Narrative collapse in Israel

Why it's looking like a fake news civil war in Israel

Israel is ruled by mostly soft power.

Things here work because people generally believe what they should, or at least act like they do. For instance: almost everyone perceives the daily Arab violence through one acceptable narrative or another; from the leftist Tel Avivian who blames the occupation, to the right wing religious Zionist who thanks the IDF and Israeli Police that the violence is no worse than it is. This creates the desired behavior, namely, acceptance and inaction.

When the narrative breaks down, global news is made. And here we can really see the incredible significance of the Land of Israel and the Jews; events that wouldn’t even have had merited mention if they’d happened in Nepal or Missouri become NYT articles.

“Breaking news, people run around as tires burn…in Palestine!”

So what passes for order here is dependent on most people believing the right things. But the right things to believe constantly change-you can imagine what even the fiercest Labor Party leftists of the 1960s would say about Pride Parades and the Eritrean refugees of South Tel Aviv. Therefore the narrative must constantly change and the people’s minds change with it.

What Curtis Yarvin describes as the Cathedral exists in Israel in an especially active form, because of the magnifying effect of the Land of Israel described above. The official narrative here must be propagated especially effectively and powerfully, and it must be persuasive-not the wooden speech of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union.

The main control surfaces of our Cathedral (our Bima?) consist of informal coordination between seemingly independent bodies of authority.

When one establishment body or another imposes a policy to which the majority of Israeli Jews would normally be opposed because it violates their principles or interests, and which they would naturally resist, it relies on support from others which seem to be independent, objective and authoritative.

To give an example, when Rabin and Peres’ team violated Israeli law, common sense and national interest by negotiating with the PLO, which had spent 30 years murdering Israelis and announcing its intent to destroy Israel at every moment by bringing it back from Tunisia across the Mediterranean where it had been expelled at great cost, when they gave the PLO Israeli land, money and weapons which it predictably used to murder more Jews, they had a mathematician on their team, an operational analyst and game theoretician named Haim Assa.

Did Rabin, whose highest level of educational achievement was matriculating from the prestigious Kadoorie Agricultural High School, understand Assa’s equations? Was Peres, whose academic peak was attending the elite Ben Shemen Agricultural School, blown away by Assa’s brilliance? Does Tony Soprano ask some Wharton professor nerd for investment advice? No-Assa was there to lend credence as an objective and independent expert, a designated Really Smart Guy. A prestige broker.

“Do you like game theory and sacrificing for peace, fellow Yids?”

The ultimate prestige brokers in Israel are the Supreme Court. This is the highest body of designated independent objective experts in the Land. Determining the truth and the correspondence of every measure to the highest Eternal Values such as democracy, justice and human rights is their very profession. And there is an entire galaxy of smaller experts orbiting around them.

There are other forms of soft power available, for instance, the financial. Our establishment includes both the governmental agencies and private sector corporations capable of imposing financial measures against the population as needed. But these are secondary in many ways, because even though they determine the material conditions of the people, they do not immediately determine its worldview or beliefs.

The educational establishment is the third leg of this arrangement, both in its higher academic ranks which provide the experts described above (directly and through education) and in its lower ranks, that of the school system. There’s a reason career officers in every modern country are required to have an academic degree.

Institutions of authority provide each other with intersecting fields of fire in the discourse.

This works when these institutions are viewed as objective and independent, and maybe even antagonistic to each other. In fact, this is one of the main functions of the right wing of the establishment-to play a sort of Judas goat in narrative conflicts which require a rapid maneuver of public opinion. “If even Arik Sharon says we need to get out of Gaza…” “If even the Republicans are in favor of gay marriage…” These are the dying moans of any organized and serious political resistance to progressive measures.

On the face of it, Israel’s judicial reform bill is very mild. It makes the modest assertion that the opinion of 15 self appointed judges or a single State Attorney on whether any given law or executive decision of the elected government is “reasonable” should not be the final law of the land. It certainly doesn’t seem to justify the operetta civil war we’ve been having for months. But in reality, what our right wing did by attacking the Supreme Court was to attack the pinnacle of the entire system. Mostly, the right did this out of stupidity, and if it had known what would happen, it probably wouldn’t have attempted its reform in the first place, focusing on its traditional competencies like yelling about Arabs and Ashkenazim.

Since the coordination between various parts of the system is informal and largely reflexive, and since its various parts are loosely coupled in game-theoretical ways (the implied promises of future rewards and punishments being its main currency,) it reacted to this attack on its nerve center reflexively and convulsively, and continues to do so. And what is happening as a result is completely unexpected. In aerodynamic terms, this is called control reversal, normal inputs producing the opposite effects, pulling up on the joystick makes the nose drop.

