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December 10, 2011
ON THE anniversary of David Ben-Gurion’s
death, the usual memorial meeting was held at his
graveside in Sdeh Boker, the Negev desert village
where he lived in his retirement. There is no
cemetery, just his grave and that of his wife Paula.
The newspapers published a picture of
Binyamin Netanyahu making a speech under a big photo
of the late leader gazing thoughtfully into the
distance.
One little detail in the picture caught
my eye: Netanyahu was wearing a kippah.
Why? Ben-Gurion was a convinced atheist.
He refused to wear a kippah even at funerals. (Though
a complete atheist myself, I do sometimes wear a
kippah at funerals, out of consideration for the
feelings of others.)
The place was not a synagogue, nor even a
cemetery. So why for God’s sake (sorry) did the man
put this black kippah on his head?
For me that is a sign of what I call the
re-Judaization of Israel.
ZIONISM WAS, among other things, a revolt against the
Orthodox Jewish religion, that was associated with the
Diaspora which Zionists contemptuously call Galut
(“exile”). All the founding fathers of Zionism –
Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Chaim Weizmann, Ze’ev
Jabotinsky and the rest – were convinced atheists.
So why did Ben-Gurion give the religious
parties two autonomous education systems, financed by
the state?
Why did he release pupils of religious
seminars (“yeshivot”) from military service?
People of my age can remember the situation.
Ben-Gurion, like all of us, believed that the Jewish
religion was about to die out. Some old people, who
spoke Yiddish, were still praying in the synagogues,
but with time they would disappear. We, the young new
Israelis, were secular, modern, free from these old
superstitions.
Not in his darkest nightmares (or
daymares) could Ben-Gurion have imagined a time when
religious pupils, some of whom are not taught in their
schools even the most basic modern skills, would
amount to nearly half the Israeli Jewish school
population. Or that the number of religious shirkers
now deprives the army of several divisions.
Step by step, the religious community is
taking over the state. The religious settlers, the
religious anti-Arab pogromists, their allies and
ultra-right collaborators are gaining new footholds by
the day. Just now the army has announced that 40% of
candidates for junior officers’ courses are wearing
kippahs. In 1948, when our army came into being, I did
not see a single kippah-wearing soldier, not to
mention an officer.)
But the danger of re-Judaization goes far
beyond the political sphere.
LET ME take a metaphor from nature.
The premier necessity in nature is
survival. There are many different strategies for
survival, and nature embraces all of them – as long as
they are successful.
The gazelle survives by running away.
When in danger, it escapes. It is very successful in
this. Fact: the gazelles have survived.
The lion survives by fighting. When in
danger, it attacks. It relies on its teeth and claws.
It is very successful in this. Fact: the lions have
survived.
Jews have survived by fleeing. They were
immensely successful in this. After thousands of years
of the most atrocious persecutions, pogroms and
holocausts, they are still there. Their dispersal over
the world furthers this technique. At the slightest
danger, they can escape from one country to another.
Jews have not built Taj Mahals or
majestic cathedrals. Their treasures are holy texts,
literature and music – things you can store in your
head and take with you when you are on the run.
Like some animals in nature, Jews sense
the slightest danger from far away. It’s like a red
light in their head – it goes on when nobody else yet
perceives the menace. (Indeed, I would not be alive
today if my father had not perceived the danger of the
Nazi regime from the first day and organized our
escape, while almost everybody around was scoffing at
him.)
Zionism wanted to turn the gazelle into a lion. It
said: no more running away. When in danger, we stand
and we fight.
No more the cowardly Jew of the
anti-Semitic caricature. From now on, the heroic
Israeli, upright and proud.
And, as seems to be human nature, we
overcompensate for the past. We have become
aggressive, militaristic, even brutal. The oppressed
have become oppressors. Jews used to say: “If force
does not work, try using your brain.” Israelis say “if
force does not work, try using more force.” (I confess
that I coined this phrase many years ago as a joke.
Alas, a joke no more.)
