By Dr. Hanan Shai September 6, 2020

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,732, September 6, 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Unlike other Western democracies, Israel has had to face the coronavirus crisis at a time when its social cohesion and governability have been weakened by a chain of processes and events over recent decades that were propelled by the values of progressive liberalism. The coronavirus crisis offers an opportunity, which must not be missed, to put Israel’s existence and security back on the footing of the country’s original liberal values.

Israel’s original values are grounded in the morality of truth, freedom, mutual responsibility on the national level, and justice, with the aim of forging a strong social-national entity on that basis. Progressive liberalism, by contrast, denies the existence of objective truth and views every social structure—from the family to the nation itself—as an outcome of power and oppression. Such power and oppression, according to progressive liberalism, must be eliminated.

Adherents of this philosophy believe, accordingly, that Jewish Israel, as a nation-state whose values represent the old social order, must disappear so as to clear the path for their own values. This line of thinking is congruent with the argument made in the last century that Judaism had to disappear so as to clear the path for the values of the communist and Nazi social orders.

The campaign to dismantle Israel began in the late twentieth century when a group of Israeli academics and journalists presumptuously self-styled themselves as “the new historians.” Through “the fabrication of Israeli history” (as Efraim Karsh put it), they turned the Israeli side, which barely survived a pan-Arab attempt to annihilate it a few years after the Holocaust, into the guilty party for defeating those seeking its demise.

Despite academic and legal refutation of their “research,” the “new historians” succeeded—along with artists and writers such as Amoz Oz, who averred that “pure truth destroys everything and does not build anything”—to puncture the fervent national ethos of the establishment of the state of Israel, an ethos that united Israeli and world Jewry.

Fabricating Israeli history paved the way to fabricating the reasons for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This involved transforming the conflict from an existential confrontation in which one party (the Palestinians) categorically rejects the other’s right to national self-determination into a territorial real estate dispute that could be ended in a compromise-based peace.

Compromise is a supreme foundational value in Jewish culture and in Western democracy, and most of the Israeli Jewish public has consistently supported it, including during the Oslo “peace” process. Ironically, even though it was the Palestinian leadership that rejected the “Oslo compromise” (just as it had rejected the numerous compromises offered over the course of the twentieth century), many blamed Israel, not the Palestinians, for the failure of this process. This enabled the Palestinians and their liberal-progressive backers to amplify their century-long denial of the Jewish People’s right to national self-determination.

The fact that the Guardian saw fit to publish three articles in a single week questioning Israel’s right to exist, like the one penned by American Jewish journalist Peter Beinart, at a time when Britain is undergoing one of the worst health, economic, and social crises in its modern history, points to the obsessive mendacity of this campaign.

No less alarmingly, the illusion that the “era of peace” and the technological revolution obviate the need to physically control territory and defeat the enemy has driven the IDF’s top brass to scrap not only the ground army, as maintained by Gen. (res.) Yitzhak Brik, the sharpest critic of the defense establishment in recent years, but also the IDF’s most precious asset: the doctrine of rapid victory that enabled its impressive triumphs in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. It was replaced by an esoteric doctrine of warfare that was concocted from the ideas of leading poststructuralist philosophers and that denied Israel the ability to end its wars with a quick, clear-cut, and overwhelming win, as seen in the failed wars in Lebanon (2006) and the Gaza Strip (2008-09, 2012, and 2014).

Meanwhile, “the constitutional revolution” dealt a severe blow to the Israeli government’s ability to function. For while this revolution helped make the moral values touted in Israel’s Declaration of Independence part of Israel’s Basic Laws, that contribution pales into insignificance compared to the damage wrought by the concomitant “cultural revolution”—especially the making of jurists into “the main agents of incorporating [progressive] liberalism into the culture of the country” (as an Israeli law professor described it). This fractured Israeli democracy and governance by frequently overturning the laws and decisions of the elected legislative and executive authorities in line with the values of progressive liberalism. Those values directly clash with the values of the state of Israel and its Basic Laws.

Thus the coronavirus, whose defeat requires the intensive use of moral acumen in every domain, offers an opportunity to go back to grounding the decision-making of the state’s three authorities, and of its operative mechanisms, in its moral values as articulated in the Basic Laws. This is a cultural-educational task of the highest order, and it must be undertaken immediately. It will require appointing a special project manager, as was done in the field of public health. Then, while the health of the country’s citizens is being protected, a vital effort will also be made to thwart the attempts to dismantle and destroy those citizens’ national home.

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Dr. Hanan Shai is lecturer in strategic, political, and military thought in the Political Science Department at Bar-Ilan University.