.
Commentary;
There are a few recent themes which stick out like sore thumbs and which beg comment.
There is the piece by Stewart Weiss, a director of a Jewish Outreach Center in Ra’anana, applying to today the virtues of Civil Disobediance, which date back to anti-slavery abolitionist Henry David Thoreau of 1840s and 1850s America.
Weiss cites Thoreau in asserting;
When the government does not act, then the citizens must step forward and do what is necessary.
In opposition to the United States’ support of slavery, he [Thoreau] refused to pay taxes in 1846. He spent a night in jail and remarked,
“Under a government which imprisons anyone unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” His subsequent essays on civil disobedience provided an antidote for helpless citizens who feel they lead lives “of quiet desperation.”
Weiss then goes on and on about his own “civil disobediance” in a restaurant against smokers at the next table in the non-smoking section of a restaurant due to the “toothless and ineffective” non-smoking laws in Israel and how “if there are no rules, then there are no rules” implying that it is incumbent upon citizenry to react strongly. He states plainly;
Abusers of the law depend upon the inaction and acquiescence of the public. There is no doubt that corruption at the highest levels of our government stems from our failure to get involved, and the knowledge that our combination of apathy and lack of communal consciousness will probably result in our just shrugging our shoulders and muttering under our breath, “T.I.I.” (this is Israel).
Then we have Rafael Medoff’s piece on Israeli political activist and author Shmuel Katz OBM and his first book, Days of Fire which was the first expose’ of the Allies’ failure to bomb Auschwitz and the rail lines leading to it “over which hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being transported to their doom” during the summer of 1944. Medoff notes that despite Jewish Agency pleadings with British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden, Katz cited;
“It was 57 days, September 1, before the British Foreign Office sent its reply, a period during which the majority of the Jews of Hungary were exterminated,” Katz wrote. “The bombing,” stated the Foreign Office, “was impossible because of ‘the very great technical difficulties involved’.”
Katz further cited;
That during that same summer of 1944, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the Royal Air Force (RAF) to airlift supplies to the Polish Home Army forces fighting the Germans in Warsaw. Despite the likelihood of the supplies being intercepted by the Nazis, Churchill did not allow “technical difficulties” to prevent the mission. A total of 181 air drops were undertaken by British planes, flying from the Foggia air base in Allied-occupied Italy.
“The appeal of the Jewish Agency leaders [to bomb Auschwitz] was far less exacting,” Katz pointed out.
Reading this piece cannot but bring to mind that as evil a betrayal as the nations can perpetrate toward Jews, they [the nations] can yet be outdone by the perfidy perpetrated by the privileged, the protexia-class, the corrupt and immoral — the evil ones amongst us; the haters, the mockers, the revilers of Torah who know us best. It is these revilers of Torah who know our weaknesses and vulnerabilities as the Islamics, as the nations don’t and never will, and have no compunctions about exploiting these very weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
Then there a couple of Caroline Glick pieces which pull no punches in dealing with the current governing mindset of Israel’s total body politic, including the so-called “religious” political sectors; line your pockets and protect your seat at all costs. This governing mindset has fostered an evolving military norm of no clue, no plan which actualizes a corrupt regime’s self-fulfilling prophecy and which results in a military appearance as rank, mediocre incompetents next to the military who decimated its enemies some 41 years ago.
And so, this blog views a common thread in the articles and columns cited above and continues calling for the Ukrainian Model as a possible moral outgrowth of Thoreau philosophy regarding the role of the masses when its ruling governance is abjectly unjust to its very root.
This is not just about Ehud Olmert, as morally, ethically bankrupt as he is. This is about the systemically corrupt and unjust governance of a total political system and it’s institutions. One could list the corrupt ones; from Bibi, to Haim “the Frenchman” Ramon, to Ehud Barak (with his own illegal, illicit campaign funds scandals), to Tzipy “at least she’s not ‘corrupt'” Livni whose lust for power outweighed all principle in joining with Sharon and Olmert in expelling Jews with no after-plan to secure Southern communities, to Eli “All for the almighty shekel” Yishai — the list could fill many pages. This is about journalistic agendization and complicity with moral and ethical governmental bankruptcy as well as journalistic treason before Israel’s enemies bent on our destruction and eradication.
The point is that an entire corrupt system needs to be taken down, dismantled. A G’d-fearing, just governance and institutions must arise in it’s place.
Will this occur? Will the collective voice of 90% plus of the populace who distrust the government be accorded its due? Is Olmert, and all of his corrupt ilk, and corrupt graft-ridden governance about to fall? Or will there be more teflon? More political expediency? More envelopes jam-packed with shekelim for gimme shakedowns? More ill-prepared, ill-planned defeatist self-fulfilling military prophecies like Lebanon 2006? More expulsions of Jews? More governmental exploitation of sectorial division and disunity?
The answers to these questions seem to lie in how far a united populace will go to compel governmental and institutional change. MB