And how can one know who caused the division / what is happening now?
Here too, after all, everyone is speaking from anti-Bibi / pro-Bibi positioning—for example, you can see how everyone is in favor of unity but cannot resist taking jabs at whoever they think is preventing the move out of current political and self-interested motives, for today and for the day after (and of course the identity of the one “preventing” depends on your political outlook / which channel you watch, etc.). And this is obvious beyond all doubt—or pro-Israel / pro-Palestine—
Gideon Levy, for example, published a piece titled: “You can’t imprison two million people without paying a cruel price”—it seems this has no end.
B. Isn’t it unnecessary to argue about who is guilty as long as there is no serious commission of inquiry to discuss the matter? Right now the certain guilty party is Hamas, and no one really knows who is to blame for the failure on the Israeli side. Of course everyone talks as if they know. And even after there is a commission, the results won’t please everyone and the arguments will continue forever and ever.
C. More generally, lately I think we never really knew what we were talking about. Most of us don’t know how to run a country, what can be conceded, what is forbidden, how far one can go, international constraints, etc. etc. Everything reaches us through media channels that are “tainted” by worldviews and by the journalists’ own interpretation (I’m not claiming they intentionally mislead us). Unlike philosophical thought, say, where the substantive arguments are openly written down in books, the real and substantive conversations of politicians are conducted in the shadows (for various reasons), and all that comes out to us is the game, the show, and the division (not only in Israel, of course).

A person has impressions and common sense. It’s true that everything is wrapped in positioning. But you form your own view and don’t just spit out other people’s views. Of course one should treat information with suspicion, and arguments and positions should be examined on their merits.

Just a reminder that Gideon Levy is a well-known supporter of Bibi, who published many articles in his favor and long ago joined the family of Bibi-ists.

With God’s help, 24 Tishrei 5784

What we experienced over the last two years was an eruption of the dispute within the Jewish people between those inclined toward tradition and nationalism and those inclined toward liberalism and universalism, a dispute that has broadly accompanied us for some 250 years.

What we have been experiencing over the last week is precisely a terrible eruption of the dispute between Israel and Ishmael over control of the land, a dispute that has accompanied us for about 150 years, since the Jewish people began to return to life.

For the first dispute it is easier to find some kind of recipe for calming things down, because at the end of the day all of us (or at least most of us) seek a Jewish identity, and all of us (or at least most of us) want to live in a democratic state without external coercion. The political struggle to find the balance leads to raised voices, but the struggle against the external enemy intensifies the need to preserve the internal balance that will allow all of us to live together in calm.

By contrast, the struggle between Judaism and Islam is an existential struggle, whose beginning was with the founding of Islam, which aspired to rule the world. And today, with modern tools, Islam’s imperialist aspiration is intensified beyond measure. This is not merely a dispute between peoples over a stretch of land. It is a conflict with a determined ideology that seeks to dominate, facing a weak Western world, whether out of misunderstanding the threat or out of a desire for quiet.

***

It seems no one has magic solutions, and therefore there is no point discussing “who is to blame.” The discussion should be: “What do we do to improve the situation?”

Best regards, Fish”l

Two solutions have been proposed for the Israeli-Arab conflict: (a) total victory. (b) division into two states.

Solution (a) is problematic, because we are politically and economically dependent on our international ties, and the world will not allow us either to expel the Arabs from the Land of Israel or to establish an “apartheid state” in which millions of residents have no civil rights. That also does not fit with most of our desire for a democratic state.

Solution (b) is problematic, because a Palestinian state established by terror organizations will not remain quiet and will aspire to continue the war against the “Zionist entity” until it brings it down. In this there is no strategic difference between the PLO and Hamas and Islamic Jihad; these and those alike hate us deeply and seek our harm.

Since there is no real solution to the problem, and Netanyahu inherited from the late Rabin the Oslo Accords, which established an autonomous territory under the control of terror organizations with a future vision of a Palestinian state—Netanyahu was forced to preserve the status quo as the lesser evil. To agree in principle to the “two-state solution,” but to condition its progress on the cessation of terror.

In this situation of “neither swallowing nor spitting out,” we still have power and deterrence vis-à-vis the areas governed by terror. They have no tanks and airplanes and no diplomatic recognition, and to the extent they flare up, we still have military superiority that makes it possible to calm them down for a long period.

Does anyone have a better solution?

Best regards, Fish”l

I have to express bitter amusement at people’s delusions. This whole business of the opposition’s hypocrisy is of interest to academics only. Bibi’s story is over, no matter how hypocritical or not some of his opponents are.

