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Thoughts in Tel Aviv
by Fjordman
The city of Tel Aviv is a twentieth-century creation. In a country famous for its numerous historical monuments, it’s somewhat ironic that one of Israel’s two largest cities is almost entirely devoid of major historical sights. In this way, Tel Aviv is very different from Jerusalem, which is brimming with sights of religious and historical significance. Tel Aviv does have its advantages, however.
Throughout history, humans have often preferred to live near large bodies of moving water. This was obviously for practical reasons such as food and transport, but it has other advantages, too. A city such as Düsseldorf, Germany would be very different (and more boring) without the Rhine river flowing through it.
When I lived in Cairo, Egypt as a student I enjoyed the special atmosphere the Nile river bestows upon the city. Nevertheless, if you go to Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast, you can smell the fresh air and the salty sea breeze. That does make a difference. Perhaps humans are biologically programmed to search for the sea?
Jerusalem is situated inland on a hilltop. Traveling to Tel Aviv is a short trip by car or bus, but the natural setting is sharply different. While I was in Israel in February 2013, I spent most of my days in Jerusalem. However, I went for a short visit to Tel Aviv. I had not been there for ten years and wanted to see what had changed since the last time I was there.
Although I didn’t plan to, it turned out that I ended up in the middle of the Purim celebrations. Purim is one of the most joyous holidays on the Jewish calendar, sort of a Jewish version of Halloween. This involves the drinking of wine, but also dressing up in various costumes. These days, Jews don’t merely dress up as Biblical characters; they might just as easily be Superman or Harry Potter.
The tradition of wearing masks and costumes for Purim may have been something that Jews picked in late medieval Europe, perhaps inspired by the carnival celebrations of the local Christians in Italy and elsewhere.
Little princess during Purim celebrations in Tel Aviv.
Amidst costumes of many different types, I did notice a disproportionate number of young girls dressed up as princesses, though. I’ve seen the same pattern in Scandinavia in northern Europe, and even in China in East Asia. Apparently, girls from all over the world love to dress up as princesses. If I didn’t known better, I’d say this is genetic. Of course, in our day, when gender is supposed to be socially constructed, merely suggesting this comes off as sexist blasphemy. Which means that it could well be true.
Carmel Market, Tel Aviv.
I visited some of the places I had not seen since I worked in the region in 2003. Carmel Market in the center of Tel Aviv seemed to be more or less unchanged. It’s charming in an authentic and dynamic sort of way. And it caters to the locals, not to tourists.
Amidst the fresh food and clothing, Carmel Market also features stands where you can buy a wide selection of obviously pirated movies as DVDs. This would not happen in Europe, at least not in Scandinavia. Maybe in some village in Romania or Bulgaria. I have younger relatives in Norway who download movies from the Internet extensively. Technically speaking, this is illegal. However, in practice, the police rarely do anything about it as long as the movies are for private consumption only.
Carmel Market, Tel Aviv.
If you illegally download movies and sell many pirated movies openly in the streets, that is a very different matter. The police will close down your store if you do so. Apart from Israel, other places where I have seen pirated movies being sold openly in this manner were in East and Southeast Asia, in places such as China, Thailand and Malaysia. In this respect, Israel seems to be a part of Asia.
Tel Aviv is by many standards the greatest party city in the entire region. It even has an annual Gay Pride Parade. That’s not my cup of tea, but if that’s what you are looking for, you can find it there. In neighboring Arab countries, Gay couples risk being beaten up in the streets. In Tel Aviv they would usually be safe.
In all of the Middle East, the only city I have visited with a nightlife that could rival that of Tel Aviv was actually Beirut, Lebanon. I visited Lebanon in 2002 along with two Norwegians who had previously served as UNIFIL peacekeeping soldiers for the United Nations in southern Lebanon.
Prior to the devastating civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, Beirut used to be known as the “Paris of the Middle East.” However, the country was founded with a Christian majority. You can still encounter pockets of decent nightlife and vineyards there today among Christians and secular Muslims, but these pockets are diminishing. The most rapidly demographically expanding ethnic group in Lebanon are the Shia Muslims, fronted by militant and highly repressive groups such as the Iranian-backed Hezbollah.
Already when I visited Lebanon in 2002, you could see huge posters of Iran’s brutal Islamic leader the Ayatollah Khomeini on the outskirts of Beirut, as soon as you left the European-looking wine bars in the city center.
