Q&A: Regarding the Remarks of Israel Frey
Regarding the Remarks of Israel Frey
Question
Have a good week and a good new month.
I’ll quote what was written on Twitter by the (Haredi) journalist Israel Frey:
“
I come out of the Sabbath only to discover that in the 24 hours I was disconnected, 126 children were killed in the Gaza Strip.
In the last week, 2,215 people were killed there, including 724 children and 458 women.
Listen to me carefully: you don’t have to be some great leftist to ask for a stop. Stop for a moment.
Just as the murder of Ido in Be’eri is a crime, so too the murder of Ahmad in Gaza is a crime. Enough, stop.
”
As a result of his remarks, people demonstrated outside his home.
On the one hand, there is justice in what he says, and yet the “weight of the value of life” in Gaza is not the same as it is אצלנו (and that is a good thing). And I ask: do we bear any part of the responsibility for the fact that the value of life is lower there? For example, perhaps targeted killings of their senior figures in previous campaigns damaged the value of life among them.
On the other hand, what is the solution? It is human to feel empathy for those who are “innocent,” but what solution do you arrive at from that? If Israel destroys Gaza, would that be immoral?
By the way, isn’t demonstrating against people like this a loss of proportion? What did he really say, after all? (And I’m asking this as a right-wing person.)
Thank you.
Answer
My latest column deals with exactly this. It is very natural and proper to identify with the suffering of innocents (babies or not). It is also very proper and natural to want to eliminate and take revenge on murderers. But we must not let emotions, neither in this direction nor that one, run us. We need to define a proper goal, and then derive from it what must be done. That can be done even at the cost of harming those not involved, if it is necessary and if the goal is worthy.
What characterizes typical leftists and rightists is that they let emotion run them.
Demonstrating outside the home of a private person who wrote something is ridiculous, even if what he said outrages someone. It is part of the emotional hysteria washing over us.
And no, in my assessment we have no part at all in the cheapening of human life in Arab culture.
Discussion on Answer
Yair
You touched on an essential point.
The man is an “influencer and media personality” — who decided that every foolish and stupid thing that gets publicity has to be taken seriously??
Our addiction to the media (long before the war too) causes us to pay attention and waste energy on an imaginary parallel virtual world, completely disconnected from actual reality.
Quite a few people are convinced that actual reality is what they see and read on screens, and the consequences are tragic — a total loss of contact with reality.
People spend all day dealing with who said what about whom, or whether that politician is more stupid / smarter than the other.
An obsessive preoccupation with evil — fights, smears, division, intimidation.
This is a critical weak point in our lives, and we must draw the conclusions.
Israel Frey is an influencer and a media personality, so his words should not be treated like the casual speech of some private individual. The exposure his words receive turns what he says into a public matter; therefore, and because his remarks can weaken the sense of the justice of our cause in wartime, the response of demonstrating against him is very much called for. If we do not take advantage of the situation that has arisen in order to deal with the threat from Gaza at its root, we will pay for it in the future with our lives, with compound interest. The public in Gaza chose Hamas in elections. It is not occupied under them; on the contrary, it grows Hamas and is in a clear war with us. It is astonishing that people do not see this even after what happened. Such statements during wartime are actions against the war effort—not at the criminal level, admittedly, but at the moral level.