MK Orit Strock shouldn’t have apologized or moderated her harsh statements against the IDF chief of staff, the police commissioner and the head of the Shin Bet security service. “What is this, the Wagner Group?” she demanded. “Who are you? You work for the government; you don’t issue statements under the government’s nose as the mood takes you.” That was in response to their joint statement condemning Jewish terror.
Strock was absolutely right. Condemnations from the heads of the security services are like a revolt against the state – the State of Judea and the gang that runs it.
Strock isn’t the one who was wrong; it was the senior security officials who made a serious mistake, by thinking that there was still some kind of border between the State of Judea and the State of Israel.
They should have realized long since that when the army allows settlers to return to the illegal outposts of Homesh and Evyatar, when the police are incapable of identifying the perpetrators of pogroms and when the Shin Bet isn’t aware that people are making plans to perpetrate these pogroms, they can’t complain about the emergence of Jewish terror and depict it as illegal activity. It is the policy of the State of Judea in its role as the government of Israel.
Strock views the heads of the security services as an underground seeking to thwart completion of the campaign of conquest that the State of Judea is waging against the State of Israel. They speak in the name of values whose time has passed and define Jewish resistance as terrorism, and the “traitors” and people “refusing” to do army service – the ones who are fueling the protests against the government’s planned legal upheaval – come from their ranks.
Sociologist Max Weber defined the modern state as an entity with a monopoly on legitimate violence. Successive Israeli governments adhered to this definition. They destroyed the pre-state militias, created a single national army and consolidated the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence by imposing a rigid separation between the army and politics. But as the years passed, this monopoly eroded, and eventually, it moved from the government to its nongovernmental partners.
The latter see themselves not merely as rivals to the government’s monopoly on violence, but as the legitimate owners of this monopoly. The result is that the security services have trouble knowing whom they answer to and whose orders they are supposed to obey. Police commissioners, senior army officers and Shin Bet directors have found themselves conducting negotiations with rabbis, settlement leaders and “representatives” of the settlers’ radical hilltop youth, as if they were the sovereign power and were authorized to wield their legitimate force against anyone who challenged their authority.
Nevertheless, they thought there was a line separating the so-called “price tag” attacks – which were perpetrated by a “handful” of Jews belonging to the “hilltop youth” – from the rest of the settlers, both those who live in the West Bank and those inside Israel who use them as a safety net. This false distinction was convenient for the army, enabling it to ignore the Jewish terrorism that sprung up on its turf. It also served the government and helped the settlers consolidate their legitimacy as victims dependent on the “failed” army’s protection.
This approach was a deception that succeeded beyond expectations. Not only did a hilltop youth become national security minister and a hateful racist become a minister within the Defense Ministry in charge of the settlements, but the entire government has subordinated the security services to the settlers’ dictates. It thereby completed the real legal overhaul – the one that destroyed the hierarchy of control over the security services and over the use of legitimate violence.
All the heads of the security services can do now is issue condemnations of Jewish terror as if they were still living in the old days, when they figured there was a difference between Jewish terror and the government, and that they served only one government.
Perhaps Col. Eliav Elbaz, commander of the Benjamin Brigade, getting thrown out of the house by a recently bereaved family, accompanied by cries of “murderer” and “traitor,” will finally remove the tattered mask. That was the obvious response of a homeowner confronting an enemy army officer, one who crossed the border in the belief that he is still responsible for security in an area that has been taken over by terrorist gangs in the government’s service.