For the Christians among you, are there any theological implications to all this?
For my Jewish subscribers (particularly the American Jews who I insist belong in Israel), what effect does the prospect of an Israeli leadership orientated towards Heaven have upon you?
For my Arab subscribers, feel free to comment, but know that I am dedicating a post to the relationship between our peoples. That might be a better place to hear your thoughts.
Watching the news this week, after the double terrorist acts on Shabbat, I was astounded to see how oblivious our news reporters are. They are constantly carping about the unenlightened masses who dare to vote for Likud, Shass or the Religious Zionists, yet they are surprised when they are greeted with boos and shouts of "Leftists go home" at the demonstration in Neveh Yaakov. These are the very people they are constantly criticizing for being backwards and unenlightened. How can they be so oblivious?