“In the big picture, it’s either them or us,” I said. We were sitting in a cafe in North Tel Aviv in early November, and my friend, an (Allah forgive me) American journalist, had asked me about the long term prospects for Israel’s future. “The people who run this country were doing a terrible job of it before October 7th. Just look at these delapidated concrete buildings, and compare the rents to the average salaries. That was in peacetime. Now we’re in a war, and it’s slowly dawning on everyone that the emperor’s new clothes don’t exist. For fifty years, they’ve been running this place like a corrupt Mediterranean livestock farm, bleeding everyone dry on the pretext that it’s all going to the IDF which defends us. Turns out the IDF can’t defend us, and doesn’t even have ammunition stockpiled for a war. I’m telling you, these people have to go or they’ll get us all killed. We need to throw them out.”
My friend looked at me like I was insane. “You’d be a pariah state. How could you even do that? The international community would not tolerate it for a second.” He shook his head and allowed himself to be distracted by the locals walking by, whom the massacre had plainly not scared into repenting of their ways. We changed the subject.
Was he right? Is the idea of a sovereign Jewish state just a pipe dream? Are we doomed to live in a Hebrew-speaking Portugal, whose apparatchiks while away the time between massacres caused by their incompetence stealing government budgets and puffing up their cheeks about “deterrence” and “apes together strong”?
I firmly believe that we could have a sovereign Jewish state if we wanted one. In the fractured political landscape of the Middle East, fought over by the proxies of decaying global and regional powers, we would enjoy freedom of maneuver. Israeli industry, enabled by Jewish brains, could provide key technology to our friends. Tiny Singapore, surrounded by large dysfunctional states hostile to its existence, was able to create and defend sovereignty. We could as well.
But that misses the larger point. So long as Israel is run by a degenerate popular government bolted onto the top of a set of state institutions staffed by people with a fundamentally slavish worldview, who see their destiny as servants of an appendage of the Global American Empire, our potential doesn’t matter. Nobody strives to achieve goals which he believes impossible. Even individual judges, politicians, military and intelligence officers who understand the theoretical potential of a sovereign Jewish Israel will do nothing to pursue it as a practical goal as long as they believe that the vast majority of their peers and counterparts view it as an impossibility whose pursuit would be criminally irresponsible.
In game theory terms, what we have here is a multilateral defect-defect equilibrium in the absence of a coordination mechanism.
In a static situation, an implicit coordination mechanism like a Schelling Point is fine. In a dynamic one, the mechanism must be explicit. We can see the Israeli media playing this role constantly, notifying the senior staff of the institutions which matter of what their peers are supposed to believe on this or that key issue on any given day. A particularly funny example is the English-language version of Haaretz, our national Newspaper of Record. The function of English Haaretz is to coordinate the staff of the various non-Hebrew speaking institutions which form our satrapic link to our American patrons: NGOs, foreign journalists, foreign academics on sabbatical in Israel and, perhaps most importantly, diplomats. The staff of the US Embassy can open Haaretz and understand what the institutions which matter here in Israel want to be perceived as thinking. Since the beginning of the war, the overwhelming message of English Haaretz articles has been “punish us, American Daddy, we’re being very naughty.”
There is no anti-satrapy coordination mechanism equivalent to Haaretz and its peer media outlets. Any conceivable media outlet working along these lines would be shut down and prosecuted for sedition long before it could serve the purpose of coordination. The fate of Channel 7 is illustrative here: it suffered a series of gratuitous state prosecutions before settling into a comfortable existence producing content which is one part grifting and one part “woe is us, the leftists are hurting us”. Attempts by the Kohelet Forum to provide an intellectual salon and policy clearing house terminated in the aborted legal reform which led us into this war and now sits in the dustbin of history for the foreseeable future. There’s no real incubator for a serious right wing alternative to the ruling institutions. This being the case, we seem to be stuck with the Israeli establishment for the near future, until it collapses under the weight of its own corruption and incompetence. Thus, the question must be asked: is it possible and appropriate to collaborate with various Israeli establishment institutions so long as they have a monopoly on power and legitimacy?
On the right wing fringe which sees the State of Israel as set on a path of disaster for the Jewish people, the historical majority opinion has been that collaboration with the state is appropriate in some contexts. The two pre-independence Revisionist resistance organizations, Etzel and Lehi, disagreed on whether to collaborate with the British, so long as they were fighting the Nazis. David Raziel, the head of Etzel, died on a special operations mission to Iraq on behalf of the British in 1941. Less than a year later, Avraham Stern, the head of Lehi, was killed by the same British, against whom Lehi continued to fight.