Just for the record: No, Dubai is not a party city. Dubai is a glorified shopping center that also happens to include some rather expensive bars and restaurants. It does not have the inexpensive street-level bars and pubs that you can encounter all over Tel Aviv.
Cairo is a very large city containing more people than do most countries. You can certainly find bars there if you look for them. However, that does not mean that most visitors go to Cairo for the nightlife. The only city in the entire Middle East that people might visit specifically for the nightlife would be Tel Aviv. Even Jerusalem harbors a much more conservative religious population, Jewish and Christian as well as Muslim.
Tel Aviv’s long beachfront.
I’m approaching 40 and getting too old for partying like a 20-year-old student. Nevertheless, I greatly enjoy visiting the beautiful beachfront. Tel Aviv has an excellent beach, several kilometers long. This is a wonderful place to relax and watch the sunset while people around you are jogging, enjoying a glass of beer or smoking a water pipe. You can walk all the way from the city center to Tel Aviv’s Arab-dominated twin city of Jaffa. I have done this myself in the past.
Tel Aviv’s long beachfront.
One of the blessings of being an Islamophobic writer with an international audience is that you have readers in many different countries. One of these is a Jewish man in Tel Aviv whom I had never previously met, but who knew I was for a brief visit to Israel. We went for a trip by car to Jaffa, to enjoy some hummus at one of the popular Arab restaurants there.
Hummus and Arab food in Tel Aviv’s Arab-dominated twin city of Jaffa.
In general, I sympathize with the Jewish wish to have their own country. I desire the normalization of Europeans. We should not colonize other parts of the world; but neither should other parts of the world colonize Europe. Likewise, I desire the normalization of Jews. They should have their own country, where they shape their own destiny like a normal people.
However, I briefly suggested to my Israeli Jewish pen pal that perhaps Jews would have been better off establishing a new homeland somewhere in South America. That way, they wouldn’t have to be surrounded on an everyday basis by mortal enemies who want to wipe them out. This will probably always be the case in the Islamic-dominated Middle East.
My Jewish friend at this point became a little bit offended. He saw Israel as the natural homeland for Jews, a place to connect with their ancestors from the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps he is right. As a traditionalist, I respect the desire to want to reconnect with one’s ancestral land and traditions. Anyway, the deed has now been done, and the state of Israel has been firmly established. One can only hope that it will survive.
One of the factors in the country’s future is how it deals with ultra-Orthodox Jews. By the time of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, when the modern state of Israel was established in the late 1940s, the ultra-Orthodox Jews numbered only a few hundred people. Today, they number hundreds of thousands.
One should recall that in Israel, even young women have to do mandatory military service. The fact that the country has for decades had hundreds of thousands of young and able Jewish men who did not do military service, but only studied the Torah, has been a cause of rising internal tensions.
In March 2014 the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, passed a law which would see the ultra-Orthodox Jews included in compulsory military service. I’m not Jewish or Israeli, so this is not really my call. However, this was probably a wise decision.
I define myself as an agnostic and am sometimes put off by the arrogant attitudes of some self-proclaimed atheists. Based on my experience, many professed atheists are in fact devout believers in political religions such as Marxism. I consider Marxism and related creeds to be every bit as much faith-based, and often more totalitarian and dangerous, than some of the traditional religions.
Most people throughout human history have been religious. This becomes a problem when the religion is very violent and intolerant and leaves little room for individual freedom. This is the main problem with Islam, for instance. However, if you look at the example of medieval Christian monks in Europe, it is perfectly possible to be deeply religious and still participate as a productive citizen in the society of your day.
One should expect the same of religious Jews. If they want to study the Torah and their holy scriptures, that’s fine. However, this shouldn’t be the only thing they do. The modern world is created by people who know mathematics, economics, engineering, chemistry and physics, not those who can only recite ancient texts.
Moreover, this is also a matter of rights vs. duties. You should have the right as a free individual to live your life as you choose, provided that you do not harm others. However, there should be a reasonable balance between rights and obligations. For instance, it is fair that you have certain duties to support and protect a society that helps protect the rights of you and your fellow citizens.
If you have only rights, but few duties, then your relationship to society becomes a parasitical one. Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel enjoy the physical protection of the Israeli state. As such, it is entirely fair of the state to expect them to do their share to keep up the physical protection of the society in which they live. Otherwise, they undermine the very future existence of that society.
