Macho Zionism Kills 10 Teens - Weekend Holyland Update
Zafit Creek, where 10 pre-military prep-school students and applicants drowned in a flood on Thursday Photo: ekeidar CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikipedia
Whether you're a total believer in all it represents, or a vehement detractor of everything to do with it, or anywhere in between - Zionism is an amazing story. Within 150 years, the world's scattered and vilified punching bag came together, revived a dead language, took over one of the most strategic and religiously obsessesed-over pieces of real estate on the globe, and built what is, at least on the surface, a thriving first-world polity, with a GDP per capita rivaling that of mighty states such as France and Italy. Doing this required a massive feat of voluntary, collective self-indoctrination.
The Jew of the diaspora, before Zionism, was mostly barred, in most places and at most times, from most occupations involving physical prowess. This was both self-imposed and externally prohibited. Jews did all they could to avoid military service in the lands they inhabited, because the Gentile-majority militaries, heavily Christian in their underpinning ethos, afforded a Jew no way to observe his religion. Nor did most Christian sovereigns want their despised-if-tolerated Jewish minority to be martial. While in gentile societies it was the mighty warriors or those who inherited great wealth (usually obtained in the first place by mighty warriors) who got their pick of desirable mates to breed with, among Jews that prerogative was reserved for the greatest scholars. The wealthy Jewish merchant did not seek out the child of another rich man as a spouse for his own, to solidify dynastic wealth and community influence. They sought the greatest scholastic prodigy, or at least the child of one. Gentile boys were encouraged to aspire to the sort of dominance that comes from strength and aggression. In Jewish society, those very traits were looked down upon. At a time when the vast majority of the world's population was still rural and working the land, the Jews in most countries, definitely in Europe, were a distinctly urban people - be it in the large cities or their own little towns. The average Jew could run circles around the average gentile in a logical or fact-based debate, but the average Gentile could fuck the average Jew up in a fist-fight. This, added to the fact that they were persecuted as a group, created an image of Jewish people, held both externally and internally, that was baked in for many hundreds of years.
One of the first orders of Zionism was to fundamentally change that. You could be a nation of pale, frail egg-heads as an anomalous minority in someone else's land, where that someone else grew the crops and defended the borders. To have your own country, you needed to be about that life yourself. In 1898 Max Nordau, co-founder of the World Zionist Organization along with Theodore Herzl, coined the term "Muscular Judaism", calling upon the nation to re-discover the benefits - bodily as well as moral - of physical exercise and conditioning. It was around that time (1895) that the first Jewish sports club, Maccabi, was formed in Istanbul. 1904 saw the beginning of the second, and arguably most formative, of Zionism's migration waves, the "Second Aliyah". Unlike the conservative (and largely Orthodox) "gentlemen farmers" of the first wave, who thought it was plenty and sufficient pioneering to buy land and pay Arabs to actually till and plant it while they sat around giving orders, the second wave consisted of pretty radical socialist activists, who gave up on Mother Russia after the pogroms of the early century, and decided to build the model classless society in the backwards wilds of Palestina.
These pioneers knew that if they didn't work the land themselves, it wouldn't truly be theirs. So they set out to "conquer the labor" - seeking to replace the native Arab laborers in all the Zionist colonies, and any new ones to come, and make sure that Jewish immigrants do the actual work of re-establishing their ancestral presence in the land, from the organizing and financing to the digging and brick-laying. So a generation of spindly, bespectacled Jewish boys forced themselves and their children to become sturdy farmer-warriors, who can swing a shovel all day and march with arms and munitions, engaging in bloody combat as needed, in a fight for survival.
2nd Aliyah pioneers. Bookish lads, forcing themselves to be farmers (Photo source )
RADICAL CHANGE IN THE MIND
This radical change could not be accomplished merely as "something we need to do, though it goes contrary to our inclinations". Like other aspects of becoming a sovereign polity ex-nihilo, this required a whole-hearted embrace. This spread to a deeply-fostered value of self-sacrifice in all regards. Taking on hardship and danger became a positive in its own, rather than merely something you had to be tough enough to do if need be. Thus, in military training, from pre-State paramilitary groups to a good few years into statehood and the IDF, there was a thing called "water discipline", where recruits were forced to march in scorching weather with heavy gear and little to no water, even when there was no problem to carry sufficient water, and even when it was indeed carried, but only as an absolute last resort (often when it was too late). This was supposed to toughen you up. What it did was cause needless physical harm, from liver problems to brain damage from dehydration to death. This asinine practice was ended in 1959 (officially, anecdotal personal experience of it from later times abounds), but the ethos at its heart lived on.