HOWEVER, LATELY it seems to me that the old Jew has
not disappeared. He has only been hiding. Hiding
inside the Israeli. He and his little red light are
right there.
How did I find out? Just by listening to
Binyamin Netanyahu, with or without his kippah.
Netanyahu has invented (or adopted) a peculiar style
of ruling: governing by playing on people’s fears.
Since coming back to power, he has been treating us to
an endless series of fears. Fearmongering is the order
of the day - every day.
At the beginning there was Barack Hussein
Obama, who threatened to punish us for not giving up
our sacred right to build settlements all over the
country God himself promised us. Unfortunately, Obama
capitulated right away, so another menace was needed.
No problem. Mahmoud Abbas, yesterday’s
“plucked chicken”, turned into a roaring tiger and
applied to the United Nations to accept the State of
Palestine as a member. As everybody knows, that was a
mortal threat to Israel. It was only averted by
Obama’s (yes, the same Hussein Obama) promise to use
his veto on behalf of Israel. But the Palestinians
have nevertheless been accepted by UNESCO, so the
terrible danger has not been banished.
Than came the Arab Spring. As Netanyahu
realized from the first moment, even before our great
and glorious friend Mubarak was sent to the glass
cage, that presented a mortal threat. Now it has been
eerily confirmed: Islam, deadly Islam, is taking over
Egypt.
Islam, as Netanyahu tells us at every opportunity, is
a murderous anti-Jewish creed. There are no moderate
Islamists – they are all out to throw us into the sea.
Even in our former ally Turkey.
And they are winning not only in Egypt.
These terrible Islamists have already won in Morocco
and Tunisia, and are going to win in Libya, Jordan,
Yemen, Syria. Our “villa” will be surrounded not just
by a jungle, but by a jungle full of deadly Islamist
predators. How absolutely terrifying.
Then another frightful danger was exposed
just in time: human rights associations are
threatening the very existence of Israel. They are
part of a world-wide anti-Semitic conspiracy. Fact:
they are financed by foreign governments. A new law
had to enacted against them in a hurry. Fortunately,
such laws were recently enacted in some former Soviet
countries. So our Moldavian foreign Minister (or,
rather, our foreign minister from Moldavia), Avigdor
Lieberman, obtained the text from his great friend,
Alexander Lukashenko, that model democrat from
Belarus, and the other renowned democrat, Vladimir
Putin.
All these mortal dangers were enough to
wipe out the sudden surge of social protest, but they
were nothing compared to that awful, overwhelming
danger: the Iranian Bomb.
The Iranian Nuclear Bomb means a Second
Holocaust, no less. Only the strong leadership of
Binyamin Netanyahu can save us in the nick of time.
Faced with such petrifying danger, nobody asks the
relevant question: why would any Iranian leader attack
a country that has plenty of nuclear bombs of its own
and the ability to devastate all of Iran in a “second
strike”? The German government is providing us with
the sixth of the submarines we have just for this
purpose.
Yes, the Iranian leaders may be religious
fanatics. But we have plenty of those, too, and some
are members of our government coalition. At the moment
the country is in an uproar because the rabbis demand
that religious soldiers may leave any military
ceremony where female soldiers are allowed to sing. “A
woman’s voice is her sexual part,” a holy text
asserts. And a prominent rabbi has just announced that
a religious soldier should rather face a firing squad
than listen to a woman singing. (I am not making this
up.)
But Iran is dominating our public
discourse. All the red lights are blinking like
mad. The Jew inside us is mortally afraid. The
gazelle says: Run. The lion says: Attack.
THE BIBLE tells us: “Happy is the man
that feareth alway!” (Proverbs 28:14). But constant
fear is a bad adviser when conducting your affairs,
the more so when directing the policies of a state.
But it may be good politics when you want to keep your
own people in check while chipping away at democracy,
equality and human rights.
So let’s release the ghetto Jew inside us
and send him on his way. Let's overcome our fear of
fear itself. And, while we are at it, let’s kick the
fearmongers out.
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