Pot, Meet Kettle

Speaking of Dr. Leon, an article of his recently came out in the latest Israel journal no. 15 (in Hebrew, sorry). In the article, Leon argues that two key social changes took place around the 1977 Likud electoral victory that enabled the ascendence of the Shas party. The first one was the increased confidence and power of the Mizrahi middle class and Rabinnic leadership, who now fought to stake out their own independent claim in the Charedi, Religious-Zionist and political world. These social forces combined to help the Likud win the election in 1981, and eventually make Shas a 10-mandate mainstay in Israel.

The second factor was the breaking up of the old religious-Zionist populace. Until 1977, Mafdal regularly garnered around 10-12 mandates. Many of those votes came from traditional and religious Mizrahi homes as well as from Ashkenazim. Unfortunately, the increasing focus on Eretz Yisra'el alone led to many parties splitting off the old Mafdal and siphoning its mandates (Metzad, Tehiyah, Tekumah etc).

This was not the only problem. An unspoken fact of many of the settlments is that they were construed as "community towns". A person wanting to enter such a community has to be able to afford building or buying a house, thus ensuring a high socioeconomic population. More importantly, anyone who wants to live in such a community must pass an "acceptance committee" which pretty much guarantees that only "like-minded" and often "like-skinned people" need apply.

Whether intentionally or not, this middle-to-upper-middle-class flight to the hills ensured that the largely Ashkenazi communities mostly cut themselves off from the poorer Mizrahim in the development towns and neighborhoods. This vacuum was filled in many places by Shas. So far, nothing more than further proof of the self-seperation of much of the religious community pundits have been debating for years.

It turns out, however, that this was not a religious phenomenon but an Ashkenazi phenomenon. Put bluntly, many, many "community towns" have been established throughout the country within the Green Line that follow the exact same principles. The difference? 75% of these towns are homogenically Askenazi, and center or left-wing politically. That's right - many of the same people who love the Palestinians and minorities oh-so much would never dream of letting one live next to them. NIMBY, I guess.

None of this absolves us for having left tens of thousands of our brehtren to fend for their own religiously, but it does make me much more cynical towards so-called liberals in our midst...

The Day After Hitkansut

I really don't want to write about this. The very thought scares me to death. Nevertheless, I think it needs to be out there.

At present, over 60,000 Jews live beyond the "fence" or "wall" or whatever you want to call it. This includes two of my best, closest friends (and I don't have many of those). They are all living there "on borrowed time", in territory that will not be Israeli under any feasible settlement, permanent or otherwise. As crazy as it sounds, we need to take into account the possibility of another forced "hitnatkut". Whether it happens because of international sanction, agreement or otherwise makes no difference. It makes no difference if it happens in five years or thirty - it's coming.

This has nothing to do with the question of whether such a move is "right". I doubt the fact that the Gaza hitnatkut was a disaster is much comfort to the thousands of families who are still without permanent homes. Now multiply that by a factor of 10 and you get what we will be facing if and when it hits yosh.

Let me repeat that number again: 60,000 (if it were up to the "green line" fetishists it would be closer to 400,000, but that doesn't seem as likely). Men, women, children. People whose lives and incomes are tied up in the houses and communities built over time. Now imagine all that erased.

So what's your solution, smart guy?

I don't have one. I just know that we need to start preparing solid, detailed back-up plans for The Day After. I know we can't rely on the government, and I'd rather see those hurt be able to rebuild their life again as quickly as possible.

In Israeli terms, I'd rather we be smart than right (al tehiyeh tzodek, tehiyeh chacham).

An Open Letter on Operation Cast Lead

To: Professor Daniel Statman, Haifa University

Dear Sir,

I read with much interest your response to Prof. Asa Kasher's article on the IDF's conduct in Operation Cast Lead from a 'moral warfare' point of view. You claim to be among the 'moderate voices' who voice reasonable doubts about the IDF's conduct, as opposed to the "functional pacifists" both here and abroad by whom Israel can do no right. Nevertheless, you claim, your doubts remain as is. I will address your critique in its two main aspects: the evidentiary and the theoretical.

Evidentiary Arguments

As far as evidence goes, your excessive, almost wholesale reliance on the report of "Breaking the Silence" on Cast Lead is curious, to say the least. Breaking the Silence is an "issue NGO"; its purpose is to prove its predetermined positions as much as possible (in this case, that the IDF is a ruthless, inhumane monster of an army). As Prof. Kenneth Anderson, a former human rights activist and current international law scholar has pointed out, NGO reports are very much like one-sided prosecutor's briefs, filled to the gills with supporting evidence, but completely lacking when it comes to contradictory evidence or even taking arguments for the other side into account.

It is because of this that I find the fact that the picture emerging from the testimonies to be "almost uniform" to be highly suspect. It sounds like (again, this is my instinctive feeling) that "Shovrim Shtika" looked for corroborating testimony to its own prejudices rather than a genuine cross-section. I am not, God forbid, saying these testimonies are false, just that they are not "smoking guns". Thousands of soldiers participated in this operation; only a professional investigation can determine whether "Shovrim Shtika" is representative or not.

