Sultan Knish
If you read the headlines, the biggest issue in Israel isn't Iran's
nuclear program or Syria's chemical weapons falling into the hands of
Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood; it's how to draft Haredim, widely
referred to as Ultra-Orthodox Jews, into the army.
Until recently, the Israeli left was feverishly complaining about the
surplus of Religious Nationalist Jews in the army and the threat of
religious fanaticism. Now it's back to complaining that there aren't
enough Ultra-Orthodox religious fanatics in the army, after spending
last year complaining that the ones in the army were too fanatical and
the ones on buses were even worse.
Religious Nationalists in the army are a problem, because many of them
are patriots and not too enthusiastic about giving up land to
terrorists. The Ultra-Orthodox don't care about the country or how much
land it has, which makes them ideal recruits from the left's point of
view. Unfortunately, they don't actually want to join the army.
The left's ideal recruit doesn't care about the country and mechanically
follows orders to ethnically cleanse Jewish towns and villages. But,
unfortunately, that ideal recruit would rather be playing guitar in Tel
Aviv or studying the Talmud in Jerusalem than patrolling the frontier
and fighting terrorists. The leftist sons and daughters of the idle rich
want to protest at checkpoints in between parties, not serve at them,
and, while Haredim will mechanically follow orders, those orders won't
come from the military, its political generals or an activist Supreme
Court.
No one really wants Haredim in the military all that much, but it's
fashionable to suggest that they aren't pulling their weight. Which
indeed they aren't; but neither is much of the country.
The left rants about the money going to Haredi children out of one side
of its mouth, while the other side screams that the children of African
migrant workers should be allowed to remain in the country and given
full benefits. Leftist tabloids act disgusted when Haredim send out
children in yellow stars to protest but have no similar compunction
about using Holocaust analogies and iconography when protesting against
the deportation of migrant workers.
And let's not forget the Muslim sector. Israeli Arabs form 20 percent of the country, but consume 52 percent of
its social benefits. It would be illegal to call them parasites, the
way that Haredim are often called parasites. An election commercial
showing a mob of Muslims clinging to the legs of an Israeli voter
pleading for more money would result in criminal charges. But a similar
commercial featuring Haredim was filmed and broadcast by a prominent
leftist third party, the son of whose scion is now also aspiring to
major third party status on the same program of social justice and
Haredi-bashing.
But so long as Haredim don't serve, they are a useful political weapon
in a country where everyone is justly convinced that they are being
screwed over by powerful interests. Men in black hats and beards are
alien enough to be a useful target, and their isolation has allowed them
fill the traditional role of the Jew in exile as a scapegoat for
national frustrations.
The Haredim are expected to stay in their ghettos, for the same reason
that Jews were kept there. The ghettos create a permanent scapegoat
while the few ways out require assimilation. And that system suits both
those running the ghettos and the state. It's the middle ground of
change that would allow Haredim to participate in public life without
losing who they are that both sides fear and restrict.
The Israeli left has never known any political mechanism besides
"divide-and-conquer" politics and it set up the very divisions that it
agitates against, enshrining Arab and Haredi political separatism from
the start, assigning different levels of benefits for different
immigrant groups and then stirring up social protests against the
monopolies that its crony capitalism put into place.
The left agitates against Haredi benefits, but it set up a system where
the Haredim would do nothing but vote in exchange for benefits, in the
same way that it set up a similar system for the Arab sector. It
complains about oligarchs, when the left is structured as an oligarchy
funded and manned by the well-connected and the wealthy. It complains
about settlements, when it derives most of its foreign funding on a
pledge to fight them. If the so-called settlements went away, a lot of
the professional left would suddenly have to find real jobs.
The Israeli left, like its international counterparts, is an elitist
movement clinging to the myth of an egalitarian past. It spreads hate
and suspicion because it knows that a united electorate would never pick
it. And it plays on issues that it only pretends to care about to feed
national resentments while promising a better way.
