Israel’s successive governments must of course take ownership of the large group of people in their country who, while they must be counted among the worst subcultures in the world, consider themselves the absolute best. Israel itself allowed its ultraorthodox to cultify and stultify, to rule the private, public, and spiritual lives of millions of normal Israelis, and to ransack any conception of Israel as a gathering place of diverse Jews. The sickening behavior Israel has brought upon itself only grows, as that country now attempts to legislate itself away from ultraorthodox control.
One of the younger, more prominent haredi politicians just shat on a woman serving in Israel’s military as a “shiksa” because she converted in an IDF conversion.
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The ultraorthodox party just released a political ad snickering at Jewish converts as dogs.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid tweeted in response: “My father once told me that there was a big sign in the parliament in Budapest: ‘No entry for Jews and dogs.’ Anti-Semites in every generation always compared Jews to dogs. Now United Torah Judaism has joined them. Disgusting.”
One long, highly produced, article after another appears there, highlighting the destructive primitivism, and the law-breaking, of Israel’s large, politically powerful, and often violent, ultraorthodox population. Today’s piece recounts the sickening synergy of a government that refuses to deal with the covid-burdened haredim, and the determination of many ultraorthodox to flout any form of compliance with health rules.
I mean, literally sickening. A recent El Al flight full of secular and religious Israelis returning from New York featured a group of ultraorthodox – maskless and gathered in groups in the aisles, both against all safety/security rules – boasting among themselves about having forged documents declaring that they were not covid positive. Of course some were indeed infected, so everyone on that flight has had to enter isolation, etc., etc.
[D]ozens of passengers were notified by the Health Ministry that 11 of those on board were found to be infected with the coronavirus and that they must enter quarantine.
A woman on the plane claimed that she heard ultra-Orthodox passengers boasting that they had used fake coronavirus tests to get on the flight, Hebrew media reported. Other passengers said that during the flight ultra-Orthodox passengers did not wear masks at times and that the cabin crew did little to encourage them to cover up.
… Tal, a passenger on the flight, told the Ynet website that as passengers were getting on the plane she noticed a group of young ultra-Orthodox men boasting that they had obtained faked tests “and saying that they hadn’t taken them at all.”
Tal said that she had approached staff about the matter and was told there was nothing they could do. She also said that although the cabin crew assured her they would require all passengers to wear masks during the flight, the ultra-Orthodox passengers moved around, stood in groups praying, and did not wear masks.
“I pleaded with the stewardesses to ask them to put masks on but I got the response ‘you are hysterical, you have nothing to fear,’” she said.
Another passenger, who declined to be identified, told Channel 12 News that the cabin crew did not intervene when he raised the issue of the masks.
“We approached the cabin staff, we asked that they make sure they wear masks, but they assured us that everything was okay and we are panicking for nothing,” said the passenger.
“They were playing with our lives,” he said. “The flight attendants were afraid to confront them and we paid a heavy price.”
You bet they were afraid. Angry, massed haredim are a nasty business on the ground; you really don’t want to rile them in the air.
Like most cults, ultraorthodox have cults within cults, breakaways that get up to even more violent stuff than the mainstream ultraorthodox.
In the 1980s, the “operations officer” of the extremist Jerusalem sect Eda Haredit, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, led a gang that, among other violent acts, set fire to all Jerusalem bus stops that featured advertisements with images of women.
The descendants of such groups today torch buses, not just bus stops. They spit and shout “whore!” at primary school girls whose skirts fall an inch too short. Tinier and tinier sectarianism has made accommodation to covid measures weak at best:
[S]ome in the community now adhered to the [finally rabbi-mandated] regulations even more avidly than the secular population. But not every sect agreed. Followers of the radical “Jerusalem Faction” — who split from the main community years ago, arguing that [the larger group was] too soft in their attitude toward the secular state — and other extreme splinter groups refused to obey the new orders.
And maybe it’s because years of living with absurd cultists have made Israel itself absurd, but its not uncommon to hear even people in responsible positions say things like this:
“We are talking about a community with values, with a lot of love for mankind. But it does not think of itself as belonging to Israeli civil society.”
What a pretty cliche, love for mankind. But of course for this value-community Israeli civil society can curl up and die.
And, given their mindless defiance, these lovers of mankind are killing themselves too. They’ve already cut quite a swathe among their oldest, and they’re making impressive inroads among younger people.
Among the ultra-Orthodox, the percentage of those testing positive is more than double that of the rest of the population. The true impact of the pandemic is expressed in the death toll: One in every 100 ultra-Orthodox people over the age of 60 has died from the disease, three and a half times as many as in the general population.
