By Carolina Landsmann, HAARETZ
It seems as if years have passed since “60 Minutes” aired its episode about the government’s judicial overhaul. It included an interview with combat pilot Shira Eting, one of the leaders of Brothers and Sisters in Arms, in which she said, “If you want pilots to be able to fly, and shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children, they must have the strongest confidence in the people making those decisions.”
On October 7, we learned that the threat of reservists refusing to serve was never carried out. At the moment of truth, they showed up with no hesitation. The pilots proved that they were prepared to bomb houses even knowing that they might well kill children. Does this imply that they have “the strongest confidence in the people making those decisions?”
I’m not asking this just to be contrary. There was something unfair about the attacks on Eting and her colleagues from both the left (which accused them of normalizing the killing of children) and the right (which accused them of slandering Israel overseas). Perhaps they didn’t say it very well, but to anyone who wasn’t biased against them, it was clear that they weren’t trying to normalize the killing of children. They were merely describing soldiers’ need to trust the judgment of the person who sends them out to kill in the country’s name.
The non-contrarian question is how – despite everything that led up to the enormous outburst of protests and despite the phenomenal collapse of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s doctrine on October 7 (from communities near the Gaza Strip to U.S. college campuses) – did confidence in the judgment of our decision makers manage to survive? What enables this confidence?
One answer is that what the protesters warned against hasn’t yet come to pass (thanks to them) – the judicial overhaul wasn’t completed, the country’s character hasn’t yet changed. Another answer is U.S. President Joe Biden and National Unity Party leaders Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot. Netanyahu may still be the face in the television studios, but the people actually running the war are the Americans, via Gantz and Eisenkot, who joined the government.
Still another answer is that the protests actually never touched on the Netanyahu Doctrine. They certainly didn’t relate to his security doctrine, which was based on nurturing Iran as a modern-day Amalek for the sake of what proved to be an illusion – making the Israeli-Palestinian conflict disappear from the local, regional and global agenda – even as he played a double game, sometimes wearing his Israeli hat and sometimes his Jewish one, for the sake of gaining geopolitical influence (the Iranian nuclear deal), even at the price of undermining Israeli identity (the nation-state law) and encouraging global antisemitism. Thus, what collapsed on October 7 was everything except his doctrine.
Many things have shattered or cracked since then – our security, our feelings of security, our illusion of power. There are people who understand that Netanyahu nurtured Hamas and weakened the Palestinian Authority to prevent a Palestinian state, and there are people who stress his undermining of the army and his diversion of attention and resources to the West Bank due to coalition constraints. It’s also true that he and his government pushed a judicial “reform” at a time when our enemies, whom we thought were deterred, were laboring over their preparations to attack us. And all this blew up in our faces.
But I’m not at all sure that the sobering up so many people say they have undergone isn’t just an embrace of Netanyahu’s doctrine with redoubled force – the Arabs are wild animals; the conflict is religious, not national; and we are first and foremost Jews in an antisemitic world. The doctrine known as “Netanyahu” is much broader than we thought, and it has struck deep roots in our soul.
Nihilism and desire for suicide is the hallmark of the post-modern left .
After the demise of the communist bloc under the dream that there is no more existential threat to western values , the ultra-small but immensely powerful elite ( WEF Davos-Bilderberg-Soros- Democrat party ) shares a condominium with China . The deal this elite looks to reach is to erase any national – particular values ( like Israel or the melting down of nations in the European Union ) to achieve global domination of “consumers only” people deprived of any citizens values or rights .Altogether the post-modern leftism is merely a tool for the domination of this small elite . The US dems are fully mobilized to help the elite reach this stage . Suicide is painless for the elite as long it’s prescribed by them to the inferior classes and inferior nations . In that giant chessboard , very few nations can escape this ultimate fate .
Thanks, Edgar G., for your support.
@John Galt III, I agree.
The left is easily shattered. When Trump won the 2016 election, various women in my Jewish choral group wrote emails to me saying how they couldn’t stop crying. I was thrilled that Trump was elected. I didn’t last much longer in the singing group.
What shatters the Left are all their illusions and fantasies that they can make the world a peaceful place by social justice and mitzvot, and when they realize that the most peaceful of all the Israelis, the ones who were most likely to be against any war with Hamas, were the exact ones chosen for the barbarous acts by Hamas.