To all his admirers who are now consoling themselves that Bibi has some way out of this—don’t bother. Benjamin Netanyahu has finished his role on the stage of Jewish history. Two possible scenarios lie before us. One: he finishes this war, hopefully with victory, and then voluntarily retires from politics and does not return. Two: he finishes this war, again hopefully with victory, and then tries to cling to the horns of the altar and will be dragged away from it by force, screaming in protest. There is no other scenario.

No propaganda machine, however well-oiled, will conceal the dimensions of the disaster and Bibi’s part in it. The scale of the event is too immense, his fingerprints on the character of the event, and his strategic failure are clear to anyone with eyes. This will not be like the Meron disaster. The murdered are not Haredim whom no one outside their community knows. There is hardly a family in Israel without a relative who was murdered, wounded, missing, or kidnapped. On Bibi Netanyahu’s watch, more than a thousand Jews were slaughtered because of a strategy for dealing with Hamas that he himself chose, promoted, and bequeathed to an entire generation of leaders. There is no one in Israel who has not heard in recent months the warnings about the security consequences of the rift within the people—a rift in the people that Bibi himself, as a polarizing figure who generates polarization, created, deepened, and certainly did not try to heal. There is no one who has not been exposed to the heroic stories of people whom he and his agents tried to portray as traitors over recent months, and in some cases they have been smearing them for years. As any sensible person could have guessed, in their hearts they have loyal Jewish hearts, entirely regardless of their opinion about Netanyahu and the direction in which he took the country. In the moment of truth, these people went out to save Jews from the claws of terrorists while taking enormous personal risk, and fought shoulder to shoulder with his most ardent supporters.

There are no casuistic verbal twists about the distinction between responsibility and guilt that he and his people can make in order to get out of this. The attempt, which has already begun, to shift the blame exclusively onto the gatekeeper, and in particular onto the heads of the security establishment and the intelligence people, will be rejected with disgust. The attempt to divert the blame from Bibi to the opposition will be met with raised eyebrows and astonishment that anyone expects people to adopt the idea that the hands of the man who ran the country for more than a decade are clean of blame. The attempt to promote bizarre conspiracy theories about “betrayal” and “a knife in the back” and other paranoid fantasies will be dismissed with ridicule and contempt.

Anyone who thinks that after such a disaster Bibi has any political comeback is living in illusions. I’m afraid people will tear him apart if it starts to look realistic that his political tricks are going to let him cling to the horns of the altar. I am not threatening; I am describing the mood among an enormous public that crosses political camps and includes people who until a few days ago were hardcore Bibi-ists. I would not be surprised if this is the mood of an overwhelming majority of the Jewish public in the country. Hints that this is a fear grounded in reality can be seen in the responses to politicians on social media, when they raised their heads from wherever they were hiding and posted something. Further evidence is apparent in the tone of bitterness expressed by massacre survivors and families of the missing in media interviews. The harsh and very blunt words are coming from people belonging to all political camps—political camps that today seem plainly irrelevant.

It would be better for all of us if Bibi realized already now that his role in the history of the people dwelling in Zion has ended, no matter what the outcome of the war will be. His foot-dragging around an emergency government with Gantz illustrates that he has not realized this. Quite a few of the messages from the few government members who make it to the media illustrate that whoever wrote their talking points has not internalized that Bibi’s story is over. He is acting as if there is some kind of “day after” for him as a leader in this country. There isn’t. The public is not there and will not be there. He can bring Israel the heads of Yahya Sinwar, Hassan Nasrallah, and Ali Khamenei on a silver platter, and as far as he is concerned the result will not change. He is finished, and it would be better for all of us if he realized it. His conduct in this war will only improve if that happens.

One option that once existed was the Allon Plan, according to which the Palestinians would be returned to the relatively moderate rule of the Kingdom of Jordan, with our security control in strategic areas such as the Jordan Valley, the envelope around Jerusalem, the western slopes of the mountain ridge, and Gush Katif, which would prevent the infiltration of massive military forces that would threaten what is within the Green Line.

That plan fell off the table with the strengthening of the PLO and Jordan’s relinquishing Judea and Samaria. Perhaps there was room to think that el-Sisi’s Egypt would accept control over the Gaza Strip, but it seems to me that el-Sisi too, entangled with Muslim extremists in his own country, would hardly be eager to deal with several more million Muslim extremists.

Best regards, Fish”l