Among the many and various distinctions of this blog is the invention of esoteric Bibism, the one true description of the deep reality of Israeli politics. The basic idea is that, once you understand that Zionism was a bit of a crackers idea that turned out surprisingly well, you conclude that the best you can now do is muddle through and not do anything self-destructive. This is made operational by getting dumb people to vote for you by waving trinkets in front of their face, then ignoring them and focussing on implementing generic neoliberalism so as to put hilonim in Tel Aviv to work paying taxes to build up a quantitative military edge over everyone else in the region. As stated above, esoteric Bibism is objectively true, but it does not justify those who vote Likud without knowledge of the doctrine, for they do so in a conscious state of sin, choosing to vote for ugliness, stupidity and crime. Another way of explaining the doctrine, therefore, is to call it ‘Bibism without Likudism’. Our desire is that Bibi should rule without interference from his party, consulting only his inner circle of transatlantic wonks. The optimum scenario according to esoteric Bibism is that all coalition MKs approximate, as much as possible, the attitude of Charedi MKs to general political questions, namely complete indifference and loyalty to Bibi in exchange for narrowly defined gifts.
Esoteric Bibism fell apart after the 2022 election when, because of his two decades of increasingly psychotic behaviour, Bibi’s only option to form a coalition was to include in his cabinet politicians with both the desire and capability to make him actually do things. The result was that the new government spent a year pursuing judicial reform - designed with no rationale beyond giving various interest groups immunity from criminal prosecution - to the chagrin of Israelis who pay taxes, openly expanded settlements while telling both the PA and Hamas to get stuffed and that they should probably roll the dice on some kind of military gambit, didn’t prepare for that at all in any way, and then ignored warnings from various parties that disaster was coming on the grounds that this was exilic cucked thinking or something. Fast forward to this year and the following things happened in the run up to the election:
Remaining Likud politicians who weren’t just depraved criminals decided they had had enough of all the clownishness and destructive incompetence and bounced, notably Dan Ilouz, Yuli Edelstein, Gilad Erdan. Other internal Likud opponents of kakistocracy, such as Nir Barkat and Avi Dichter, were humiliated and sidelined.
When asked how Israel should avoid sanctions, Bibi said he wouldn’t even try and would just do magic with blockchain or something like a senile boomer who saw a YouTube advert.
Bibi declared that as a result of his successful seven-front war, and multiple historical victories over Iran that would secure Israel for decades to come (this year!!!!), Israel was at imminent risk of nuclear attack.
And as a result, he got 27 seats. Not much to say about this really. Likud voters shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but they can. Under the circumstances, the obvious sane thing for the country is to have a Likud-Yashar unity government, with one or two more parties, but that can’t happen because of Bibi. Thus, the true believer in esoteric Bibism understands you must get rid of Bibi. You could, for example, well, let’s not get all specific. But not all heroes wear capes, as the saying goes.
A few notes:
Every election there’s a bit of a flurry about Shas’s election campaigning tactics, which combine a sort of disarming childishness with ruthless amoral cynicism and the systematic exploitation of their target audience’s emotional incontinence and inability to perform complex cognitive tasks. But actually, Shas got 7 seats, less than half what they achieved at their peak, despite modest relative demographic growth of their core electorate. Our hero Deri might get kicked out. They couldn’t sell a continued blanket Charedi draft exemption during a forever holy war to traditional Mizrahim. Perhaps it’s just unsellable.
Secondly, the Democratim did pretty badly, and some say that’s because they got sucked into dumb culture-war leftardism by the Meretz wing. It’s a good thing, it must be said, that woke politics are so genuinely unpopular in this country. On the other hand, it’s a bad thing, that there is no organised political force explicitly in favour of a realist foreign policy that doesn’t pander to ethnic grievances, revenge fantasies and pseudo-religion.
Otzma didn’t do as well as they were polling a few months ago. It turns out that the relentless cruelty slop Ben Queer has been pumping out actually isn’t such a big vote winner either, even in the gutter. A little sliver of hope maybe.
Speaking of Ben Gvir, he is in charge of prisons and police. Murder, the crime which (as Steve Sailer tirelessly points out) is the hardest to fudge, doubled in his first year and stayed there. Statistics for violent crime, rape and burglary are hard to find because the reporting rules were changed and statistics are now published with delays of more than a year like a third world turdbucket. Statistics for anti-social behaviour are hard to come by even in countries that aren’t deliberately misgoverned, but you can just get on the bus. Ben Gvir’s policy of allowing crime to explode while engaging in non-stop provocation of Arabs for the benefit of depraved imbeciles is being blamed by some for the surge in the Arab vote. I think it’s more because of Smotrich. Here’s the ad he was putting out promoting his policy of establishing farms in the Galilee on the Samaria model.
