Blink and you missed it. A January 6th like riot happened, and if you don't follow Jewish media, you wouldn't know about it. I'm not even sure the international media thought it worthy of mention.
The Israeli military wants to police itself, but it's the organization the world charges as perpetrators of apartheid and dictatorship. The military is in fact the functional, pragmatic arm of Israeli life. Many generals try to maintain resistance to pressure to prosecute the war much more aggressively. Often they fail, because the civilian government is a lunatic fringe. This hated fringe tries to politicize the military, the facet of the country most Israelis deem too important to be politicized.
So in summation, the Israeli ultra-right tries to violently intimidate Israel to be the repressive military state the world already thinks Israel is. And yet, if this fringe government can't be dislodged, maybe, just maybe, Israel is already the kind of state the world says it is.
There's a war in the Jewish soul. I have to imagine every Jew in the world feels either nonstop rage or completely stretched out on a rack. Jews are demanded to defend Israel when a large part of the Jewish world wants Israel to become an indefensible country.
Israel is not the apartheid state the world thinks it is, but a huge segment of the Jewish world wants Israel to be that state and may yet get their way. Millions of Jews looked the other way at these other millions for decades. It was exhausting. We were caught up in a constant melee of propaganda and social pressure to defend the actions of a country whose actions were often wrong, counterproductive, and exploitative of our good will.
No ideological movement is immune from its own manichean extremities, not Zionism, not liberalism, not the progressive ideologies people think beyond question today. If you believe your movement can only be criticized for not pursuing its actions more forcefully, you and your movement become in the most dire need of criticism.
But just as in the case of those ideologies we won't mention, part of this war in the Jewish soul is the knowledge that a large part of Israel still needs our defense, and separating the good from the bad is extremely messy. The reason nobody outside Israel pays attention to this riot is that the world doesn't concede there's another side to the Israel establishment, a liberal side, that tries to rein in its brutality.
I'm a Zionist because without a Jewish state, Jews died in the millions. Not just in the Holocaust but for millennia before it. I am not a Zionist because I believe God promised a land to the Jewish people. Even were I to believe in God, I categorically reject that interpretation, and so do millions of other Jews. Once any movement believes their rights are God given, there is no limit to what they justify in God's name.
And even in the pursuit of defending Israel, I categorically reject the idea that soldiers should not be held accountable for any brutality that has no necessity, and so do millions of other Jews, including Israelis. If a Jew has even a tenuous grip on reality, they'll soon realize that this war should have been over months ago. It only still goes on for the Prime Minister's gain.All react
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