oatmealThe current Israeli regime values death more than it values life. It’s a death cult.
#Palestine / Loss resilience or adherence to losses as a social glue in Israel
What do you call a group that embraces violence and a lack of regard for human life? Israelis are already using the term “death eaters” to describe the religious right, and they have a reason. But this term might apply to a much larger portion of the Israeli population today.
A recent analysis of cultural attitudes toward casualties in the ongoing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories (aka Israeli-Palestinian “conflict”) reveals a significant shift in societal values. The study, focusing on the period surrounding October 2024, identifies the rise of a "loss resilience" ethos, indeed particularly within right-wing and religious Zionist circles.
This new paradigm prioritizes unwavering commitment to the occupation and acceptance of casualties as a necessary cost, often at the expense of previous values emphasizing empathy and questioning the inevitability of loss.
From the paper:
[…] The new ethos of loss resilience engages in a directed debate with two earlier values that provided collective meaning to death in war. The first value, the ethos of self-sacrifice, is a conscious act of a heroic warrior, whose willingness to die glorifies the collective for whom he sacrifices his life. However, the commemoration of soldiers in recent months is almost not dedicated to the glory of the nation, and even ignores the war. Stickers commemorating the fallen in the public space describe the qualities of the fallen as human beings, not as soldiers. At the same time, activity and heroism are attributed mainly to the public's "resilience," which does not question the war policy and the routine of mourning, but rather accepts the unending death of its best sons and daughters.
[…] The second value, sensitivity towards losses in war, is the central value against which the new ethos of resilience rebels. Sensitivity to losses as a shared ethos gained momentum in the 1990s, mainly against the backdrop of the First Lebanon War, and included questioning mourning as an inevitable and unifying experience. Sensitivity to losses united a liberal political camp that promoted peace efforts, and reached its peak three years after the "helicopter disaster," when the IDF withdrew from the security zone (for more on the decline in militarism in those years, see Levy, 2023).
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The draft dogging law is something #Netanyahu will find very difficult to have most Israelis stomach. This was published on “Makor Rishon” (Firsthand Source), a rag catering to the religious Zionist conservative crowd, which forms a big chunk of his “base”.
“Don’t worry guys. Learning (Torah) for his health and your success.”
#Judaism / There Are No Lights in War: We Need a Different Religious Language (Ariel Schwartz [January 16, 2024])
Ariel Schwartz comes from a right-wing, religious Zionist family, in the political dialing areas of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. He studied at the Etzion Yeshiva, in southern Mount Hebron, and during his regular service in the settlements in the West Bank, he asked himself who those stateless Palestinians were, "who live under the daily rule of the IDF." These questions caused him to become a left-wing activist.
He tells #Haaretz […] "They took from me the thing most precious to me, my faith, and directed it against me. As religious people, we believe that our tradition demands a different moral stance, one that can restrain the war instead of fueling it."
[…] An example of this can be found in the recent words of R. Amihai Friedman, the rabbi of the Nahal brigade’s training base: “I sit and imagine that in these days there are no casualties, hostages, or injured,” he told his soldiers. “And the second I remove them from the screen, I’m left with what is maybe the happiest month in my life since I was born.”[1]
[…] R. Friedman’s words give rise to a harsh realization: around us is a religious world that is happy, in many respects, about the current war.
[…] Thus, for example, writes R. Yigal Levinstein in the pamphlet He Leaps Up Like a Lion: On the Exaltation of the Spirit and the Special Level of Life During Times of War that saw light in the situation: “The war is not a marginal thing, and we should not view it as a ‘mistake’ or a ‘mishap’ which we would have preferred to avoid. The war is a great thing and, at the end of the day, brings a great message to humanity on its wings.”[2]
[…] According to R. Levinstein, the greatness of the war is rooted in the fact that it is one of those extraordinary moments in which “the inner soul shines in all its vitality.” Indeed, for the individual, the war is a difficult event, but at the national level it calls forth great moments in which the people of Israel “reveals from within itself its mighty heights of life.”
[…] Widening segments of the contemporary religious community are seeking to wrap the war in a halo of enchantment and holiness and turn it pleasant, ideal, and even joyous from an emotional perspective. In furtherance of this aestheticization and idealization, there are those who seek to remove any ethical brakes from the war. They call for us not to differentiate between blood and blood and condone any action done in its framework. These conceptions treat the spirit of battle as the climax of the revelation of the human spirit, but within this, implicitly, it is as though they require war to happen again and again, so that this “spirit of battle” may be revealed. In light of this attempt, we must seek a different religious language―one that remembers that the Jewish horizon is not war but peace, that the goal of the Jewish nation’s existence on this land is not “to shorten the life of man but to lengthen,” and that ethical conduct even in times of war is the soul of our religious tradition.
Translation to English by https://thelehrhaus.com/commentary/there-are-no-lights-in-war-we-need-a-different-religious-language
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There Are No Lights in War: We Need a Different Religious Language - The Lehrhaus
A growing list of dati le’umi leaders and thinkers frame war as a desirable state and even an opportunity for spiritual elevation. Religious Israeli activist Ariel Shwartz traces this trend with alarm and argues that it contradicts deep-rooted Torah values. Translated by Mordechai Blau.
Tamir, Dan. Hebrew Fascism in Palestine, 1922-1942. 1st ed. 2018, Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
A timely read, considering all the conditioned Tamir discussed in 2019 seem to be present in Israel today.
The combination of a constitutional crisis, a major national threat, economic distress, and a charismatic right-wing leader could potentially lead to a resurgence of fascist-like politics in Israel, even if the manifestations would differ from historical #fascism. But this scenario is not inevitable.
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#OtzmaYehudit #Likud #Netanyahu