The first time I felt the hatred from the Left was in basic training in a camp near Ashkelon. There were nine other soldiers with me in the tent, all kibbutz members. They didn't know my name or anything about me. All they knew about me was that I had a kippah on my head. The first sentence they hurled at me, with the kibbutznik arrogance of those days, was, "Are you a nag or a parasite?" At that time, the hatred and incitement in leftist circles were at their height.
Allow me to provide a brief history of the Left's hatred.
In Israel, the Left is in the midst of a long and continuous process of contraction. The leadership of the proletariat has been sidelined, the absurd vision of peace wrapped in the national flag and lowered in a grave. The Meretz party is contending for Arab votes, and in the absence of any authentic leadership, figures with roots in the Likud party have been elected to the Zionist Union leadership. The old elites are losing their grip.
A large sector, which throughout the years suffered from feelings of inferiority, the result of local patronage, is raising its head and learning to recognize its own value. The historic revolution of 1977 began as a political one, and with the passage of time, created a new reality of consciousness. On the eve of the revolution, there were those on the Left who recognized the great darkness that had fallen on them, while others proposed the people be replaced.
The persistent sense of desperation among left-wing circles and the internalization they are unlikely to return to power through democratic means has made the Left pull out the sharpest weapons at its disposal: hateful poison, incitement and slander. The Left has used these tools with remarkable skill, including prior to the founding of the state. These weapons are in the hands of these "robbed Cossacks," who although they are guilty of perpetrating the crime, assume the role of the victim. The hatred, the incitement and the snitching come pouring of these people in every direction, and yet without batting an eye, they accuse the Right of utilizing these very same tactics.
Twice a year, when the anniversary of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin comes around on the Hebrew and Gregorian calendars, we in Israel are witness to displays of hatred and incitement in Rabin's name. Propagandists on the Left blamed the Right in its totality for the shocking murder, and ever since, it has become a bubbling spring that waters the flowerbeds of Israeli society with unfathomable hatred. The grandchildren of the deceased, with extraordinary impudence and that old familiar condescension of yore, take advantage of a state ceremony to harm the prime minister and the Right in its entirety, which is forced to silently listen to these false accusations. They have stolen from me the noble memory of Rabin, the IDF chief of staff in the 1967 Six-Day War, and sacrificed to the flames of hatred and incitement.
This is not the first time the leftist camp has taken advantage of a murder for its political needs. When Zionist leader Haim Arlosoroff was murdered in 1933 while walking along the Tel Aviv beach, then-Mapai leader David Ben-Gurion determined it was the Revisionist Zionists who had murdered him. These false accusations allowed his camp to win the elections within the Zionist movement. A decade later, the leftists were turning right-wing underground fighters in to the British authorities in Palestine.
My Holocaust-survivor relatives endured the Dachau and Stutthof concentration camps and the death march. Their dream was to come to Israel. They were on the Altalena, an Irgun ship that was shelled on Ben-Gurion's orders. Thirteen of their friends survived the Nazis but not the Altalena affair, which nearly sparked a civil war. The Left's hatred was not directed only at the "sabonim" ("soaps," a reference to the soap Nazis supposedly made from Jewish corpses and a derogatory term for Holocaust survivors). That was also how they treated the waves of immigrants from Eastern countries, who were to become an underclass within the country. And we have yet to hear the final word on the alleged disappearance of more than 1,000 Yemenite Jewish children in Israel from 1948 to 1954. Suffice it to say there is no need to discuss at length the Left's treatment of the haredi sector and the settlers.
Informants have been a familiar phenomenon among the people of Israel since they first graced the pages of history. Since ancient times, there were Jews in the Diaspora who collaborated with the foreign power, the church and thieves. In his address to the U.N. Security Council just last week, the director of the human rights organization B'Tselem, Hagai El-Ad, impudently explained to Israel's haters that his country was brutal, oppressive and violent. It is no surprise then that in the prayers we say thrice daily, we say, "For the informants, let there be no hope."
My suggestion to the Left is, before you criticize others, take a long, hard look in the mirror. Stop the campaigns of hate, the incitement and the snitching on the Right and its voters. One cannot roll one's eyes and warn of a societal rift while at the same time acting to deepen it.
To return to true vision, action and leadership before it is too late, the Left would be wise to remember the following words of wisdom from Ecclesiastes 9:6: "As well their love, as their hatred and their envy, is long ago perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun."
