The Deep Shtetl Takes An L

A big crack in the Israeli Mommy Lawyer Reich

I was in the middle of reviewing Aron Simanovitch’s memoir of his time as Rasputin’s handler when really significant events began transpiring here in Israel, and so I had to take a break and write about them. In short, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the chief legal officer of the IDF, was fired shortly after it turned out that she was personally responsible for leaking of a video of the alleged abuse of Nukhba terrorist prisoners by IDF soldiers in the Sde Teiman prison.

Until very recently, this person ran the IDF

In the summer of 2024, several soldiers were arrested by the Israeli military police and charged with abusing a terrorist prisoner, including sodomizing him with a metal rod, after he had attacked or sexually harassed a female prison guard. Given that this happened several months after October 7th, where these prisoners had tortured, raped and murdered masses of Israeli civilians, and while Israeli hostages were being held and tortured in Gaza, there was mass outrage; Israeli protesters, including several right wing members of the Knesset, went down to the prison where the soldiers were held and held a January 6th-type demonstration, going into the prison and so forth.

In the aftermath, the video was leaked to the press. The video itself was edited together, and showed soldiers moving a prisoner and then doing something-it’s not clear what-to a different prisoner. The claim was that they were sodomizing him. Given that the medical report on the injured terrorist (filed in Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital by an Arab Israeli doctor) stated that he had injuries to his rectum but not his anus, this seems to have been a false accusation, and the soldiers’ version, that he had sustained rectal injuries from keistering a weapon, seems true.

The regime

Normally, the generals leading the IDF are nominally responsible to the Defense Minister and the Prime Minister, but they are actually told what they may and may not do by military lawyers. The Prime Minister himself is told what he may and may not do by the Attorney General, who doubles as his judicial advisor, whom his Justice Minister chooses from a list made up by a committee mostly made up of high level lawyers. The top military lawyer, the Advocate General, is two steps beneath the pinnacle of power, the Supreme Court, and can reasonably expect to make it to the Supreme Court if she plays the game.

The setup is exactly like the Nazi system of Gleichschaltung, meaning coordination, where every institution and body of interest had to have a Nazi representative at its top level to ensure its policies were properly coordinated with those of the Party. Since power comes from the barrel of a gun, it’s crucial to ensure that the hands holding that gun answer to the right commands. In a country where “everything’s adjudicable,” the IDF spent decades being micromanaged by the courts and their military lawyer emissaries, which literally decided whether it was permissible to put a guardpost on a given patch of land or not. For instance, my friend’s grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Raanan, was murdered by an Arab due to the IDF taking down a guard post after being advised by a military lawyer that the Supreme Court would likely not approve of it.

The square jawed, beret-wearing IDF generals have varying qualifications-some had been jet fighter pilots, others commandos or tankers, yet others intelligence officers-but they all have the most basic military skill, that is, knowing one’s place. The military has a formal rank structure and hierarchy, of course, but also an informal one. To advance beyond field grade, towards general rank, one must please the informal one. Then, the sky is the limit-a place on the General Staff, post-retirement sinecures, a spot in the Knesset, the position of Defense Minister, maybe even Prime Minister! But all of this depends on making the right friends and not ever, ever upsetting the people who matter.

This system is informal. The lawyers are not formally responsible for anything beyond the narrow constraints of their formal roles. They can’t officially tell anyone what to do. Their coordination mechanisms are entirely sub rosa. Just as the New York Times acts as the DC interagency memo system, from which various high ranking American bureaucrats learn today’s party line, Haaretz and similar Israeli media outlets are used by the people who matter to publish various privileged information, so that other people, who matter less, can find out what they’re supposed to be doing:

Moshe Yaalon, the head of the IDF, found out that the IDF would to be expelling the Jews of Gaza and handing the place over to the Palestinian terrorists, from an article in Haaretz. He was not consulted on this for his opinion-his input was not required. People who mattered more than him had already made the decision. Who werethese people? Not Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister-he could have simply picked up the phone and told Yaalon. Sharon probably found out the same way Yaalon did.

