Israel’s political and military leadership at first appeared hesitant and unprepared, yet its soldiers and citizens are seizing their destiny to restore freedom and security for themselves and their posterity.
Many insisted that the Jewish nation is fragmented: secular v. religious, Ashkenazi v. Sephardi, inside the “green line” v. outside the “green line”. These divisions are not new, and, over time, the state of Israel has reconciled its various camps. Indeed, the events of the past weeks belie these divisions. Israelis of all stripes have come together to preserve our polity and civilization in the face of jihadist and genocidal barbarism, showing exemplary volunteerism, heroism, financial generosity, and brotherly love. We are comforting and defending ourselves during this crisis, for there is no one else who can do it for us.
Yet, over the past year, internal factions wishing to transform the Jewish State in their own image deliberately reignited and magnified the nation’s fissures to gain illicit power. The original mass protests opposing judicial reform soon became an open revolt against a legitimately elected government. On Yom Kippur 2023, they dropped their mask further, and revealed their contempt for traditional Judaism in Israel.
They did all of this against a backdrop of rising Hamas and Fatah terror attacks throughout the Jewish state. The steady drip of Jewish blood did not stop the destructive “uprising for democracy”.
To no one’s surprise, except the “military establishment experts” who should have known better, our hostile enemies upped the ante and exploited this internal rift with an unprecedented terror attack on Simchat Torah on October 7, 2023.
Faced with Hamas’ obscene atrocities, the Israeli subversive elements went underground.
Yet, as Caroline Glick has pointed out on her excellent podcast, we are now hearing chirps of renewed agitation threatening the nascent war effort. “Enlightened” opposition leaders are opportunistically pointing fingers at the current government and blaming it for decades of failed leftist military strategies. We cannot allow this to happen.
The nation’s economy stands in limbo, hemorrhaging money, with absent fathers who are stuck on the front lines, although we are told by experts that there is a surplus large enough to leave us solvent. Israel’s population is now on constant high military alert with hopefully, a concrete plan to utterly destroy Hamas and neuter the Palestinian Authority or control Gaza and Judea and Samaria if successful.
What has the elite military establishment been doing with the high taxes it collected from us for 18 years since its foolish disengagement from Gaza?
Our current political turbulence in Israel reflects the general loss of republican values and a tilt toward totalitarianism across the West.
Across the globe, individual and local autonomy and financial resources are flowing to a small group of wealthy, powerful elites. This was true for much of human history. In the past, these minority elites were emperors, feudal lords, nobles and kings. Today they are high-tech moguls, international bankers, the legal establishment, bureaucrats, and global corporate power-broker organizations.
The West enjoyed a brief respite from top-down elite rule for the last eighty years under the post WW2 global order led by the United States when its leaders still espoused liberty. But now, as the world’s greatest power no longer respects its own Constitution or biblical values, we are lurching toward global totalitarianism.
In “free countries” progressive elites promote bizarre, irrational and harmful diktats that are anathema to the Torah. Anyone who voices any objection or even the slightest reservation to these self-destructive edicts faces severe consequences. These include social media cancellation, loss of employment, or confiscation of banking and financial services. As history teaches us, and as we are painfully witnessing across our screens today, anti-Semitism is another ugly symptom of totalitarianism.
With the help of God, after we resolve our current acute military and security crisis, we must reconfigure our political framework and legal system to best serve the Jewish people in their homeland. The Hebrew Bible has much to say about morally degraded, powerful people who seek absolute, self-serving control over the silent majority. It contains insights that are vital to quieting our internal unrest and neutralizing the human tendency to totalitarianism.
We, in modern Israel, must heed these lessons now, lest we face the unthinkable.
What is the Tanach’s Vision of Optimal Government for the Israelite Polity?
Two verses repeat themselves like a Greek chorus in the Book of Judges. One is “And the Children of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord”. The other is “There was no king in Israel. Every man did what was right in his own eyes”. These two refrains bemoan the absence of leadership during the period of the judges.
The Book of Judges describes a loose confederation of tribes and clans acting in their own interests without a national vision. This created infighting, which sometimes turned bloody. The Canaanite states saw this internal division and attacked the Israelite tribes. When victorious, these Canaanite polities controlled Israelite people and lands, and extorted strangling tribute.
Note the parallel to the situation to modern Israel where Iranian funded Palestinian Arab terror groups, encouraged by constant internal Jewish strife, seriously threaten Israel’s security, and successfully wage strategic and psychological warfare.
The Israelite leadership vacuum, as recorded in the Book of Judges and lack of national unity, resulted in cycles of moral decay, leading to enemy exploitation. In desperation, the people turned to a spiritual revival where God, in his repeated mercy, sent warrior/judges to rescue the Israelite tribes.
Israel’s judges, although imperfect, got good marks from the biblical narrative. Some were more in tune with God’s morality than others.
One of the most effective judges was Gideon, Israel’s 5th judge. He was a brilliant warrior who stole into the enemy camp incognito to discover the psychology of the enemy and won the day with a visual and audio tactical ruse.
The biblical narrative makes a point of diminishing numerical superiority as the cause of Gideon’s victory. First, Gideon collects 30,000 Israelite fighters. God tells Gideon to send home all those men too fearful to fight. That left Gideon with 20,000 fighters. God told Gideon to whittle down the number further with a strange examination of how the men drank water from a river. Gideon ultimately defeated the enemy with only 300 men, highlighting that Israel must not fear superior numbers of global enemies.
Perhaps Gideon’s greatest achievement after defeating the hostile enemy was keeping the peace between the tribe of Ephraim and the other tribes. Contrast this with Yiftach, the 8th judge, whose diplomatic failure with the tribe of Ephraim led to 42,000 deaths in a tragic civil war.
Modern Israel sorely needs effective statesmen like Gideon. We need ethical, loyal leadership with the wisdom to use our military assets in the most cunning and creative manner without falling prey to the manipulations of superpowers, be they friend or foe. Above all, our leadership must keep our internal cohesion intact.
If our military and political leadership are not up to the task, “We The People” of Israel must continue to unite under our middling and lower level military commanders and at the local level, outside of politics if need be. We must do this work while relying on God’s mastery of history, as narrated in the Hebrew Bible.
Ann P. Levinlives in Karnei Shomron Israel. She is the author of Burning but Never Consumed: The Hebrew Bible in Turbulent Times.