IDF

Dubious (Bogus?) Haredi Call for Killing Jewish Army Recruiters Goes Too Far

rafifarber Libertarian Halacha, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

I’ve got a Jerusalem Post in front of me, an article written by Jeremy Sharon, actually an old acquaintance of mine. Apparently there are pashkavillim (flyers) going around urging people drafted into the army to kill soldiers with the M16’s they are given at basic training.

Before I go into the legalities of this from a libertarian perspective, I’ll just speculate that this is a scare tactic by young kana’im (zealots) probably teenagers who printed up a few posters that the media is blowing out of proportion. I do not believe that the actual power centers in the haredi community would post such papers, and Sharon’s article admits this possibility.

Some doubt has surfaced as to whether the flyers were part of the central anti-enlistment campaign because its wording is unlike that of standard pashkavillim, public notices commonly used in the haredi community. It was also not professionally printed, as are regular pashkavillim and anti-haredi military service materials.

It could be a false flag, planted by some state operator to cause outrage and deepen divisions, but probably not because they are not professionally printed. So most likely the rantings of an unstable zealous kid who is taking out some angst issues, seized on by the media to sell some newspapers. (I did not buy the Jerusalem Post. My parents are in town and they bought it.)

Be that as it may, the only situation I would say where it is permissible to kill a Jew, even a State agent Jew, is if your actual life is in immediate danger from the person. Otherwise, you can’t just go and kill a person for kidnapping you into the army. Active resistance is OK as long as you don’t kill anyone (though stupid and I recommend against it strongly), and passive resistance is the best option.

If it were a goy army then yes, it would be justified to kill a recruiter because goyim are much more dangerous. With a goy army, your life is in immediate danger the moment you are recruited, since you can be unwillingly recruited into combat. Whereas in the IDF, at worst you’ll be recruited into a useless unit, never by force into combat.

No state agent Jew is going to kill another Jew for not being willingly drafted. He’ll give you trouble, humiliate you, put you in prison, do other bad things, but he will not kill you. Thank God for at least that limit to State power. Cause him enough trouble and eventually he’ll let you go.

So no, whoever kanai printed these pashkvillim. You cannot go around killing Jews for arresting you. I’m speaking from a Jewish perspective here. From a secular libertarian perspective maybe you can (not sure), but Judaism overrides reshus in libertarian halacha. You have to suck it up and passively resist, unless your life is in obvious and immediate danger.

Jewish army recruiters do not pose an immediate threat to your life.

Why IDF Deserters Deserve Mad Respect, And Redefining Zionism

rafifarber Jewish State, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Bored IDF Soldier

Excuse typos on this one please. I’m typing really fast before Shabbos and I still have to clean my house. 

A follow up on my niece Eden Farber’s article on serving in the Israel Defense Forces.

She took down her article after being pressured by the bureaucrats to do so. It is still up on the Wayback Machine and will be as long as the Archive.org server remains online.

A short word on the IDF policy to not allow soldiers to publish negative commentary on Tzahal. At first glance it seems a rational policy. Employees of private companies would be fired for badmouthing the company that employs them. This is the old adage “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” The policy itself is not the problem. A company should have the right to fire its employee for any reason at all, even if they don’t like his nose. Everything should go by contract, and if the contract says you can be fired for having an ugly nose, then that should be enforceable. Practically, this clause is actually in most contracts in the form of “any party can terminate said agreement on X notice for any reason etc.”

The problem with the policy is first, IDF service is not a voluntary contract for young people. Eden would have been forced into it anyway in some form. So to prevent soldiers from saying anything they want about the machine that forces them in is unjust, but really the problem is that a private company would fire you and demand its money back. If the IDF stopped there that would be fine. Kick anyone who badmouths the army out of the army and demand back their stipends of what, 300NIS a month? Fine.

But the IDF does not do that. If she didn’t take it down she’d go to prison eventually, be blackballed against future employment etc.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post. The point is rather the comments that I’ve seen in response to her article as well as in response to my reposting of it on Facebook. Most of them miss the point and display a clear bias towards army service and against market activity, which is not surprising.

