Shelly Schreter: Connecting the Dots
My gut-anguish about the direction Israel seems to be lurching in has not diminished. Neither has my love for this country and its people, which just deepens the pain for me. “I have lived here for the last 50 years and am seriously considering staying” – is my smart-alecky motto.
Individual freedoms and civil rights are such a recent, precious invention of the human race, just a few hundred years old, and they remain fragile and vulnerable to the waves of authoritarian demagogy plaguing our present world, including in democratic countries. The barely repressed or explicit violence of survival-of-the-fittest ideologies is never far away, never taken for granted, never beyond the influence of malevolent actors. Democratic regimes thus have to struggle with the central paradox that preserving those very freedoms sometimes necessitates using force against its aspiring destroyers. There is no perfect formula for doing that without losing your essence. Fine-tuning and self-questioning, checks and balances, are never-ending, indispensable tools for protecting both majority and minority rights from populist distortions. It is an infinite work in progress and its critical vehicle is the law, democratically devised and revised.
Israel’s emergence in 1948 was amazing in itself. Its adoption of a democratic system of governance, with all its imperfections, was little short of miraculous, given the origins of most of its population in non-democratic societies. Sustaining and extending that required very great effort, and leadership and luck, which the constant external threat of unashamedly genocidal enemies made even more difficult.
My cri de coeur was provoked by the perception that a tide of violence is increasingly evading our democratic institutional safeguards and invading our daily lives. It inserts itself insidiously into different and seemingly disconnected areas of life… until you take notice and start connecting the dots. This worries me intensely, not least because I don’t know how to fight it. I used to believe I had all the answers and now I’m just trying to ask the right questions.
To be fair, it is not as if fist fights are breaking out in the local supermarket or vicious brawls in the post office. Some friends urge me not to take everything so much to heart, not to see connections that may exist only in my imagination, not to be so fixated on the news and upset by its content, nor to romanticize past periods or to fantasize about their superiority to the present. Is this just about my getting older, grouchier, more pessimistic and cynical?
I wish it were, but I don’t think so. I can’t prove my dot-connecting in what follows, but I am convinced that the coincidences and parallels are compelling, and that you have to be willfully blind to deny them.
Is this due to the pressure of living under constant threat, surrounded by antagonists who really mean us harm, who object not only to our policies but to our very existence? That is an undeniable influence, but I don’t believe it is the pivotal one.
Our Zionist forbears wanted to “normalize” the condition of the Jewish people, which included among other things, Jewish criminals and a Jewish underworld which becomes increasingly obtrusive and less restrained in its crimes over time. And they are far outdone by the criminals in Arab Israeli society, who have generated a reign of terror with more than one murder a day so far in 2026! Tough luck for bystanders caught in the crossfire, literally.
The Israeli police are not so much ineffective in countering this as they are intentionally negligent, led by far-right politicians who scarcely bother to conceal their unconcern about Arabs killing other Arabs. And this in its turn provides a classic example of the erosion of social norms like the primacy of the law and equality before the law by a government whose priority is self-perpetuation at any cost. All societies have corruption, it seems, but Israel has more than its share, sapping the motivation of ordinary people to value civic morality. The political sources are flagrant enough, but old-fashioned theft, bribery and extortion are rampant, especially at the municipal level.
What goes on in the West Bank is, in my view, a significant input into daily Israeli life. It might as well be called the Wild West Bank. On one hand, you have the never-ending terrorist acts of Palestinian militants, which Israel’s security forces contain sometimes more, sometimes less successfully. Most of the outside world regards this as legitimate resistance to illegitimate occupation, expropriation and ethnic cleansing.
On the other hand, Israel’s West Bank settlement enterprise has continued unabated for most of the period since 1967, accelerating during the term in office of the present Israel Government. “Illegal” settlements are created on privately owned Palestinian land and later declared legal retroactively, with the explicit goal of rendering a future, contiguous Palestinian state impossible. For years, armed, brutal settlers have been physically harassing Palestinian civilians in an ongoing crusade to force them off the land, out of their villages, and altogether out of Palestine. Forget law and order. The masked marauders are almost never arrested. If by chance a few occasionally are, their cases are almost always dismissed for lack of evidence. They benefit from the cover provided by shameless politicians and even – I am devastated to admit – all too often by a complicit IDF.
