So, I did this debate last night. It goes on a long time and there are lots of technical problems, and the first 30 minutes at least is pointless. But maybe I got a chance to clarify a few details. Various commenters in the chat remarked that they were surprised I had a beard. Perhaps some other things got cleared up too.
Please give feedback in the comments. Don’t tell me I should stop fiddling with stuff because I’m not going to stop doing that, but other substantive comments are welcome. Now my take.
In some parts, most notably the whole section about discipline in schools, Boruch is, charitably, engaged in motivated reasoning to justify partisan affiliation and defending an Israeli Right that doesn’t exist. Whatever downsides standing on the sidelines and carping has - and I’ll freely admit that there is something a little gay about it - it does free you from the temptation to engage in that kind of obviously false stuff. It’s like a free blogger IQ boost, perhaps roughly equivalent to a cigarette. Nevertheless, for the most part, he does faithfully represent the spirit of the movers and shakers in the present government, and I hope that if you weren’t paying attention to me, you were paying attention to him.
To sum up: how is Israel supposed to manage its diplomatic relations given still plummeting popularity in every country? Whatever. Who is supposed to provide all of the added value if hilonim in hi-tech decide they have had enough of being exploited and abused and bounce? Whoever. Where should we actually send the Arabs we don’t know what to do with so that they don’t just end up being on the border attacking us like what happened last time we did it. Wherever. None of these extremely prosaic, common-sense concerns are even worth discussing; they deserve, at most, a bit of sarcasm, some random factoids thrown at the wall, and lofty contempt.
The Right in Israel is characterised by three things, all of which you got to see. The first is a deep feeling of invincibility, the conviction that since we have got away with everything over the last three years, we can just keep pushing and it will all be fine, and, therefore, that even token efforts to minimise the risks involved are beneath our dignity as proud Jews. The second is the belief that willingness to kill civilians is the hidden cheat code of geopolitics and, once you crack it, then you have everything set from now on in. All you need to do is throw off false western morality and you won’t even need to try anymore. The third, which is a logical corollary of the second, is that, all along, the problems of Israel have been easy and the Zionist leadership, in their perversity, have erred consistently in the direction of excessive leniency, expending all their energy on money for Palestinian programmes.
Now I’m just going to ramble a bit. Attentive readers have already figured out that that’s my thing, so might as well make it explicit. You put the pieces together.
I haven’t much cared for The Abrahamic Metacritique’s commentary over the last year or two. I do think that Israel deserves someone out there in the ring who is literate and not overtly imbecilic to defend it, so I don’t begrudge our loyal goyim per se, but, still, there’s a point where it becomes demeaning. He’s had enough though:
Israelis have, moreover, lived among the Palestinians, and in the region long enough to have absorbed a good many of our habits and ways, and not all of them, I confess with grief, are good. Among the more recent acquisitions, for which an Arab pro-Israel hasbara advocate bears the dubious credit for introducing it to Israeli public life, is the custom of handing out baklava and dancing when an enemy has been killed, a rite that until very recently Israelis cited as evidence of how backward, if not primitive, Palestinian culture has become. Now some Knesset members perform the ritual themselves, assimilating it into Israeli political culture. And one cannot look at the gangs of hilltop youth, their faces masked in keffiyehs, rocks and stones in hand, without seeing the iconography of the first Intifada. Ben Gvir videos of “revenge porn,” taunting prisoners and revising Israeli national security doctrines to deprive convicted terrorists of fresh pita, remind me of similar videos from Iraq, Syria, and Libya. The fear is that superficial imitation at the level of buffoonery is giving way to deeper absorption of “Arab” ways of doing politics, the process Rene Girard described, in which rivals imitate one another until they become each other’s doubles.
…
Radicalism, as those who know it can attest, is a slippery downward spiral: each form leads to a worse and more degrading one. The Muslim Brotherhood gave rise to the jihadists, and al-Qaeda gave rise to the Islamic State, whose savagery made al-Qaeda look restrained. Israelis have seen this logic at work on their own doorstep. In 1993, as Hamas rose, Yitzhak Rabin turned to Yasser Arafat, the man who had founded modern Palestinian terrorism, hoping that the PLO would deal with Hamas “without the High Court and without B’Tselem.” If Jewish radicalism keeps growing, there will come a day, likely sooner than many think, when there are Jewish radicals who make Itamar Ben-Gvir look like a reasonable and sober man, and secular Israelis may turn to him and his like in the hope that they can tame darker forces. Purity outbidding, the competition among radicals to prove who is the most zealous, will keep pushing things further and further.
