There is an old Jewish joke of a sort, that features two men walking to shul. The first says to the second, “you know everyone we know is either an apikoris (heretical) or a fanatic, except for me and you, and I’m not so sure about you.”
The relevance of this observation is apparent when regarding the reaction by so many politicians and pundits to the recent replacement of Defense Minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon with Avigdor Liberman by Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
In the now familiar trope, Bibi, and consequently Israel, has just "opted for fascism" instead of enlightened principle. The beacon of morality has just been replaced by Putin’s soul mate.
As a result, Israel stands on the precipice of extremism and is about to lose any remaining international legitimacy. Just ask the pundits.
Forget that many of the same people ready now to canonize St. Bogie were recently excoriating him for his knee jerk condemnation of Sgt. Elor Azaria (after Azaria shot dead a downed Arab terrorist assailant in Hevron), or for his full throated defense of the tone deaf Maj Yair Golan for calling out Israeli society, its government and leadership for extremist tendencies during a Holocaust Day speech.
Earlier, there was widespread skepticism about Ya’alon’s handling of Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014, accusing him of being unwilling to win battles, and seeking to grab at any straws for a ceasefire.
All of that, though, has been forgotten in the wake of the "shabby treatment" accorded him by the Prime Minister, and worse yet, the replacement of Bogie with the lightning rod of the Left, Liberman.
Analysts more politically astute than I can and have pointed out Ya’alon’s very mixed tenure, as well as the fact that Liberman was a surprisingly effective Foreign Minister in the previosus Netanyahu administration.
What frankly concerns me more is the hysteria that we seem to default to whenever something happens that we don’t like. Yes, Israelis are notoriously critical of others, as the old joke above reminds us. And yes, we tend to view the world through the prism of our own values and perspective.
It sounds a bit hollow to hear politicians exhorting the ghosts of decency and principle to shield their disappointment at being outflanked.
But does that make everything we don’t like the footsteps of the apocalypse? One can go back in Israeli history and find countless situations where the country was said to have had made a deal with the Devil, or was courting dictatorship, or at a minimum, had been stripped of all its values and decency.
As an Executive Board Member of Im Tirtzu, I have become used to understanding that I am actually a fascist, and that my dedicated colleagues are not really trying to promote Zionism in Israel, but are actually all somehow complicit in neo-Nazi activities.
How truly unhinged is this? It sounds a bit hollow to hear politicians exhorting the ghosts of decency and principle to shield their disappointment at being outflanked or outvoted in “end of days” moralistic terms. You would think that we would be mature enough not to hit that red button every time something happens that we don’t approve of.
We all know that “sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never harm me.” So let’s tone down the hysterical rhetoric and recognize that we are watching politicians, whose stock in trade is making and breaking deals, some better and more effective than others.
Will the swap of Ya’alon for Liberman be good for Bibi’s coalition, and for Israel? I can’t say, certainly not at this juncture. But I sure don’t think that Bibi cycnically made a deal with the Devil, and doesn’t care about the IDF, or the direction of the country, or its standing in the world.
And as far as Ehud Barak’s recent accusation of the “seeds of fascism” inherent in Bibi’s decision, is there a time line for the germinating of the fascist plant, and does it produce thorns, or just nettles? And when did Barak become a horticultural political scientist?
I dislike many politicians here, but they are not fascists, nor Nazis, nor aides de camp to Satan. We owe to it each other to have a lot more perspective, moderation and good old fashioned sanity.