1.
Here is what the former IDF chief education officer Nehemia Dagan proposed this week (shortened for length): "The current stage: demonstrations. The next stage: turning the demonstrations into a protest that will neutralize all coalition members... leaving them unable to work; the next stage after that: shutting down the economy, leading to a civil war." And after displaying such confidence, he added the caveat: "If the Messianic-pro-Bibi camp wins the battle, all these stages will be skipped, and we will go straight to war with them."
On March 20, Dagan wrote publically to Channel 13's senior defense correspondent, Alon Ben-David: "Go back in time to Germany in 1933. Even there, there were Dichter's, Barkat's, Galant's, and Edelstein's – good people. But there was one person – Hitler – and by his side were fanatics like Goebbels and Goering. And all those good people were alarmed by the fanatics and mostly kept silent. And we all know what happened." The disturbing analogy is clear. Dagan's pathology is representative of a phenomenon. Another of his pearls of wisdom: "Herzl dreamt and acted. Weizmann, Bialik, Ussishkin, Sokolov... Jabotinsky and Yair from the Lehi, and Ben-Gurion and Rabin... and millions who dreamt for 2,000 years... and six million who were burned. All of them were builders. And then came one man - -Bibi – and tries to destroy everything."
The entire history of the Jewish people throughout the generations comes up against the anti-Christ, the greatest demon of all, Netanyahu. What a childish perception, what moral redundancy, what ungratefulness. And this man had the audacity to educate our soldiers.
2.
Nehemia Dagan is emblematic of a certain group within Israeli society. For around a decade I have claimed that there is a group of people within us who have chosen the "Samson Option." In other words, if that group no longer leads Israeli society as it did for many years when Dagan and his social circle were at the helm of the Zionist ship, and if the state no longer obeys the imagined codex of values that they designated for us, then, "let me die with the Philistines" and declare a civil war.
Terminal rhetoric of that nature has been a feature of Zionism since its inception. An expression of this can be found in A.B. Yehoshua's 1963 novella, "Facing the Forests." The hero of the story, an alienated intellectual who works as a forest ranger, helps to set the forest alight together with a local Arab and his daughter. The fire is meant to expose the past, the ruins of an Arab village abandoned in the War of Independence. Yehoshua, prior even to the "occupation" exposed the feeling of guilt that some among us hold, a feeling that fanned the desire to set ablaze the Zionist enterprise and return to exile in the Diaspora because in their opinion it is not possible to reconcile the establishment of a Jewish state with what they perceive to be the injustice meted upon the Palestinians.
3.
The great victory in the Six-Day War "redeemed" them for a moment from their feelings of guilt because they were able to transfer their occupiers' guilt to the territories liberated in June 1967 and thus cleanse their conscience. The fact that almost no Arab distinguishes between this occupation and the establishment of Israel, did not change much. The war for the identity of the people was channeled to the geographical arena: we will divide the land, establish a state for the Palestinians in the Samarian hills and in Gaza, and wash our hands of it all.
During the decades that have passed, the demonic figure of the settler became the personification of the great enemy of liberal Israel. The aspirations that for many centuries preserved the hope of a return to Zion turned into a derogatory epithet – "messianic" aimed at the hilltop pioneers. In the perception of liberal Israel, the settlers were delaying the redemption and through their physical presence hindered the coming of peace (a substitute for the coming of the Messiah).
Alongside the development of faith and religious identity, the terms "Land of Israel," "motherland," and "soil" represented the biblical territories, the birthplace of Jewish nationalism, at the same time of the formation of faith and religious identity. Our return to Jerusalem let "the religious genie" out of the bottle: messianic winds that brought the masses back to ancient Jerusalem, i.e. the religious component that "threatened" the Zionist enterprise.
We can see an example of this in the late Meir Shalev's outstanding novel "Esau" (1991), which moments before the Oslo Accords summed up an Israeli cultural phenomenon: the escape from Jerusalem as a result of irrational fear of the perceived threat it posed. "The mother carried the weight of the city on her shoulders, the hatred swelled within her," writes Shalev, describing how the family matriarch, Sarah, sees Jerusalem. She declares, "We're finished with Jerusalem" and flees the city.
4.
The Oslo Accords were an opportunity to rid ourselves of this intolerable burden. Along with significant concession of parts of the Land of Israel and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, its instigators wanted to put the religious genie back in the bottle and from their perspective return to a sane existence. However, the Oslo process failed, and that failure came at a heavy cost. To conclude the process, we had to undertake a historic experiment in fulfilling the vision of normalcy: In the summer of 2005, we pulled out of the Gaza Strip, destroying Jewish settlements and disinterring our dead. The result was not peace but a terrorist entity that subjugates its residents under an Iranian-backed dictatorship and engages in regular rounds of conflict with Israel.
As time went by, Israelis realized that there is no partner for peace on the other side, and perhaps there never was, except in our imagination. The vision of a Palestinian state has waned in the meantime; the Netanyahu governments that came to power in the meantime have given us the best decade in our history since the establishment of the state. However, the struggle over the identity of the people residing in Zion has not ceased, although its goals have changed. Two socio-political currents converged through the Likud (with a few exceptions here and there): religious Zionism, particularly the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria, and the ultra-Orthodox parties.
It is the ultra-Orthodox who have replaced the settlers in the role of the demonic enemy and are presented as a threat to the Zionist vision and the future of the state. They, after all, represent the other side of our identity coin: the religious component. If in Italy, people were to use only one percent of the texts deployed against them here, it would be seen as a shocking and intolerable display of antisemitism.
5.
Let's go back to Nehemia Dagan. We should indeed be disgusted by his hate speech so as not to normalize this outrageous discourse. Still, in his defense, he claimed that he wrote his words not out of hatred but out of fear. His argument is one that is worthy of consideration. Thus, I will briefly revisit points I have elaborated on in the past.
When Nathan Alterman in the "Joy of the Poor" describes the relationship between a young maiden and her living-dead father within the besieged city, he presents a pathological symbiosis between them, bordering on rape. The young maiden represents Zionism, and the father represents the old Jew. This is how religious tradition has been perceived in the eyes of a significant portion of our intellectual and political elite over the past two hundred years. They blamed the father - in other words God - for the cast down state of the Jewish people in the 19th century – the Jews were an entire nation that lived on the margins of history, subjected to the whims of the nations of the world. The "holy rebellion" against the abusive father led the masses of young people of that era to cast off and reject Jewish religious tradition.
This sentiment is a central component of secular Zionism, and it is what has led to the hysterical reactions, to the point of war and distorted historical comparisons. Imagine children in a family whose abusive father is about to return home against their will, after a long period in which he was not allowed to go near them. Throughout that time, it was the courts that protected them from their abusive father. Now the courts are about to lose their power to defend them. We must not be dismissive of this fear. We are all brothers – Nehemia Dagan as well.
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