One thing both Etzel and Lehi agreed on was the permissibility of collaboration with the mainstream Zionists, whose ideology and policies both opposed. During the period of resistance to the British, both groups collaborated and coordinated with the mainstream, including in combat operations like the Night of the Bridges. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the secular dissidents of Lehi moved into some of the highest positions in its institutions; Yehoshua Cohen, a Lehi veteran was Ben Gurion’s bodyguard, and Yitzhak Shamir made a career in the Mossad before becoming the prime minister.
In the meantime, a new nucleus of right wing dissent had formed in Israel, that of the religious nationalists. Previously, religious dissenters were opposed to the existence of a secular state in principle. The new dissenters went a step further; they actually wished to make the state of the Jews Jewish. Paradoxically, they exceeded both the secular Zionists and the Haredim in their extremism. Beyond the Haredim, they wished the state to behave in a Jewish fashion in its policies-fighting Jewish wars, conquering Jewish land, imposing Jewish law; beyond the Zionists, they wished for the state to live up to the standards of the Biblical heroes, to whom Zionist Israelis so often appealed and whom they so rarely emulated.
The first religious nationalist dissent movement was that of the religious settlers. Their movement was, in one sense, astroturf. The GOI originally saw them as useful tools of national and party policy (Shimon Peres, for instance, played a key role in the first settlements’ establishment.) On the other hand, the settlers’ leaders saw the GOI the same way. “Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook viewed the Zionists as crooks anyway, so…” told me one of my friends, a scion of religious Zionist settler nobility. The transparent sentiment held by the religious Zionists that the State of Israel was the “Messiah’s donkey,” a stinking, unkosher animal destined to be ridden to the desired destination, was cited by Yair Lapid as a major factor in the handover of Gaza to the Arabs. In a nation whose national fear is being a freier, a sucker to be taken advantage of, the religious settlers transparently saw the rest of the country as freiers, and not unjustly so.
In fact, both sides’ opinions of each others were reasonable. The religious settlers are a constant thorn in the side of the secular mainstream, a reminder of the hollowness of its ideology and worldview. That secular mainstream pulls off a third of the children of every generation of the religious settlers into itself, leaving them to dwell in that hollowness. Nonetheless, collaboration is essential to the existence of both. Religious settlers live in settlements relying on the establishment’s utilities and security systems, and overwhelmingly work in state institutions or companies which represent mainstream Israel. The state relies on those same settlements for loyal manpower for the army to which it owes its continued existence, and for space for suburbs to house the workforce of the industrial and commercial areas between Beer Sheva and Netanya.
The more radically nationalistic right wing dissenters of religious Zionism all collaborated with the establishment just as much as the mainstream religious settlers did. Rabbi Kahane and Dr. Baruch Goldstein both served in the IDF, the latter as a doctor.
The allegiance of the members of the Jewish Underground to the State of Israel was attested to by the judge at their trial:
In more recent times, the Hilltop Youth movement collaborates with the establishment apparatus as the opportunity presents itself in their mutual interests. The universal reliance of the members of the movement on establishment Israeli institutions such as the banking and medical systems goes without saying, but we can also remark on the collaboration of the movement with the security system. Until the Simchat Torah massacre, every hilltop settlement relied on the implicit assumption that the IDF would show up if hundreds of Arabs attempted to wipe it out as they had during the pogroms of 1929 and 1936. The failure of the military on October 7th has not yet been internalized in Israeli society, including that of the settlers; it is still being explained away as an aberration, not a sign of deep systemic decay.
In this context, we can say that the question is not whether the dissident Israeli right should collaborate with establishment institutions or not; it has been collaborating with them since it came into existence, and in large measure owes its identity to that collaboration. The question is, what form should that collaboration take?
The collaboration to date has rested on basic fundamental assumptions about both parties’ capabilities and implied obligations. The settlers receive the security backing of the state. The state receives the ability to control extensive strategic areas indirectly, and a narrative by which it can justify to itself the need to control key areas directly. The result is that there has been no massacre of communities near Judea and Samaria to compare with that in the Gaza Envelope, and that the state enjoys the advantage of inner lines against its most probable enemies. It now turns out that the state has been exaggerating its capacities and can not be relied upon to fulfil its obligations. Sooner or later, this reality must lead to the renegotiation of the contract on different terms. A social movement which can no longer rely on the state for certain things like security and must provide them itself is certainly justified in asking for an increased share of power and control over resources in exchange for holding up its end of the bargain.
