Tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv on Saturday night to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. About a mile away, a few hundred people descended on Hostages Square to call for the return of the remaining bodies of captives still held in Gaza.
What the two events had in common was the loathing, shared by all speakers and attendees, of the current government and the members of the public who elected and continue to support it. Rather than serving as a reminder of what unites Israelis, particularly during this incredibly difficult period, both happenings emphasized divisiveness with a vengeance.
It’s a neat trick on the part of the self-anointed elites whose entire raison d’etre is to profess moral superiority over the rest of us. You know, the riff-raff who admire Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s navigation of the multi-front war. And who—gasp!—regularly watch Israel’s Channel 14, vilified for presenting an alternative to the near-homogeneous left-wing local media.
The ploy of the paragons of virtue-signaling is to engage in intellectual projection, accusing the right of all their own ills. They also spend oodles of literal and figurative capital enlisting unsuspecting fellow travelers of the justice of the all-encompassing “cause.”
Anyone who thought that the war, spurred two years ago by the worst atrocities committed against Jews since the Holocaust, would put this “cause” on the back burner was sorely mistaken. If anything, it amplified internal rifts.
Some pundits attribute this to “Bibi Derangement Syndrome.” Others to radical politics. Many point to the outrage on the part of the chattering classes that the right “stole” the country—and accompanying culture—to which they lay exclusive claim.
All of the above assessments are correct, but there’s an additional element rarely mentioned: globalism. This anti-nationalist ideology was on full display at the closing of the Rabin memorial.
Indeed, after the performance of “Shir LaShalom” (“Song of Peace”) by Miri Aloni—who sang it at the peace rally in 1995, just before Rabin was shot and killed by assassin Yigal Amir—the crowd belted out John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
The lyrics, which sound like a Communist manifesto, tell you everything you need to know about what the hordes of Israel’s “best and brightest” believe is the best way to counter the enemies’ attempts to annihilate the Jewish state: by erasing its religion, borders and will to fight. The poisonous words are as follows:
“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky;
“Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too.
“Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one.
“Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man.
“Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one.”
It’s one thing to wish for the fall of the government or hope to oust it in the next Knesset elections. It’s quite another to “imagine” a world in which there is no Judaism and no Israel.
Israelis who harbor the latter dream are no different from Jew-haters abroad, despite their bleeding-heart finger-pointing at their genuinely patriotic counterparts. If and when the national camp emerges victorious yet again at the ballot box, the losers will have only themselves to blame.
