RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tens of thousands of protesters were swarming the streets of Tel Aviv on Sunday, calling on all restaurants, bars, and shops to shutter in solidarity. Many did. Highway 4, the major coastal route that runs from the Lebanese border down to the cusp of Gaza, was blocked in several locations by protestors setting tires on fire and confronting the police. The Histadrut, the country’s largest labor union, declared a general strike, which meant closing schools, businesses, and other essential institutions. Outraged, a slew of municipalities declared the strike illegitimate, with mayors threatening to take action against anyone who doesn’t show up for work. Although Histadrut abided by the Labor Court’s order to end the strike by Monday afternoon, the battle lines were drawn: town against town, brother against brother.

What are Israelis fighting about?

It’s a complicated question, but it is best answered, perhaps, by an editorial Sunday morning in Haaretz, the broadsheet beloved by Israel’s elites, accusing Israel’s prime minister of failing to do enough to release the six Israeli hostages executed earlier this week in Rafah. “Hamas may have pulled the trigger,” ran one key sentence, “but it was Netanyahu who sealed their fate.” In this telling, Netanyahu, succumbing to the far-right extremists in his coalition, refused to engage Hamas in fruitful negotiations, sacrificing the lives of the hostages in order to preserve his precarious coalition. This line of argument was also echoed by Barak Ravid, the former Haaretz writer who is now an Axios and CNN contributor as well as a favorite of the Biden administration. “We warned Netanyahu and the cabinet ministers about this exact scenario,” a so-called senior Israeli official told Ravid, “but they wouldn’t listen.”

Never mind that the Israeli government sent delegation after delegation to attempt and negotiate with Hamas. Never mind that it was the terror group, not Netanyahu, who turned down iteration after iteration of any possible deal. And never mind that Netanyahu’s key objection, according to ample leaks from his security cabinet, was Hamas’ demand that Israel relinquish control over the Philadelphi Corridor, the strategically crucial strip that runs along Gaza’s border with Egypt and therefore a key asset for anyone hoping to smuggle in supplies, weapons, and ammunition. All such nuance was lost when the masses took to the streets. There, over the din of the water cannons, the cries were much simpler: Bibi abandoned Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alexader Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi. Bibi must accept any deal, right now, and bring the rest of the hostages home, no matter the cost. And then, Bibi must resign.

There are many great and valid critiques of the prime minister’s conduct this past year. Future inquiry committees, no doubt, will have much to say about any responsibility he might’ve had downplaying warnings about Hamas’ true intentions, as well as his decision to pursue a policy of lulling the terror group with work permits, a decision that proved disastrously misguided. And once the Hamas attack was in full swing, Bibi waged a military campaign that, while often astonishingly successful in achieving very difficult aims, was, according to many critics, far too subdued and unambitious. On the Israeli right, for example, a host of increasingly louder voices, including ex-generals, are arguing that by being much too deferential to American pressure, and by refusing to pursue goals that would provide real deterrence—like seizing and keeping swaths of the strip as a security buffer zone—the prime minister greatly diminished the impact of Israel’s military response. You can scrutinize Bibi from the left, arguing that he failed to do everything he could to follow through on good diplomatic leads. You can attack him from the center, noting his government’s inability to provide adequate services to the hundreds of thousands of Israelis displaced by the war, or to take action to allow these refugees to safely return to their homes. These are all fair and valid points, and a democratic society can and must debate them all urgently and candidly.

That, however, is not what’s currently going on Israel.

The masses in the streets are not abstractions to me. They are my mother and my closest friends, former work colleagues and men and women I’ve served with in the army. I know their heart, and I know that it is bleeding with rage and with a profound sense of sadness for all that was lost. But rage and sadness are dangerous substances, and right now in Israel, these emotions are being manipulated to incite an inflamed mania that, if we’re not careful, may succeed in doing what no Nukhba jihadist could ever achieve and bring Israel down.

To understand how we got here, consider the following two observations.

First, we’ve had incredibly difficult and divisive moments in Israel before. We’ve lived through the sinking of the Irgun’s ship, the Altalena, by the Israeli army in 1948, through massive demonstrations following the botched war in Lebanon in 1982, through the assassination of a prime minister in 1995, and through the forceful removal of 8,600 Israelis from their homes in Gush Katif in 2005. These were all deeply traumatic and violent moments, and all involved bitterly acrimonious accusations on all sides. None, however, inspired either side to announce that life may not go on as usual until its demands were met. How come? For that, we turn to observation No. 2.