Expect more NYT features, as the drama of state failure emanating from powerful, destructive cults plays on.
But it isn’t only romantic suicide, lad; it’s romantic homicide.
Throughout yet another opinion piece urging us to admire the haredim and castigate ourselves because we’ll never be the Jews they are, the writer stresses only the self-harm the haredim generate by breaking virus containment laws. It killed many of them. Yes, and continues to do so.
And, because they’ve carried the virus to the rest of us, it is killing many of us.
See?
The writer doesn’t see. His argument seems to be that because the haredim believe divine promises to the point of communal decimation, they deserve a kind of backhanded admiration, rather in the way one has to admire the fervor of Mad Mike, even if his belief that his steam-powered rocket would make him famous rather than dead was flawed.
Yes, we know you do.
The question is why any rational human being, let alone a government tasked with protecting citizens, listens to a word you say.
Israel has, post-coronavirus, so much to answer for.
See Engels here. Compare the haredim of Israel, in the age of Covid 19.
I’m the eldest of 11 children, and it’s not even an especially large family. In my parents’ building in Beit Shemesh, there are around 200 children and lots of elderly folk. The option of assisted living or retirement homes barely exists… These are families with 10 to 15 children. Some households have children who are already married with their own kids, so there can be 20 to 30 people living in one home. The average size of a Haredi apartment is 60 to 70 square meters [700 square feet]. It’s like a small ghetto. On a normal day, everyone is out studying, but these days everyone is together 24/7 with nothing to do. There is no internet, no smartphones, no T.V., no leisure books, nothing. You can’t leave the house…
How did a modern democratic state let this happen?
When, in a few decades, half of Israeli children come from homes like these, Israel can give up any pretense of being a modern democratic state.
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Fun detail from this interview:
[A haredi website] called “Mevaser” … last week published a whole page of photos of [virus victims] from Borough Park, Williamsburg, and other places – with the women blotted out in black.
Dead in life; dead in death.
Hey, the health minister himself flouted the rules and got the virus.
Nothing’s ‘incredible’ when your country’s ruled by theocrats.
All they do is hang out, fuck, and demonstrate against the government. They’re even draft dodgers! It’s all so ‘sixties.
I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the corrupting effect of big pharma money in the American university, especially in the hard to define and hard to diagnose area of depression. I’ve talked about the mindless defensiveness on the part of some academics to growing evidence of the largely placebo effect of anti-depressant pills for millions of people who take them.
But I’ve never seen anything like what some Israeli academics are doing with these pills when a rabbi brings to their office a haredi Jew who does not conform to haredi culture.
[Professor Omer Bonne sanctions] prescribing antidepressant pills from the SSRI family (most commonly used for the treatment of depression, anxiety disorders and some personality disorders ) for yeshiva students who masturbate excessively, or have sexual relations with other men, yet do not suffer from depression.
Bonne justified the use of these pills by pointing out that their side effects reduce sexual urges; he argued that such medication preempts possible destructive conflicts between the men and their surroundings, and the pills might also preempt conditions of depression.
A prominent psychiatrist cited in the report justified the use of lithium – medication ordinarily used for bipolar disorders – in certain cases where a man or woman suddenly decides to stop observing religious commandments, or to break up the family unit. The psychiatrist said that in some cases, such behavior derives from conditions such as mania.
Bonne and other psychiatrists confirmed that some of the patients come to clinics accompanied by rabbis or various “supervisors” associated with yeshivas. Sometimes, the religious pupils’ families are not notified of these visits. The psychiatrists confirmed that the rabbis or supervisors are on hand when patients are examined.
This article, in Haaretz, is difficult to read. It evokes the world of 1984, and Brave New World, in which closed and repressive cultures enforce conformity with chemicals. A senior psychiatrist interviewed for the article says: “I am stunned that people do that.”
UD has chronicled for years on this blog the scandalous refusal of ultraorthodox men and women to defend Israel. Even under current combat conditions, they refuse to lift their asses off of their prayer seats.
But now Israel’s high court has frozen yeshiva funding! No money if you don’t fight!
Which means Israel will soon have a two-front war, since the Haredim will respond to this call to civic duty by setting the country’s cities aflame. Operation Black Hats will divert many of Israel’s soldiers to the streets of Jerusalem, where ultra-orthodox mobs will riot mercilessly in defense of their right to do nothing and care nothing for Israel.
