Israel can intercept ballistic missiles launched a thousand miles away and sell them to Germany, but it can’t keep tabs on gangs of settler vigilantes? Maybe it isn't looking too closely
The news that the German government is set to buy Israel’s Arrow 3 missile defense system as the central element of its European Sky Shield initiative strikes me as one of those historic moments that words can’t quite define.
Walking among us are still Jewish men and women who were marked down for extermination by the Germans. Like many of you reading this, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now if the German plan to kill every last Jew in Europe had been fully successful.
And now, 78 years since the German Reich conceded defeat, Germany is planning to protect its citizens and those of other European nations with an Israeli system that was originally developed to protect the Jewish state from Iranian missiles. And yet somehow this makes perfect sense.
At least, it makes perfect sense to everyone except French President Emmanuel Macron, who is miffed at Germany taking the lead and wants the rest of Europe to invest in a French system that at this point barely even exists on paper.
It makes sense in clear and clinical lines of historic logic because of course Israel – a nation of survivors, founded in an inhospitable environment – would be the place where the technology has been developed and proven. And that Germany, having belatedly awoken to the threat to its east, would look to Israel to supply the obvious solution. How far we’ve come from the Final Solution in the space of one lifetime.
Yet, just a week after the Bundestag earmarked the first installment of about $610 million for Arrow 3, it turns out that Israeli military technology does have its limitations.
Not for the first time, in the wake of a terror attack against Israeli civilians, groups of settlers rampaged through Palestinian villages in the West Bank. The worst attack was on Turmus Ayya, where after houses and fields were set alight by settlers on Wednesday, Israeli security forces arrived late on the scene and clashed with the angry residents, one of whom was killed.
Later that night, the Israel Defense Forces spokesman, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, told reporters that “we didn’t have prior intelligence that such an incident was going to happen in Turmus Ayya.”
In the short period Hagari has been in his role, I’m not aware of him having tried to mislead the media, so therefore I’m prepared to take him at face value on this. However, there should have been absolutely no surprise at the settler attack, which took place a day after four Israeli civilians were murdered by Palestinian gunmen next to the settlement of Eli. After all, it happened so many times before and their intentions weren’t a secret: The plans were there in WhatsApp groups and had already been leaked on social media.
It doesn’t make any sense that an Israeli army that can intercept ballistic missiles outside the Earth’s atmosphere that were launched a thousand miles away can’t keep tabs on a gang of vigilantes operating in an area where it has an entire territorial division with six brigades on the ground. Unless you take into account that the resources of Israel’s intelligence community are not prioritized toward the settler threat.
Military Intelligence has no mandate to track Israelis, while the Shin Bet security service’s “Jewish division” is overworked and discouraged by its political masters from looking too closely. So yes, if you’re not working too hard to find it, you won’t have prior intelligence.
There are those who see historic resonance here as well and call the settler attacks on Palestinian civilians “pogroms” – the Russian and Yiddish term that was first used for the violent attacks against Jewish communities in czarist Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe, often instigated by the authorities. The word has also been used occasionally in recent decades in reference to attacks against ethnic minorities in other parts of the world.
I’m uncomfortable, to put it mildly, with the usage of terms that were coined to describe the historic persecution of Jews in other contexts. Just as I think it was wrong for American sociologists to use the word “ghetto” to describe black neighborhoods, I don’t think we should use the word “pogrom” here either. It’s disrespectful to Jewish history, even when Jews are the ones doing it.
But I’m not such a huge fan of policing other people’s words – and it’s pointless anyway. Like in so many other cases, arguing over what to call something diverts attention away from how and why that something is so awful.
Whether it’s right or wrong to use the term, the sight of armed gangs attacking and setting homes of another religious group alight, while the army and police can’t be bothered to stop them, should indeed make us think of pogroms. Because even though there’s a long list of historic and contextual differences, ultimately, these are men terrorizing innocent families in their homes.
The history of the persecution of the Jews over the centuries is unique. As a result, Israel’s achievements are pretty unique as well. The hatred of an individual who is capable of setting a house on fire with its occupants still inside is not. No matter where it happens or the identity of the arsonist. You don’t have to call it a pogrom to remember how, not long ago, our grandparents were the ones inside the burning homes.
The acrimonious and toxic discourse over the Israel-Palestine conflict tends to veer between the poles of whataboutism and expecting a higher standard of Jews than any other nation. But in between those poles, we live in a moral contradiction.
No one has any right to expect Jews to be somehow better, and there is no lack of ethnic hatred and murderous depravity elsewhere. But the burden of our history is there, and we can’t just shut it out when it becomes uncomfortably inconvenient to remember.