According to the left, Israel has no peace because of the settlers and
has no fair distribution of benefits because of the Haredim. The Mizrahi
members of its lists will tell their communities that the Russians are
stealing the benefits that should be theirs. The Russian members of its
lists will tell their communities that the Orthodox Jews are stealing
their benefits. The Arabs on the list will tell their communities that
the Jews are stealing all their benefits (but not vice versa as that
would be illegal.)
Everyone will troop out for a social protest overseen by the left's
NGO's with money that it solicited from foreign donors on a promise to
fight settlements, but after a week or two, there will be a Muslim
terrorist attack which will interrupt the momentum of the social
protest, and the organizers will fold up their expensive tents, bought
with money from the European Union and American leftists, and do the
same thing all over again next month.
The Israeli left has become a pathetic and degenerate creature that
feeds on this sort of hate. It rarely identifies itself in elections
anymore, camouflaging its parties as centrist and mainstream. Its social
protests may be stage-managed by the sort of people who parade around
with red shirts and Palestinian flags in their real protests, but the
social protests are masked as centrist protests, exploiting people with
real grievances so that the grievance-makers may once again take power.
In the long run, the Haredim are needed in the workforce and the
military, but getting them there would require changing the system,
rather than the system that relies on them politically using them as
scapegoats when politically convenient.
The National Unity Government came together and split not over the
Haredi draft, but its cynical use as a political football in the game of
coalitions that defines Israel's political life. No one really wants to
draft the Haredim, but no one, besides the Haredim, wants to appear not
to want to draft them either. Haredi service, unlike food and apartment
prices, is a stable grievance commodity. A political party that
promises to draft them has its hand on the brass ring of Israeli
grievance politics.
Israel's fragmented immigrant cultures, its political system of ethnic
and religious parties, that represent groups rather than neighborhoods,
make this sort of game all too easy to play. Every faction and group
breaks down into myriad splinter groups and divisions, all of them
animated by a fervent belief that they are getting the short end of the
stick. Even its political parties consist of microscopic coalitions
welded together by a few influential figures for temporary periods of
time.
All that chaos can temporarily coalesce together in the face of a
crisis, but the crisis is usually a war. Iran's nuclear program and the
threat of nuclear annihilation haven't done it yet. Instead a temporary
unity government between Likud and Kadima was built on both sides
playing the other over the Haredi draft in a display of incredible
political cynicism.
But there is psychological safety in ignoring real problems. Bashing
Haredim on the dole is easy; but doing the same thing to the Muslims,
who don't report income or pay taxes, is dangerous because it comes too
close to a real national problem. Going on about your children being
shot at because of the settlers (who nevertheless are a dominant
presence in the military) is safe, but talking about the destructive
political interests that ceded portions of the West Bank and Gaza to
Islamic terrorists is a dangerous topic. Like the Muslim benefits topic,
it's dangerously close to being illegal because it deals with an actual
grave national problem.
Israel's existential problems have to be ignored because solving them is
too difficult and requires challenging the entire system of authority
and its embedded assumptions. Internal warfare is safer than fighting
external enemies, in the way that all family squabbles are safer than
pushing back against the outside world. The Schorim, the Ultra-Orthodox
black sheep, are the safest target because they are unfamiliar enough to
be alien, but close enough to still be family.
The New Middle East of friendly Muslim neighbor states turned out to be a
mirage. Now Israel has a choice: it can either deal with the reality of
its place in an eternally hostile region or it can deny that reality by
fighting more civil wars while ignoring the foe at its gates.
Having a large military is not useful in and of itself. Not if it is as
badly equipped and prepared as it was in the Second Lebanon War. Not if
the political leadership allows American pressure to tie its hands
behind its back, as during the Yom Kippur War. And not if the soldiers
and officers have been chosen for their willingness to obey orders from
the Supreme Court, rather than an awareness that they are fighting for
their land and their people's survival.
Israel's true war does not require a draft, so much as a determination
to face the future, because at some point the red line will be reached
and its enemies will make a final bid for its destruction. That war will
depend less on the number of men that Israel can put in the field and
more on its willingness to fight for its survival.
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