They are left shattered. Their policies are ruinous, and as you wrote, are largely responsible for the war. But they cannot face that, because they totally believe in their righteousness, and that they are on the side of goodness and compassion for the enemy. When the enemy cuts the heads of their babies, they cannot compute what has happened. They just fall back once again on blaming Netanyahu as if that settles the whole thing. That preserves their sense of virtue and locates their aggression in someone else (by the use of projection).
They are easy to see through, the leftists. They are never to be found when it comes to taking responsibility for their errors.
They retreat back to virtue signaling and belief in some kind of peace process with the same people who have only murderous wishes for them.
There has to be a reckoning not just for Hamas, but for all those who tried to ruin the Israeli government simply because they can no longer win elections, and at a time when it was crucial for the government to be on their toes. The leftists inside the military establishment are going to have to be reckoned with, because Israel will be crippled by them if not.
My view:
During his eight years, Obama attacked and failed to get rid of Bibi, followed by four more years of Joey/Obama III. Finally, the right split and a coalition of anti-Bibi people comes to power and exposes their weakness! Bibi isolated comes back to power and the left screws up again with its rejection of judicial reform and the tragic Oct 7th.
Who will succeed Bibi?
The left has nothing to offer but TSURIS!
It seems that my “live or kill” thumbs doesn’t work. The very first for this. I’ve “refreshed” several times .
I suggest that we already know what the Leff thinks, since Ha’Aretz has been on the scene for a very long time, and that there are articles, better written, less blatantly obvious, which could be posted rather than such an out-and- out attempt to influence an admittedly ignorant public.
I appreciate your feedback.
I posted it because I think we should know what the left thinks and says.
I needed only to read two paragraphs. This is subversive writing by an Israeli enemy.
Is it possible that every Gaza residence or apartment block does not have a below ground shelter??? For these underground experts, it would be easy, and they would have demanded these shelters.
A fake story, and I horoughly agree with Adam;he is 100% RIGHT.
For goodness sake, Ted, why are you posting these lies by our internal enemies allied with Hamas, the PLO, Iran, Etc.? This would only be a good idea if you posted an a “correction” to each of these these lies, one by one, with the truth. Surely we don’t want anyone who reads Israpundit believing these Hamas-Hesbollah-PLO- Iranian-UN lies.
No difference between the Oslo gamble made by Pérès-Rabin with the treacherous Arafat and the Sharon-Netanyahu arrangements-compromises-appeasements made with Hamas-Qatar . Both have repeatedly failed and will fail again . Brutal force , radical destruction , of Hamas-PLO is the prerequisite . Expulsion of thousands of die-hards fanatics to Syria-Lebanon is mandatory This war will result in upsetting the weak-appeasements paradigms of the last 30 years since 1992. Biden will be trounced either by Trump or Nikki Halley so no need to worry in Washington DC .
There never was, is or will be a peace partner out of the house of horrors. What remains to be defined is how to handle that besides voiding zhe Oslo Accords and Disengagement.
After… the failures are assigned we need to elect a new top layer. Good luck!
Bottom line: Who would this writer prefer as “Commander in Chief” – Netanyahu or Biden?
Unfortunately I have a feeling that the folks at Haaretz would choose the latter…
Good points John Galt. I have been telling many deaf ears here in Canada that the riots against Netanyahu were a huge distraction from Israel’s concentration on handling its enemies.
As for “religious Communists”… the good thing is that these people have been so overcome by the ideological pap with which they have been fed, that their thinking has been dulled (if it ever existed) such that they don’t have an original thought.
Israel’s Communist news outlet Haaretz babbles:
“Many things have shattered or cracked since then – our security, our feelings of security, our illusion of power.”
The same Haaretz that represents the Israeli Left that since 1948 has taken away the gun rights of Jews in Israel so they were utterly defenseless on October 7th. The same Leftists who run the IDF that totally ignored months of repeated warnings from the the front line IDF observers of Hamas. The same Leftists who support Israel’s corrupt judicial system and fight against its reform so much that the Mossad, IDF and Shin Bet spent all their time before October 7th undermining Netanyahu instead of doing their job.
Will Haaretz apologize for any of this? No, they are religious Communists so you can forget that idea.