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The Sounds of Silence

Most Orthodox Jews in Israel operate from a very strange rule that one is never allowed to complain about anything in Israel – not the rocks (a Talmudic principle), nor the government as an entity (apparently a religious Zionist principle), nor the Minister of Fishes and Loaves, nor the bus drivers, nor the cats, nor the garbage cans, nor the garbage in the cans even when the garbage came  originally as Chinese imports. However, Arabs one is obligated to condemn at all times and is encouraged to do so without facts or logic or humanity. Same with political scientists, even the Jewish ones, who criticize Israel ever for anything. Moreover, one is not allowed to even examine his own life in Israel because “three things are acquired with difficulty...” If I had a shekel for every time I have had that line dumped on my head, each person uttering it remarkably as if I would never have heard it before.
In other words, there’s a lot of group think here, and repression of thought, and magical thinking, and ignorance, and well, many of the traits of cults. I find it amusing to see it in the Dati Leumi crowd because they criticize the Charedi for being that way. I guess we all do it when it comes to our vested interests.
But I contact people anyway much as I did when I first became frum in the hope of getting a nugget of something useful here and there. I was debating online a staunch Israelist recently and he pointed out to me that the UN Partition plan made the proposed Jewish state 45% Arabs, so that Arabs as a group were not getting just 46% of the land, they were getting 66% in accordance with their composition of 66% of the population. It was a good point and I changed my view of the partition plan after that. When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" John Maynard Keynes. Otherwise, he was an insufferable bore and wholesale purchaser of Israeli propaganda but I learned an important thing from him.

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