And the core reason Israel is now functionally a theocracy?
Israel has never created a constitution separating church and state. As a result, among other things, the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate holds a monopoly on marriage, which forces many secular Israelis to get married in other countries, or even online. Israel has no formal public transportation on Saturdays, which strands the millions of residents who don’t own a car.
As most of the school funding goes to schools that reverse engineer intelligence, having no wheels on a Saturday is going to be the least of Israelis’ problems.
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One silver lining: Normal people are being brought together.
“We should be glad about the greatest achievement we got: the creation of a new kind of centrist identity,” [one observer says]. “This center includes various shades, from the capitalist, hawkish right that believed in Netanyahu so far but not anymore, through the liberal center and up to the social-democratic left.”
“[When] a serving coalition is acting in a frenzy, it makes us feel, every minute of every day, that we are connected,” [says another]. “The liberal camp is a country that is just being formed.”
It’s the same thing here with theocratic attacks on abortion rights; it’s the same thing in Iran with theocratic attacks on women. Outrageous acts bring normal people together in defense of liberty, democracy, decency, equality. Indeed I think we can begin to see, in the polling, the same thing happening in regard to America’s homegrown outrage-generator, Trump. Eventually most normal people can’t take gross abnormality.
Until recently, a large majority of Israelis tolerated the [ultra orthodox]. Sometimes they gritted their teeth, sometimes they griped, but they went on shouldering the security and economic burden of the state on behalf of the haredim. The events of the last few months, and the conduct of the government, in full partnership with the haredim, will likely change all that. Utterly blind to reality, the haredim have now gone even further by proposing a new Basic Law: “Torah Study,” which would give draft dodgers a status similar to those serving in the IDF.
… Faced with yet another step which the majority of Israelis, the burden bearers, perceive as unfair and exploitative, the tumult of recent days may pale in comparison to what is to come. True, the haredim can do whatever they want under the current government, but short of a complete dictatorship here, they will pay the full price when the next government takes power. The budgets that finance their way of life will be slashed, government support for those who don’t prepare their students for a productive life will be terminated, and rights will be denied to those who don’t serve in the army or at least in civilian national service.
Dr. Matan Bar Yishai, a family doctor from the Maccabi healthcare service who has decided to relocate to New Zealand, told the Walla news site: “I am very sorry to everyone for the decision I made. I really love the country and my patients, but in the end, it is a family decision.”
Look. Give the people driving out Israel’s doctors, and provoking impressive numbers of Israeli pilots to stop flying, what they want. The people about to take over Israel didn’t give a shit about whatever “covid” was and refused vaccination and thereby killed a bunch of their people. Germ theory of disease? Our rabbi calls bs on it. The old ways are the best ways! He alone (to use the words of one of the heroes of the world’s ultraorthodox) can save us. What we need and what Israel needs is prayer, which is why our people don’t fight to defend the country, but only pray to defend the country, the way we prayed to keep all those children and old people from dying of covid…
Not that the haredim recognize the country “Israel,” since the messiah isn’t here yet or something. Many make a point of ignoring the national moments of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day, pointedly cavorting about while Israelis stand in mourning. These people do not want vaccines, doctors, or even a country. They don’t want an economy of workers. So let them have what they want. Large numbers of people with money and skills are leaving Israel; investors are leaving Israel. The economy’s tanking. The ultraorthodox are giddy with excitement. They have always gloried in poverty and ignorance, and now all the people bothering them about teaching basic literacy to their children or getting jobs instead of rioting are finally going to shut up. Gottze dank!
Israel has never created a constitution separating church and state. As a result, among other things, the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate holds a monopoly on marriage, which forces many secular Israelis to get married in other countries, or even online. Israel has no formal public transportation on Saturdays, which strands the millions of residents who don’t own a car.
Things are beyond bad.
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Harold Meyerson, American Prospect:
I do not believe the Israeli nation can endure half modern-democratic and half theocratic-primitivist; a house divided against itself cannot stand. Unlike Lincoln, neither do I believe that it will become all one thing or all the other. Someone there should start thinking about how to break it up.
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The idea of dividing Israel into cantons, which for years has been received with mockery due to the country’s small size and security challenges, has been gaining more and more traction over the past few months, and liberals are angrily calling to separate “Israel” from “Judea.” For some, Judea means the occupied territories. For others, Judea represents all ultra-Orthodox and messianic Jews, whether they live in Bnei Brak (in Israel proper) or Hebron (in the West Bank).
Gitit Ginat, Foreign Policy