For a complete archive of Fjordman’s writings, see the multi-index listing in the Fjordman Files.
It is true that little girls the world over enjoy dressing as a princess as you call it. At Purim (world wide) Jewish little girls dress as Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story. It isn’t mandatory, but it is the most common costume for girls. All it takes is a party dress and a crown of some sort (plus of course some of mommy’s jewelry and/or makeup).
Regarding the drafting of Charedim in Israel, don’t necessarily disagree with what is proposed on the surface despite being ambivalent about the whole situation.
At the same time, one thing that does not sit well with me in all this is that the proponents of the draft in much of the Israeli establishment are part of the same largely Leftist sell-out forces currently at work chipping away at or compromising non-muslim cultural defenses / immune-systems throughout the west and the rest of the non-muslim world, making me question the motivations of those proponents.
Those same largely Leftist proponents also have a record of ceding land / holy places to muslims, evicting Jews from their homes and forbidding Jews (whether soldiers or civilians) from defending themselves against islamic aggression / terror amongst other things, so the Charedi reluctance to join the army is justified to some extent.
While there are many many things I disagree with Charedim on, hypothetically speaking would anyone least of all principled patriots or counter-jihadists be willing to participate let alone allow themselves to be drafted in countries ruled by sell-out dhimmi establishments or pro-brotherhood manchu-riyadh types like Obama who’d readily cede land / holy places to muslims, evict non-muslims from their homes, forbid non-muslims from defending themselves and use the draft as a weapon against their political / religious opponents in the service of muslim interests?
Also given that the islamic birthrate in Israel/J&S/Gaza has been falling recently due to prosperity (as well as other reasons related to the ideas within David Goldman’s “How Civilizations Die”) while the Jewish birthrate is growing, is it possible that the pro-draft proponents are somehow motivated by a desire to stem / reverse the growing Jewish birthrate (which the Charedim have contributed towards along with secular Jews to a lesser extent) as together with the vastly over-inflated muslim population figures in the area, those same proponent’s demographic doomsday theory has since been discredited?
Another thing to consider is that prior to the passing of the draft law, the Charedim were legally prohibited from going to work without serving in the army until the age of around 30-31, which reputedly came about as an act of spite by David Ben-Gurion in the early years of the state that ultimately led to the current unsustainable situation of dependency and non-participation within the Charedi World as the population grew.
Just a few of my limited thoughts on the matter.
As an Evangelical Christian, I long noticed that many of my co-religionists would never doubt their duty to defend their culture. It is only recently, with the O’s administration, that we are now regarded as a more dangerous threat than Muslim jihadists.
Fjordman says: “Beirut used to be known as the “Paris of the Middle East.”
Sadly this is still true. The only difference is, Paris has become an Islamic hell hole as opposed to Beirut formerly having been a small slice of Europe when it was civilized. So Paris and Beirut still resemble each other a great deal. Just not in a good way.
“Europeans should not colonize other parts of the world”.
You’re joking, right? If Europeans hadn’t there would be no Latin America, no New Zealand, Australia or United States.
Ah, but look how they “colonized” Australia…
Some Europeans colonized in order to escape religious persecution at home – and then set up persecutions amongst themselves for the sake of maintaining godliness.
Some Europeans colonized by accident as they traveled the seas looking for treasure and precious metals.
Some Europeans colonized because other Europeans were colonizing and they didn’t want to be left out.
Some Europeans set up competing colonies so they could continue warring against one another out of sight of their fellows.
Some Europeans just scattered as much seed as possible before leaving with the loot.
Some Europeans left all they knew and loved because they didn’t want to starve where they were standing.
Some Europeans today are still ‘colonizing’…leaving the beautiful benefits of their homeland to live in exile because the price of remaining is more than they can pay. “Freedom ain’t worth nothing but it’s free”…
And some groups of settled colonizers are being forced to flee or be slaughtered. Let’s see if the farmers of South Africa going to Georgia will make any difference in that fierce country.
I am so happy my ancestors left England in the 1630’s. You like it there, but we will be seeing you here in 20 years when there are another 10 million camel jockeys. You are too much like eloi to fight them.
What part of my response indicated I am in England? I am a first-generation American who hasn’t set foot in that benighted place.
Given that I can’t claim ancestry here since the 17th century – I’m presuming your lecture to me is coming from America – I’m not as qualified as you are to speak to the situation. Perhaps you can tell me why you and your ancestors permitted the ruination of this place?