Here are some 3 examples:

…Just remember that Israel needs you, both as a soldier and as a citizen, but I think you already understand that as well.

…Nice to read about a spoiled American idealist kid faced reality, grew up, and became a contributing citizen of the most important country in the world. The IDF isn’t there to help you feel good about yourself, that’s YOUR job, no matter what the task. The IDF is there so that every Jew can have the opportunity to do so in that country.

…She deserves respect from the community for volunteering to serve. But, she shouldn’t be so depressed, not everyone can be Moshe Dayan, and even he was not as much as he’s made out to be.

Here’s the problem with these comments. At the base, they build off the assumption that merely wearing a uniform and twiddling your thumbs is a holy endeavor. Because there’s this metaphysical “entity” called Tzahal, sort of like כל ישראל יש להם חלק לעולם הבא, every Israelite has a share in the world to come, and just being part of it is like joining up with some spiritual core. I’ve said this before, but it is a form of worship of something other than God.

Therefore, no matter how useless one is, how abused, or even how destructive (take the case of Gilad Shalit who contributed nothing and lamely went into captivity in one of the most pathetic army stories I’ve ever heard – not blaming Shalit he was forced into it like everyone else) one is to Tzahal, it is still considered holy to wear that uniform.

Now, one of my על חטא’s that I klopped for this year is being too reactionary and caustic. I’m trying to soften my tone a bit here, so I’ll say I understand these sentiments. I grew up with them. They are not foreign to me. They are part of my past, and I get it. Defending the Jewish people (any people really, in the true sense of defensive protection) indeed is a holy endeavor because we are God’s people, and those motivated to join the IDF for this should not be faulted.

But here’s where the bias comes in. If defending the Jewish people is holy, then why aren’t army deserters who would rather work and make money in Israel praised for doing the same exact thing? Take Bar Refaeli for example. She is extremely productive. I like her a lot. (I’m a guy and she’s Bar Refaeli, OK?) The taxes she pays support how many IDF soldiers? And yet she is reviled for being a deserter. Many business leaders and successful Israeli Jews are also army deserters. Good for them. We should respect the heck out of them for being brave enough to say no. That they won’t simply “do their time” to be part of the “big picture”. I’d have less of a problem with respecting army service for the sake of army service if deserters who go into the private sector to make money were also given the respect they deserve.

Zionism connotes service to the State of Israel. The State of Israel is not some metaphysical spiritual yeshus that exists in heaven. It’s just a group of people who pass laws coupled with enforcers. Zionism should not be defined as service to the State of Israel. It should be defined as service to God, or service to one’s conception of some Jewish higher purpose as centered on the Land of Israel if you’re an atheist or don’t believe in religion. I’m religious, so I pick the first one.

I am anti Zionist because I do not serve the State of Israel. But according to my definition of Zionism, I am a Zionist because God has given me a personal religious obligation to live in Israel and to create value in Israel. I am fulfilling that obligation by living in biblical Israel and creating value here for myself and for others.

Are soldiers who twiddle their thumbs in the army fulfilling their religious obligation according to this? I would say no. Market value is very had to measure with a monopoly army, but it’s pretty obvious that a soldier doing nothing is simply consuming resources in Israel.

The Mitzva of יישוב ארץ ישראל, settling the Land of Israel, requires creating more value that one consumes, either measurable economic value in terms of a monetary amount or spiritual value in terms of enriching people’s lives (which in the end could be valued monetarily aggregating the salaries of Rabbis and other spiritual workers in the private sector), both are necessary. If you just have people leeching of the work of others that is not settling. Settling requires work. If everyone leeched, everybody starves and יישוב cannot be done.

Army deserters who are not on welfare fulfill this role more than soldiers who do nothing, or next to nothing.

Now imagine this the other way around. Private companies in Israel, everywhere really, are often reviled for whatever they do, sometimes justifiably but often for simply doing business legitimately. It’s always דן לכף חוב, guilty until proven innocent with the private sector. If someone from a private company like Teva or something were to write an article reviling Teva’s abusive practices against its employees, oh boy would there be hell to pay.

