After the 1977 revolution, it was common to mock people who "corrected" their biography and included in it a chapter of sailing on the Altalena, the Irgun weapons ship sunk off the coast of Tel Aviv in 1948.
These are members of the labor movement who underwent retroactive conversion therapy and disguised themselves as right-wingers who wanted access to state resources after its leaders changed.
But today it can be said that many "former" commanders, retired commanders, are truly "surpassing the Altalena", that is, abandoning the legacy of obedience to an elected government.
As Menachem Begin, commander of the Irgun, almost did during the first lull in the War of Independence, they are undermining the sovereignty of the state. With the renewed attempts at democratization of the government, "former" people who lack a state conscience return and foster political subversion against the elected government, in the army, in the police and perhaps in other branches as well.
This political subversion dwarfs the severity of Begin's conditions for handing over the Altalena's weapons to the IDF in 1948. What happened then in Altalena? The trouble is that most of the writers and readers of that affair get bogged down in questions such as what were the details of the negotiations between the sides. They deal with baseless speculation about their motives, and painful questions such as how the deterioration into exchanges of fire took place in the village of Vitkin and on the Tel Aviv coast, and why after the sinking of the ship its men who were swimming in the water were shot.
These are important questions, but they do not deal with the main thing that stood between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Begin: the necessity of every state, for its existence, to maintain an undisputed monopoly on the use of legitimate force. This monopoly includes, of course, the decision to distribute weapons to every soldier serving in the army of the sovereign state, including in Jerusalem.
Begin violated his authority at the time, and his action did not coincide with the agreement signed three weeks earlier for the integration of Irgun fighters into the IDF, many of whom defected and participated in the confrontation. Only after the deaths and the sinking of the ship did Begin come to his senses and retreat from the violation of conversions, even if only by grinding his teeth, and many praise him for holding back. It was his official worldview that motivated his retreat and restraint and he may have been caught up in a confrontation against his will.
But our "former" – chiefs of staff, Mossad chiefs, commanders in Military Intelligence – are running mindlessly and conscientiously to cut down on the plantings of Israeli sovereignty. They are not anarchists. It is absurd to attribute to them at all an orderly, and more radical, worldview. But it is certainly permissible to say that they, former members of the "tribe" of the late Labor movement, are literally brought up in one of the most important traditions of that glorious movement: the tradition of the Haganah, including the Palmach, and the IDF's tradition of unchallenged submission to the authority of the elected leadership.
This was one of the most important keys to the historic victories of the Labor movement, and it could be one of the suicidal keys to the political destruction of the entire State of Israel.
"The dissidents," as the Irgun and Lehi were called, what did they quit? They withdrew – in the name of Zionist ideals, of course – from the political conversions that the Zionist movement fostered, a bitterness that the State of Israel must preserve as much as it desires life.
The new "dissidents" incite pilots and fighters, however few, to condition their service on extortionate demands. In doing so, they raise their hands on our very sovereignty, on our ability to govern ourselves through representatives. This ability is the haze of democracy and the hazel of Zionism itself.
Opposition leaders irresponsibly withdrew from compromise negotiations on proposals to democratize relations between Israeli authorities. This means that they want to dictate their position to the elected government, or else they will set the streets on fire under the auspices of the police and the prosecutor's office that are "friendly" to the incendiaries, pull the strings of extortion and refusal in the army, and sabotage the Israeli economy to the "best" of their ability.
Surrendering to this dictate means destroying Israeli democracy, whose flag the opposition carries in vain.
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us