Now consider the last 10 years in American public life. Think of the COVID years, and of being told that going to synagogue, say, was strictly forbidden, but that attending a mass rally to protest the killing of George Floyd was virtuous because racism, after all, was also a major public health crisis. Think of college campuses, and of the sniveling little ignoramuses who scurry along with the conviction that if they don’t like a particular policy, no matter how little they may actually know about its intricacies, the logical next step is to occupy a building and demand that they be supplied with vegan meals and healthy snacks. Think of America’s formerly preeminent newspaper firing its editorial staff for printing an op-ed by a U.S. senator suggesting that looters and rioters mustn’t be given free rein to riot and loot, but then printing, with neither qualm nor protest, a piece suggesting that the U.S. Constitution is a dangerous anachronism.

If you understand the damage all of the above have done to America, mazel tov: You now also understand what’s going on in Israel.

It hardly takes a strategic mastermind to understand that American pressure on the Jewish state isn’t limited merely to determining how many smart bombs are delivered and when. Nor, for that matter, does it stop with Tom Nides, the former American ambassador to Jerusalem, admitting openly and giddily that America is happy to intervene in Israel’s domestic politics, because, in flagrant violation of all diplomatic norms and traditions, it believes it can save Israel from itself. The same logic applies everywhere else: Once you’ve set up a large and largely impregnable construct that folds into it major conglomerations, the government, media, academia, and just about every other previously independent institution, you can expect nothing but pressure to conform, by everyone everywhere in every way.

Here’s one jaunty example. Just last week, we heard Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful human beings, admit, in a letter to Congress, that he and his company, Meta, bowed down to pressure by the Biden administration and heavily censored stories and information about everything from COVID-related restrictions to the shady dealings of the president’s son. Now imagine you’re an Israeli startup executive, hoping to sell your company one day soon to Meta or some other giant and enjoy a fabulously lucrative “exit.” You’re patriotic, of course, and brave, and you’ve likely spent large chunks of the last 11 months in reserve duty, maybe even at a great personal cost to your family and your company. But would you support a policy that was absolutely essential to Israel’s security if you knew it also almost certainly meant losing all of your investors or potential buyers?

This, alas, is not really a hypothetical. The story the Israeli protesters are telling themselves—and one that is mightily amplified in American media—is that Israel now has a choice. It can go the way of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Bibi’s two right-wing coalition mates, and descend into hazy messianism that tramples democracy and roars with racist glee. Or it can come to its senses, toss Bibi to the curb, appoint a more serious and less corrupt prime minister, and return the nation to something like respectability. The first path, the story concludes, leads to ruin and international isolation, to mass demonstrations in London and Paris and New York and to all investments drying out. The second path is the way back to the heart of the global, enlightened consensus.

This story, of course, is patently ridiculous. It’s also, in its entirety, an American tale, the grim nightmarish script of the last decade in American politics. Change some of the names and squint just so, and you’ll have no trouble recognizing the very same vibes at play: Trump is a fascist! He attempted a full-blown insurrection against American democracy! His supporters are neo-Nazi thugs! We must replace him before he leads America to the brink of disaster!

It took us a minute, but Americans, hallelujah, are only now realizing just how cynical and hysterical this script had always been, and how aptly it was used to mask terrible crimes against our actual democracy. They also understand, for the most part, that when you ululate with the rest of the choir, what you eventually get is a middling unelected mediocrity like Kamala Harris, because the large and largely impregnable construct we’re up against isn’t interested in candidates or positions or beliefs or ideas—it’s interested in power, its own, and in preserving it fully and forever.

Israelis, or at least many of them, are slower to realizing all of this. Swayed by their dislike of Bibi, they’ve convinced themselves that it is actually the prime minister—and not the superpower limiting their military options or the murderous terrorist group taunting them at every turn—who is public enemy No. 1. And that, for a small country with very big existential threats, is not merely a derangement syndrome you can shake off; it is, instead, a potentially deadly distraction.

Because Israel these days is waking up to the shattering realization that the rosy tales it told itself for decades were false. That there is no such thing as “the peace process with the Palestinians,” if only because a) the scattered family-based tribes who dot Judea and Samaria do not coalesce over any one coherent national consciousness and b) even if they did, coexistence with the Jews next door has never been and will never be on the menu. That America, the object of every Israeli’s infatuation, won’t always be a perpetually reliable ally. And that the world, much as we may crave its approval, remains, as it had always been, at best unmoved by our suffering and, at worst, committed to seeing the Jews as pesky outsiders who must be erased.