If you ever wondered why tough guy steely eyed, barrel chested killers like Mattis, Petraeus, McChrystal magically turned into shitlibs, that’s why. Shitlibbery is the operating system, the default ideology of the apparatus which they served for their entire adult lives. They found out what they were doing from the New York Times, just like anyone else did. Once they retired, they continued taking all commands from the tower, just like they always had.

After October 7th, for which they were directly responsible, the people running our regime went into a state of shock and confusion, a bit like Stalin during the summer of 1941. The IDF, not feeling the leash to which it had been used for decades, started taking initiative. Some of its senior combat leaders even began making scary noises about the need to bring the political leadership to account.

"Ex unitate vires", huh? Maybe a bundle of sticks would make a good symbol...

In this context, the Sde Teiman case was the regime publicly yanking the leash to reestablish dominance. The IDF spent the next year shuffling its feet, waiting for strategic guidance which never came, because no major strategic moves are possible in a country which is in a cold civil war, where the foreign conflict is a proxy for class warfare.

A disturbance in the force

So, what happened? Why is Miz Tomer-Yerushalmi in the position of having her career ended, her rank revoked, maybe even doing some jail time for doing nothing more than her job? It seems to have something to do with the new director of the Shabak, General David Zini, a religious Zionist and high school classmate of Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, a religious judge who spent the war driving an armored bulldozer around Gaza, knocking down various buildings.

It’s not clear how Zini’s connected, but his name keeps coming up.

The last decade has seen the regime launch one failed campaign to drive out Bibi after another. The last campaign resulted in October 7th, following which regime activists had to rebrand themselves as the representatives of the hostages, pressuring criminal, callous and incompetent Bibi to make the concessions necessary to bring them all home RIGHT NOW. Now that Bibi has pressured Hamas into a deal which secured the return of all the living and most of the dead hostages, what will the deep shtetl’s next pivot be? While it’s trying to come up with something, the populist right has launched a counteroffensive, which might be devastating if pressed to its logical conclusion, since the regime’s control mechanisms are, as we saw above, highly informal and illegal. In the meantime, the IDF’s generals don’t know what to do and find themselves consulting with their new surrogate schoolmarm mommy figure:

"Mother, should I build the wall?"

What now?

What does all of this forebode? Let’s say that the deep shtetl is defeated, its representatives shuttled off to ignominious retirement, particularly odious ones put on trial, maybe even fined into bankruptcy. Who will run our little falafel stand? Will it be the repulsive Chuds of the Likud? Aren’t they too dumb and corrupt? Won’t it be an Israeli version of the Gilded Age, a Moroccan Tammany Hall?

“Thanks, kapara. Take some burekas on your way out, neshama. See you next month, achi.”

Well, yeah. But compare the Gilded Age to what followed. Boss Tweed was a man you could do business with, and he was nobody’s fool. The infrastructure and beautiful buildings of New York City were built under his tenure and those of his successors. Meanwhile, the New Deal bureaucrat nerds who replaced them, with their oversized brains and undersized gonads, presided over proxy race wars, hideous architecture, general dysfunction-and there’s nobody to talk to. The New York subways cost $1.5 million per mile in 1904. Today, they cost fifty times that, and nobody’s building them, and you can’t ride the ones that have been built without getting into a mixed martial arts contest with a Michael Jackson impersonator, where the prize is getting your life ruined by the courts.

Say what you will about the old NYPD, but they took care of these guys

More importantly, it’s a lot easier to get to a monarchy from Tammany Hall than from the current Israeli Mommy Lawyer Reich. It’s just a matter of formalizing an informal arrangement. Which, squalid as it may be, is a lot closer to what we pray for three times a day than the Deep Shtetl and the unaccountable tyranny of a thousand bespectacled bureaucrat schoolmarms.

PS: After being fired, Tomer-Yerushalmi disappeared today, triggering a massive police search. Shikma Bressler, the Voice of Our Democratic Conscience pictured above, immediately announced that extremist Messianic right wing Religious Zionists had hounded her to suicide, killing her just as they’d murdered Rabin thirty years ago. Fortunately, she was found alive and well. Presumably, we will soon hear that she can’t really be treated as a criminal for an innocent mistake-after all, she is merely an honorable lifelong civil servant who misinterpreted some technical regulations in the service of justice and democratic transparency. She is obviously already distraught, and isn’t that in itself enough of a punishment?