My Word: Splits within Israeli society and calls for unity

They’re back. Or more to the point, they’re off again.

A year ago, the biggest tragedy in the history of the modern State of Israel – the Hamas invasion and attack of October 7, 2023 – was so brutal and harrowing that the country was forced to pull itself together. Now, those fostering divisions in Israeli society are back in action. And they’re drawing increasing publicity.

For the nine months before the savage attack in which some 1,200 were slaughtered, Israel was racked by internal strife over the government’s proposed judicial reform and the response to it. 

Among the most prominent protest acts was the announcement by reservists from several elite units that they would no longer turn up for service. The refusers included pilots, members of Military Intelligence’s renowned Unit 8200, and some fighters from top special forces. 

The horrors of October 7 were so great that these veterans immediately dropped their protests and mobilized. Some were later willing to admit that their earlier threats – meant to bring down the government – had weakened the country, something that had not escaped the attention of our enemies just across the border in Gaza and Lebanon, and their arch-terrorist sponsors in Iran.

But as if nothing has been learned from the experience, the threats to refuse to serve are again being heard. Added to this are the growing number of reports of Israelis leaving the country en masse – educated professionals and members of the business community. 

This, too, is a return of a theme heard before October 7, 2023. We will leave – “we” being those who can afford to economically and career-wise – and everyone else will be left to suffer until the country finally falls to pieces. This is not so much abandoning ship as deliberately creating the hole to try to sink it. (Those of us who never entertain the thought of deserting Israel are expected to beg them to return and rescue us.)

The military refusers are currently making headlines with a protest letter signed by some 140 veterans. In a post-October 7 twist, instead of the threat being based on opposition to the government’s judicial reform, this time the refusers say they can’t turn up for service unless the government does more to forward a hostage deal for the 101 captives – dead or alive – still being held by Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza.

Just as involving the military in a political protest a year ago was wrong – not a mistake, but deliberate wrongdoing – it is wrong to turn the hostage issue into a political matter. And, sadly, it doesn’t even increase the chances of their release. 

How will Hamas react? 

How is Hamas likely to react to the protests: Release the hostages straight away or hold on to see how much higher a price they can get with the government under pressure and – as an added benefit – watch “the Zionist entity” tearing itself to pieces? Maintaining public awareness does not need to exploit the families of hostages as a political tool.

Similarly, the reservists cannot hold a gun to the government’s head – the country’s head – and declare when and under what circumstances they are willing to serve. 

Could the pilots who flew last week’s bombing mission on Iranian targets have decided to pick and choose which facilities they agreed to bomb and which not?

The threats of mass emigration are also familiar from the pre-October 7 period. Last month, Kalman Libeskind dedicated his weekly column in Maariv to showing how, over the past few years, the attitude to those who leave the country has changed. 

Recent press coverage, he showed, has acted more to encourage the phenomenon, to make it trendy and acceptable, rather than treating it as an abandonment in a time of need.

There is a huge difference between those who relocate temporarily for work or studies – and those who really need a break from the pressures of the war for their mental health – and those who leave in an act of protest. Hint: Soldiers who don’t feel able to serve can quietly inform their commanding officers and drop out; those who want to leave the country can pack their cases and go: no one needs to broadcast it to the general public unless they are trying to make a deliberately demoralizing point.

“We need to be clear that with all the criticism – which is sometimes very justified – you can’t be a conditional Jew or a conditional Israeli or a conditional Zionist,” Libeskind wrote.

The efforts to make everything conditional on getting your own way – the government you voted for but that didn’t get elected; the secular over the religious; this or that cause or campaign – is damaging rather than democratic. No wonder Iran has worked hard at encouraging the splits and divides. Even the recently discovered spies it recruited in Israel were given tasks aimed at fostering hate and polarization: graffiti, attacks on protesters, etc.

We’ve come a long way since prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1976 referred to emigrants as “nefolet shel nemushot” (a hard to translate phrase that means something like “the droppings of wimps.”) In those days, all emigrants were referred to as “yordim,” those descending, in contrast to “olim,” immigrants making aliyah, ascending to Israel.

In a recent column in Israel Hayom, former minister Yoaz Hendel – no fan of this government – wrote: “Those who abandon now, harm the ability to repair, to restore the country; harm the ability to fight for its existence and prosperity. There is nothing good about leaving the country, not even politically. 

“In the meantime, we will continue to fight, to mobilize, to defend the homeland – even when there are deserters, when there are secular and ultra-Orthodox evaders, and even when there are delusional politicians. Why? Because it’s ours.”

Press causes harm 

The press coverage painting emigration favorably causes harm on many levels: encouraging others to leave and discouraging others from coming. It also gives our enemies hope that if they make conditions hard enough, the Jews will simply run away.

I’m not sure where we’re meant to run to. The rise in antisemitic attacks – including physical violence as well as not-so-subtle discrimination – makes even those Western countries that are most proud of their values and lifestyle a frightening place for Jews today.

Fortunately, there are people who refuse to give in to the pressure to give up on Israel. More than 30,000 immigrants have arrived in Israel since October 7, 2023 – some fulfilling a life’s dream, others making the decision because of the rise in antisemitism in their hometowns or on college campuses.

Strikingly, Israel still ranks high – in fifth place – in the UN’s World Happiness report. In a week like this week, when my Jerusalem neighborhood has come together again and again to pay last respects to fallen soldiers, when there have been terror attacks, and rockets have taken lives, it has been particularly hard to be upbeat. But the togetherness grants strength.

A particularly poignant call for unity came this week from the family of Cpt. Avi Goldberg, who fell in battle in Lebanon, leaving a wife and eight children, among other mourners. 

The family of the high-school teacher and rabbi, well-known in the hard-hit National Religious community, requested that any politicians who wanted to pay their respects to the mourners did so in pairs: one member of the coalition and one from the opposition. Among the bereaved families, calls for unity are common. Fight the enemy, not each other.

During the judicial reform protests, doctors went on strike and threatened to leave, although, like the military, it is best to leave medical care beyond political lines. 

In August, the Kan Public Broadcasting Corporation reported on a particularly strange group of emigrants. Citing “the socio-political situation,” a group of 10 senior psychiatrists and their families left Israel to make a new life in Bristol, England, having originally been approached by one of their colleagues in the UK during the judicial reform turmoil.

Of course, now more than ever, Israel needs psychiatrists and psychologists. Very few Israelis have survived the events of the last year without any trauma. 

But those relocated psychiatrists clearly don’t understand what goes on in the minds of those of us who stay – through thick and thin – because this is home. You don’t express your love for a country by leaving it. You stay and fight for change.