Checking in on the national camp

Peeling back layers of delusion to reveal more delusion

Every so often we have to talk about what’s up on the Israeli Right. To briefly recap, they are criminals, they are trashy, they are criminals, they are spiritually Palestinian, they are criminals, they are criminals, they are criminals, they are criminals. I could go on, but this blog is such a downer. Why not say something positive for once? Yair Ansbacher is the perfect antidote to the parade of lowlifes, freaks and race-baiting grifters who make up the bulk of the ‘national camp.’ He’s special forces, and a legitimate war hero who, like Yair Golan, rushed in to liberate the kibbutzim on October 7th, but also a man of intellect, with a not-fake PhD in military theory. He speaks fluent English, is hooked up with the Kohelet Forum, and he’s white. When he’s not being a war hero, he doesn’t just talk like a gaylord, he does legit stuff like founding military academies and whatnot. He’s the modern-day incarnation of the marriage of brains and heroism that built this country out of scrubland and marsh, but a man of the Right with a kippah and five kids. In short, if you still dream of a new elite taking power and steering Israel to a new era of greatness, instead of ever metastasizing kakistocracy, Yair is your man. He’s popular too. This video got 116k views, equivalent to 4 million for a US audience.¹

Right now, though, Dr Ansbacher is super pissed. His case is simple: Bibi promised ‘absolute victory’ and the ‘destruction of Hamas’ and instead he signed up to, well, no-one really knows, but not that. Hamas are not even in theory committed to disarming. The question of whether to accept the Trump plan pits those on the Right who are committed to their ideals of territorial maximalism and security through overwhelming force and who meet the minimum threshold of intelligence to know when they are being sold a pup against those on the Right who will agree to anything, sell anything and defend anything that Bibi says because they are human garbage. Unfortunately for the former, there are a lot more of the latter than there are of them because that’s what happens when you build a political base composed of human garbage. Duh! So, as I say, Dr. Ansbacher is not happy. Here he is practically crying:

Lol. Anyway, today I want to look a bit closer at another interview he did recently. What I found interesting about it is he explicitly calls out a genre of Right-Wing slop in which soldiers blow up a building while sending encouraging messages, or quoting a pasuk, or dancing to subhuman techno music or whatever. He doesn’t object to this on a moral or aesthetic level (he says it’s ‘very nice’), but he points out that this performative sadism serves to pump up an audience of cretins while Bibi signs up to everything he said he would never sign up to. The ostensible goal is to make Gaza unliveable, so the Gazans have to leave, but Gaza is already unliveable; the problem is that there is nowhere for Gazans to go, and real important countries that don’t run their foreign policy for the entertainment of their stupid population are determined that they stay where they are. Blowing up another apartment block while whooping doesn’t make any difference. This, I think, is kind of the first stirrings of an awakening in the rightoid mind, which goes like this: my side are retarded → why do I want my side to win then? → I am retarded. However, I’m skipping ahead; here it is:

And here are my comments:

1. The core question animating Ansbacher is ‘why can’t Israel achieve a decisive victory?’ He appeals to various hidden variables (muh deep state), but his main answer is that Israel lacks ‘vision’, because, as yet, it won’t embrace its biblical destiny. He believes that, against their will, the Jewish people are being dragged by circumstances to embrace said destiny. On the other hand, it’s not so clear what this destiny means. We can start with what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean compliance with the covenant of Sinai as received and transmitted by the sages, and expressed in the system of halacha. It’s better if you keep halacha, but not necessary. He is emphatic in ruling out any suggestion that conditions of the covenant are obligatory.

2. It seems to be the case that the biblical vision does require a belief in God, though not a God who demands fulfilment of the Torah. What, if anything, God does demand is unclear. Ansbacher mentions the ‘experience’ of his visit to the ‘holy Ohel’ in New York, and 770, so any kind of fussiness about monotheism and not worshipping human beings or chairs is irrelevant. The only thing belief in God does clearly entail is support for territorial expansion by means of military aggression, and faith in God is apparently co-extensive with faith in that. I don’t want to say that what these people mean by God is some kind of externalised representation of racial narcissism, but I already just said that, so it’s too late.