Sooner or later, everyone will have had enough. It doesn’t matter how developed your skills are in excusing, in handwaving, in changing the subject, in providing context, our capacity to make you look like a massive dick for standing up for us will, in the end, exceed your capacity to take it on the chin. Here’s Jeremiah:
בראשית ממלכות יהויקים בן־יאשיהו מלך יהודה היה הדבר הזה מאת יי לאמר: כה אמר יי עמד בחצר בית־יי ודברת על־כל־ערי יהודה הבאים להשתחות בית־יי את כל־הדברים אשר צויתיך לדבר אליהם אל־תגרע דבר: אולי ישמעו וישבו איש מדרכו הרעה ונחמתי אל־הרעה אשר אנכי חשב לעשות להם מפני רע מעלליהם: ואמרת אליהם כה אמר יהוה אם־לא תשמעו אלי ללכת בתורתי אשר נתתי לפניכם:לשמע על־דברי עבדי הנבאים אשר אנכי שלח אליכם והשכם ושלח ולא שמעתם: ונתתי את־הבית הזה כשלה ואת־העיר הזאת אתן לקללה לכל גוי הארץ: {פ} וישמעו הכהנים והנבאים וכל־העם את־ירמיהו מדבר את־הדברים האלה בבית יי: ויהי ככלות ירמיהו לדבר את כל־אשר־צוה יהוה לדבר אל־כל־העם ויתפשו אתו הכהנים והנביאים וכל־העם לאמר מות תמות: מדוע נבית בשם־יי לאמר כשלו יהיה הבית הזה והעיר הזאת תחרב מאין יושב ויקהל כל־העם אל־ירמיהו בבית יי: וישמעו שרי יהודה את הדברים האלה ויעלו מבית־המלך בית יי וישבו בפתח שער־יי החדש: {ס} ויאמרו הכהנים והנבאים אל־השרים ואל־כל־העם לאמר משפט־מות לאיש הזה כי נבא אל־העיר הזאת כאשר שמעתם באזניכם: ויאמר ירמיהו אל־כל־השרים ואל־כל־העם לאמר יי שלחני להנבא אל־הבית הזה ואל־העיר הזאת את כל־הדברים אשר שמעתם: ועתה היטיבו דרכיכם ומעלליכם ושמעו בקול יי אלהיכם וינחם יי אל־הרעה אשר דבר עליכם: ואני הנני בידכם עשו־לי כטוב וכישר בעיניכם: אך ידע תדעו כי אם־ממתים אתם אתי כי־דם נקי אתם נתנים עליכם ואל־העיר הזאת ואל־ישביה כי באמת שלחני יי עליכם לדבר באזניכם את כל־הדברים האלה
Let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that God has once more set his mind to destroy us. Let us stipulate further that He wishes to give us no excuse, to make our guilt as inarguable as possible. What would He do differently than to give us over to the leadership of criminals, lovers of silver and blood, who sing, as they march into catastrophe, the songs of the false prophets almost word for word, who are not merely unable to hold back their contempt for every principle of religion, but pester you with it, unable, it seems, to just shut up for one minute, for whom no blasphemy is so foolish and beneath ordinary human dignity that they will not run towards it with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their might, who laugh in the face of every obstacle for they simply know that God is with them, no matter how many signs they receive to the contrary, who consider - of all things - rebellion against the principle of compassion for sucklings to be the cornerstone of a new moral order in which they will rule? Was that sentence long enough? I’ll be the judge of that.
And yet, when it comes, and whether it’s a biggie or more of a Judges-era chastisement, God will not let us die - this too He has promised - and we will have to pick ourselves back up and carry on, though all who pass will hiss and shake their heads. We will have to work out what it is we have that is worth preserving. Here is something that happened on a bus between Tel Aviv and Petah Tikva the other day:
A woman was speaking Arabic on the phone. As it happens, she is a Druze and the sister and daughter of distinguished combat veterans in the IDF. Regardless, members of the דור הגעולה were in no mind to tolerate her presence. They ordered her off, and, when she would not oblige, they cursed and threw things. Boruch told me that if you can get these guys to put on a kippah, they become much better behaved. I guess it depends how you define it.
There are so many questions to ask at this time, but not the least of them is this: ‘is this the people we wish to be’. In three weeks, we will answer. The only thing we can say for sure is that it will be a close call.
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