When the armies assume battle positions and will shortly join in war, the priest anointed for war stands in an elevated place before the array of the entire army…Afterwards, an officer proclaims these words to the nation in a loud voice. The officer announces on his own initiative: "Is there a man who is afraid or faint-hearted? Let him go home...". Another officer proclaims these words to the people. After these individuals depart from the battlefront, the army is arrayed again and commanding officers are appointed at the head of the nation. Powerful officers with iron axes in their hands are placed in the rear of each array of troops. If a person wants to leave the battle, they have permission to chop off his legs, for flight is the beginning of defeat.-Maimonides, the Book of Kings and Their Wars, 7:3-4
The modern Israeli experience has a deep quality of inauthenticity. I’m not speaking of Haredim or Arabs who just happen to be living in Israel, but of Israelis whose main identity is that of an Israeli. In their slang, in their music, in their food, hobbies and dreams, Israelis are always aping somebody who’s not from here. You can see this with arsim playing Arab mafiosi, moshavniks from the Galil styling themselves like American redneck farmers, academics pretending like they’re from whatever fey European or Western college they did their postdoc at, Israeli leftist hipsters raging against the machine on Kaplan. Even the early 20th century kibbutzniks made a point of not letting their European socialist ideology keep them from emulating their Palestinian Arab neighbors in many points of style (and, later, behavior.) Shakespeare said “all the world is a stage,” but we’re Jews, not Englishmen. The Yiddish expression “gantz yor Purim” is a pejorative reference to someone so deeply, habitually fake that he has forgotten that there is such a thing as reality.
Authenticity is comfort in your own skin, a natural identification with your own place, people, religion, profession, identity, social context, language. It is “living the good life,” a more pure existence, spending your life among those you love, doing things whose meaning and purpose are clear to you as you do them. Even suffering and death are easier in some sense to those for whom they are parts of an authentic, meaningful reality, for suffering and death in an inherently meaningless and arbitrary existence take on the additional pain that awareness of their meaningless must bring.
Israelis are so fake, that even our inauthenticity is not original but a combination of two other kinds of inauthenticity invented on opposite sides of the planet and meeting here, in the Holy Land: the Bugman and the Mankurt.
The Bugman
Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you the Last Man."What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.
"We have discovered happiness" -- say the Last Men, and they blink.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.
Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!
A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death.
One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.
One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.
No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.
"Formerly all the world was insane," -- say the subtlest of them, and they blink.
They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision.-Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
You’ve met the Last Man. “Well, of course I know him. He’s me!” Each of Nietzsche’s sentences describes many-most?-of the people around you, and even if you have not succumbed to becoming him, you can always feel the pull at you, the path of least resistance beckoning. Nietzsche even casually predicted Big Pharma, the drug scene and Canadian healthcare!
Bronze Age Pervert famously reanimated the Last Man into popular awareness in 2018 in Bronze Age Mindset, as the Bugman. The Bugman is spiritually dead, hates beauty, is driven by a fervent denial of authentic reality and emotionally invested in this denial.
BAP hit the mainstream in the context of a general discourse well-summarized by the phrase “get in the pod and eat the bugs.” His work has taken on a life of its own and now mostly exists as its perception in the minds of tens of millions of primary and secondary readers. All of the factors producing the American and European Bugmen are present here in Israel and working overtime (though the perception of overall safety has recently cracked .)
Mostly, the Bugman is notable for his weakness; to the degree that this is not an inborn trait but an acquired one, he has acquired it through indulgence, being bribed and massaged into degradation, to the point that he is no longer capable of even feeling shame for himself. The shame which is no longer felt by him is felt by those who see him, manifesting as that defining feeling of the present West: cringe. The Bugman has been brought to his present condition by treats: tendies and vidya.
The Mankurt
The Bugman’s doppelganger, the Mankurt comes to us from the harsh reality of Eurasia instead of the soft American suburbs. The Mankurt comes to us from Soviet Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov’s book, the The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. Borat Does Bradbury, more or less. It’s not what I’d call a good book, exactly. The Mankurt is its only memorable character.
His story goes like this: staked out in the steppe sun, a raw camelhide cap slowly crushing his skull, a captive would gradually be driven insane and forget his prior identity, at which point he could be implanted with a new, slavish identity-a Mongol MKULTRA. A Mankurt would attack his own mother if ordered to. Aitmatov used the Mankurt as an analogy for his Kyrgyz, stripped of their identity over 70 years of Soviet occupation, but the archetype works for all peoples which passed through the 20th century Eurasian empires. It also works for the experience of many of the Mizrahi Jews who came to post-1948 Israel and had the full weight of Israeli institutions applied to them to turn them from embarrassing superstitious Orientals into modern secular Israelis.
