Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail (Sorry, Hunter)

The comments on my last post have been very thought-provoking, so I thought I'd upgrade my response to here.

One person wrote:

MK's are flocking to Kadima because it represents a broad emerging centrist consensus among the populace. Put differently, the country does not want what you want. This is not to sweep under the rug any abuses of democracy that have occurred under Sharon's watch. But it does mean, and this is something that you have to start to be able to hear, my friend - that the large majority of Israelis fear religious Zionists a lot more than they fear Sharon. And it also means that beyond a certain point there is a falseness to all the cries about crimes against democracy. It is one thing to demand that civil rights and minority rights be respected (a cause, by the way, which Religious Zionism utterly ignored until things started to not go its way, which is part of why many of its spokespeople sound so hypocritical now.) But to live in a democracy means to acknowledge that the majority rules. And the majority does not want to send its children to defend small yishuvim in the midst of a million Arabs. It does not want to fight wars for Eretz Yisrael haShlemah, and it does not want to be held hostage to policies which mean that neither we or our descendants will ever see peace unless all the Arabs miraculously disappear.

So, let's see:

1) I agree that democracy is the rule of the majority, which must be upheld. That's why I opposed disobeying orders during the so-called 'Disengagement.'

2) The civil rights abuses that have built up over the past few months are eloquently laid out here and here. [The swipe at Religious Zionist ignoring of prior Civil Rights abuses is gratuitous.]

3) I am sure he is right that 'the large majority of Israelis fear religious Zionists a lot more than they fear Sharon. ...the majority does not want to send its children to defend small yishuvim in the midst of a million Arabs. It does not want to fight wars for Eretz Yisrael haShlemah, and it does not want to be held hostage to policies which mean that neither we or our descendants will ever see peace unless all the Arabs miraculously disappear.'

However...

The majority fear Religious Zionists, because we have been diabolized in a way that is truly incredible. The media and politicians have taken a page out of Trachtenberg's The Devil and the Jews, and applied it to every knitted kippah in the world, and everything for which it stands. In this, they had the help of our lunatic element. But, hey, if a few coin clippers can get the entire Jewish community thrown out of England (1291), think of what a larger group can do for the rest of us.

For everyone's information, Eretz Yisrael ha-Shlema stopped being a real program in 1993. So, I don't really understand why it keeps getting thrown up in the faces of the Right. The question now is, will Israel undertake a terrtorial realignment or will it run a liquidation sale. Every time this comes up, it's liquidation sale hands down. Furthermore, since most Israelis don't know the difference between an outpost and a city of 12,000 like Betar Illit, they really don't want their sons to protect anything. (Difficult situation for those of us in Yosh who have children defending the Northern or Southern borders.)

This is a recipe for disaster, because (and how many times do I need to say this?) the Arabs are playing a zero-sum game. You can't play compromise when the other side says all or nothing. This is the principled position of the overwhelming majority of Muslims. Period. Anything less is blasphemy against the Divinely ordained order of things, as set by the Qur'an, the Hadith and the Shari'ah. So let's deal with it. There will be, can be no peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs (or any other Arabs) until an alternative Muslim conception develops. [Please, don't retort that we have peace with Egypt and Jordan. Yes, the governments are in a state of non-active belligerancy. However, states that you can't visit lest you be killed because you're Israeli or a Jew are not states where peace reigns.] Furthermore, as Bernard Lewis and Ehud Yaari keep pointing out, the Arabs see ANY concession as a sign of weakness and imminent implosion of the Zionist entity.

So, yes it's true that the Israeli majority doesn't want what some things that I want. OTOH, maybe it does.