Political Spinner

The narrative and daily life of every country has a delusional part (usually called ‘myths’). This includes issues that have to do with the origins of the nation, the life and times of founding fathers (always, never mothers), and a set of rationalizations for the country’s less than glorious chapters (we all have them). This mythical, delusional part usually accompanies a somewhat (not too) rational narrative of introspection and of viewing the world around. A more than partial narrative is usually the domain of very few individuals, and they are usually not very popular in their own countries (though essential for the collective’s partial sanity).

Israel, special in many ways (good and bad), is somewhat special in this department as well: the proportional part of the delusional segment in Israeli life is rather large and dominant - and growing like mad.

For example, most Israelis (including philosophers, Supreme Court Justices, and other allegedly educated and rational people) refer to their country as “Jewish-Democratic”. Now, that’s such an obvious oxymoron, that I feel it does not require explaining, but for the sake of those still struggling: a democracy is based on equality before the law and on equal rights. A Jewish state is founded on preferential treatment (legal and cultural) of a section of the country’s citizens based on their religious affiliation. Case closed. Anything beyond this is splitting hairs for the purpose of avoiding the need to deal with the realization that Israel is not a democracy. It is an ethnocracy with a reasonable number of democratic-like institutions, and a modicum of democracy-like behavior, particularly in areas that are well within the fairly broad (and almost exclusively Jewish) consensus.

Another delusional aspect of life in Israel has to do with the relations between the country’s military and its religious soldiers. The entire relationship between the army and many of its religious soldiers is rotten from the foundations because it is based on an “Hesder” (arrangement, in English). That means that religious soldiers arrived at an arrangement with the military, whereas they do not serve a full term of service like every soldier, but serve about half the regular period of an active service, and the rest of their service takes place in bible studying schools, where the brave soldiers “kill” themselves in “Madrasa” like environments, where they stuff themselves full of religious indoctrination. The “rotten” part of this arrangement is not the fact that the religious community negotiated it with the military, but with the fact that at the (very close) background of the negotiations rested a very thinly veiled threat that unless they (the so called “national” religious communities) get their deal, they would refuse to serve in the military altogether (as do tens of thousands of ultra orthodox Jews in Israel).

But that is only a minor part of the religio-military delusion. The major part has to do with the fact that most Israelis choose to ignore the fact that religious soldiers and their real leaders (rabbis) keep insisting at every opportunity that when biblical interpretations collide with military orders, bible takes precedence without questions. That effectively means that the interpreters of biblical dogma (rabbis) are the de-facto military commanders of the part of the Israeli army that includes religious soldiers (I forgot to mention that most of these soldiers serve in segregated units, where they don’t have to sully themselves by co-serving with “regular” Israelis).

Myths and national delusions sometimes (not too often) play a constructive roll in the life of a nation. In the case of Israel, the two delusions I pointed to, and several more, help maintain a sort of a tenuous “industrial peace”, because they help postpone serious discussion about the true nature of the country and the true nature of the military command structure, thus help postpone inevitable clashes between the country’s widely incompatible sectors (and that’s only within the country’s Jewish sector).

But when the maintenance of the delusions come at the cost of almost completely hiding the true nature of the situation from the very constituency that both created and is effected by the delusions, that is the time to bring these questions out for public debate, regardless of rational and/or irrational national fears. Of course, that’s a delusional assumption on my part: no way, no how will the Jewish citizens of Israel dare examine the more rational premises of their current condition. The results will be insufferable from their perspective; hence, the country is doomed to continue down an agenda-less, vision-less, and unfortunately brain-less path to a sad, though very real, end.