By acting in a too transparently coordinated and dishonest manner for too long the establishment bodies enter a new state, where the support of one for another does not lend the supported one prestige and credibility, but rather contaminates the supporting one with the mark of untrustworthiness.

For instance, the left’s protests and riots had mass support initially, but are wearing thin on the left’s very target audience. Lapid’s voters drive on Ayalon Highway and fly out of Ben Gurion on vacation, and do not appreciate them being degraded for the indeterminate future.

“Oren, I think we’re going to miss our Hummus Airlines flight to Bulgaria...”

The politically ambitious police commanders initially issued very uncharacteristic hands-off directives to the arsim under their command. This would have paid off with subsequent appointments like being the Israeli ambassador to Rumania after retirement, except that unfortunately the protests continued until the commanders were finally fired. Now we’re seeing the ars cops on the street with their shackles loosened a little bit.

And this is just the start-to understand what the cops on the street REALLY want to do, look at the Amona expulsion in 2006.

Various independent bodies of experts issued independent expert calls for police restraint when dealing with the leftist rioters. An independent group of doctors called on the police to avoid using tear gas, which could potentially damage the rioters’ lungs. The doctors presumably came to this conclusion after analyzing decades of data from the Israeli police deploying tear gas on settlers and Haredim, which they had not condemned at the time.

“Science says that this is actually good for your lungs, as long as you got the bivalent booster.”

BIG, a major Israeli retail chain, issued a statement supporting the protesters, saw a boycott brewing and retracted the statement. The CEO of Strauss, one of our largest food manufacturers, has issued a statement condemning a right wing television channel for allowing an unacceptable view to be aired. I assume a Strauss boycott is in the wings, too.

The IDF, long cloaked in an atmosphere of holiness, respect and immunity to critique which was completely unmerited, has come out of the closet as a deeply politically engaged institution. Statements from senior leaders, service boycotts from members of elite units, pilots, intelligence officers have all made it very clear that there is no daylight between the IDF and leftist political parties. And the result is that for the first time in the mainstream public discourse, the IDF leadership has lost its diplomatic immunity and prestige and is increasingly seen as something like the Histadrut union or the state electric company, a mafia which is corrupt, parasitic and hostile to the interests of the people as a whole.

Finally, the economists of the state and its financial oligarchs have also joined in the narrative breakdown. Their self-fulfilling promises of financial ruin caused by the reform were followed some level of capital flight which drew lots of media coverage, and then by the national credit rating being downgraded by Moody’s, resulting in a higher cost of debt and a falling exchange rate with the dollar. But the average Likud voter is in deep debt, which he will now repay with a cheaper shekel. And the high tech boom has not enriched the average Israeli, except through inflation which has made his apartment worth three million shekel instead of the three hundred thousand that he bought it for a few decades ago. Even the leftist agricultural concerns are suffering the results of overexerting their control, with import tariffs lifted and foreign produce coming in and undercutting their prices.

In short, the establishment, which has controlled all the institutions that matter and thus set the bounds of permitted discourse for half a century after losing the majority of Jewish voters, is feeling that control crack. The earth is opening up under its feet.

So, what’s next?

Due to a combination of their extreme provincialism and the game-theoretical nature of their relationships, our leftists will not be able to stop and reverse course, or even throttle back. Like at a Stalin speech, you do not want to be the first one to stop clapping. This will result in a collapse on the current issue of legal reform, unless the geriatrics of the Supreme Court decide to force a showdown and test the loyalty of the IDF and security forces by disqualifying Bibi from the Prime Minister’s office, or declaring the reform illegal. And then what? Martial law from Kiryat Shmona to Kiryat Gat and Kiryat Malachi? Ruling the majority of Jews to whom you’ve just explained that their vote is worthless through the military which is composed of their own children? You can do many things with bayonets, but not sit on them. At the end of the day, power comes out of the barrel of a gun. And most of the guys carrying guns in Israel just aren’t politically reliable.

“Our brave troops, the sons of Kiryat Malachi, will bring their beloved hood to its knees!”

So, the leaders of the left will probably fold in the near term, having destroyed their main control mechanisms. This will not result in some fabulous regime of truth and justice. In the aftermath, I expect to see a combination of both demoralization (leading to leaving the country) and radicalization on the left. The latter will involve more drastic attempts to reverse the situation, including more overt cooperation with Arab terrorists and more overt attempts to import non-Jewish future leftist voters en masse. Eventually, all this will result in anarchy, from which the next regime will emerge. I doubt that regime will be composed of the right wing of the current establishment-that right wing is no more equipped to pick up power than Kerensky and Milyukov were in Russia in 1917.

The Cathedral model of governance has been ascendant for more than a century. It’s got to start failing somewhere so that the next model can be born. Why not here?