Israel: Unifying Around the Center

Ever since the October 7 Hamas pogrom polls have indicated that there has been a massive shift rightward in Israeli society. A poll by the Direct Polls organization indicates that 44 percent of Israelis, including 30 percent of leftists, have moved politically to the right. It’s common for people to rally round the flag during wartime but this shift has been due neither to blind patriotism nor to government propaganda. On the contrary, the shift has been organic, from the bottom up. It is the upshot of people having epiphanies arising from personal experiences and is also based on popular images about how the war is playing out on the battlefield.

One of the ongoing criticisms of the Haredi community from the Israeli secular Left is that they are exempt from military duty. However, the Haredi are not the only Orthodox sector of Israeli society. The most interesting aspect of the shift to the right is that it has stemmed from the acknowledgment by many on the Left of the outsized sacrifices of a different religious sector of society, the religious-Zionists, to the work on the battlefield. Notably this contribution arises directly from religious values and conviction. (READ MORE from Max Dublin: Moloch Is Back: Sacrificing Our Children)

The highest value of the Jewish religion is the protection and preservation of life. It supersedes all other religious values including the most stringent rules of religious observance. From the very beginning of this war no sector of Israeli society has embodied this value more than the religious-Zionist camp (not to be confused with the party of the same name). On October 7 this supreme value was epitomized in the heroic actions of the Kalmanzon brothers who belonged to a religious community called Otniel in the Hebron hills. Elhanan Kalmanzon was a reserve major in the IDF and a member of Mossad. As soon as he heard about the Hamas invasion, he immediately called his brother Menachem and, though it was the Sabbath when driving is forbidden, they jumped in a car and sped to where the Hamas pogrom was taking place. When they arrived, they found an abandoned armored troop carrier and for fourteen and a half hours went house-to-house in Kibbutz Be’eri pulling besieged kibbutz members through the windows of their safe-rooms and transporting them to safety. They saved about a hundred of the kibbutz members this way but in the end the terrorists managed to kill Elhanan on what turned out to be his last run.

Ironically, as Caroline Glick has pointed out, Kibbutz Be’eri was part of the leftist community that during the anti-government protests before the war had vilified people like the Kalmanzon brothers. Surviving members of Kibbutz Be’eri attended Elhanan’s shiva where his father called for national unity. From this example it is easy to imagine why the country is unifying towards the Right. But what the Kalmanzon brothers did was not unique.

Since the beginning of this war, it has become evident to the Israeli public that a disproportionate number of soldiers who have fallen in action have come from the Religious-Zionist camp. Despite the fact that this sector comprises only ten percent of Israeli society, it has suffered forty-five percent of the casualties. The reason for this is that an inordinate number of soldiers who belong to this camp sign up for combat units in the IDF. On the internet you can find images of religious warriors saying prayers while in the field. In recognition of the qualities that have led to their service to their country the Jerusalem Post has editorialized, “Most within this camp agree that there is religious significance in the reborn State of Israel and that defending it is both a historic privilege and a religious value.”

These facts seem to fly in the face of the leftist narrative about the true essence of Israeli society. Israeli leftists like to point out that the early Zionists were secular Jews just like them. This was indeed true but only up to a point. As secular Jews they were not so assimilated as to be willing to completely erase their Jewish identity in order to feel safe. Nor, obviously, were they assimilated to the point where they were willing to forget that Israel had once been the Jewish homeland. If they had been that assimilated there would not have been a Zionist movement at all.

It must be remembered that in the late nineteenth century, just when the Zionist movement was taking off, it was explicitly rejected by the Reform movement in America. In its Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 not only did the Reform movement reject Zionism it also rejected what it called Jewish ritual including the most basic rules of religious observance while calling its places of worship temples, fitting them with organs, and purposely not facing them eastward towards Jerusalem. In other words, it tried as hard as possible to assimilate to the then dominant Christian culture in America.