Theoretical

In your letter, you rail about the position according to which soldiers should take no risks to avoid hurting enemy civilians. You argue (as do your colleagues, Profs. Avi Sagi, Noam Zohar and others) that soldiers should take "some risk" (A very vague and undefined term) to avoid harming enemy non-combatants. You claim that there is sufficient room between occasionally letting terrorists go to avoid harming civilians (your position) to letting everyone go to avoid harming any civilians (the European position). No offense, Prof. Statman, but I consider this to be a cheap cop-out. It may make you and your colleagues feel better, but it is useless as a guide for commanders on the ground.

Let's say that I could somehow wave a magic wand and make every commander, junior and senior, agree with your "some risk" position. What exactly is to prevent them from being ridiculously over-cautious and rarely ordering an attack for fear of possibly harming civilians, to the detriment of the whole operation? After all, they all know that both international law scholars and philosophy professors such as yourself are busy second-guessing their every move. Why take the risk of condemnation and possible criminal prosecution? Why do so, when even by us there are professors who believe that sometimes "defeat is the desirable moral outcome [sic!]"? If fear of malpractice suits paralyze doctors, all the more so should not such fears paralyze commanders?

[This is not unprecedented; similar command dithering has happened when commanders feared high soldier casualties - at the first assault on Petersburg in the Civil War, for instance.]

Also, I don't understand why you make no effort to differentiate between intentional harm to civilians and unintentional (inevitable or not) harm to civilians (the so-called "double effect"). This refusal to see a distinction between the two is the lot of the self-same ultra-hostile voices abroad you yourself condemn. If you share their positions and place the entire moral responsibility for harm to civilians on Israel and none on Hamas/Hizbullah, then I frankly fail to see a difference between you and Goldstone.

Conclusion

All this is as nothing to the most serious problem, and that is how the IDF is supposed to effectively wage war (i.e. achieve victory) under the increasing constraints which you place on them. After all, without the possibility of accomplishing something – a cease-fire, a victory, the saving of lives – one could plausibly argue that ANY offensive is immoral since it serves no real purpose. While you claim to not be a "functional pacifist", I believe that you and your colleagues are coming dangerously close to that definition.

I'd like to hope that I am wrong about you, even totally wrong. I would like nothing better than to know that people such as yourself know the difference between abstract ideals and harsh reality; that you know not to be utopian and one-sided in your moral demands. This country needs moral consciences that can give constructive and realistic moral criticism as opposed to the self-declared Jermiahs who pine for "peace on earth".

Unfortunately, your letter has not eased my doubts on the subject. Like your own qualms about the IDF during Cast Lead, they remain in force.

Sadly yours,

aiwac

Mizrachi Jews

[OK, now that I've gotten my rather depressing political rants out of my system, we can return to our regularly scheduled programming. – aiwac]

In my first post on Israeli MO policy, I brought up the touchy issue of interaction with that vague population of Jews in Israel which defines itself not as "religious" or "secular" but rather "traditional" or "masorti". This amorphous group, largely made up of Sephardic/Mizrachi Jews, has not really been given much academic treatment (on their religiosity) over the years and is often the subject of cliché and generalization. This is beginning to change, and two books have recently come out on the subject.

The first book, "Soft Charedism", is by Dr. Nissim Leon, an up and coming researcher who specializes in the development of that unique blend of Charedi outlook and Sephardi religiosity. Leon is a serious scholar with an understanding of how religion actually works (a rarity nowadays among academics). He discusses the development of Mizrachi Charedism through changes in the Mizrachi shul and siddur, as well as the development of a cadre of Mizrachi yeshiva bachurim that grew over time. Highly recommended.

The second book is by Dr. Yaacov Yedgar, a researcher previously known for his analysis of the changing of the national ethos form 1967 to 1995. His study, called simply 'The masortiyim in Israel', is based on thorough interviews of with self-identified 'traditionalists'. While I am less familiar with Yedgar's work and am a little skeptical as to how many people are "consciously" and "ideologically" masorti, his study sounds like a good start on the subject at least.

Unfortunately, both these books are only available in Hebrew...unless someone could take the challenge of translating them...:)

Desperation or Derangement?

The new Hebrew Azure is out, with plenty of goodies - including a very enlightening article about the differences between value-laden education and education that focuses solely on equality. I would like to dedicate this post to another enlightening article by Asaf Sagiv on the mentality of the radical Israeli anti-Zionist left.

Sagiv, editor of Azure, is in my opinion a brilliant and erudite intellectual historian. His essays explaining the thought of various radical thinkers are always clear, concise and fair. Even if one doesn't agree with the views of his subjects, and I certainly don't, he succeeds in presenting their side of things in easy-to-understand manner.

Sagiv tries to explain the position of radicals like Adi Ofir, Yehouda Shenhav (this is how Shenhav spells his first name in English) and Ariella Azoulai as one not of hatred, or self-hatred, but rather of despair. The radicals have convinced themselves that the entire Zionist enterprise is one long act of evil and oppression, one which cannot be separated with "cutting-off points" like the 1948 refugee problem or the six-day war. The differences between "green-line" Zionists and settlers are for them purely cosmetic; the entire state and Zionist society is one large empty void, a dark void so malevolent it conjures up horrifying 1984-esque images of a totalitarian atomizing state that will snuff out all hope.

