In the wake of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's historic visit to Judea and Samaria and the festival surrounding Deni Avdija's meteoric journey to the NBA, we would be wise to put some distance between us and American politics and culture. On the domestic front, we are suffering from an endless war of generals, where small public groups are being used as cannon fodder for their fight. This "war of generals" does not refer to the current leadership's battle against oppositionists, but the disease that has afflicted Israeli society since the 1930s.
There's no fool-proof formula for lowering the flames of this never-ending public campaign against the prime minister. But one thing can be said about this struggle: It is not a-symptomatic. The visible symptoms are that Israeli society is currently capable of creating strife between one bereaved family and another across the street. It is capable creating apocalyptic wars between brothers in arms. Between Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, who now deny that their relationship in the army began with the admiration of a junior officer for his superior and the superior officer's affection for his subordinate. Israeli society is currently tolerant of rhetoric evocative of Hitler and the Nazis, as weapons in the bitter political quarrels spilling into the streets.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
One way to understand these tensions, which are severely hampering the public's steadfastness and sapping our zest for life, is because of the propagandistic carpet bombing to which the people are being subjected. It is an atmosphere rife with propaganda, which fosters hysteria. Every minor news item is compressed and converted into a cluster bomb whose shrapnel is dispersed via radio stations, large and small, television stations and, if any targets remain standing, it becomes the job of social media to finish. As explained by the epidemiological experts in relation to the coronavirus pandemic: What once was a brush fire we could control with extinguishers and hoses has become an inferno threatening to engulf the city.
Incidentally, it took the death of a skeptical and alienated poet, a man who spewed awful things into the public space, to remind us of what we used to be and help us listen again. For a fleeting moment, we could hear the soft rustling of the trees in the field. Maybe we tried hiding some of our emotions, because it's awkward these days to be caught indulging in a bit of Israeli sentimentalism. It truly is an uncomfortable feeling to be connected to a war of the past, when that war has become fuel for ratings. And the suspicion starts creeping in that our public corporations have become subcontractors for American production companies, such as HBO.
Why then is the American aspect important? If we compare the influence of Americanism over the past 60 years to the influence of communist Russia, which was particularly prominent in Israeli culture for three generations, we can compare what's happening today in America to the disaster at Chernobyl. Nearly 70 years of a society predicated on the Bolshevik revolution ultimately produced a nuclear explosion that created an enormous, uninhabitable area. America, with all the destructive criticism toward it, continues to radiate influence on all its consumers in the West, including of course Israel, perhaps more so than any other country in the West. This is due to the symbiosis the countries have forged in countless fields. Alongside this symbiosis, however, Israelis lack the defense mechanisms against this excessive proximity. First and foremost, America gained its influence due to its exports of jeans, wonderful pop, rock and jazz music, and films. Essentially, it's the fashion of dreams. Today it exports a fractured election system, an internal collapse akin to Chernobyl. And yet, I can't remember a time when Israelis I know personally have so immensely identified with and paid such close attention to the developments there.
The problem is that Israeli society has become a copy-paste replica of the destructive political fight being waged in the streets and news studios of America. We see this in the ecstatic reaction to Donald Trump's election loss. The adherence to American pathology is occurring amid the backdrop of the political vacuum in the opposition, here in Israel. The opposition is actually quite powerful, we can see it. But when a relative balance of power existed between parties, emotions were filtered through parliamentary and ideological channels. We could divert our energy to loving one another, to our collective memories, to the roots of the Israeliness we all share. In a situation where 97% of our conscious activity is dedicated to politicization and rampant propaganda, the public is in a tailspin. Some will call this yearning for sentimental solidarity that will never return. Indeed, it seems like something we shouldn't expect. But, as a first step, we certainly can give our "friends" entrenched on the other side a friendly warning: We are in the blast range of the American disaster and we should all move out of its radius.
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
