So the current trend is to blame the schism on the tragedy. On the eve of the 100th anniversary, this is perhaps the main insight that has assumed the status of an indisputable social convention. If you win together, you lose separately. And we were probably too apart.
The concept, with all due respect to it, is secondary in importance. It is terrible and terrible and we will investigate and investigate, but it is only a concept. Fact. We lived in its shadow for many years. We survived for more than a decade. The enemy was the same enemy, the omissions the same omissions. All this time we discovered immunity. But we have never been as divided as the year before the attack. And that's the given, the single factor, that changed the picture.
"The rift has penetrated the IDF": Minister Galant called for a halt to the reform's legislation // Photo: Defense Minister Media
I don't want, of course, to underestimate intelligence analysis. A wise man whose opinion I admire showed me with signs and wonders how external enemies read the social map in Israel, monitor internal tensions, and calculate when we are vulnerable enough.
The talks and commentaries bring up Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah's "cobweb" speech from 2000. Israel's military power is enormous, he said at the time, but Israeli society is weak. In retrospect, we probably want to understand that he meant "disjointed" or "conflicted." But Nasrallah meant something else: that Israeli society is hedonistic, spoiled, and unwilling to tolerate more terror, war, and bereavement. But what does he understand.
Nor do I want to deny that the pictures we've seen over the past year aren't particularly endearing, and certainly don't reflect brotherhood and contentment. There is also no doubt that political struggle reflects political polarization, and when the struggle escalates, polarization worsens.
MKs in the "victory" selfie after passing a reduction in the grounds of reasonableness, photo: Oren Ben Hakon
Perhaps it can finally be admitted that behind the protest against the reform, with all the roadblocks and threats of refusal, there was not only opposition to a governmental move, but also broad sentiments regarding the social groups that the government represents. For example, the ultra-Orthodox who need to be put on wheelbarrows, the ultra-Orthodox who tarnished Gantz's flag, the settlers whose violence is the real danger to Israel, and the entire Bibism, which must be toppled. Along with the babysitters, of course.
In procession to Canossa
The belief is so fervent that the quarrel between us is what brought about the disaster that there are already those who are determined to apologize for their part in fanning the division. MK Galit Distel-Etbrian did so in a television interview with Lior Keinan on Channel 13 News. Confession in the face of the nation. Not a knee crawl in the snow, but still a decent walk to Canossa.
I appreciate her for her honesty, for her openness, for her outreach. But how expected it was that an outstretched hand met neither hand, sister, nor thanks. Vice versa. Of those who even bothered to respond, one called on her to express her remorse for her actions and resign from the Knesset, while another wrote that until she acts to oust Netanyahu, her words will remain worthless.
This only implies that much of the Great Schism thesis is not intended to mend rifts – but to mark blame. And there are some whose names shine far and wide, such as Dr. Avishai Ben Haim. One newspaper wrote that there was no place for his merchandise on television after October 7. His name comes up frequently, one of the great agents of division. Here you already have two culprits in the disaster. Gen. Haliwa? Small money. Who needs a commission of inquiry.
Dr. Avishai Ben Haim. The thesis is intended to mark culprits, photo: Oren Ben Hakon
I think you can already guess who will be next, and they will all have a common denominator: They come from a political area code that empathizes with the Likud, Netanyahu, and the national camp. Especially if their name rhymes with "Bibism". And this, by the way, is nothing new: they were considered great conflicts even before the war. How did their conflict manifest itself? They fanned hatred against imaginary elites, repeatedly unleashed the sectarian genie from the bottle, invented the "Second Israel" and then incited it with the "First Israel."
And all this time, naïve, kind-hearted but simple-minded people did not know that the real enemies were the ultra-Orthodox, the settlers, the ultra-Orthodox and the Bibists, and they walked blindly, like a herd without thinking, in cells holding drabukas, after the wizards of the Lazian conflict. Thus Israeli society disintegrated, divided and polarized and irreparably divided. And over the fence they watched us, rubbing hands with pleasure.
Galit Distal Atabrian. Confession in the face of the nation, photo: Oren Ben Hakon
Two, three, f-lag!
Of course, I don't deny conflict, and I certainly don't like division. But with all due respect, Israel's conflicts have done little more than a rather trivial vote on systematic exclusion from power centers, cultural barriers facing different groups, and hegemonic control over consciousness-shaping systems. They mainly shed light on power relations that work in favor of certain groups – which do not gladly accept the empowerment of those who once used to see them as "marginal" or "other" – like Mizrahim in the periphery, like Haredim, like settlers.
These are really not particularly radical and subversive theories – they simply escaped from sociology books into the wild jungle of public discourse and created social consciousness. Is there a greater threat to the elites than that?
And just as blaming critical voices for fanning hatred and division is intended to oppress, silence, and incriminate those who threaten the social order, blaming the divide on the October 7 disaster is a means of silencing criticism of the nihilism that also contributed to the disaster. It connects, with a feeble touch, to the slip of the mouth about a "woman from broadcasts and reserved" who won't tell the army when a phase of combat is passed. It is again this popular stratum that is causing trouble at the top.
Evacuation work at the Sderot police station after October 7, photo: Yossi Zeliger
How convenient it is that the blame once again lies with the "second Israel" and its spokesmen, who created a conflict here that invited Hamas to a sadistic massacre. It's true, there were threats of insubordination by elite units, the economic whip of the financial elite, the calls of rebellion by the security elite. There was a protest leadership here that pumped that in a second the government would discover that it had no army. All this Yahya Sinwar did not have time to see; He was simply engrossed in Avishai Ben Haim's book.
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