Last year, Israeli President Rivlin denounced Israel as a “sick society” and accused Jews of having “forgotten how to be decent human beings.” Now Major General Yair Golan, the military’s deputy chief of staff, accused Israel of resembling Nazi Germany in a speech delivered on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Israel is a sick society only to the extent that, like a fish, it rots from the heads of men like Rivlin and Golan. It is a sickness comes from members of the political elite whose views are fundamentally at odds with those of the people. The hatred that Rivlin and Golan, the beneficiaries of privilege and protektsia, feel for ordinary Israelis is unrelenting in its ugliness.
The Jewish State is fundamentally divided between two groups, its people and its leaders. Israel’s population is defined by a diverse mix of Middle Eastern and Russian Jewish refugees along with large numbers of Orthodox Jews. These groups tend to have more conservative views and their influence makes it very difficult for the left to win elections the way that it once used to.
Rather than adapting to Israel’s changing demographics, its elites have poured on the hate. From Dudu Topaz to Yair Garbuz, a Labor rally can’t seem to pass by without slurs aimed at Middle Eastern Jews. At last year’s election, Garbuz ranted, “How did this handful quietly become a majority?”
There was nothing quiet about it. But inside a leftist bubble of power and privilege the revelation that the majority of Israelis have very different views than they do has been deeply traumatic and shocking. Prime Minister Netanyahu is on his third straight term, but the Deep State of the elites is unwilling to be dislodged by mere democratic elections. And the Deep State controls leadership roles across the government from the military through the judiciary, not to mention academia, non-profits and culture.
It’s been a long time since this elite has been optimistic. Instead its rhetoric is divisive and nasty; it’s marked by paranoid suspicions about the ordinary Israelis who have left them behind. Hostile remarks, like those by Rivlin and Golan, express an undemocratic distaste toward the average Israeli.
The majority of Israel’s Jewish population now consists of refugees from the Middle East. This is a population with fundamentally different views when it comes to fighting back against the Islamic supremacism which they and their ancestors had lived under and eventually fled. It feels no guilt over the death of terrorists. It does not mourn the Jihadists of the Nakba who headed for the border in the expectation that the Jews in Israel would meet with a final Holocaust at the hands of the five invading Muslim armies, not to mention the forces of the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead it feels a moral pride.
