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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.
Not only is this Gell-Mann amnesia, it's the literal ur example of it. You don't trust the NYT when they imply (never outright say) that MAGA republicans want to destroy American democracy, so why do you trust them with the equivalent reporting on another country? Do you understand Israeli politics well enough to know why ~10% of the Israeli population will vote religious-right regardless of who's leading it? Probably not, and it would take actually living here to get it.
The equivalent is if a European would think that 50% of Americans want to turn the US into literal hands-maid tale. It's a not-even-wrong level understanding.
OK. Perhaps you could try to explain? That's one of the things I was asking for. Just a few paragraphs would help; there's no need for a 5,000 word essay.
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