Compared to everyone else in the Bibi coalition, I like Smotrich. He’s spiritually white. But it has to be said that this is a completely deranged and literally evil thing to be doing in an election campaign, and also dumb.
Now I’m going to talk about the big flop of the elections, Tzibbur Charedi. When I talked with Mordechai, I was sceptical, but clearly not sceptical enough. They flopped so bad that they did even worse than the neo-Peleg party with a random fat weirdo as its leader. People are giving their takes, so I’ll give my take:
Most Charedim don’t want reform of their system, because their system works well and is good for them. They have happier more fulfilled lives than most people; if they mess up and lose all their money they will be supported; they can have lots of kids with a reasonable expectation that they won’t come out as nutters. It’s just better. Officially, Kiryas Yoel is one of the poorest towns in America, but anyone can wander around and see that not only is it not poor overall, but basically no-one there is poor by ordinary standards. Partly that’s because of not reporting salaries earned in cash, but also it’s because a given family’s access to resources is substantially different from their income because of community structures. The community has very rich businessmen who spread their wealth around in return for status. In Israel, Charedim aren’t at the same level of material comfort, but it’s a lot better than statistics would suggest, and enough to be happy. The actual problem with this situation is that other people are paying for it without their consent, but that’s other people’s problem, not their problem. Why would Charedim vote to solve other people’s problem? A reasonable analogy is black people in America. One can argue that, for complex reasons, they really suffer because of the welfare state, but the more simplistic way of looking at it is that when other people give them money, they win and other people lose. That’s not the whole truth, but it’s kind of the ground floor truth. Why would you vote to have to join the army and get a job? Have you ever worked at a job? On top of that, Charedim don’t experience most of the negative results of community welfare dependency. You look at the Tzibbur Charedi guys as brave, enlightened figures, but maybe it’s more correct to see them like this.
When I was talking to Mordechai, I was sniffy about R. Yehoshua Pfeffer and it occurred to me that that was unbecoming. He’s obviously extremely intelligent, driven and conscientious, and has succeeded in different fields. I happen to think his politics are whack, but that doesn’t justify talking smack. The really relevant point is that he isn’t Charedi. He’s superfrum, for sure, but that doesn’t make him Charedi. If you are pro-secular education, and civic duty and go to conferences with Douglar Murray about reinvigorating the West, then that’s wonderful, but you’re not Charedi. Unlike him, Nechumi Yaffe was born Charedi, but in a sense that makes her even less Charedi because she doesn’t get the one-generation-only pass to break the rules. There was an old video going around where she explained that she was culturally Charedi while rejecting many beliefs held to be normative in the community, and used as an example that she preferred kugel to sushi. Some people pounced on this to show that her conception of Charedi identity is comically shallow. That’s not an unfair critique, but there’s a more fundamental one: Charedim love sushi! There’s nothing an upscale Charedi woman likes more in the ladies’ section of a simcha than a stunning plate of sushi alongside the stunning flowers and the stunning napkin arrangements and the stunning tiny bits of cake with 16 different layers and the stunning plastic diamond things on the tablecloth. By contrast, upscale Charedi women don’t eat kugel. They make a big pan for their husbands and then nibble on something at the other end of the table so that the other women don’t snicker at them for being fat at chasunes. Sushi is perfect for that. Charedi men like sushi less. If they have pretensions to piety, they may even denounce it as foreign and materialistic. But Nechumi Yaffe is a woman so I don’t know what she’s on about.
People like Nechumi Yaffe and Yehoshua Pfeffer have way lower status in the Charedi community than they would anywhere else, or than their achievements and capabilities merit by any reasonable standard. That sucks for them, and they tried to build a party out of other Charedim who are discriminated against by the system. The problem is that most people with low status in the Charedi community are just low status by nature. The husband can’t be bothered, or isn’t organised enough to always daven Mincha with a minyan. The wife can’t get round to twisting up the children’s peyos regularly enough. They use a Gameboy to make the kids shut up so they can destress. They have relatives who became junkie OTDs. If there is a school that won’t accept parents below 3.6 points on the Charedi scale that combines wealth, conformity and piety into one number then parents who are a 3.5 will, with perfect justice, feel hard done by. However, they don’t want the parents who are 3.4 to have their kids accepted. If they wanted their kids to go to school with 3.4s, they could just send them to the reject school that already exists. Thus there is no real way to coordinate internal victims of the Charedi system because what they all want is to get in the door and shut it behind them. The whole idea is misconceived.
I will now close with an interesting anecdote that I think is quite revealing