Assimilation is a very good thing. It is absolutely essential in any society that wishes to create and maintain the social cohesion and unity that it needs in order to function, flourish, and ultimately even to survive. But any pressure for citizens to assimilate beyond what is needed to achieve unity is distinctly undemocratic and illiberal. In liberal-democracies the melting pot was never intended to be a smelting pot; it was never meant to be so absolute that it would nullify two of the other fundamental principles of liberal-democracy, tolerance and pluralism.

When carried on indefinitely assimilation inevitably leads to a sort of extinction—not, of course, of the physical person but of all of the qualities that make one kind of person or community different from others.  When the Assyrian empire conquered Israel about 2,700 years ago the Hebrew nation had already split into two parts, Judah and Israel. As was common then, the conquering Assyrians moved most of the Israel part to other parts of their empire and they never returned. They are the part that is now popularly known as the Lost Tribes. But they were not lost the way you might lose your wallet. They were lost because in time they were completely assimilated and as Jews completely faded away.

This is what has steadily been happening to the Reform movement in America (though notably not in Canada where it is more conservative). The rejection of Jewish ritual by the Reform movement has ultimately turned into a slippery slope. For some time now the Reform movement in America has been twisting itself out of shape while trying to assimilate to the most perverse social trends, to the point where there is no longer anything recognizably Jewish about it. Only in America could arise the astonishing phenomenon of a Reform Rabbi consecrating a late-term abortion clinic. Meanwhile, despite these efforts, its numbers have been rapidly shrinking away much as has been happening to the most secularized parts of the Christian church. Currently there is a Jewish joke going around that succinctly summarizes this trend “Q. What is the difference between Donald Trump’s grandchildren and those of a Reform Jew? A. Donald Trump’s grandchildren are Jewish.” (READ MORE: In Their Words: The Families of Hamas’ Victims)

If not for religious Jews, Israel would not have been a viable region for a Jewish nation-state. It’s safe to say that the Jews that managed to stay in Israel after the Roman expulsion as well as the small number that crept back before the advent of Zionism in the mid- to late-1800s were all religious Jews. Today they are not thought of as having been Zionists, but for two millennia this tiny beleaguered community is what constituted the continuous Jewish presence in the Promised Land. And in the diaspora it was the religious Jews, and not the disappearing ones, who were the culture-bearers of the Jewish traditions that, to varying degrees, define all Jewish sectors of Israeli society to this day. It is unfortunate that the militarily-excused cult-like Haredi with their retrograde attire and professed conviction that through round-the-clock Torah study it is they who are “sustaining the world” have become the face of the religious community. They are not its most authentic representatives. It is the religious-Zionists who represent the Jewish religion and Jewish tradition in its fullness.

If one compares the Zionist movement with the Reform movement as alternate strategies for Jewish survival there is no question that Israel, with all of its challenges and difficulties, is the more successful. The secular Jews outside of Israel are heading for self-extinction, they are joining the Lost Tribes.

In terms of Jewish survival some interesting and rather telling sorting and convergence is now taking place both in Israel and America. While before the Hamas pogroms Israeli leftists in the tech industry were threatening to leave the country, as soon as the war started Israelis working in Silicon Valley returned home en masse to participate in the call-up of reserves. Meanwhile in America some congregations that are collapsing are inviting the orthodox Chabad movement to take them over. In Israel Haredi men of military age, though exempted from military service, are starting to enlist in the IDF.

In the end, dividing the Jewish religion into different segments is a mug’s game. What really exists is a spectrum with extreme religionists and extreme secularists on either end. But the heart of the Jewish religion is not about observance or even faith. The heart of the Jewish religion is about the values exemplified in the Ten Commandments and other parts of the Hebrew Bible and indeed, that is the Jews’ primary contribution to Western Civilization. I think that what appears to be a movement to the Right in Israel during the present war is really a movement towards those values, that is, towards the center. Politically if this holds it is very promising because it means that in the future centrist coalitions could be formed that exclude the extremists on either end of the political spectrum.

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