JNS
For them, the ideal state is no more than a "Sweden in Hebrew."
The Oct. 7 massacre brought Israelis together. Most of us understood full well that we need to hurry up and heal the wounds created by the bitter struggle over judicial reform so that we can pool our resources together for the momentous task we now face.
But the far left, and certainly the hardcore of the permanent protest, does not share the sentiment. After a short lull at the beginning of the war, in which they too felt obliged to offer lip service to unity, their strategists, cheerleaders in the press, ringleaders and advertising wizards, were back at it.
Though much smaller in size, the demonstrations became wilder and more violent, pushing ever closer to violent insurrection. It felt like the war had only increased their desperation and sense of urgency in fighting Israel's right-wing government.
In recent months, we've seen all this: The protesters flew paragliders over the private Caesarea residence of the Netanyahu family. Police found they had a military-grade aerial photograph of the vicinity, on which they had drawn IDF-style battle plan markings, detailing a strategy for storming the house. The house itself was circled with a dotted red line, the way IDF maps designate enemy targets.
Then there were the torch-carrying protesters who stormed the barriers protecting the prime minister's official residence in Jerusalem. There was also a Jan. 6-style riot staged in the balconies overlooking the Knesset chamber. And then there was the failed four-day "siege" around the parliament, where protesters camped in the area surrounding the building.
The turnout was unimpressive and the goal—to coerce the coalition to call early elections for fear of the collapse of public order—was not achieved.
An endless string of road blockings, bonfires on highways, provocations against the ultra-Orthodox that crossed the line into violence, and deliberate clashes with the police, who have better things to do in the current state of emergency, multiplied. One protester hit a policeman with a burning torch he threw at him. The real war, explained another Never-Bibi activist, is not against Hamas, it is against the enemy within—Netanyahu and his government.
Perhaps even more astonishingly, once they felt comfortable to abandon the lip service to unity, the leaders of the protest movement began attacking the ideal of unity itself, clawing at the newly applied stitches and savagely tearing open the wounds that had just begun to heal.
In an April 7 tweet, half a year into the war, Shikma Bressler, the self-styled Jeanne d'Arc of the anti-reform protest, and still one of the most prominent among the protesters, rejected unity as a desirable end. Instead, she distanced herself and her fellow travelers from the deplorable hordes:
"There's them, and there's us. Them: A strange combination of nationalist fanatics, an ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist leadership, corrupt, power-hungry people who breed those who will run over protesters [a reference to a driver who hit protesters in Tel Aviv on April 6]. Less than 20% of the public. Us: All the rest who want to live in a normal Jewish-democratic state. There's no need to build bridges between the groups. Only to break their stranglehold on the levers of government."
Bressler's X bio succinctly describes her as "Mother, From the Valley, Physicist"—the Valley (short for the Jezreel Valley) being a badge of Zionist nobility: it was the home of pioneers and an incubator of much of the old guard elite. Bressler is also a professor of physics, which means she must know that the 64 Knesset seats that the right-wing coalition holds (out of 120) are not 20% and that some 5,000 or 10,000 chronic protesters rioting and attempting to tear the country apart in the midst of a war are not "the rest of us."
But what is most striking about this tweet is that Bressler wants nothing to do with all these others. She doesn't see them as brothers in arms in the war on Hamas or lost relatives who should be brought back into the fold, or even lapsed citizens in need of some re-education. She simply wants to rid herself of them. Even a war that threatens the lives of all of us, even a genocidal orgy of Hamas savagery directed at her no less than it is directed at them, does not engender in her a sense of shared fate.
Bressler is well known as a tireless promoter of the most divisive of anti-reform protest tactics: IDF reservist refusals. She famously and repeatedly threatened that if the government pushes the reform through, "by September Netanyahu will have no army."
"Without us," she said—that is without the elite units in the army and security apparatuses—“the State of Israel remains blind in the Middle East."
Our enemies were following, too, and they must have concluded that the IDF is falling apart and that now was the time to attack. Worse, on the morning of that black sabbath of Oct. 7, it indeed seemed like we were blind and had no army.
But even the horrors of the massacre did not convince Bressler that disunity was a danger to the Zionist enterprise. She's back to her old inciting, directed—as it was before the war—against those unenlightened hordes of Jews she wants nothing to do with.
