65 Days to Elections: Complicit or Complacent?   

Just a bit over two months before Israel’s election day on October 27^th, we are seeing something developing in Israeli society that is somewhat unique and more than mildly concerning. There seems to be a certain complacency developing regarding actions that are clearly detrimental to the society which, if left unchecked, will also make us complicit in the resultant negative effects of the events themselves.

There is, of course, more than a subtle difference between those two words. Being complicit means you share guilt in doing something wrong. Being complacent means you are overly comfortable or lazy and fail to act out of indifference, not shared wrongdoing. Yet, of course, one can clearly lead to the other and neither are positive signs for a society that sees itself as valuing each and every life equally.

For example, over the last few weeks we have watched the news feeds about the Israeli settlers who blocked access to three legal houses of Palestinian families that made it impossible for those inside to get out, to buy food, get medical assistance or secure anything else they needed to function normally. We find out now that water and power lines were cut as well, thereby making it impossible for the families to keep what food they had stored fresh enough to eat or to have a functioning waste disposal system.

When the siege began the press here reported that the IDF showed up, even participated in morning prayers with the settlers, and then left. It was only last week that the government finally began arresting the settlers who were involved in this illegal action and began charging them as well. We all saw this and, with rare exceptions, went on with our daily lives making few demands on the government to interfere and end the illegal siege. By being complacent about all of this we became complicit in the travesty of justice that was taking place in front of our eyes.

Last week it was reported that under the orders of the Minister of National Security, gallows were being built on which terrorists convicted of killing Israelis would be hanged. Seriously? Where does the Minister of National Security think we live? In 1950s Mississippi? Or Georgia in 1915 when a mob took Leo Frank, a Jewish Atlantan falsely accused or murdering a 13-year-old employee of his company, and lynched him using a noose hung from a tree branch? Could Israel have produced any worse optics? And did any of us raise the rafters about this insanity? Did our complacency once again cause us to be complicit?

Then, just a few days ago we find out that the security authorities are now identifying presumed terrorist prisoners with numbers scrawled on their forehead with a black sharpie. This is being done by Jews, some of whom probably have ancestors whose arms had numbers tattooed on them by their concentration camp taskmasters. Are we complacent about having our security forces take away the identity of prisoners by marking their foreheads with numbers? If we don’t complain, do we then become complicit?

Perhaps even worse, over the last three years of the war with Hamas, as our cooperation with the US has ever so slowly morphed into deference in the face of directives from Washington, has our complacency become too high a price to pay for what we used to call cooperation? By not objecting, are we all now complicit as well?

A government that permits such things to happen is not the kind of government that represents Jewish values, nor one that should be permitted to continue to govern. All of us will have an opportunity to make our voices heard in 65 days. If we continue to be complacent at that time as well, we will have been complicit in allowing the incompetence to continue. Hopefully we will all have understood how complacency leads to us being complicit and we will, therefore, do all we can to avoid that trap.