On Thursday, Knesset Constitution Committee Chairman Simcha Rothman compared the settlers rampaging in the West Bank to the anti-judicial overhaul demonstrators who blocked roads in Tel Aviv.
Simcha Rothman is a cheap demagogue who sought to obscure the fact that the valve controlling pogroms by lawbreaking settlers in the West Bank has been opened wide (and nobody in Israel has even a gram of the fortitude needed to return this genie to its bottle) by creating a false symmetry between the settlers and the law-abiding protesters on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street.
I don’t rule out the possibility of a violent outbreak in the ranks of the left, and certainly not as long as the processes of internal disintegration continue. But this is still a hypothetical possibility that we should be leery of if we want to prevent civil war from breaking out. It’s impossible to put this on a par with the real and consistent violence by the right, whether systematic or spontaneous, much less by the settlers, who in practice live outside Israeli law.
If Rothman is right, and the backbone of society represented on Kaplan Street is capable of developing the same attitude toward Israeli law, Israeli institutions and the army that the pogromists in the West Bank have evinced, then the situation is much worse than one would guess by looking at his face.
Governability? Playing the role of sheriff for the Arabs and the Bedouin? Prattling about sovereignty in the West Bank? They’re losing Tel Aviv.
His comparison was demagogic, but there's an element of truth to it, in the sense that no matter where you look, you see different manifestations of the same thing – the disintegration of the State of Israel. The violence in Arab towns, the protests on Kaplan Street, the pogroms in the West Bank, the Druze protests, the displays of racism in Jerusalem’s Teddy Stadium – everything is burning.
The government is a joke. The Knesset is a circus. The legal system has become a target. The media has turned into reality TV. The police are collapsing under the burden. Even the army, our melting pot, the only agency that is ostensibly beyond politics and always managed somehow to float above our internal tensions, has been damaged.
The hierarchy of the old social order has shattered, but nobody has unveiled a construction plan for a new social order. Because who exactly would do so? The great sage, Rothman? The visionary of the apartheid state, Bezalel Smotrich? Justice Minister Yariv Levin? The useless national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir?
It didn’t begin with the government’s planned legal overhaul, and it won’t end if the overhaul is shelved. On one hand, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime cause, but on the other, he’s also a symptom of the hereditary disease that prevents us from exercising sovereignty without a doctor’s note, a handicapped sticker, mitigating circumstances for Holocaust survivors – a nation like all other nations, a state like all other states.
Nevertheless, on the continuum between “it’s simply our nature” and “it’s all the legal ‘reform,’” there’s one dramatic milestone that can’t be separated from everything that is happening today. Five years has passed since the nation-state law was enacted.
Immediately after the Knesset passed that ugly law which enshrined Jewish supremacy, turned Israel’s back on its alliance with the Druze and slammed a door in the face of the Arab minority, Netanyahu gave a speech that may be his most ridiculous ever. “This is a foundational moment in the history of Zionism and the history of Israel,” he said. “122 years after Herzl published his vision, we have enacted the fundamental principle of our existence into law.”
With the pathos of someone who at the very least announced the establishment of the State of Israel, Netanyahu and his governing coalition effectively derailed Israel. Negotiations with the Palestinians ended at around the same time.
Israel replaced the debate over the Palestinians’ right to self-determination with superfluous legislation about the Jewish people’s renewal of self-determination. Only later did we discover that this was the opening shot in its internal collapse.