A similar case of "the means of collective liberations becoming trappings and rituals" can be found in the quintessential Zionist myth of draining swamps. See, when Zionism began, and contrary to what Israel propagandist will tell you, the land wasn't empty. It was sparsely populated and less than effectively managed, but most of the land worth anything was already taken and cultivated. To create Zionist colonies, we Jews had to buy useless swampland, and then put in the immense labor - economically senseless under normal circumstances - of draining those swamps to create pretty fertile soil we could plant crops in. Now, while draining swamps was both necessary and worth of praise down the ages in terms of a tough undertaking few believed could be done with those means, it sadly became "something you do if you're a Zionist". So a few years after Israel was established, what does it do? It drains the Hula Lake, which indeed included pestilent swamps that were a barrier to holy Development, but was also a unique and vital wetlands ecosystem, the kind you limit but preserve, not dry out entirely. But that's what Israel did, and a staggering amount of unique flora and fauna died from the country forever.
Another aspect of becoming the people of this land was an ethos of knowing and traveling the country, from the main roads and sights to the smallest of nooks and crannies. "Knowledge of Country" ("Yediat HaAretz" - ידיעת הארץ) is still on the curriculum in many schools, as a topic completely separate from mere "geography". Geography class is about facts which you are not expected to feel one way or the other about, whereas "Yediat HaAretz" is about VALUES. Now, lest anyone get me wrong: I love traveling, and not just in comfort. I love hiking, and camping, and knowing the land you call "yours" and your surrounding countryside, its features and past, whether or not your current abode is "home" to you or not. I love all of that. However, as with many good things, interior tourism and hiking turned in a way from a good in their own right to a signifier of virtue and superiority. You had to love it (like you had to love folk-dancing) and do it at all costs, to be a "good Zionist". And yes, the unpleasant historical parallel you are recalling is correct, but not unique to that particular regime. Rather, it is a pretty universal feature of nationalism.
Zionist pioneers draining swamps in the early 1900s (Photo: Kedem Auctions )
THE TRAINING GROUNDS OF THE NEW ELITES
In 1977, power changed hands for the first time in Israel's history. The Labor Party, which had founded the country and most of its institutions and had ruled these institutions, uninterrupted, since 15 years before the establishment of the state to the 29 after that- was dethroned. The long-vilified Likud party - more nationalist, more sympathetic to religion, vehemently "free market" - took the wheel, and with it came the more radical wing of Religious Zionism (the mainstream wing of which had always been a coalition partner of Labor) to positions of influence. By 1988 they were feeling confident to start preparing a generation of leaders that would be groomed to take over key positions of influence in the country and further promote the religious right's agenda. That year, the first religious "pre-military prep-school", the "Sons of David" institution in the illegal settlement of Eli was founded[1]. These institutions were so successful in sending their graduates on to consequent military service - and therefore prominence in civilian life as well - that in 1997 the first "secular" pre-military prep-school was founded.
[1] The one whose leaders are in the news regularly of late, for hating on gays, women, non-Jews, democracy and anything to do with the spirit of enlightenment, really.
Ad for an instructor job at a pre-military prep-school "in the spirit of Religious Zionism". Fun and indoctrination. (Photo: Shatil )
These institutions need joint recognition from the ministries of Education and Defense to call themselvees "pre-military", but once they get it there's precious little supervision on content and conduct. Today there are 52 recognized "mechinot", and a few dozen unregistered ones. About half are ostensibly "non-religious", but almost all of those have the strengthening of Jewish identity (along with "Zionist" and "Israeli") as a declared value and goal. They'll boast of sending their kids to meet all sectors of Israel society - even Druze and Bedouins! But what about non-brothers-in-arms Arabs? The vast majority of Muslim and Christian Arabs who are decidedly non-Zionist? Oh, well, you see... about that... Yeah. No. At these "non-religious" prep-schools (most of which tend to be helmed by national-religious men), they combine (excellent and admirable, by all acounts) community volunteering with leadership classes and tons of martial arts, night-time open field navigation (often half-assed, in which kids get lost for hours), extreme hiking and the like, activities geared at eventual combat service in the IDF.
At these prep-schools, even the "secular" ones, the posturing ethos of needless hardship and danger is alive and well. It is considered normal there to send 17-18 year-olds on two day trips with enough food for one meal and maybe four hours of sleep in 48, to sleep on the ground outside on particularly cold December nights, with potatoes for supper but without the means to even start a camp fire effectively so you have to eat them raw[2], and if you complain you're "soft", a "city boy/gal" and "the reason this country is in the shape it's in." Another part of the ethos is that as their field trips are not designed merely to better know the country, but to prove a martial capacity to be in the field in all conditions; consequently, there's a strong ethos of "We don't cancel field trips."
[2] all these examples from stories shared by graduates of "secular" and "humanist" prep-schools on twitter
INEXPRESSIBLY BAD JUDGMENT
Which brings us to this weekend, or more precisely to Thursday. We had been enjoying actual weather in Israel the past week, with serious rainfall deep into April. Contrary to the annually-shocked, it almost always rains some in April, but it's usually light showers with temps around 60. This was low fifties, forties or even thirties at night some places, and driving rain all over the country in long bursts over several days.
