by Yehuda Vald, Director-General of the Religious Zionism Party, translated by Hillel Fendel.
The right-wing never threatened to burn down the country. The left-wing must follow suit.
During the course of the tenure
of the Bennett-Lapid government, which was supported by a terrorist supporting
Knesset party associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, I was called to serve as
a reservist in the IDF. Once in uniform, I found myself among many friends from
the nationalist camp, and we discussed our discomfort and difficult feelings
given the government under which we had been called to serve.
Many of us were incensed at the
ideological about-face that then-Prime Minister Bennett had made, and the way
he turned his back on the values he had pledged to represent and thus earned
many of our votes. But despite the turmoil we all felt, not one of us
considered not showing up for military service.
Way before that, after the
Rabin government signed the Oslo Accords, and after Shimon Peres brought Yasser
Arafat to our midst and supplied rifles to the Palestinian Authority that led
to the murders of many Jews throughout the country, the story was the same. I
never heard my father or his friends threaten to organize a taxpayers'
rebellion.
Yes, we protested and
cried out in the streets. We blocked roads when the government set out to expel
nearly 10,000 of us from our homes in Gush Katif. We watched as it destroyed a
beautiful expanse of our homeland, despite our warnings that Israel's security
would be in mortal danger. Those in power ignored us.
Knowledgeable and
grave-looking former security officials said that everything would be OK, and
they prevailed over the teary-eyed orange-bracelet wearers [orange was the
color of the campaign to stop the Gush Katif destruction]. Yet even then, we
did not refuse to serve in the army of our country that had expelled us, and we
did not stop saying the Prayer for the Welfare of the Country and Government.
The right-wing camp
protested, cried out, demonstrated – but never threatened civil disobedience.
We did not call on the populace not to pay taxes, we did not encourage refusal to
serve in the IDF, and we certainly did not threaten a civil war. Even when the
government itself acted against us, we continued to remain loyal.
But the Left Acts Differently
Two years ago, high-scale social turbulence enveloped the country following
the elected government's attempt to institute a reform of the judicial system.
The anti-reform protest gained momentum with slogans such as, "This is the
End of Democracy," "Israel is Becoming a Dictatorship," and "A
Country of Halakhic Law." Various protest initiatives warned that Israel
was on its way to becoming an oppressive regime that would discriminate against
women, and posters warned that not allowing a court to abolish a Knesset law simply
because it considered it "unreasonable" would lead to students being
forced to don tefillin in schools…
At the same time, unprecedented anti-IDF intiatives began to take shape.
Pilots and reservists announced that they would refuse to serve, youths began
publicly burning their draft notices, and former bigwigs, such as Ehud Barak,
started calling openly for civil disobedience. It was even discovered not long
ago that 120 million shekels were funneled into those massive protests from
foreign sources.
Two years later, all the scare-tactics have proven to have been
groundless. There is no religious
compulsion, women have not turned into low-level housemaids, and the democracy
has not collapsed. But a deeper problem remains: the fact that one side, the
left, took steps to "overturn the table" and collapse Israeli society.
Political disputes are far from new. There was always right and left,
and always different approaches as to how to run the country. But it never
happened that senior members of one camp called openly for refusal, civil
disobedience, and not to pay taxes.
And we're not talking about marginal left-wingers, but rather leaders of
the pack: Opposition leader Yair Lapid, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and former
Deputy IDF Chief of Staff and current leader of what used to be the Labor
Party, Yair Golan. They have actually called for refusal, disobedience, and
even the first steps of civil war. This creates a situation in which every
political camp may do the same whenever they lose an election. Can any of us
imagine the terrifying scenario of hareidim declaring a civil war if they are
drafted, or of the religious-Zionists closing down the country if a Hesder
yeshiva is closed? Is this the future of Israeli democracy?
The answer is no. Contrary to the panic in the media, most people in our
country, on both the right and the left, want to live together, want the
country to be Jewish, want to preserve democracy, and refuse to fight and hate.
Most people vow that we will never have a civil war. Those who fought – together!
– in the alleys of Khan Yunis and the hills of Lebanon, and who spent days
preparing for battle or taking part in distributing supplies to the soldiers,
and the youths who helped rebuild the Gaza- border areas and the north, and who
helped out the reservists' families in Tel Aviv, Gush Etzion, and everywhere
else – know that that's where the truth of Israeli society lies, and that our
nation is, essentially, one.
If the left is truly committed to democracy, it must also commit to
abide by the rules of the game – even when they don't precisely match its
agenda. They must not burn down the clubhouse, and not rock the foundations of
the existence of our democracy, and not take extreme measure simply because
they find themselves in the minority. "Together We Will Win!" is not
just a slogan; it is the essence of our existence here as a nation.
