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Notes -
A couple of weeks ago, the NYT Magazine had a long in-depth article about certain factions of Israeli society who tend toward violence against Palestinians. If you ignore the click-baity title of the article, the body seems mostly descriptive, and like the sort of investigative journalism I want to see more of. It's not an overview of the entire conflict, not about the Palestinians, and mostly not about the many Israelis who don't do this. It focuses on groups connected to Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and their respective Mafdal-Religioius Zionism and Jewish Power parties, which together have 11.67% (14/120) of seats in the Knesset and got 10.84% of the votes in the last election back in November 2022. (Ignoring the existence of Noam for simplicity.)
The upshot seems to be that there's an active minority of Israelis who are intentionally engaging in hostilities against Palestinians, and who are subverting attempts to mitigate those hostilities. The only comparisons that come to mind are areas where gangs and mafia have hollowed out the state, and the example of the US South after the Civil War, working around Reconstruction. Since the number is at least 10%, we have to assume that they're present at most levels of civil society and the military.
Then there were these tweets from Haaretz, about the IDF command losing control over some units. It didn't sound like full "Apocalypse Now" donkey-slaughtering, but still worrisome.
(And there was the IDF reservist who posted a video which effectively threatened mutiny. Of course, it would be wrong to judge an entire group based on the most extreme thing one of them posted online.)
I've got questions in two main areas.
First, how accurate is all this? This stuff passes my "bounded distrust" filter: it seems plausible from what I know of human nature and society, matches what information I have about conditions in Israel and the settlements, and makes sense of some contradictions I'd been seeing regarding the Gazan war. But I'm hoping that people who know more (@Dean seems like one) will chime in. Maybe I'm suffering from Gell-Mann amnesia.
Second, assuming this is roughly accurate, what the heck does Israel do about it? More generally, how can a state recover when a substantial minority refuses to go along with its orders? As anarchists delight in telling anyone who'll listen, a lot of what we think of as "government" is a consensual hallucination. There's fiction about what happens when people say "I won't" or "mind your own business" or "fuck off", but how often does it happen in real life? If we're supposed to "never give an order that won't be obeyed", where does that leave legitimacy when 10% won't obey certain types of orders? Maybe an Israeli Eliot Ness could put together a modern day group of Untouchables, but (going by vote totals) there's over 500,000 Israelis who at least nominally support this agenda. And the political factions that represent them are in the government coalition.
It is true but historically the extremists pull back when the IDF does. Settlers left the Sinai. Settlers left Gaza. Raze their houses and let the enemy move in and they run scared pretty easily. Most extremist religious Zionists aren’t angry young men, they’re large families with huge numbers of women and children, they’re easy targets.
I don't really care about the settlements, as buildings on pieces of land. It's more the faction of the population that acts in these ways, and said faction happens to be associated with the settlements, and the existence of the settlements puts the faction in proximity to West Bank Palestinians (who have their own set of problems).
If the settlements were razed today, and all the people in them were pulled back deep into Israeli territory, those people wouldn't instantly change their views. They'd still vote, and would still be in the IDF and the police and all other branches of the government. They'd still have access to Israeli Palestinians. And anything going on in Gaza that's attributable to them, would still be happening. Or at least, that's what it seems like to me?
Pretty much. Or at least, it's a very reasonable understanding. Your bounded distrust filter seems healthy.
All I'd additionally add is the reminder is that there are many, many forms (and reasons) of non-compliance/active subversion of a state, such that it can be anti-value to conflate groups and rationals too aggressively lest you start implying/believing that all groups conduct [worst act of subversion A] for [worst rational D] when really groups doing [subversion A] are doing so for [less malign rational C] and groups with [worst rational D] are reasonly only doing [marginal acts of subversion B]. If there's a reason to be hesitant about the NYT piece, it's in this conflation risk.
As for what you do about different groups, that depends on the groups and the nature of the subversion and the nature of your democratic checks and balances. Military groups in particular, however, can generally be cracked down on with military law, as a refusal to abide by lawful orders is anathema to the principles of civilian control of the military when said lawful orders are derived from civilian leadership-set policies. Others parts, however, may be prosecued on criminal lines, or may not be criminal at all- the ability to challenge the state is inherent to an actual democracy.
But ultimately, a lot of government is based on deference to the government from the bottom up, not top-down control. Non-compliance and apathy, let alone active disagreement or opposition, routinely subvert government attempts at policy implementation.
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