The Mankurt was not seduced or indulged: he was crushed into his present shape. The crushing imbued him with a certain twisted strength and determination, but broke his connection to God, his land and his people. His lack of authenticity is as yawning as the Bugman’s, but unlike the Bugman, the Mankurt has strength and rage. The Mankurt didn’t sell his soul but had it torn away. He is a dangerous pet to own! In fact, he often seeks out danger and violence, feeling instinctively that the key to his salvation, to finding meaning, must lie in some form of strife. You can find the Mankurt on every battlefield in the world, often one he has no place being.
Aside from being well-represented in the elite units of the military, police and security agencies, many Mankurts do very well in tech, academia and other prestigious secular pursuits. Many either leave Israel or wish to. From post-Soviet Israeli programmers who move to the US to work in Silicon Valley to my trucker friend who wants to move to Portugal and raise fruit there, it’s not surprising. If your life is not authentic, if it’s inherently arbitrary, then why not choose a life in a less violent place where the land is cheaper, the paychecks bigger and the taxes lower? Those who stay and come up in the more respectable Israeli institutions tend to assimilate the views and values of their Bugman peers over the time.
A Bugman minor prophet speaks
If Amir Hetsroni had been somewhat less disagreeable, he would have made a fine career in Israeli academia pushing cargo cult science. With his doctorate in communications, he became a professor at Ariel University, the only university in the West Bank. Not being satisfied with being a leftist professor at a settler university, he published an article in Haaretz during the 2014 war, calling for international boycotts of Israeli universities due to their persecution of Arab students for joking about Israeli children kidnapped and murdered by Hamas, condemning the IDF’s actions as war crimes, etcetera. Ariel kicked him out, and he spent the last few years teaching at third rate universities in China and Turkey.
One of his achievements in Turkey was to bring a particularly bloodthirsty speech made by Moshe Feiglin in Hebrew to the attention of his Hamas supporter students, who then filed a complaint against Israel through South Africa in the UN court system. Koc University eventually fired him when his Turkish girlfriend leaked his private messages criticizing Turkey, his lazy students and so forth.
In short, Hetsroni is too much of a contrarian to make a good Quislingstein. Instead, he has become a Bugman Bilaam, trolling the mainstream by saying out loud what a quarter of the country is thinking.
Serendipitously, as I was writing this article, Dr. Uri Milstein published an interview with him, in which Hetsroni gives a remarkably honest and detailed overview of the Bugman perspective on the current war in Gaza.
For those who don’t speak Hebrew, here is a summary: Israel must quit the war in Gaza for its own benefit. The war costs us too much in terms of money and casualties. It’s barbaric to have a country with people walking around everywhere with rifles. Our quality of life is affected by endless war. We must simply accept that every so often someone is killed in a terror attack, and this is just a fact of life, 50,000 people die every year and only a small minority of them are killed by terrorists. Even the 7th of October involved a small number of victims, if you divide the number by the 56 years since we conquered Gaza in 1967. We are isolating ourselves from the whole world-not a single international DJ has visited Israel since the beginning of the war. People are spending four months mobilized-that’s too long when you consider that all you are doing is preventing a few terror attacks. We are fighting 3000 tractor drivers who got lucky and breached the fence-does that justify a war which costs half of our budget? We want a normal life, not an endless war of attrition. At some point, Israelis will have had enough and start leaving. The cost of the war is such that we could rebuild the Gaza Envelope 20 times over for it, and for what? To keep the terrorists from hitting some building in Ashkelon with a rocket once a year? Vengeance is irrational. Every time you kill ten Hamasniks, ten more are born. Unless you plan to exterminate the Gazans, it’s a Sisyphean labor. We’re not living in the times of Shimon and Levi who wiped out an entire city to avenge their raped sister. We’re going to force people to serve a cumulative three years of active reserve service after their three years of mandatory active service, and eventually they will just acquire a foreign passport and leave. You can already see many moving to Greece. Netanyahu is continuing this war because as long as it goes on, he will stay out of jail.
The value of Hetsroni, again, is that he is not ashamed or afraid to say loudly the things which our Bugmen and Mankurts are whispering in their hearts. Their whispers are slowly growing in volume. Soon, they will begin to speak these things out loud, and then they will feel that there is nothing to be ashamed of
So What? It Works! Am Israel Chai!