Oct. 7 proved, with haunting clarity, just how much Israelis will now have to rethink. To gain real security, to name but one obvious example, Israel can no longer revert back to its whack-a-mole strategy of engaging in limited-scale conflicts with Hamas or Hezbollah every few years only to withdraw, attempt something akin to containment, and face increasingly fortified foes on their terms. To truly deliver a deadly and effective blow to its enemies, Israel will have not only to assassinate its leaders and their enablers—which, in the case of Lebanon, at least, involves a wide swath of the country’s elected officials—but also reclaim and keep key territories, including a permanent return to the Litani River up north and the creation of vast buffer zones in the north and the south alike. It will have to dismantle the murderous and corrupt Palestinian Authority, and enforce some solution that gives Palestinians some autonomy in their daily lives but nothing remotely resembling an armed sovereign nation. And it will have to radically rethink the way it deals with terrorism, including immediately executing the worst perpetrators to eliminate incentives for kidnapping and holding Israeli civilians as bargaining chips.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has been living in the region these past 20 years. But many Israelis, alas, have, even while waking up and going to sleep in Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem, been living elsewhere, in dreams of startups and exits, in low-cost flights to Barcelona and Berlin, in a mental space that promised them that the first six war-torn decades of their national existence were an anomaly and that peace and normal life would now prevail.

It’s hard, even monstrous, to blame anyone for wanting to live without the constant pain of violence and bereavement. But Oct. 7 reminded Israelis, in the most brutal fashion imaginable, that the quasi-normal life they had imagined was now their forever lot was an illusion. Now, they must fight, and in fighting they must also ask themselves what it is that they’re fighting for. The answer cannot merely be survival—those merely struggling to stay alive rarely do for very long. The answer, instead, involves rethinking the nation’s commitments and priorities, its purpose and its powers—the ur-discussion that had informed Zionism from the very moment of its birth.

It’s all the more tragic, then, that instead of having these painful conversations, Israelis are engaging en masse in the most rank American-style lunacy. Slogans like #BringThemHomeNow, for example, demonstrate just how hollow and inflamed Israeli public discourse has become. To whom, exactly, is this exhortation addressed? Surely not to Hamas, the only group with the actual power to release the hostages. Instead, it’s a bombastic bit of emotional manipulation, daring anyone to defy it while at the same time giving cover to political movements with unclear aims and means. Just like Black Lives Matter—and who would ever argue that they don’t?—the Bring Them Home movement in Israel is now an amalgam of anti-Bibi activists who’ve been marching for years under a host of different banners, bolstered by sheer emotionalism that argues for a deal at any cost, even if it means leaving Hamas victorious.

Thankfully, not all Israelis agree with this defeatist madness. In recent days, a post from an unnamed reservist in Gaza has been going viral in Israel for making a very different argument than the one you hear parroted by self-appointed experts on TV or hear shouted in the streets of Tel Aviv. “The Philadelphi Corridor is more important than hostages,” wrote the reservist. “It’s more important than me and my entire battalion, which has been fighting in Gaza since the beginning of the war.” Approximately every 100 meters, he explained, a tunnel passes through the fence, openings used for smuggling massive amounts of contraband. Therefore, the reservist continued, “leaving Philadelphi for one day means a death sentence for thousands more Israelis … Our blood is no less red than the blood of the hostages, although we are ready to sacrifice our lives for the sake of defeating the enemy.” Take a deep breath, the reservist concludes, “and think again about your rhetoric. Now you are on the side of our worst enemy.”

The clashes unfurling all over Israel these days, then, aren’t really about the hostages, or the war, or even about Bibi Netanyahu. They’re more ontological than political, a referendum on how Israelis see the world and their role in it. For those who can’t imagine life outside of the global thicket of governments and corporations and cultural commissars, the chief duty is to return posthaste into alignment with the dictates coming out of Washington. For those who understand that Zionism was always meant to guarantee freedom, not safety, now’s the time to make difficult choices, choices that would almost certainly lead to fresh waves of international condemnations but that would very likely save Israeli lives. But like with every civil war, all we can see now is how it begins, not, alas, how it might end.