Nobody would come to Teva’s defense commenting on an Eden type article documenting the emotional abuse of Teva that:

…Just remember that Teva needs you as an employee and Israel needs Teva, but I think you already understand that as well.

…Nice to read about a spoiled American idealist kid faced reality, grew up, and became a contributing citizen of the most important country in the world. Teva isn’t there to help you feel good about yourself, that’s YOUR job, no matter what the task. Teva is there so that every Jew can have the opportunity to have cheap medicine.

…She deserves respect from the community for working at Teva. But, she shouldn’t be so depressed, not everyone can be Mark Thatcher (founder of Teva), and even he was not as much as he’s made out to be.

Etc. That would all be ludicrous. In fact, just the opposite. Jews left and right would be manhandling Teva and urging a bunch of people to be fired and big fines to be levied and compensation to be paid to the abused.

But with the IDF, no matter what the heck you’re doing, whether it’s damaging or nothing or barely anything, it’s always good because the IDF is holy.

Well what about Teva? Yes, they do bad things when they partner with the State. Not a perfect example. But how many lives has Teva saved? Wow, a lot. Who cares? Very few. Who considers Teva holy for fulfilling יישוב ארץ ישראל? Virtually nobody.

Statists like to quip, “Israel can’t survive without the IDF,” by which they mean a monopoly State-controlled IDF. Well, maybe, maybe not. It’s an empirical question. Several IDF’s privatized into different competing security companies sounds scary to many, but it is at least conceivable that it would operate much better than what we have now, which is a drain on everyone’s standard of living and death to many who commit suicide in the army.

(In fact, parenthetically, statists also quip that if Private Company X, say Teva again, would cease to exist, the market need would be filled by some other company to meet the need so there is no need for Teva specifically and it is not holy. But when libertarians say that if State Institution Y (say the IDF) would cease to exist, statists claim that everyone would die so therefore the IDF is holy, whereas libertarians say that the market need would be filled by private companies and therefore the IDF is not holy.)

But can the IDF survive without people working in the private sector? No, it cannot. That is not an empirical question. In order to survive in this planet and consume its resources, you first need to produce those resources. That is an a priori logical proposition. The IDF cannot surive  without a private Israeli economy.

So, being that the IDF is absolutely dependent on the private sector, whereas Israel is only dubiously dependent on a public monopoly state controlled IDF, then by transitive property, Israeli companies are much holier than the IDF.

Therefore, army deserters who work in the private sector in the Biblical Land of Israel, deserve equal, if not MORE respect than IDF soldier with no obvious purpose in the army.

 

On the IDF Draft and Battered Woman Syndrome (Politically Correctly Stated as Battered Person Syndrome)

rafifarber Jewish State, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

My niece Eden Farber is an IDF soldier. I was also one shortly after I made aliyah. I do not generally advertise this because I am not particularly proud of it.

Anyway, Eden just wrote this piece at Times of Israel. The IDF forced Eden to take down the piece. I found it on the Wayback Machine though, and they can’t take that down. Ha.

But anyway, call me biased, but it’s very well written. And to me it’s agonizing. It’s about her disillusionment with the Israeli army, how she went into it idealistic and wanting to serve, use her talents, be useful. Driven by Zionism, love of Israel, all the stuff we are taught in Jewish day school or Hebrew school or youth groups or home school all our lives.

But then she realized that the army is not that great. In fact it was the worst experience of her life. She’s still in it. Here are some relevant passages to the very sad point I’m going to try to make here. Eden writes (my bold):

I became depressed. I cried, more than I ever have. I couldn’t sleep more than a few hours in a row. I stopped eating. Food nauseated me. I could go a week eating just one box of cookies. I fought with my family, I canceled plans with my friends. I kept fighting to advance, putting in appeals, meeting with high ranking officers to show them who I am, but in the back of my head I began to ask myself, who am I? Why would I deserve this?

And then one sentence later (my bold):

I know that Israel needs the IDF, and I know that being a part of it is important in the big picture. But I wasn’t ready for this.

