Israel’s Animal Farm Moment
Everyday life is experienced linearly; physics suggests that it is relative, but Judaism always focuses on the cyclical. We place a strong emphasis on the circle of life, and it is through that lens that we tend to view history. We have developed a strong appreciation for the repetitive nature of history and how the more things change, the more they are the same. This has provided us with a certain insouciance to the frequent difficulties that have plagued us over the centuries. That being said, every once in a while, circumstances throw a curveball, and now seems to be one of those times.
In 1827, Czar Nicholas I issued the infamous and brutal Cantonist decrees; they remained in place for a 30-year period. This was weaponized legislation designed to brutalize the Jewish community and effect the erasure of a culture. Jewish boys, sometimes as young as 8, were torn from their homes and yeshivas and forced into a 25-year conscription. Often baptized and broken, most of these boys never returned home, and those that did found themselves geographically home but spiritually and emotionally a world apart. The Czar’s plan was to eliminate the Jewish identity within a generation, and he nearly succeeded.
Parents lived in a perpetual state of fear for their young sons, even going to the lengths of mutilating their children in the desperate hopes of avoiding the draft. Khappers were proxied to raid the shtetls and hunt down young boys in order to incarcerate and humiliate potential draft dodgers. This was a dark time for the Jewish people, and the impact was felt by every shtetl, community, and family.
Even after the Cantonist decrees were eventually repealed, the draft burden on the Jews was heavily disproportionate, and combined with the pogroms, this communal trauma became the catalyst for a new movement called Zionism. The early Zionists, including Pinsker, Ahad Ha’am, Lilenblum, and even Herzl, drew their inspiration from this existential threat and concluded that only Jewish sovereignty could provide protection and salvation to a nation so bruised and battered.
More than two million Jews fled Russia in the aftermath, and many of them made their way to Israel. The first Jewish settlements of Rishon Lezion, Petach Tikva, Zichron Yakov, and others were not populated by utopian-seeking European philosophers but rather by refugee draft dodgers. They made the decision to no longer be subjugated to the Czar and chose to restore their agency as masters of their own destiny.
My maternal great-grandfather, for whom I am named, found himself in a similar predicament and managed to escape to Chicago, albeit with a missing toe. Family legend says he had it removed in order to escape the draft, which was crude but effective. This was the economics of survival: lose a toe and save a soul. He lived to raise generations of Jewish offspring in America, but many others were less fortunate.
Which brings us to today and the unfathomable situation we are currently witnessing in the Jewish homeland. For the first time since Czarist Russia, Jewish boys are being dragged out of their homes and yeshivas in Bnei Brak and Meah Shearim in heartbreaking scenes and jailed for the crime of draft resistance. The only difference is that now the people doing the arresting are Jewish police officers in a Jewish state. The Zionist revolution gestated out of the resistance to conscription, has now come full circle.
Dostoevsky, in his darkest moments, could not have imagined a plot twist so laced with sardonic irony, although Orwell would have recognized it at once. When I was in yeshiva, Animal Farm was required reading. Orwell’s fable is a warning about the corruption of revolutions and the ease with which the oppressed become the oppressors. “All animals are equal,” the pigs declared, until they amended it to “but some animals are more equal than others.” This is Israel’s Animal Farm moment, a state born of draft dodging now imprisons draft dodgers.
To be clear, I am not opining or editorializing on the complex debate of religious draft. Israel’s enemies are real and not metaphorical; the threat is one of survival, and there is a very real discussion to be had for another day. I am discussing the fact that the practical necessity does not erase memory, and to forget the Cantonist is to forget why Zionism exists in the first place.
This is not a policy debate about the equality of burden or the prioritization of Torah learning over military service; this is about national amnesia and a state that is ignoring the echoes of its own history. The Czar used the draft to erase Jewish identity; Zionism’s stated purpose was to restore and nurture it.
This is not religious versus secular or right versus left; this is the existential threat that should shake us to our very core. If Zionism has matured to the point of mimicking the actions of the Czar, what was the point of it all? If Zionism was the philosophical offspring of Cantonist decrees, what will be the offspring of this enforced draft on our yeshiva students?
The last image Orwell leaves us in Animal Farm is not of speeches but of a window. The animals peer inside the farmhouse. The pigs are now drinking, gambling, and smoking with the men, indistinguishable from the masters they overthrew. “From pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
That was Orwell’s verdict on a revolution betrayed. It may yet be Israel’s destiny if it forgets that it was born from boys dragged from their homes and yeshivas into the Czar’s army. Looking through the window today, what was once Czarist uniforms seizing Jewish children is now Jewish uniforms. From Czar to Jew, and Jew to Czar again, until it is impossible to say which is which.