I swan, wherever you people go you kill off the natives. At least the Spanish took the more civilized course: they mated and married instead of wasting thousands of perfectly good human beings.
Well, you’re the first to have accused me of being English – or of living in England at any rate. Most of those commenters who don’t pay close attention to what we say – the hit and run commenters – are more likely to think we’re sitting in Vienna…or Israel.
Camel jockeys? Seriously? I guess that proves you can take the boy out of England but you can’t take…etc.
Are you really suggesting America is in better shape than Europe? I’d rather live in Turkey than Colombia. That’s what America is becoming, a country like Colombia, a failed latin American state with uncontrollable crime, degenerate culture and drug use, while Europe is becoming another middle-eastern country, not as bad, and obviously I’d rather live in neither. I wanna live around my own people, like most people in the world do, and like any sane person does, in that regard, America is much worse off than Europe at the moment.
A country like Sweden or Belgium may be the first to fall to the forces of Jihad, but North America will be the first to fall to the forces of the third world.
No pirated DVDs in Scandinavia?
Scandinavian countries are the worst in the world. Over the last 5 years they have been touting themselves as post-modern, post Christian, the most developed societies in the world. Some people used them as a touchstone for progress, kindness and humanistic feelings. To prove that they were not bad as Christian and Jews, they imported their antithesis to embrace, and enrich and add their already unsurpassed Scandinavian culture. They imported rag-dressed, Somalis and Pakistanis and any Muslim working for world Caliphate and Sharia and was provided with clean clothes, and a copy of the Quran, magnificent hotels and later houses after chasing out whiteys, girls to enrich the offspring, torching cars to help Scandinavian see the roads, too dark in the Northern Circle. Crimes to enrich their lawyers, newspapers and provide topics for gossip. Being Altruistic and unselfish they are helping Islam revive and establish the Scandinavia- /world- wide caliphate. Progress towards that goal goes by meters in Europe, but by kilometres in modern, highly educated, very , very, radically democratic Scandinavia. They are so altruistic they leave their schools, institutions and districts and cities to they brothers in humanity.
Ah, progress thy name is surely Scandinavian. The world has been humbled by your generous open-handedness. (hey, Denmark! Sweden is nicer to these sharia folk than you are. Better catch up.) The world looks to you, creators and providers of the Nobel Peace Prize, to see who you value so we can follow humbly in your giant footsteps and know who it is we’re supposed to admire.
Dymphna.. My comments probably prompted yours, which were actually were in my mind and you beat me to them. It is amazing how I and you were brought up at 15, 000 km apart and think the same as Mr Geert, Fjordman, Spencer, Geller, and one or two in Australia and Britain. Being clear-eyed and seeing the imminent danger, it is amazing how tiny the number of “salt of the earth” is. I don’t have anything against Scandinavian countries. When I write with bitterness about them, I actually thought before that they really were developed and advanced. For example, in the eighties we would hear that Sweden would not cut a tree unless they planted one instead. Now they are transplanting their own people. When I heard that I wanted to meet a Swede, touch him, look him in the eye, converse with him learn something from him, see how the tenor of his mind worked, see if they has a few more grams of brain than 1,250 grams average us. I was disappointed that alas he has lost even the basic knowledge of human nature, so important for survival. They deliberately blind themselves, and act superbly stupidly. Over the last 30 years they’ve returned back to kindergarten. Lose your faith in Christianity – — thou agonizing death shalt die, and stranger will over you rule, and maketh you slaves in thy own country. Lost thy faith and thou shalt lose everything.
Give me a break!
Apparently religious Jewish women in Israel often support their feckless husbands (can I say that? -well, I have). Because the women don’t spend their youth studying the scriptures, they get a proper education, equipping them for work. If only most Muslim women could do likewise, we might see some progress.
Fjordman, I generally like what you say here, but I’m not one to criticize colonization.
First of all, I am a mostly white American with strong ties to the island of Taiwan and fond memories of Thailand, Southern China, and England.
Were we to adopt a consistently anti-colonialist tack, my Hakka-speaking kin would have to relocate all the way up to the valley of the Huang He, as would my Minnan- and Cantonese-speaking friends. Taiwan would be left to a few hundred thousand Austronesians, and southern China to a few million Zhuang, Yao, Hmong, and suchlike. Should I tell all my friends who identify with the Thai language and ethnicity to decamp for the northern portion of the Viet-Lao borderlands to leave their country to a few Khmer, Mon, Nyaw Khur, Chong, and Soay tribals? As for dear old England, should we really deport most Anglo-Saxon Brits to Schleswig-Holstein and Saxony, leaving the British Isles to a few Celts?