And then this (bold and italics mine):

I was able to get out of my depressive state. I was able to find myself outside of just being a cog in the machine. I’m a relatively happy soldier now, who hates her job, just like every other soldier, but does it anyways, just like every other soldier, and goes to the pool and the gym with her friends on breaks. I have had my share of important shifts, where I’ve done a great deal, as well as shifts so boring I started counting speckles on the ceiling tiles. I have set my naïveté aside and learned that the biggest challenge – the one nobody prepares you for – of being in the army is staying out of it, mentally and emotionally.

…the process of separating yourself, the you that thinks and cares and wants, from the you that obeys and does and works, can be heartbreaking.

For this article she is being praised, and rightly so (partially) for being courageous enough to write an article that is not entirely flattering about an institution that most American Jews are trained to revere. The draft is like a חפצא של קדושה, a holy object. To say anything bad about it or unflattering is being courageous, and it is.

But Eden stops just short of the real conclusion, because to her the draft itself is holy. She would not object to that assertion.

I just googled battered woman syndrome. Political correctness has infected Google which brought me to Battered Person Syndrome. Here are some key symptoms:

Repeated cycles of violence and reconciliation can result in the following beliefs and attitudes:

  • The abused thinks that the violence was his or her fault.
  • The abused has an inability to place the responsibility for the violence elsewhere.
  • The abused has an irrational belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient.

There are elements of all these symptoms in her article.

Repeated cycles of emotional violence and reconciliation with the IDF (being a part of it is important in her words) results in her thinking the violence is her fault: “I began to ask myself, who am I? Why would I deserve this (a promotion from a high ranking officer)?”

The responsibility is elsewhere, never with the abuser, the IDF draft, who the battered person always returns to: “I know that Israel needs the IDF, and I know that being a part of it is important in the big picture.“ 

The belief that the abuser is omnipresent and omniscient (in this case holy or godly), is in that same sentence.

Her solution? You can’t ever fault the draft itself. You can’t repudiate years of education meant to make you believe the word of a politician that you must be drafted is a holy word. So you disconnect from yourself. Stay in the marriage, become emotionally detached…a ghost of yourself…

…the biggest challenge – the one nobody prepares you for – of being in the army is staying out of it, mentally and emotionally.

Mentally and emotionally. Notice what she did not say. Physically.

In order to refrain from lashing out at the draft itself, which is what I have done, you have to disconnect from everything. Turn yourself off. Become a robot rather than a human. Learn to turn off your humanity.

But there’s a bigger challenge than staying out of the army mentally and emotionally. The biggest challenge – the one that causes you to fundamentally change the way you see the world – is to stay out of it physically. To put your foot down and say NO MORE.

You can get a divorce.

And here I’m not talking to Eden alone. I’m talking to everyone drafted against their will and miserable, you don’t have to do this to yourselves. You don’t have to stay married. You don’t have to return to your abusive spouse convinced that being part of an abusive marriage is important or idealistic. You don’t have to believe that it’s holy to serve in the army for the sake of serving in the army because it happens to be that a group of at least 61 out of 120 politicians who all lie, cheat, and steal from you for a living say that you have to do it. We all dislike politicians to some extent at least, yet we believe following their word is holy?

Let’s assume the IDF is holy. I believe it is, but not any more intrinsically holy than any other industry in Israel. IDF is just the defense industry. Israel needs all of its industry to survive, high tech and grocery stores included. But let’s accept that it is. That doesn’t mean, however that serving in the IDF is holier than serving anywhere else in the country. If everyone served in the IDF, everyone would starve because there would be no profit-driven division of labor. We’d turn into Mao’s Great Leap Forward where everyone was a soldier and simply die of starvation, just like the Chinese did, 45 million of them from 1958-62, when the whole country was drafted into a Chinese army all at once with Mao directing it.

If the IDF is holy, it needs support. It needs people outside of it in the economy to feed it. I’m one of those. Other people in Israel need people in the private sector to supply them with goods and services. When you get a job and make money, you are doing something holy because you are supporting the IDF that way. You are supporting the army, but you are also supporting everyone.