Having convinced themselves of Israel's unredeemable nature, these radicals are focused entirely on the act of destruction (or deconstruction) of the void, withdrawing completely from any attempt at reform. The attempts at boycott, of derision and violent anti-Zionist rhetoric; these are the acts of people who have become so ostensibly desperate that they believe that only through negation and destruction – "resistance" in their terminology – can anything be accomplished.

So far, this is Sagiv's take. While I'm sure many if not most radicals believe in this vision, I cannot help but see the underlying pathology of radicalism that taints their view of the world. Radicals tend to see things in essentialist terms that often have only tenuous ties to real life; Israeli radicals are no exception. They have no interest in real life, in facts, in shades of grey and actual people. They remind me of many a Russian radical pre-1917 who claimed to speak as "the general will" of the people or the proletariat despite having never actually gained their consent to act on their behalf.

The examples are strewn throughout Sagiv's article. They refer to "the state" as an idea and not the actual state and how it functions, either then or now. The 1948 Palestinian refugee problem is a cosmic event made with a Zionist wave of the hand and not a messy, complicated process borne of a violent national conflict. Actual positive reforms and changes that help the disadvantaged mean nothing to them, since there is either total equality or total darkness. One gets the impression from much of the rhetoric that the Zionist project has to do with a great cosmic clash between Good and Evil rather than serious disputes between fallible human beings. Under such conditions, their despair stems, in my opinion, not from objective reality, but from the underlying assumptions that guide their thought, a mirror image of their essentialist view of how they think Zionism works.

So what am I saying? It's simple. While radicals may be convinced that their's is a position of despair, I argue that this despair is borne of a view of the world that cannot possibly actually deal with the world as it is, with its flaws and foibles. It is a pathology, a powerful and intoxicating philosophical drug that both convinces the bearer of his righteousness and absolves him of the need to get his hands dirty. These people put on themselves the mantle of prophets speaking His word, only they replace themselves with the actual Almighty Blessed be He.

Against people like that, we need to marshal the reformers and the centrists, people of action and not just pure vision. We need more realists. We need more Yaacov Lozowicks and Shalem Centers, more people who deal with the real world and its problems, who can offer real-life solutions and not utopias and apocalyptic visions.

We need to deal with the world as it really is, not as we think it should be.

The Pointlesness of It All (The IDF and Goldstone)

Yaacov Lozowick has a nice discussion of the IDF's thorough response to the Goldstone Report. The army clearly made a concerted effort to adress the specific accusations made therein. I salute Avichai Mendeblit, the Army JAG (and an Orthodox Jew, BTW), for his work. Nevertheless, I am not rejoicing, important a step though this may be.

The first reason is that thorough studies like this should have been made (even if only for internal purposes) from the outset of the 2nd intifada. Instead the army stuck its head in the sand, only beginning to conduct systematic investigations and explanations many years later (e.g. the Gaza beach incident). As things stand now, only the "prosecutor's version of events" (i.e. the various NGO reports) for the IDF's conduct during Intifada II is publicly and easily available. Journalists and future historians will only have this version of events when evaluating the army's conduct. The (military) losers have written almost the entire first draft of this part of history, a fact that was completely avoidable if the government had taken serious steps to counter them.

The second reason I am not happy is because a substantial portion of the intellectual elite in Israel dealing directly with war and warfare have become what George Wegel calls "functional pacifists". This is not an insignificant fringe group; it consists of most Israeli international law professors, some philosophy professors and even one ex-general. As "functional pacifists" they give lip service to the right of Israel to defend itself and no more. As far as they are concerned, any military attack on cities or areas which are thiock with civilians is immoral a priori, irrespective of the steps taken to minimize civilian deaths. Since terrorists almost always meld with the population, this is an effective granting of complete immunity to one side, who may now do what they want to the enemy with impunity.

Some say this outright (as Gordon did), others so restrict the rules of engagement and increase the degree to which soldiers must endanger themselves to avoid civilian deaths so as to make military efforts costly, ineffective and ultimately pointless (which raises the question of whether it renders the attack itself immoral). Indeed, every time we've had intense engagements in a civilian-heavy - in 2006 and 2009 - said functional pacifists have merely tightened the screws and make it even more impossible to actually wage war against terrorists (The following article is a good example of such).

As far as this group is concerned, the moral onus is completely, and always, on Israel, no matter what. Hizbullah and Hamas either bear no responsibility for creating this morally horrible situation, or they are condemned with a few mealy-mouthed words meant to conceal the critique of Israel. In short, as far as this group is concerned, Israel may not conduct war unless it is completely surgical; anything less is off limits.

As long as there are not more people like Asa Kasher who calls for a more balanced approach, as long as the discourse is dominated by "functional pacifists", all the efforts in the world to fight morally will not make one bit of difference - not to this group, and certainly not to people abroad. Until then, Mendeblit's heroic efforts will accomplish little.