Even you Norwegians–Sure, they say southern Scandinavia, from perhaps a dozen miles south of Trondheim down to the Danish Islands, was the likely cradle of the Germanic peoples. But would you cede everything further north the the Sami?
We could also call on every Bantu African to retreat to the Nigerian-Cameroon borderlands to leave everything else to the Khoi-San peoples. We could call on even the Malays to head back to Yunnan or Taiwan and leave their homelands to the Oran Asli. We here might cheer the Arabs surrendering the Maghreb to the Amazigh, Egypt to the Copts, and the Fertile Cresecent to the Aramaeans and Jews; or the Turks surrendering Anatolia and Thrace to the Greeks and Armenians. We would even have to tell the Aryan peoples of India to head back to the Pontic Steppe. Even if a colonization took place a few millennia ago, it is still colonization!
Hence, I have long ago ceased to feel guilty about colonization. Apart from the Han Chinese of the Huang He area, the Tamils, the Mon, and Khmer, there’s probably no highly civilized people now inhabiting the lands on which their Neolithic ancestors lived.
Nobody here but us pieds noirs!
No one’s talking about reversing previous colonization. However, colonization, especially any further colonization, is a tragedy and people who defend it give conservatives a bad name.
I don’t care how much more good America/the Oceania countries brought to the world, how much more advanced they were, it was genocide and everyone deserves a homeland.
Nice knowledge of migration history though, I study it myself.
The grand paradox of Israeli society is that the people who are the most militant in territorially expanding and consolidating “Eretz Israel” avoid military service, ie they are unwilling to risk their own lives and those of their sons and daughters to defend their conception of Eretz Israel. Conversely, the lethal burden of militarily defending Israel is imposed upon those who are the least “expansionist” and generally most content for Israel to remain within the 1949 Armistice Lines (a stance I personally disagree with): the secular and the non-Charedim religious.
One has to question the motives of at least a significant proportion of the hundreds of thousands of Charedim youth who over the decades have avoided Israel’s compulsory military service by reason of their religious piety. The laws of economics dictate that if a “good”, such as a no-cost means to avoid otherwise compulsory conscription, is supplied then there will be a demand generated for that good. No doubt there are some sincere “Yeshiva bokkers” amongst them, but the exponential growth in the numbers of draft exemptees since Ben Gurion’s concession 60 plus years ago suggests motives other than a mono-dedication to the learning and deeper grasp of the Torah, Midrash, etc.
An even uglier factor in the equation is that, according to many Israelis I have spoken with both in Israel and Australia, a great many of those who spearhead the “settler” ( not a term I favour) movement are “Americans”, ie they hold US passports, but live in Israel. So when the situation in Israel ever gets nasty with its annihilistically minded neighbours, they have the luxury that most Israelis don’t have of scooting safely back to the States.
Further, the same Israelis of my acquaintance also noted that when Israel vacated the Sinai post Camp David (and the residents, eg, of the settlement of Yamit, just west of the Gaza Strip, were forced by the Israeli government to leave) the Israeli residents of the Sinai were financially compensated to a degree out of all proportion to the real value of the improvements, ie houses built, they had made to the lands they lived on. This generous compensation scenario was repeated when Israel forcibly uprooted Jewish residents of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Sordid as it may seem, from these precedents, financial gain would seem to be, and is believed to be by many middle of the road Israelis, a factor in the motives of the “settler” – a term I employ here only for convenience – movement. That is, they hope for a financial windfall when, one day, they may well be obliged by the Israeli government to vacate likely-to-be-ceded parts of the West Bank.
It is surprising in the extreme – absent the political brokerage power of the Shas and related political parties – that non ultra-orthodox Israelis have tolerated the Charedim exemption for as many decades as they have. Place ones self in the shoes of an Israeli parent whose son was killed, crippled or wounded serving in the IDF 1955-2014. It is in fact astonishing that there has been no civil insurrection in Israel over the issue.