When you sit in the army and do nothing, you are not supporting the army. You are not supporting anyone. You are obeying politicians. That’s it. You are burdening the army. So the most courageous thing to do would be to simply leave and accept the consequences. If you are worried about prison, you need not be. You’re already in one.

Yes, if there was a war I’d fight in the IDF, and I’d be grudgingly OK with forced basic training only so we are prepared in case of an emergency. But serving just because it happens to be the artificial law agreed on by 61 out of 120 loathsome people is not a holy endeavor.

But let me close out by putting this into perspective. Eden is complaining, and rightly so, about being wasted in a vast bureaucratic system that doesn’t know its right from its left. But it gets much, much worse than that. Eden’s case is a mild one. Consider the families – the wives and children and parents – of soldiers who have died capturing murderers, who are then released by Netanyahu in a “good will gesture” to Abbas, and they go out and murder again.

Imagine how broken, beaten, downtrodden they are if they have any will to live at all. Eden has the luxury of reconnecting with her humanity on weekends or breaks or when she happens to maybe be doing something useful in the IDF in rare instances. Those people, they do not. They are broken for good. There is no way out of their eternal hell. They will die miserable, because of the IDF and the politicians who run it.

Some soldiers are not as strong as Eden. Many commit suicide. Suicide, in fact, is the leading cause of death of IDF soldiers.

You can break away. You can separate. You can love Israel – the people, the nation, the land, and the God of Israel – and hate the draft. Once I achieved that break, I became a happier person.

If you don’t think you’re doing anything useful, just leave. Don’t go back. If you are fighting and you don’t believe what you’re doing is helpful or morally acceptable, don’t risk your life. Leave. Don’t go back. Take the prison sentence and move on.

And if you’ve already been destroyed by the draft, or you have a loved one who was drafted who has already committed suicide, the only thing I can say to you is that Moshe Rabeinu placed the broken tablets in the same Aron (ark) as the full, unbroken set of tablets. You may be broken, but you’re still with us, והמקום ינחם אתכם בתוך שאר אבילי ציון וירושלים.

עד מתי, as they say in the army. It’s an inside army joke to some as I learned when I was a soldier, but a serious life-threatening question to others, some who cannot survive it.

Yidlach Shirai…Ad Mussai!

When will this hellish draft end? When the Jews realize it is not holy, and as we say in Avinu Malkeinu –

אבינו מלכנו, אין לנו מלך אלא אתה.

Our Father our King, we have no King but You.

When I say it, I mean it.

Chag Sameach.

 

Tzahal Recommends Arming Arab Government and Freeing Prisoners Because Why The Hell Not?

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

It’s a headline that could come out of The Onion.

צהל ממליץ להעביר נשק ותחמושת למנגנוני הרשות

IDF recommends transferring weapons and ammunition to the Palestinian Authority

Really, what did anyone expect? The cartel in charge of defending us, which prohibits anyone else from defending us, is recommending that more weapons be given to the people killing us and freeing of prisoners that already have killed us. This is all defended by the State’s intellectual bodyguards in universities all over the country who pedantically pontificate about how transferring lethal weapons to other governments is enlightened.

This is the government response to stabbings. Give arab governments more weapons.

Onion type news like this can elicit two responses. Either we can whine about how stupid the government is and try to change who is in charge of it, or we can come to the conclusion that there shouldn’t be a government and try to eliminate it nonviolently.

There is no benefit to having politicians lead a monopoly defense institution, because the politicians inevitably turn that institution into a pack of bumbling idiots who give weapons to the people trying to kill us. Again and again and again. Armies should be private insurance companies who know better than to give weapons to the people trying to kill its clients. That makes you lose money.

When the money you make comes from taxes though, as in the case of the IDF that doesn’t matter. They can test their insane policies out by experimenting with our lives like lab rats however much they want and there’s nothing we can do about it. Even though they’ve done this before and it resulted in the second Intifada. In effect, the morons in charge of the IDF are arming the Arabs with even deadlier weapons now because knives are not enough to elicit public sympathy from the “international community”.

It won’t stop until we privatize the IDF and split it up into competing insurance companies.