This renegotiation can even be cloaked in face saving arrangements. For instance, the inability of the Roman Empire to protect its barbarian clients resulted in the barbarians taking over the Roman military. This was presented as the pacification of the barbarians, who rather than attacking and despoiling Rome made up its loyal servants and protectors. The inability of the Jews of the Jordan River Valley, the Negev and the Galil to protect themselves from Bedouin predation and the resulting extortion are masked in a similar cloak; the Bedouin form registered and licensed security companies, and those Jewish businesses which “employ” them are now immune from theft and arson which those Bedouin would have committed upon their property.
Similarly, the renegotiation of the social contract with the more active settlers can take the form of the latter forming companies to provide the Israeli state and communities with security services. These companies would provide better security at a lower cost to the taxpayer than the GOI can, and the GOI would be able to distance itself from the measures needed to provide that security. Casualties incurred by the companies would not carry the same political cost to the generals and ministers as dead and captured soldiers do. Competition between companies would result in constantly improving performance, instead of the capacity decay experienced by the IDF. Instead of relying on the costly foreign systems imposed upon the IDF by the political considerations of its military and political leadership, private security companies would be free and incentivized to use advanced open source and commercial-off-the-shelf technology creatively to increase their capabilities and reduce financial and human costs. Such companies could allow Israel to control Gaza in the long term at an acceptable cost, or even a profit: if the international community is willing to pay billions so that Gazans can enjoy food and housing, why not pay a bit more so that they can enjoy security, which is no less essential?
In short, from the perspective of the state, this arrangement would bring many short term benefits. The benefit to the companies and the movement they represented would also be clear: money, honor, influence. Unlike the benefits accruing to the state, these would be redeemable for long term political power, allowing progress towards a Jewish state of Israel. Perhaps more importantly, the private security companies could fill that key function of a coordination mechanism for the right; a secure environment where new ideas and methods can be developed, shared and implemented by an institutional right wing underground which currently exists only by implication, but is waiting to spring into existence.
This may seem like unhinged fantasy, but consider Russia. The only serious systemic challenge for power that was issued to its sclerotic and corrupt institutions did not come from Chechen terrorists, nor Western-backed dissident politicians and “performance artists”. The Chechens flipped sides or died in Russian airstrikes and jails. The Russian Orange Revolutionaries achieved nothing but prison sentences and entertaining Putin. The only real challenge came from the Wagner Group, which until then had been providing critical security services at unbeatable prices to those same institutions.
The missing piece needed to get this initiative off the ground is retired and reserve military and intelligence officers, who would be able to use their connections to their senior active duty colleagues to secure contracts. General Itzhak Brik, the former IDF ombudsman, has been announcing that the IDF has developed a culture of lies, ticket punching and dysfunction over the last several decades, pushing out capable and honest officers. Brik has mentioned Brigadier General Ofer Winter as an example of an excellent combat commander whose career has been shut down due to his religious Zionist worldview, going so far as to say that if Winter had been the commander in the South on Simchat Torah, the massacre would not have happened. Perhaps Winter and Brik could stand at the head of the first religious Zionist private military company in Israel, allowing their former colleagues who are still on active duty to continue enjoying their sinecures while taking on the functions which the IDF can no longer carry out competently.
If these companies can fulfill their security functions efficiently, perhaps they can eventually expand into other essential fields; they would certainly be able to do a better job than the current jelly of Israeli public sector bureaucrats.
PMC - Private Military Contractors- have a long history and made a tremendous comeback in American Foreign Policy the last generation.
Don’t overlook logistics contracting as that’s most of it during OIF, indeed most of what Armies DO is logistics.
Units fight, Armies Supply.
Emulating the Bedouin has been wise before, and remains so - but as long as you don’t control your money and logistics you don’t have real power.
Michael Collins’s power was money and logistics.
One might not notice, but there’s a market for safe and er, private banking in low trust societies, the Arabs may have some insights... the same may hold true in banking as international banking arrangements collapse, er... decline. Yes, a managed decline.
Yes.
Enjoyable read. I especially enjoyed the pithy characterisation of 'beyachad nenatzeach' as 'ape together strong'.