The Jewish people and the Jewish state face extraordinary challenges today. Luckily, we can handle all of them. But to do so, we need to be capable of judging ourselves fairly.
By CAROLINE B. GLICK, The Jerusalem Post
Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish year because it is the day that the Torah sets aside for us to reckon with ourselves. We are commanded to give an accounting – before our fellow men and before God – for our actions in the previous year. We must make amends to both for our misdeeds. And since none of us is perfect, every one of us has things to atone for.
Yom Kippur’s power stems from a basic assumption that forms its core. That assumption is that we are all moral agents. We all have to make an accounting.
This basic assumption is the most liberating notion ever created. Moral agency is what makes us free. It doesn’t matter how wretched or rich our external circumstances, the fact that the Torah enjoins all of us to take responsibility for our behavior means that as far as God is concerned, we are not slaves and never will be slaves.
The converse is also true.
We are only free for as long as we are capable of accounting for our actions. This means that preserving our ability to properly judge ourselves is the key to preserving our liberty.
This is true not only for the Jewish people as individuals. It is true as well for the Jewish state, Israel.
The question then is how do we do that? As far as Israel is concerned, the answer to this question has become one of increasing urgency over the past generation or so.
Over the past couple of decades, we have seen the world – and more importantly our own elites in Israel – rushing to judge our society and find it lacking seemingly on a daily basis.
Our journalists, professors, judges and generals routinely tell us what is wrong with our society. And each year, their harangues become shriller and angrier.
Indeed it is becoming hard to avoid the conclusion that for our elites, Israeli society is morally irredeemable.
Consider the behavior of our generals in the IDF. Sunday night, after
the terrorist attack in Jerusalem, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen.
Gadi Eisenkot spoke at a memorial ceremony for the armored corps.
There he restated for the umpteenth time in recent months that the key
to defeating terrorism is maintaining the IDF’s values.
Eisenkot and his fellow generals never seem to tire of talking about
the IDF’s values and of insisting the IDF is the most moral fighting
force on earth.
The problem is that the more they make these statements the more they
alienate the public.
It isn’t that the public doesn’t view the IDF as the most moral
fighting force on earth. It does. And it also believes that IDF
soldiers live in accordance with the IDF’s values – which are also the
values of Israeli society.
The problem is that the public doesn’t think that Eisenkot and his
generals share its faith in the goodness of the army they command.
For the past seven months, every time that Eisenkot and his generals
have invoked the IDF’s values and morality, the only thing that anyone
has ever heard is a rebuke of Sgt. Elor Azaria, who is standing trial
for manslaughter for killing a wounded terrorist in Hebron, after the
terrorist had stabbed another soldier.
The Azaria prosecution was by far the most significant national event
of the past year. It exposed the wide and expanding gap between our
elites – who rushed to condemn the combat soldier – and the public
which gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Based on a video of the incident taken by an employee of the
anti-Zionist, foreign government-funded B’tselem organization, the IDF
General Staff, the media and Israel’s various and sundry leftist
luminaries rushed to condemn Azaria. The decorated combat soldier was
filmed handcuffed, being loaded into a military police squad car and
removed from the scene.
In the months that have passed since his trial for manslaughter began,
the public has learned extensive details about what happened on the
ground the day of the incident and since. These details easily lend to
the conclusion that Azaria was railroaded by senior commanders who had
uncritically accepted the veracity of the B’tselem video.
In other words, the public has learned that whereas the generals
denied Azaria the benefit of the doubt, our military brass gave their
full faith to a film produced by an organization that has been falsely
accusing the IDF and Israeli society as a whole of criminal behavior
for nearly 30 years.
Once the public discovered the nature of their behavior, it naturally
followed that the more Eisenkot and his comrades speak of the IDF’s
values, the less they are trusted.
It didn’t use to be this way. Time was that the IDF’s commanders said
next to nothing about the IDF’s morality and its values. They simply
assumed them.
They trusted their soldiers and officers. And their soldiers and
officers, and the public as a whole, trusted them right back.
There is no doubt that past practices were sometimes excessive.
Sometimes soldiers and officers didn’t deserve the trust they
received. And actions that should have been disciplined were wrongly
swept under the rug.
But our military leaders have gone overboard in their rejection of the
old ways. It is possible to give soldiers and officers the benefit of
the doubt without giving them a pass. It is possible to accept the
basic idea that they are innocent until proven guilty and treat them
as innocent so long as they haven’t been proven guilty.
Doing so does not impair our ability to correct and punish bad
behavior, it facilitates it.
Eisenkot and his generals appear shaken by the loss of trust they have
suffered for their faithlessness to Azaria.
The same cannot be said for our legal elites in the courts and state
prosecution.
Consider the legal context in which Sunday’s attack took place.
The terrorist who killed two innocent Israelis was a convicted felon.
This past May he was convicted for assaulting a policeman and
sentenced to prison.
But then the magistrate’s court judge Hagit Mack-Kalmanovich decided
to give him the benefit of the doubt. First, she sentenced the
offender to a measly four months in prison for the crime of punching
an officer and threatening to kill him.
Then Kalmanovich agreed to his request to delay the start of his
imprisonment for five months. He was supposed to enter prison Sunday.
Kalmanovich’s decisions were all the more startling given that this
wasn’t the terrorist’s first conviction.
He assaulted the policeman shortly after he was paroled from a
one-year prison term for inciting terrorism on Facebook.
MK Yehuda Glick, the human rights activist who survived an
assassination attempt in 2014 when a paroled terrorist tried to kill
him for championing the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount,
blasted Kalmanovich in a Facebook post on Monday.
It works out that the same judge who gave the repeat terrorist
offender a light sentence and then allowed him to remain free for five
months, decided to ban Glick from the Temple Mount based on no
evidence of wrongdoing on his part just 10 days before he was shot in
the stomach and nearly killed.
Kalmanovich, Glick intimated, falsely found him guilty of endangering
the public because she didn’t like his championing of Jewish rights.
By siding with terrorists and their supporters against Glick, she
legitimized the false claims the Palestinian leadership issued against
him at the time. Those claims, that Glick was endangering the Temple
Mount, surfaced days before Glick was attacked. They incited his
assailant to shoot him.
In other words, Kalmanovich refused to see the good in Glick, and so
she misjudged him. And she refused to see the evil in the terrorist
she allowed to walk free, and so enabled him to kill innocents.
In both cases, she failed to judge well because she was unable to see
either good in a Jew or bad in a terrorist.
The Jewish people and the Jewish state face extraordinary challenges
today. Luckily, we can handle all of them. But to do so, we need to be
capable of judging ourselves fairly – of loving what is good in us
even as we work to correct what is bad.
This is how we will secure our future and this is how we will remain
forever free.
The leftist rot that has corrupted the US has also corrupted to Israel!
Bibi attempts to move towards the LT is problematic at best.