3. Ansbacher believes that the key to Israel’s international diplomatic and PR predicament is to share this biblical vision with the world. The British once believed in Zionism because they were ‘men of the Bible’ and by abandoning cringe hasbara and embracing our destiny, we can once again get the righteous gentiles to get behind Israeli nationalism. (He cites the late leader of Lubavitch in support of this view). It’s impossible, I think, to overstate just how detached from reality this is. Christian Zionism was the product of a specific and temporary phase in the secularisation of the West. It has always been greeted with, at best, bemusement by Catholics, the Orthodox and ‘classical Protestants’. Liberal Protestants today, obviously, can’t get on board with it either. Christian Zionism, rather, was one of the many spasms of a tradition in collapse, a mutant combination of traditional and radical ideas cobbled together to appeal to culturally adrift people desperate for some kind of religion to hang on to. It survives today as not just cringe, but radioactive cringe, its expiration date measured in funerals. In any case, the core of western support for Israel was never Christian Zionism anyway, but generic liberalism before it radicalised on race, which Zionists exploited with stuff like this:

   Or this:

   The traditional, albeit not ubiquitous, view of WASP liberalism was that Jews were a talented, if sometimes annoying people, with a noble history, who had been mistreated by sundry continental brutes, and many concluded from this that they merited a fair crack at starting their own project provided it wouldn’t ‘prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’. Reviving WASP philo-Zionism probably isn’t a viable idea nowadays, but even if it was, you wouldn’t do it by loudly declaring the Tanach gives you the right to commit open-ended ethnic cleansing.²³

4. Rightoid Zionists really just seem to be very misinformed at a basic level about what level of military casualties are normal to incur as an expansionist militarist state. Ansbacher laments how Israel could have sacrificed so many soldiers in Lebanon without annexing any territory. OK, but total fatalities from ground operations were 51. It’s quite likely that political pressures from abroad forced Israel to accept a worse deal than what purely military factors might have dictated, but 51 soldiers is just not a lot to die in a war. If you think it is, then you can be a pacifist or some type of lib, or whatever it is I am, but you can’t be a militarist; it just doesn’t go. As in other areas, (e.g. education policy) Israeli rightism has adopted a kind of Jews-only hyper-liberalism, the specific expression of which in this context is the demand that Israel should blow up a gorillion apartment blocks to save one soldier combined with a genuine incomprehension of how this sounds to literally anyone else.

5. In all the talk of vision and destiny, we never learn - territorial expansion aside - what the destiny is. Ansbacher mentions being a light unto the nations, but a light to do what? Binary Options? Mrs NonZionism took a trip to Tel Aviv recently. Here are some snaps from along the way:
   

   

   Come on now

   

   ?

   But we’ve been over this a thousand times. The point is what are goyim supposed to say, ‘I used to have some kind of vague idea that morality was being nice to the people and looking after the planet, but then I saw Israelis dancing to techno music while carpet bombing civilian areas, and some feral person throwing molotovs at an Arab house and a Rabbi told me this was morality, and now I know better’? Presumably not that, but, then, seriously, what? Some goyim are still into this only-democracy-with-gay-bars-in-the-Middle-East thing, but,who is the actual market for being enlightened by Israeli irredentism?

6. Finally, while he certainly knows a lot about wars, and how they have been mis-fought, Ansbacher gets very vague when it comes to how they are actually supposed to be fought. He thinks Israel should have done more in Iran, but more what? Israel should have done more in Lebanon, but more what? Fair enough, he thinks we should have conquered south of the Litani, but we already did that once, then what? In Gaza, I know at least the barebones: drive out the Gazans, but to where? Again, you already did expel Palestinians; that’s why you are where you are. The point here, obviously, is that the goal of war is to impose a political solution, but there is no political solution, because the problem is that rightoids want to build a country on top of other people, but refuse to rule them. Like children. The rightoid conceit is that the Palestinian problem is, as a matter of logistics, an easy problem to solve, and that the obstacle is only some kind of false consciousness. They are such inept hillbillies that the favourite candidate for villain is ‘postmodernism’, but it can also be ‘westernising liberalism’ or progressivism, or the mental traits of exile, or whatever. If we can just have enough ‘moral clarity’ to overcome this ideological blinder, then we could just not have a Palestinian problem at all. That’s certainly not because we would just murder them all. That’s an antisemitic BLOOD LIBEL. It’s because … oh, look, a balloon.

Anyway, that’s all that comes to mind. We’ll check back in periodically to see if any of these guys make any progress.

1. Arguably, the relevant comparison is with the total global audience of English speakers, which would make it equivalent to 12 million or so views.

2. It’s a little tangential to our main point, but check out this from the Times of London, September 7th, 1903:

3