The March of Folly

(Israelnationalnews.com) The Campaign of escalation against outposts and their inhabitants in Yosh is a pointless exercise in baseless hatred.

What’s happening in Judaea and Samaria should keep us up nights.  Once again, as in February 2006, fools in high office think they can profit by instigating violence, inciting others to violence, and creating a vicious cycle of escalation between the state and the public in Yosh from which they can derive political and diplomatic benefit.  True to the tradition of Israeli public policy for decades past, they are motivated by hostile passions or, at best, the pursuit of short-term political and policy goals.  That they may be moving all Israeli society closer to the brink of dissolution is not a thought they entertain seriously.  Diseased souls that can view provocations and violence against one’s own citizens as a viable policy are in poor condition to evaluate the dangers their actions portend to society as a whole.

The IDF’s conduct in Judaea and Samaria was perverse to begin with.  Intentionally or not, its guardianship of the security of Jews in these areas is pretty spotty.  It might do a better job if it weren’t constantly allocating disproportionate manpower to pulling down “illegal” outposts and arresting and beating up their inhabitants.  The latter policy has no point because its purpose to make it possible to reach a negotiated settlement on a Palestinian state. Everybody but Tzipi Livni and the editors of Haaretz know this is simply pie in the sky and will be dead as a doornail when Netanyahu becomes Prime Minister in February (it’s not that Netanyahu is against a negotiated Palestinian State—too bad for him—he just knows it belongs in the same mythical category as Santa Clause and the pot ‘o gold at rainbow’s end).  But it’s something Ehud Barak has gotta do to maintain his tattered reputation as a leftist.

The policy has recently taken on a life and a logic—if it can be called that—of its own.  That is, it is being pursued not for the sake of genuine policy goals but because the IDF and police want to show the residents of outposts who’s boss.  The outpost residents simply feel that attacking them in their homes is illegitimate, and particularly incensing when the attack is made Monday by a platoon of IDF soldiers, and on Tuesday by a Palestinian terrorist who got by because the IDF platoon was busy taking down an outpost someplace else.  Some have taken to reacting violently, creating disturbances in Palestinian villages where the IDF is responsible for keeping order so as to make clear to the IDF that its action against outposts entails manpower costs it cannot afford.   

Some residents of the outposts and settlements stone and curse soldiers—not necessarily the soldiers who threw Jews out of their homes, just any soldiers. This is not to be condoned.  Any violence against another Jew is wrong and dumb.  But these violent fools, who little understand the gravity of what they do, are being used as pawns by unscrupulous politicians and soldiers who hope to profit by provoking them.

The IDF’s actions against residents of the outposts recently has taken on a new dimension.  The IDF and police are seeking to create provocations and spur escalation.  They want to provoke outpost residents to violence, to allow the hostile press to film settlers cursing and spitting on soldiers.  In doing so, the police have more or less broken free of any legal moorings.  The beat up whom they want, arrest whom they want, destroy what they want, with or without a court order, with or without a trumped-up legal excuse. This police behavior has spread within the Green Line; when a senior IDF officer intimates he wants a legitimate demonstration broken up or a Jew denied the lawful use of his land—the first happened in Modi’in on September 2 and the second in the Shaar Mizrach area of Jerusalem on September 4—the police happily oblige.  The destruction of the Federman Farm and other outposts in Samaria, without or even against court orders, demonstrates the same cavalier disregard of “law enforcement forces” for the law that supposedly is the sanction for their actions.

In effect, we have two extralegal vigilante militias conducting guerilla warfare against each other within and beyond the Green Line, except that one of them wears the state’s uniform, drives official cars and has its costs paid by the state treasury.  It also responds to the political and other ambitions of political and military leaders, who appear now more in the character of warlords off on a private campaign for personal advantage than persons elected or appointed to carry out legitimate, legally-grounded state policy.  The warlords have decided, for reasons that may or may not have to do with the elections, to escalate the frequency, violence, and hence illegality of what they do in order to provoke violent reactions among their victims, further delegitimizing them in the eyes of a compliant press and a complaisant public.

To raise a hand against another Jew, even one in uniform, is evil.  But this evil is compounded a hundredfold by the evil of unscrupulous politicians and military commanders who plan to provoke and use violence to achieve the objects of their passion--political profit or simple revenge.  Those who provoke internecine violence for personal profit are the worst of evildoers.  They, and not their benighted victims, are deserving of the lion's share of opprobrium.  By their actions they bring closer the dissolution of the Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael and upon them lies the responsiblity to desist.