We may, I think, begin to understand what seems like complete insanity given the backdrop of a national emergency, if we look at the previous battle those activists took part in, the battle over judicial reform, through their eyes. The reform was roundly defeated, but for the inner circle of protesters, it didn't feel like a real victory. And not only because their most cherished aim, toppling the right-wing coalition, was not achieved. There was more to it.
For them, halting the reform was a stop-gap measure that managed to postpone, but not prevent, what they feared most. In their eyes, they are running against the clock to preserve their ideal of a liberal-progressive Israel from what they imagine to be a dark demographic tide of deplorables who would overwhelm it with too much Judaism and nationalism and too little progressivism. Because though the birth rate among Israel's progressive elites far exceeds that of their counterparts in other Western democracies, it still falls short of the birth rate among Bressler's "Them."
"Us" are already a minority. And they are genuinely scared of the National Religious, the ultra-Orthodox, the conservative and not least the nationalist, traditionalist non-Ashkenazi Likudniks. All these, they believe, quite wrongly, are planning to use their growing demographic advantage to impose a "messianic dictatorship" over the soft sprout of modernity that elites have managed to plant in the hardened soil of this land, scarred by thousands of years of fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.
Never mind that, in clear contrast to the permanent protesters, the Likud voters, conservative in their worldview and tolerant in their temperament, don't have a single Bolshevik bone in their bodies, and would not dream of a dictatorship, messianic or otherwise.
That demographic anxiety drove the protesters before the war to begin a campaign for a constitution that would, they hoped, secure their brand of woke liberal progressivism against any future majority. They are clearly not content with their astonishing achievement: preserving, and even strengthening, the grip of an elitist Supreme Court over Israel's polity, against the will of the majority. They think anchoring it in a formal constitution offers the best hope of ensuring its durability.
But then came the Hamas massacre. The war had not only derailed their political plans. It did much more than that. It threatened to overwhelm their progressive dreams with a nationalist tide, to shut the door on the possibility of peace on which that dream was predicated, and what may even be worse, to pull them right back into the fold of the Jewish story that in their heart of hearts they have been yearning to transcend—the old story of Jewish exceptionalism, and its permanent shadow of antisemitism, its heavy baggage of enslavement, exodus, wars, rebellions against empires, the destruction of two Temples, pogroms, expulsions and the Holocaust. Even the founding of Israel did not stop the cycle, since we had to fight repeated wars.
But then in the early 1990s, it seemed like the dawn of a new age had finally come. In the left's collective telling of the story, it was Yitzhak Rabin who finally put Israel on the road to peace and prosperity, which was supposed to usher in a new age of normality—the "normal Jewish-democratic state" that Bressler alludes to.
All this, the story goes on to say, would have come about if only Rabin had not been assassinated by the right. The hand that pulled the trigger was Yigal Amir's. But in this view, what drove him to do it was the whole basket of deplorables.
The problem with this story is, of course, that it ignores the real reason peace was never achieved: There never was a Palestinian partner willing to recognize the right of Jews to self-determination anywhere in the Land of Israel. One can readily understand then why the orgy of violence and hate perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, and widely lauded by the Palestinian public, as polls have consistently shown, made it very difficult to continue telling it.
Not that it was easy before Oct. 7. If Gaza was a pilot of sorts for the two-state solution, it failed miserably from day one. It's just that the massacre made it that much more vivid, and accordingly made many more Israelis turn their backs on the idea of a Palestinian state. The hope for "normality" was, yet again, put on hold.
***
While Bressler may be on the level when she says she is a Zionist, her Zionism, which she shares with many in Israel's progressive elites, is only very minimally Jewish. It is based on an ideal that sharp pundit Irit Linur described as an Israel that is no more than "Sweden in Hebrew."
This, more or less, is what Bressler seems to refer to in passing in her tweet as "normal." Because, I'm sure, somewhere in the back of her mind lies a nagging feeling that Judaism is not exactly normal and that being normal requires transcending most of it. And so, though she would never say that about herself or her colleagues the truth is that for them, Zionism has morphed into something bordering on hostility to Judaism.