Ha! Hope your international Islamophobic identity was kept hidden in that falafel restaurant…
I concur with you that in retrospect, going back to Israel’s birthplace was probably a big mistake: see how much blood and treasury that society has expanded just to maintain a semblance of normality. I also understand (and admire) Israel’s desire not to yield to savages, and maintaining her honor instead of cowering away in South America. Mazel Tov!
That said, I often wonder whether one day, we will not see a massive population movement out of Israel, when the danger becomes clear and present for everyone to see. By most estimates, Israel is not able to take down Iran by itself – unless it resorts to very unpalatable means, such as a full-fledged pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran.
If the dilly-dallying goes on, imagine when Iran conducts a nuclear test just like the North Koreans and declares itself a nuclear power – that would scare the bejezus out of me if I were living in Tel Aviv and I would wait in line to buy a one-way ticket out ASAP.
Just a piece of advice: do not relocate in big American cities. In all probability, they are where Iran will conduct their “tests”.
Any strategic player knows that the only way to attack an enemy bigger than yourself is to use a single blow, with overwhelming force. A coordinated attack on multiple American targets is almost sure to tie America’s hands so much that retaliation will be impossible, or made impossible by Obama’s drastic degradation of American capabilities.
This is rather typical for Comments where Israel is involved , you get all kind of strange points of view , everything except the mainstream israeli point of view .
So , here it is : Its a pity Fjordman didn’t connect with some of us locals , because then he would’t be writing as a tourist . Ask Gert Wilders , who lived here for years As One Of Us , or at least as close as you can get without serving in the army .
Except for that , some comments missed the elefant in the room , which is the growing division between two already VERY different kinds of religious jews . One , the fanaticly orthodox Haredim comunity does’nt contibute much to society exept an enormously high birthrate . They are NOT involved in the settlement activity . The other , the national-religious camp are just the opposite . They work hard , serve in the army and mostly raise sensible-sized families with 3-4 kids , and educate them well. They are the ones most active in settlement activity.
The good news is , that the national-religious camp finaly have joined the secular comunity in demanding of the Haredim that they stop being parasites , and start serving in the army and earn their living like everybody else .
Another typical turist-misunderstandig is the asumption that mainstream israel might start packing the suitcases as Nulear War gets to be a more and more realistic possiblity . It works exactly the other way : in good times many will go abroad to make money and more money , but in BAD times more wil come back to share in whatever Fate is waiting for us .
Re the little “princess”- I hope it’s not frivolous, after the earnest discussion above, to quote Robert Heinlein: “Little girls are like kittens and butterflies: sent to delight us”.
I as an Israeli want to clear up false statements made in the article and the comments.
The most important is this, the majority of combat soldiers in the IDF are religious. So the claims of being parasitical are clearly false.
Furthermore the draft law has nothing to do with making a charedi fighting force in the IDF. That was already happening, the Netzach Yehuda brigade, the largest brigade in the IDF is commonly known as Nachal Charedi. It is an entirely Orthodox unit, what you would call Ultra-Orthodox and it was the fastest growing unit in the IDF. The army was expecting to have to make a second brigade for all the religious soldiers joining. There is also an intelligence and Air Force unit that is for the Charedim.
The actual result of the new draft law has been to drive religious Jews away from the army. The harsh reality is that the draft law had nothing to do with the burden of service but actually exists because the Israeli elite is terrified of losing power to the Dati. They desperately hope that the IDF will act as a melting pot to strip the Torah from the Charedim.
Lastly Fjordman, the Jew has no home but Eretz Yisrael. If we were to forget our moledet may our right hand wither. If we must fight for all time to keep our land it is better to do that then have peace in the galut.
Absorbing an uncooperative haredim into the army is not going to be a nice exercise, the army is generally accepted as a rite of passage for the average Israeli. I have two sons in the army, one a reservist.
A conscript army is difficult to manage when the general recruit is cooperative, I fear that trying to mould an uncooperative element will in no way enhance the army at a time when the region is beginning to hot-up.
An army is all about team work, I do not believe that elements of the haredim are capable of teamwork. In the past, Israel has been victorious because its army has operated in complete harmony against fragmented and uncooperative enemies, putting harredim in the army may well shatter that harmony.
Whilst it is ‘not fair’, whoever said that the world is fair? I am disappointed that the haredi community leaders feel no attachment or responsibility to the Jewish State of Israel, and require separatist ‘special treatment’, but that is one of the ironies of life. But using the army as the butt end of party politicking is a strange insanity in a beleaguered nation whoose continued existence only the army insures.