The government fiddles while Israel burns

Last night, while bombs continued to fall on the Galil and the Golan, while tens of thousands of Israelis buried the hostages Hamas executed, and while over half a million Israelis marched and lit fires for the third consecutive night in the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Caesarea, Haifa, Beer Sheva, and elsewhere, the government fiddled.

The Prime Minister fiddled with a tunnel-free map of the Gaza-Egypt border and with a concept of unity that forbids all deliberation or accountability. At the same time, Ministers Yoav Gallant (Likud), Itamar Ben Gvir (Jewish Power), Yariv Levin (Likud), Israel Katz (Likud), Yitzhak Goldknopf (Agudat Yisrael), May Golan (Likud), Yitzhak Wasserlauf (Likud), and Bezalel Smotrich (Religious Zionism), along with MK Simcha Rothman (Religious Zionism) and MK Benny Gantz (Israel Resilience), to name but a few, fiddled at a Haredi wedding in Jerusalem. While the largest protests in history are currently widespread and while their popularity is at a record low, the government is operating with Neronian disconnect from reality.

Yet, unlike Nero’s Rome, we are a republic, and our chief woe is not Imperial frivolity, but faction and sectarianism. James Madison defined faction as

A number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. (Federalist 10)

According to Madison, Hamilton, and the founding fathers of the United States, faction is the primary cause of destruction in a republic. They were probably looking at the Italian republics of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, but we can see that Israel is afflicted by the same disease.

Ben Gvir and Smotrich clearly and openly place the Temple Mount and the settlements, including unnecessary jobs for otherwise unemployable people who live in them, above the welfare and lives of the majority of Israeli citizens. Goldknopf, who famously said “Who has it bad here?” last February, cares only for increasing subsidies for non-working Haredim. The Likud famously cares only for its contract workers and property owners and openly neglects the economic welfare of working Israel. All of these sects neglect the aggregate interests of the community (cf. the budget). Miri Regev, as Raviv Drucker showed just before political interests had him removed from the most popular Israel news show on television, assigns road contracts only to her own people. Ben Gvir’s management of police appointments has led to near complete neglect of Arab towns, and increased use of unnecessary violence against masses of peaceful protestors. This ruling group of factional interests is also openly united against the courts, the professional civil service, and any check on their power.

David Ben Gurion used the Hebrew term mamlakhti to refer to the national interest, above the factional and it is time to return to mamlakhtiut. The lessons of October 7 show that we need a large army to respond to threats at the border in reasonable time. We need a strong, working society to support life here. Moreover, we need professionals, who are mostly not represented in the current government at all.

It is time for the fiddlers to go home and for the people to elect properly mamlakhti representatives.