Now, I'm not a graduate of no pre-military prep-school. Hell, I didn't even last the full three years in the actual military (long story). Point is, I do love my country and know a little bit about it, and I particularly love hiking in the Judean desert and know that while most of the year your big danger there is sun-stroke, which is something you can effectively protect against with the proper attire and plenty of water with you, there are a handful of days a year when it actually rains in the desert, and on those days the desert rivers, aka wadis, which are usually bone-dry, flood and flow furiously, eroding their walls in pretty big chunks and tossing anything floating within them against the canyon walls so hard that not even scuba gear will save you.
A flood in a creek in the Judean Desert. No joke.
It doesn't even have to rain right where you are for there to be a flood right where you are. It can rain several dozen miles away, an hour before. See, the Judean desert is mostly Loess sand and similar types of soil. These types of soil seal upon first contact with water, so that further rainfall can't soak into the ground, so it flows on the surface, creating a flood. This is why almost nothing grows there, because even the little water available won't get more than a few inches into the ground. Now, water may seep those inches, before reaching the strata that's firmly sealed. Then it'll start to flow underground, and burst out to the surface wherever the chance formations of millions of years created the opening - usually in one of the riverbeds, which will then experience a flash flood even if there's no rain over it.
So, what does some dumb motherfucker who runs Bnei Zion (Sons of Zion), one of the most highly regarded "non-religious"[3] prep-schools in the country, decide to do? Yup - to NOT cancel a field trip for students at his instutiton and kids applying to go next year, along the bed of the Zafit Creek (a steep and narrow ravine, as you can see above) in the Judean Desert. Despite flood warnings every day for four days on the news, despite the prospective hikers themselves disbelievingly questioning the decision, the word from the organizers via text was firm: "Of course the trip is still on! We are well prepared. It'll be wet and a real experience." Swinging dick, toxic masculinity, clown machismo. "Me tough! Nothing can take me down!" Bitch, Mother Nature crush yo dumb ass with the twitch of an armpit muscle and not even notice.
10 kids died, beautiful promising young lives, including one hero (a student, not a guide or instructor, i.e. responsible adult) who kept pulling his friends up to safety until exhaustion overtook him and the current swept him away. Some of the victims exchanged prescient texts the morning of the cursed trip about how "I can't believe they're taking us there in this weather" and "we're going to die."
[3] founded and managed by graduates of the Religious-Zionist Bnei Akiva youth movement, though.
Text messages between one of the victims and a friend. "This doesn't make sense... we're gonna die. I'm serious." (Photo: Israel Channel 2 News)
Now, seeing a flood in the desert is an amazing sight, one I have yet to experience live[4]. So is seeing a volcano erupt. Some people "chase floods" as a passion - from the motherfucking high ground, viewing it from a safe distance above. This absolute imbecile sent the children under his protection along the actual bed of the creek. I'm on pretty good terms with the English language, but I don't quite know the words to truly express what a wilfully mindless decision that is. Nothing can explain it but the placing of the toughness fetish, of "we don't cancel trips" over the most basic of realities and clear mortal danger. And if this placing of "ideology" and "faith" and "our willpower will overcome all" above simple realities seems familiar to you from such hits as "Israel's general conduct on the macro level", well, I can't say I don't feel ya.
Oh yeah - the inclement weather cost two more lives in the floods: a Bedouin kid walking home from school, and a truck driver who got overturned with his rig. All the television networks went to special broadcasts over the (truly horrible) tragedy of the prep-school kids. It dominated the news for 36 hours like a war had broken out. In all that time and loop after loop of largely the same information, and eventually names, you could count the number of times they mentioned non-Jewish victims - who weren't out seeking thrills or trynna become leaders through doing unnecessary shit, just trynna get on with their day - on the fingers of one hand. So little has been reported of their deaths that I can't find their names online. They're there somewhere, but... You feel me[5]. My apologies to the deceased who deserve that we #saytheirnames too. Make of that what you will.
[4] Now what you do, if you're what's known as a sane fucking person, is go a day or two after it stops raining, when there's still water in the creeks, and the desert's carpeted with short-lived blossoms, but there's no danger of flooding.
[5] UPDATE: My boy on twitter, who reads Arabic and follows Palestinian data, provided me with those names: The 17 year-old boy was Qeis al-Hawashly, and the 34 yo father of 4 was Ayman Jabber. The 18 year-old hero, who already reached safety, could have easily scrambled another few feet up to be totally clear of danger, but instead remained and let his friend hold on to him and climb over him to safety, until he succumbed to exhaustion and got swept to his infuriating death, was Tzur Alfi. RIP.
This has been a special edition of the Holyland update. Thanks for reading and any love you care to share - not least in the form of comments and discussion. Be good and don't die for a damn hike in deadly weather. We believe you. You're tough.