I want to share with you an incredibly important piece written in Hebrew by my friend Erez Tadmor.
He gives a biting historical context on the multiple mistakes of the left, yet, regardless, their arrogance makes them always “right”.
Do you hear?
You who are burning the country down because you are so right.
You who allow yourselves to trample on every red line because you know, not think, you know that you are saving democracy from the ignorant crowd.
You are so successful. You are pilots, doctors, academics and cyber experts. that you will be wrong? Not a chance.
I’m sorry to tell you, but you are a little less successful and wise and always right than you think.
Well it’s simple: I have a historical perspective.
Your parents also thought they were the pinnacle of progress. The embodiment of the good, the right and the beautiful.
And your grandparents were sure that they had a monopoly on the values of morality, social justice and rational thinking.
And see it’s a miracle: the test of history shows that they were indeed very successful, but they were almost always wrong. And not by ten, twenty or thirty degrees. When the left is wrong, it tends to do it 180 degrees.
In the 1920s until the 1980s, boys and girls joint living facilities, away from the parents, was practiced in most kibbutzim. The people who thought they were the pinnacle of progress managed to detach themselves from every parental and maternal instinct and sentenced their babies to be separated from the family at the age of a few months.
In a small part of the kibbutzim they woke up from this madness in the 60’s, in most kibbutzim it only happened in the 80’s.
In the 1990s the left decided that the mass murderer Yasser Arafat was a partner for peace, imported him and his gang of terrorists from Tunisia, armed them with thousands of Kalashnikovs and made Arafat a welcome guest in the capitals of the world.
“The Oslo test will be the blood test. Will more blood be shed after it than before it,” said the architect of the agreement, Yossi Beilin, shortly after its signing.
The right tried to warn: “Don’t give them guns”, “This is part of the phased plan”, “Katyusha will fly from Gaza”, “Every area that is vacated will become a terrorist base in the heart of the country”, etc.
No one wanted to listen.
The right is primitive, extreme and dark.
The media presented the Likud as an equivalent of Hamas: “the enemies of peace”, “the people of yesterday”, “the extremists on both sides”.
The Oslo test ended with 1,500 people murdered and a fatal blow to Israel’s national security, economy and international standing.
The left, so enlightened and progressive and marching with the spirit of the times, turned out to be a ship of fools that crushed Israel on the iceberg of reality.
And the right is so primitive and ignorant?
It turned out that the right actually saw reality.
These are just two prominent examples from a long line.
In the last hundred years, it has become clear that the leftist elites tend to miss out and stand on the wrong side of history in almost every essential issue and controversy.
Many on the left and in the kibbutz movement saw Stalin as the sun of the nations. Many more supported communism and even more socialism and a planned economy. They were also wrong.
The left saw Syrian leader Assad Sr. as a partner for peace and tried to convince himself that Assad Jr. was a lovable ophthalmologist who was educated in Britain and would put his country on the path to modernity.
Most of the security political establishment – including all the signatories of the generals’ and academics’ petitions – wanted to give the Golan Heights to Assad the elder and then to the son. They were also wrong. And precisely the political right was right.
Shall we continue?
Remember the parade of experts who explained to us about the crime of robbing the natural gas from the Mediterranean Ocean?
If we had listened to them, the gas would still be under water and our electricity bill would have jumped 5 times. Not to mention the damage to the state’s revenues which would have hurt us in countless other ways.
Next: Netanyahu’s trial. Until five minutes ago you were all still sure that Netanyahu took a bribe.
All the commentators and jurists have explained to you that these are concrete and steel cases. You tore the people of Israel apart because you are “fighting to save the country from corruption”.
His cases are falling apart. You were wrong again.
What more?
Only nine months ago, your experts explained to us that handing over the maritime area to Hezbollah removes the danger of war with Hezbollah.
This time, you have to admit, the disillusionment was particularly fast.
You can go on and on with this, but at this point I will cut straight to the point: in all these cases and acts of folly, the left was completely convinced of its righteousness.
The elites are so educated, moral and advanced, and the right is so primitive and ignorant, that there is no shadow of a doubt where justice and truth lie.
Somehow you always knew, you didn’t just think, you always knew that you were right. And somehow, you were almost always wrong.
Everything is fine. It is legitimate in a democracy.
There is a debate, there is a campaign of persuasion and information, there is an attempt to mobilize a majority for moves and policies in public opinion and in parliament, we go to elections and decisions are made. And mistakes are allowed.
It is legitimate.
What is not legitimate?
What is illegitimate is to ascribe to your subjective position the validity of a fact, to ascribe to yourself and your fellow travelers the ability to know (not think, know) what the right way is and hence to grant yourselves the patronizing right and authority to trample the democratic rules of the game and burn down the club if the other side does not submit to your threats.
And now a spoiler: later on in the plot, it will turn out that you were wrong this time too.
The claim that Netanyahu and the right-wing government are planning to establish a dark, stupid dictatorship here is even more disconnected from reality than most of the far-fetched assessments the left has had in the last hundred years.
This is a vain claim that is based on demonization, decades of brainwashing and hatred of the right-wing, religious and ultra-Orthodox other.
And especially for an unimaginable lack of familiarity with the majority of the Israeli public.
You live in a movie. in a bubble in an imaginary world.
There aren’t millions of primitive baboons out there planning to take us all into dark processes and no one has any intention of realizing even a fraction of all the intimidation that demagogues like Aharon and Ehud Barak push into your brainwashed minds.
Your universities act as though they are a thought police. So most right-wingers who pass through university prefer to keep their opinions to themselves.
Likewise in most government offices and most high-tech companies.
Most of the right-wingers who sit next to you at work prefer to remain silent because they know they are surrounded by intolerant people.
Let me tell you a secret: most of them are much smarter, more educated and more informed than you.
Unlike you, they bother to read not only the editorial in Israel, but to read and study in depth the issues on the agenda so that they have the tools to deal with the brainwashing that has subdued you.
In your communication there is only manipulation and mind engineering. They search with tweezers for the most ridiculous statement and the most ridiculous right wing around and sell you a lie as if this is the true face of millions of good Israelis. This lie catches on because it rides on the arrogance and sometimes racism that you already receive at home. From your parents and grandparents. Those we have already dealt with. Those who made mistakes over and over again were not able to learn even the most elementary lesson: leave room for doubt. There is a situation where you are wrong.
The connection between the violent silencing you impose on your environment and the media humiliation and ridicule of the right-wing people has created a distorted perception of reality for you, as if you are surrounded by beavers and only successful gatekeepers like you can save us all from destruction.
And just as your grandparents’ generation was wrong in their perception of reality, and just as your parents’ generation was wrong in their perception of reality, and just as you have been wrong again and again in the last decade or two, you are also wrong this time. Only this time your mistake leads you to burn down the only Jewish state.
Let’s hope it will be possible to repair the destruction you are causing. Unfortunately, I am not at all sure that this will be possible.
First published in IsraelUnwired.
