Month by month, nominees for anti-Zionist of the year keep accumulating – in Israel and worldwide.
Leading anti-Zionist Israelis include ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers and their rabbis trashing the state, far-left academics and perennial protesters who hate this government more than they love this state, and some Arab Israeli leaders who keep cashing government paychecks while trying to weaken the state.
Still, despite such stiff competition, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir may be Israel’s anti-Zionist of the year.
His video humiliating flotilla prisoners, giving them the kind of publicity they seek, followed by his insulting assault on President Isaac Herzog, met the key criteria for this mark of shame. His behavior violated Zionism’s foundational ideals while flouting Jewish values.
It damaged Zionism’s global standing, and it betrayed many Zionists – especially the soldiers who trained hard to neutralize the flotilla activists to keep them away from Israel’s shores and the headlines.
I have joined many Israelis in excoriating Ben-Gvir’s bigotry and buffoonery, while criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for mainstreaming this “goonatic.” But in healthy democratic discourse, acknowledging the good is also important.
I applaud Ben-Gvir for rolling back some indulgences Palestinian terrorists enjoyed in prison, and for making gun licenses accessible to more Israelis, making Israel safer and deterring numerous terrorists.
Still, Ben-Gvir’s moral lapses and PR catastrophes remain inexcusable. Facing brutal enemies, Zionists keep trying to fight effectively, aggressively, and creatively, but not viciously or vindictively. Israelis must do whatever is necessary to defend the homeland, and whatever they can to protect Israel’s soul, too. We must never sink to our enemies’ level, especially when we wield power and are not physically threatened.
Zionism’s foundational ideals
The Zionist thinker Berl Katznelson coined the term tohar neshek, “purity of arms,” urging moral restraint even amid the 1930s’ Arab revolts.
The Palmah commander Yitzhak Sadeh taught: “A weapon is pure only if it serves a pure cause, and only if it remains clean in its application… We must never humiliate those who are helpless.” This directive wasn’t to save them but us: “If we lose our humanity in the process of fighting for our freedom, our victory will be hollow.”
Asa Kasher and other military philosophers translated these ideas into Ruach Tzahal, the IDF’s Spirit. This code of ethics proclaims: “IDF soldiers… will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to [the enemies’] lives, bodies, dignity, and property.”
These Zionist ideas were rooted in Torah law amplified by rabbinic tradition. Deuteronomy 25:3 limits punishments to 40 lashes, “lest your brother will be degraded before your eyes.” Punishment is legitimate; humiliation is not.
Mainstream religious Zionists teach this balance. In his best-selling guide to Jewish law, Peninei Halacha, Reb Eliezer Melamed wisely emphasizes that “mercy misplaced during battle is a sin against our own people.”
Still, Melamed teaches: “An individual enemy who has surrendered and no longer poses a danger should not be harmed or abused out of personal malice.”
Ben-Gvir’s foolishness
Too many religious Zionists have long tolerated “Ben-Gvir-ism” and other abuses within their community out of cowardice. They don’t realize how much this vulgarity saps their moral standing throughout Israel. Even worse, they underestimate how such boorishness – and the mass complicit silence – scars their own souls.
Beyond the moral harm, the unnecessary foolishness of it all is mind-boggling. Reasonable people know that the Spaniards, even the Canadians, compulsively seek excuses to indict Israel, holding Israelis to standards their own soldiers cannot meet. And, ironically, some flotilla activists endured beatings in Spain and elsewhere.
Still, Israel is fighting on the “eighth front” – the war against delegitimization, and the challenges are sobering enough without self-inflicted wounds.
Days ago, in late April, Israeli soldiers, well-trained and disciplined, demonstrated how to neutralize these flotilla activists. Israel’s navy intercepted over 20 vessels offshore, detained 175 activists, then transferred most to Greek boats or sent them home. That kept these performative agitators away from Israel and the hypocritical foreign correspondents based in Israel.
It’s hard to know what journalists love more: living in modern Israel or slandering it as some medieval torture chamber targeting Palestinians. Then, the Foreign Ministry mocked these self-righteous stuntmen and women for joining the “Condom Flotilla.” Photos of condoms and drugs the IDF found on their party boats shamed these bogus activists.
By contrast, Ben-Gvir’s stunt inflamed much of the world.
My soldier friends who trained to defuse these situations feel particularly betrayed. But all Israelis should object, further proving that he’s not us. And please, spare me the “what-about-ism,” highlighting others’ hypocrisies.
I recognize our true enemies and the anti-Zionist sea in which we are forced to swim. But instead of “what-about-ism,” we must start asking “what about us” – and refuse to let Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric and antics brutalize Israelis’ already-traumatized souls, or even tarnish our Zionist ideals.
At its best, Zionism is pragmatic enough to survive the Middle Eastern jungle – yet principled enough to inspire the world. Ben-Gvir’s actions were clownishly clueless, once again. This time, even Netanyahu felt compelled to call Ben-Gvir’s bullying “not in line with Israel’s values and norms.”
To rehabilitate this off-the-rails minister, Netanyahu should have him sit with Israel’s presidential paragon of grace, Isaac Herzog. Herzog could try teaching Israel’s wildest bull-in-a-china-shop “Responsibility Zionism.”
Zionists succeeded by understanding that, after thousands of years of exile, we needed tough Jews – and moral, disciplined, exemplary human beings, too.
The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. Last year he published To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, available on the JPPI website. Next month, he will publish The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership, the 250th Edition.