It has worked so far, but less well every year. Until this war, the steady degradation of this system under the weight of its own inauthenticity had been papered over with fictional wealth and a quiet based on lies. Hamas pulled back the curtain.
Our successes against our enemies have been built on a certain degree of mutual trust and cohesion which they do not have; a common fiction, “we’re all in it together”. An inevitable corollary of inauthenticity is untrustworthiness: how can I trust your word or your intentions if even you do not know who you are? How do I know that at the critical moment, you will not spontaneously reinvent a reality where your obligations to me are null and void? Untrustworthiness leads to distrust, and systemic distrust leads to systemic dysfunction: “I must defect on you before you can defect on me.”
One of the reasons that Arab armies have traditionally failed against the West is systemic internal distrust. Distrust is friction in the gears. The second that a critical mass of Bugmen defect publicly and visibly, it will start a rush for the exits. Flight is the beginning of defeat. But worse than the flight of the Bugmen is their staying, because they will undermine the morale and functioning of the entire nation from within, and just as October 7th was the cost we paid for indulging them for the previous decades, so will we pay a future cost for continuing to indulge them. Therefore, we should encourage them to leave and follow their dreams in Greece, Portugal, America or anywhere else they wish. Simultaneously, we must seek ways to rehabilitate those who are interested, and reintegrate them into the Land of Israel and a new Israeli society in an authentic way. From this authenticity, they will draw spiritual strength and courage, and God willing, a spiritually strong nation of Israel will win.
This may all sound unrealistic and utopian, but there is no other way to survive here in the long term. This war is only a prelude to the tests which await us.
To whom does the phrase "Is there a man who is afraid or faint-hearted?" refer? The phrase should be interpreted simply, as applying to a person whose heart is not brave enough to stand in the throes of battle.
Once a soldier enters the throes of battle, he should rely on the Hope of Israel and their Savior in times of need. He should realize that he is fighting for the sake of the oneness of God's Name. Therefore, he should place his soul in his hand and not show fright or fear.
He should not worry about his wife or children. On the contrary, he should wipe their memory from his heart, removing all thoughts from his mind except the war.
Anyone who begins to feel anxious and worry in the midst of battle to the point where he frightens himself violates a negative commandment, as it is written (Deuteronomy 20:3): "Do not be faint-hearted. Do not be afraid. Do not panic and do not break ranks before them."
Furthermore, he is responsible for the blood of the entire Jewish nation. If he is not valiant, if he does not wage war with all his heart and soul, it is considered as if he shed the blood of the entire people, as ibid. 20:8 states: "Let him go home, lest he demoralize the hearts of his brethren like his own." Similarly, the prophetic tradition explicitly states: "Cursed be he who does God's work deceitfully. Cursed be he who withholds his sword from blood." Jeremiah 48:10
In contrast, anyone who fights with his entire heart, without fear, with the intention of sanctifying God's name alone, can be assured that he will find no harm, nor will bad overtake him. He will be granted a proper family in Israel and gather merit for himself and his children forever. He will also merit eternal life in the world to come as I Samuel 25:28-29 states: "God will certainly make my lord a faithful house, for my lord fights the wars of God and evil will not be found with you... and my lord's soul will be bound in a bond of life with God." Maimonides, the Book of Kings and Their Wars, 7:15
“It’s barbaric to have a country with people walking around everywhere with rifles.”
Actually it’s really cool!
“We must simply accept that every so often someone is killed in a terror attack, and this is just a fact of life,”
I remember hearing this bugman logic that “we must learn to live with an acceptable level of terror” in the US after 9/11.
“We are isolating ourselves from the whole world-not a single international DJ has visited Israel since the beginning of the war.”
Is he serious? Who gives a shit about this? I can’t even name an international DJ.
“At some point, Israelis will have had enough and start leaving.”
This is the only Arab path to victory - make the Israelis get fed up and leave.
“Vengeance is irrational.”
It is both rational and essential.
“Every time you kill ten Hamasniks, ten more are born.”
So be it.
“Unless you plan to exterminate the Gazans,”
You said it not me dude.
Unauthentic Israelis? There is another phrase for that: Ingathered exiles. A little patience and love of the people of Israel, Baruch. Your writing hurts because there is a large measure of truth in it. That truth is harder to pinpoint and more deceptive than you portray, I think. However, the one clear truth that you do bring forth, if indirectly, is that a Jew living in Israel must ask himself at some point: "What the hell am I doing here?" If the answer is not--at the very least--"because this is the home of the Jewish people," then you may be right--that Jew would be better off somewhere else. Would the Jewish people be better off? I'm not sure.