One of the scariest aspects of this time in history is the sense of impending civil war and/or societal dissolution. There's a place in the heart that hopes or believes that however dismal the world seems, when the need is great, people will step
up to the plate, some unexpected hero will arrive, something will happen to prevent the worst of all. That's the sense that I've lost over the past two months. Not a shred of decency is left in the Netanyahu government, and the more pervasive
the emergency in Israeli society as a whole, the more despicable the government response.
Our country has been hijacked by an extreme minority who care only for their own, and have clarified that anyone outside the Bibi cult or the religious extremes doesn't concern them. At this time of war, when hundreds of thousands of Israelis are
displaced from their homes, hundreds of thousands recruited into active military duty and cannot work their jobs or support their families, hundreds of thousands injured or severely traumatized, newly bereaved, suffering loss of property, business,
employment – crisis upon crisis – the government's top priority has been to route as much of the budget as possible to coalition partners for their sectoral purposes.
Not only have they not diverted sufficient funds to support the home front and civilian crises, they’ve been unabashedly slashing budgets for agriculture, special education, mental health and higher education – just when the need is greatest – to
funnel money to the plethora of ministries ostensibly in charge of different aspects of Jewish identity and heritage. Huge sums have been channeled to the separate ultra-orthodox education system, at the same time removing the condition that these
institutions must also teach core subjects such as mathematics, science and English – Torah only is fine; and exempting them from financial oversight, so that if much of the money ends up in a few private pockets, no one will really know. The
small number of Opposition MKs who decry these budget grabs are demonized and overruled.
The press, also, is helpless. Journalists can write and write but no one is listening. The Minister for Communication calls in plain sight to starve or criminalize media outlets such as "Ha'aretz" newspaper who do not tow the party line and insist
on investigating; at the same time, diverting special budgets and extending special privileges to the propaganda Channel 14, which encourages division, disregards truth, and nurses the cult of personality surrounding Netanyahu, his family and
cohorts.
The truth in Gaza is largely unknown, the truth within Israel is also surprisingly unknown. We are forced to resort to private investigations to attempt to resolve rumors about the extent of the crises we all see and feel around us. There is no official data available through a reliable, centralized channel; just as all the social and economic support for civilians is being shouldered by impromptu volunteers and donors, so is the news. The rumors are wild: of rocketing suicide rates amongst survivors of the Nova Music Festival and other October 7th massacre sites, of sexual predators taking advantage of the chaos to volunteer at evacuee hotels where they are not required to be vetted, resulting in further rapes and abuses of the already vulnerable refugees. Dozens of the survivors have apparently been institutionalized for their own protection, in a mental health system that was already underfunded and under-supervised prior to October – possibly kept in terrible conditions, but no one is shedding a light on the actual situation. What we do know is bad enough to believe almost any horror, and so scary rumors abound and multiply.
The police have also been infiltrated and cannot be relied upon to protect civilians who are not visibly Ben Gvir supporters. Last week's shooting of Yuval Castelman, a Jewish civilian who neutralized two terrorists in Jerusalem, demonstrated just how far we've gone down the slippery slope to anarchy, in which the rule of law is cast away. There was a time when ethical guidelines dictated when and how enforcers may engage and open fire in an active shooting situation. Shooters were to be neutralized, not executed. Authorities have been trying to spin the murder of Yuval Castelman as a case of mistaken identity, and him a tragic victim of friendly fire; but even if he had been one of the terrorists and not a civilian, the protocols were supposed to prevent the execution of a neutralized, unarmed individual who had cast aside his weapon, kneeled, bared his torso to show he was not booby-trapped, put his hands up and loudly surrendered.
Rather than condemn this botched extra-judicial execution, Netanyahu shrugged in a press conference and said, "that's life". (Marie Antoinette ain't got nothing on Netanyahu for callous slogans.) The Jerusalem police released Castleman's body without the essential autopsy, making it impossible to prove which bullet killed him. Aviad Farija, the soldier suspected of shooting Castelman – primarily because he boasted of the killing in an interview immediately following the event but before Castelman's identity was made public – was only arrested after massive public outcry, and will likely be exonerated. He is a member of a special unit of "Hill Boys" – extremist West Bank settlers – who was promoted in the IDF in an expedited process that circumvented usual officer training, which used to include training in ethics and protocols.
Ben Gvir has been busy arming civilians, as well, in an expedited process, in which politics are more important than range practice. Basically it seems that Ben Gvir has been giving out guns and gun licenses willy nilly to anyone who supports his radical politics; reporter Tal Schneider revealed yesterday that these licenses can effectively be bought by paying off brokers connected to Ben Gvir. Several witnesses of the rushed "certification" process reported that the training ranges were a travesty and the applicants were not properly instructed in use of the weapons. Upon exposure of the extent of unregulated distribution of gun licenses, the head of the Department for Ammunitions in the Ministry of Interior Defense, Israel Avisar, resigned on Monday. Couple the reckless arming of vigilantes with the fact that earlier this year gun licenses were revoked and personal weapons confiscated from trained, experienced reserve officers who participated in the anti-coalition protests of 2023, and you have a grim picture of how the government under Netanyahu and Ben Gvir is arming its supporters for an upcoming civil war.
Currently what I find scariest is a march planned for tomorrow in Jerusalem, approved by the Jerusalem police. The Temple Mount Movements – the most militant Messianic Jewish groups – are planning to march through the Old City of Jerusalem, including the Muslim Quarter, to demand full Jewish control of the Temple Mount including the Al Aqsa Mosque. This is basically bringing torches to march in a powder keg, and will almost inevitably lead to horrific violence, and yet the police – who have banned non-violent protests and arrested Arab leaders for even suggesting a rally calling for ceasefire – have given their approval.
All this is much scarier to me even than the Hamas missiles that continue to rain down on us. Hamas are so monstrous that no one even calls for them to cease their fire, they are expected to continue bombing schools, hospitals and other civilian targets. Of course they'll keep bombing: they are Hamas. No one even blinked when they violated the first cease-fire in November by targeting southern cities in Israel barely 15 minutes in; it was a childish provocation, proving that asides from everything else, Hamas are also total assholes.
Ironically, the greatest danger of the Iron Dome defensive system is that it is so effective that it creates the illusion that we are in no danger at all. Here in Tel Aviv we've grown blasé, but just yesterday, for example, three massive pieces of shrapnel (imagine something about the size of the lamppost in Narnia) landed: one right outside a toy store I love here on King George street, 3 minutes walk from my office (your place to go for Moomin merchandise in Israel); one on the north Tel Aviv balcony of a family who used to be neighbors of ours and whose children went to kindergarten with mine; and a third that landed inside a school classroom, which happened to be empty only because of the late-ish hour. A hunk of metal that size falling on you out of the sky will kill you even if it's been pre-detonated. These aren't handbills Hamas is sending to convey their message.
Hamas are monstrous, they must be stopped. But our current government seems mostly hellbent on imitating their monstrosity. A government in which amazingly, not a single minister seems to have skin in the game of the actual fighting: ultra-orthodox and their children are exempt from military service, and none of the others act as though they have loved ones on the front. We're all just cannon fodder to them – Gazans, West Bank and Israeli Arabs, and Jewish political opposers alike.
It's all so bad. |
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