Their New Jew, the Jew from the Valley, is not what the original pioneers envisioned. Unlike the original creed, the Zionist ideal that Bressler and the protesters represent does not emphasize Jewish continuity, through the resurrection of Jewish national independence. Instead, it is energized by a desire to transcend religion, nationalism, particularism, exceptionalism—or in short, any concrete Jewish content (save perhaps the Hebrew language).
This is the source of their visceral fear of all those religious, ultra-Orthodox, conservative and Mizrachi Jews. This is why, for example, they angrily intruded on public prayers in Tel Aviv last Yom Kippur, demanding that any group that voluntarily erects even the most symbolic barrier between men and women for the purpose of worshipping—ezrat nashim and ezrat gvarim—be banished from praying in the public sphere. Their new Jew is an up-to-date progressive. It is the Jew that no "normal person" has the right to hate.
And yet, hate persists. This must be, then, because the deplorables won't let us become normal Hebrew-speaking Swedes.
This mutation of Zionism, bordering on anti-Judaism, is not completely alien to the creed. From its inception, Zionism explicitly aimed at normalizing Jewish existence, making us, the Jews, "like all other peoples."
But what Zionists like Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion meant by this is not that we should lose our distinctive national culture and identity. This was not a program of assimilation. Quite the opposite. It was an antidote against assimilation. Normality meant, for them, that we would be able to freely express our culture and identity in what became the normal way in the modern age: by rebelling against our chronic dependence on others and creating the conditions for political self-determination.
"It is the natural right of the Jewish people," says our Declaration of Independence, "to be like all peoples, masters of their own fate in their own sovereign state."
But normality has changed its meaning for people like Bressler. The rising tide of globalism helped along the dream of transcending particularism and provincialism. Many among Israel's elites wanted to be like all people, not like all peoples: to be accepted as equals at academic conferences, ski resorts, wine-tasting clubs, hedge funds, advertising agencies, social media, paying high-tech jobs, and not least—welcome members in the newly-anointed moralizing classes, with their "progressive" frowning on national identity, religion, nuclear families and traditional male and female roles.
Ay, there's the rub: that new vision of normality has always been absolutely dependent on peace with the Palestinians. It's harder to transcend national identity when your nation-state is under constant attack. It's harder to transcend Judaism when you are besieged by antisemitism. It's harder to transcend provincialism when your province is fighting for its life.
And, of course, you can't be accepted by the woke so long as your country appears to oppress the Palestinians, no matter how urgent the need to stop terrorism, how wildly antisemitic the Palestinians remain, or how vehemently you try to distance yourself from your own government that is obliged to protect you from them.
The Oslo process and the illusion of coming peace with the Palestinians it ushered in seemed to solve these dilemmas. The new normal suddenly seemed within reach. And this is why the collapse of Oslo has been so traumatic for Israel's leftist elites. This is why they had to blame the right for its collapse and to absolve the Palestinians, so they could save the hope of resurrecting the two-state solution. They just can't give up on the dream of peace, because it would mean giving up the "normal" identity that have so painstakingly constructed for themselves.
On Oct. 6, one could still pretend that Oslo was just in a coma. Oct. 7 took it off life support. That is why Oct. 7 drove the far left to near despair. The clock began to tick faster. The chances of resuscitation were slipping away. It became that much more urgent to remove the right from power, before it harnesses public anger to enflame nationalist passions before it uses the war to close the door permanently on the two-state solution, before it reoccupies Gaza, or worse, resettles it with Jews.
***
Enter the Biden administration and its meddling in Israeli politics.
At the very beginning of the war, it seemed to most Israelis that the United States would naturally stand by us and support our effort to eradicate Hamas in Gaza. But it soon turned out that the Biden administration had different priorities, more in line with its "regional integration" policy, i.e. its determination to prevent this war from wrecking their strategy of appeasement of Iran.
The plan they worked out was to prevent an Israeli victory and return the Palestinian Authority to Gaza on the bayonets of the IDF, where, after being "revitalized," it could supposedly bring a weakened Hamas under its wings.
And then, when there's a unified Palestinian representative leadership, force on a weakened, chastened Israel the two-state solution it now rejects more vehemently than it ever did before. But for this to happen, the right must be removed from power.
This is nothing short of the wet dream of Israel's shrinking left—the leftist minority in the Knesset, the progressive press, the peace-addicted upper echelons of the IDF and the security establishment along with much of the state bureaucracy and the progressive all-powerful judiciary. The truth is that all these long ago abandoned the hope of convincing Israel's electorate to return to the Oslo track, and invested their hopes instead in external—that is, American—pressure.
