Until I Came to Live in Israel, I Was Sure That Jews Were Smart

HAARETZ

Until I came to live in Israel, years and years and years ago, I was sure that Jews were smart.

I thought that if Jews ever had a country of their own, these people – with their passion for learning, their tragic heritage of persecution and oppression and exile and mass murder, their openness to new ideas, their appreciation of the values of democratic freedoms and of minority rights, and their demonstrated talents for international relations – would run their country accordingly.

Instead of running it into the ground.

CAVEAT: Over time, I’ve learned that, by and large, the Israeli on the street is a person of considerable acumen, who would support efforts by the government – if those efforts actually existed at all – to honestly pursue peace through diplomacy, reconciliation between Jews and Arabs, widening of rights to minorities, and moderation over extremism.

For proof, you need look no further than the popularity of Israel’s formal head of state Reuven Rivlin, a rightist who champions these values.

Ruvi, however, doesn’t run things here. The people who do, meanwhile, do things like this: On Tuesday, Israeli police at Jerusalem’s Old City Damascus Gate responded to the working presence of the Washington Post’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief William Booth, by taking him into custody, hauling him off to a police station on grounds of suspected “incitement.” 

Booth, one of the foremost correspondents in the region, had been conducting interviews with passersby at the site, one of the most frequent locations of the current wave of bloodshed. A photographer working with Booth was also detained. They were released after about an hour.

Police spokespeople gave various explanations of the incident, with one quoted as stating that an Arab woman told Booth that she could get some of the bystanders to demonstrate against the police if he paid them.

The Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, called it “a regrettable incident, casting an unnecessary shadow over the work of an excellent journalist.” It said it would ask the police for further explanations.

But there is at least one explanation which the police are unlikely to offer. One at least as plausible as the one above. It has to do with incitement. And not by Palestinians.

Just watch the news. Lacking the smarts or the flexibility or the vision to do what is needed to stem the terror attacks that now number as many as eight per day, the Netanyahu government has clearly decided that incitement, its declared mortal enemy, can now be its best friend.

Incitement, you will recall, is one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s primary explanations for the wave of terror attacks and Israeli response which have claimed the lives of at least 31 Israelis and 174 Palestinians in less than five months.

Although the head of Military Intelligence, Maj. General Herzl Halevi, has told Netanyahu’s cabinet that feelings of rage and frustration, especially among younger Palestinians who feel that they have nothing to lose, are part of the reason for the wave of terror attacks in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the prime minister is having none of it.

“Terrorism doesn’t stem from frustration due to the lack of progress in the peace process,” Netanyahu has told the Knesset. “Terrorism stems from the will to have us exterminated.” It is, he declared, “a result of wild and false incitement” by Palestinians.

But incitement, it seems, can cut two ways. These days, we in Israel are witness to government by incitement, an unending weekly cavalcade of enemies of the state.

Led in large part by the prime minister, there have been orchestrated campaigns against the New Israel Fund and several of the NGOs it supports, notably the Breaking the Silence organization of IDF veterans; against Israeli Arabs as a whole, whom Netanyahu, speaking at the site of a Tel Aviv terror attack, suggested were disloyal to the state (“Whoever wants to be Israeli must be Israeli all the way”);  against Arab lawmakers in particular, with Netanyahu nearly alone in spearheading a slapdash law to allow the Knesset to summarily expel Arab members; and finally, beginning last week, the foreign press.

Last week, the key Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee asked members of the Foreign Press Association to attend a hearing on “biased, one sided reporting against soldiers and police following terror incidents.”

Four days earlier, the head of Israel’s Government Press Office said “we will consider revoking press cards from journalists and editors who are negligent in their work and give headlines that are opposite from reality.”

Maybe the problem with the people running this country is not that they are dumb, but that they are so sure that everyone else is.

Makes you wonder how long you can get away with an attitude like that, before someone, or everyone, catches on.