The attempt to pass this off as the insignificant actions of a tiny minority of hyper-active, dysfunctional youths – is a transparent lie. Anyone who imagines that this wanton, lethal violence is hermetically sealed inside the West Bank and does not seep back into behavioural norms in the rest of Israel is deceiving either themselves or others. It is full-blooded ethnic cleansing and national persecution, which sabotages Israel’s legitimate self-defense narrative and moral pretensions.
The rule of law is the most basic principle that protects citizens from government abuse in a democracy. That principle is being systematically eroded, in the West Bank, in the Government’s continuing attacks on the judicial system and its ability to serve as a check and balance on its power, which is so much the heart of the matter. The consequences are all around us, and pushing Israeli society closer to chaos. May I offer a few examples?
Try driving a car in Israel. The sheer aggressiveness of Israeli driving norms gives us a horrifying rate of traffic casualties. Relax at a soccer game, if you dare. The “soccer hooligan” phenomenon thrives in Israel, on steroids. Pitched battles between rival fans and live fireworks in the stands during games are common. Check out the Israeli educational system. Beyond the acute shortage of teachers and steady deterioration of educational standards (except for the small high-achiever elite), the indiscipline of Israeli schools is legendary and often results in violent conflicts between students and includes attacks on teachers. Need some medical attention? Israeli hospitals have to employ security personnel to protect medical staff from attacks by outraged, frustrated patients and their families.
And then there are our haredi fellow-Jews, the ones who proudly trample the social contract between a state and its citizens, and disdain equality before the law in refusing to participate in defending the country, while at the same time demanding and receiving ever-greater portions of the public purse. Their entire rabbinical and political leaderships oppose the draft. Sure, it is only a small, extremist minority who attack police and riot, but they are unrestrained by their silent majority. How can this NOT be massively demoralizing to the rest of society?
It is not just the rabbinical leaders who are bankrupt, it is also most of the rest of our political leaders, who represent faithfully the gradual breakdown of law and order and even the ability to disagree civilly. Underlying all is the truth that Israeli society is profoundly divided on some of its most fundamental issues, including religion-state relations, judicial independence and authority, relations with the Arab neighbours and the disposition of the West Bank. More than anything else, that is why we have never been able to agree on a Constitution setting the basic rules of the game and enshrining individual civil rights. Whether that deep cleavage can be bridged before Israel tears itself apart is the great strategic challenge we face.
The anger and sheer hatred in our public discourse infects the Knesset, our mass media, our social media, and the tenor of everyday life. When citizens exercise their democratic right to protest, all too often they wind up violating the basic freedom of movement of other citizens by blocking main roads or picketing the homes of politicians. This is true of both sides of the political spectrum! No doubt readers can add examples of their own.
We are melting down and have to find a path to social sanity and accommodation before it is too late. I am crying gevalt! I have no magic formula for how to fix this, nor how to get our leaders to lead responsibly. This is really critical, because we are losing it! We were heartened by the awesome gestures of solidarity, mutual help and self-sacrifice of the Israeli people on Oct. 7th and afterward. However, all the internal antagonisms have reasserted themselves and are ramping up as national elections approach, by next October at the latest. It is as though we learned nothing from the catastrophic costs of our internal divisions at the end of the Second Temple period.
Israel simply cannot afford to degrade the basic social glue that keeps its fractious tribes from devouring one another. That is why a national army mobilizing representatives of the entire population and teaching them to function together in the country’s defense is so critical, beyond pure security considerations. The stakes are everything.
Postscript: Some friends found this article depressing. Unlike our younger days, I cannot pretend to have a neat solution. The fact that some of the phenomena mentioned occur in worse forms elsewhere is no consolation, just part of the foul, authoritarian demagogy of our times.
Nonetheless, in the spirit of Viktor Frankl, I retain hope and reject despair. The Jews have survived worse situations than this, despite our talent for harming ourselves, while complaining about everything all the time. If complaining were an Olympic sport, we would have permanent possession of gold, silver and bronze. (Some Jew-haters contend that we already control all the gold and silver.)
Thank God for our humour, which gives us some hold on sanity and self-awareness. I love the Israeli stand-up comic who observed that, in high school, he was given a choice between studying conversational French or Arabic. Most of his friends preferred French, but he went for Arabic. Now he’s the one who feels most relaxed about hanging out in Paris! The wheels of our fate keep turning, and turning again. (Please let me know if you can figure out what that actually means.)