For the permanent protest forces, urgency borne of desperation was now re-energized with new hope. The "normal people" of Israel could now turn their backs on their deplorable Jewish brethren and team up with the "normal people" of America to "do the right thing," which is, in their view, partitioning the Land. Never mind that most sane Israel would never risk living near a new terror state, or that the Palestinians never dreamed of creating any other sort of state.
But such minor considerations have never deterred progressive yes-we-can dreamers. And they easily recognize themselves in each other.
It now seems that the Biden administration may be offering the protesters more than abstract hope. While the majority of Israelis see the protesters as insurrectionists, dead set on destroying unity in the midst of an existential war for survival, the Biden administration is, it seems, encouraging them to accelerate the protest, as it did during the struggle over judicial reform.
In a JNS piece titled "The Biden administration's war against the government of Israel," Caroline Glick quotes at length from Ami Dror, one of the veteran leaders of the anti-reform movement.
Dror maintains that the rioters were accelerating the protest under instructions he personally received from the White House. That may well be fanciful. Not because such things are beneath the Biden administration, but rather because it is doubtful whether Dror would be their point man for the task.
But what is not in doubt is the glee with which Dror promotes the idea that the U.S. will run roughshod over Israel's sovereignty, and how it will save us from the stranglehold of Israel's deplorables. He writes:
“The American plan, as I published it on March 6, remains unchanged. The day after my publication, the Biden administration announced the establishment of an American port [in Gaza] that will seize from Israel the ability to rule the Strip—the port will be used initially to provide food, but the central purpose of the port is to rebuild Gaza.”
But the protesters have a role to play as well.
“And the most important thing? Us, and President Biden’s request from us: The American method of dealing with misbehaving states, [including] driving a wedge between 'the nation,' and 'the leadership.' In our case … for this to work—the nation of Israel must show (in the streets!) that it is fighting the leadership. … The American administration needs to see the nation in Israel fighting the government of Israel.”
Like Bressler, Dror casually substitutes the 10,000 protesters for the "nation," ignoring the fact that the actual nation elected this government. It is nothing short of astonishing that these people have convinced so many during the reform struggle that they were fighting for democracy, while they were fighting, all along, against the idea that deplorable Jews have a right to partake in determining our common fate.
How lucky we are that the adults in the room, responsible Americans, can help save the "normal people" from the clingers, the bigots, the believers and the nationalists. That is, they can save the enlightened post-Jewish elites from the grave threat of being pulled back into the fold of Jewish history, made, once again, to carry the heavy burden of the 3,500-year-old story that they have been so desperate to transcend.
Thus, post-Judaism leads in the end to a rejection of democracy, which means, a rejection of Zionism too. Because if Zionism aspired to make the Jews masters of their own fate, in their own sovereign state, the desire to turn Israel into a protectorate of a superpower (where Israelis do not partake in the franchise) means giving up on the idea that Jews should be masters of their own fate.
So ironically, this attempt to transcend Jewish history sends Bressler, Dror and their ilk right back into the darkest chapters of Jewish history they sought to transcend: helplessness, and total dependence on others.
These are dangerous plans, but they aren't going to produce the results their perpetrators expect. Even if Israel's elites try to pull a two-state rabbit out of an American hat, they will ultimately run up against the same Palestinian recalcitrance.
But the more crucial consideration is that the "Palestinian question" so central to our elite's self-image is now a marginal one in reality, and the Gaza hornet's nest our smaller problem. True, leaving Hamas on its feet in the short run will exact a heavy price, because our stronger enemies are watching. We shouldn't let that happen, and a government that does will pay a price. But we are going to have to fight our stronger enemies in any case, and so a decade of wars is probably ahead of us.
Sweden in Hebrew is not an option, nor is a Western style of life for the foreseeable future. Israel will have to become an armed, fighting nation, or else perish. And this means that these progressive elites, now in thrall of a full-blown tantrum about their lost Sweden, are playing a losing game, and will have to change. They will either acquire a fighting spirit, or become irrelevant. Irrelevant like their childish assumption that fixing the leaking pipe in Gaza will be enough to stem the region-wide tsunami ahead.
