For today, we had planned to post something about what I thought was a fascinating exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum, on alternative visions of Zionism. It’s a truly interesting exhibit, made all the more worth seeing because as the curators describe the works in most of the current exhibits, all the art is about the war.
When I looked at the art, it was clear to me that much of it was not about the war. But understandably, in today’s Israeli discourse, nothing is not about the war. Even in the work of museum curators. We’ll come back to that.
We’re delaying that because of two stories now in the news about the IDF. Neither story has people feeling too great about the army, which is why the clip above is more important than ever.
Yaron Avraham, a talented reporter for N12 news, sent out this series of tweets yesterday (they are Google translated here). The series is about a story he was breaking, part of the investigation into what happened on October 7, and particularly, why key people were missing from a middle-of-the-night meeting just hours earlier when the army began to get series indications that something was about to happen.
Read his tweets, and you’ll see that there’s a rat. There has been much discussion of how and why Aharon Haliva, the Head of Military Intelligence who has since resigned, was not more involved in those discussions. There was a story floating that he was on vacation in Eilat (entirely his right) but had turned off his phone because he didn’t want to be disturbed on his vacation (he denies that). In this alternate narrative, the issue wasn’t that he had turned off his phone, but that his assistant decided not to involve him. Really? He admits that he was part of the 3:00 a.m. conversation. How did an attack unfold 3 1/2 hours later, with all that intelligence info beginning to pile up?
This is but the beginning of the revelations. Avraham’s (translated) tweets are worth reading to get a sense of what he’s sharing with Israelis. (AMN is Military Intelligence.) The Google translation is hardly poetic, but the basic points are clear.
That was yesterday. Today, as if that was not sufficient, a new story.
The IDF has announced that it will draft only 4800 Haredim, even as it is extending regular military service to 36 months and is raising the age until when people have to serve in the reserves. Not in this story, but in others, the Attorney General has responded that the IDF’s decision to draft such a small number of Haredim is a violation of the law, and her office has asked for an explanation.
So far, the IDF hasn’t offered one.
The screenshot below, from Calcalist, is also Google translated. We’ve highlight a few things to quickly point to this other rat. To be sure, this is but a just-beginning story. Given that the Supreme Court has ruled, how, exactly, is the army ignoring that? Who’s pressuring whom and why?
Many of us, with not-so-young kids in and out of the army these days, have conversations about “who is really running this army that is sending them into battle? Who’s in charge? Is there an adult in the room?”
I don’t know. What we do know is that outside the room, on the front, there are many adults, many extraordinary people. The clip at the top of this post appeared on Israeli social media in a few places. The English translation isn’t great, but it was alreay there, so we didn’t redo it.
The translation is good enough to convey the point.
And it’s good enough to explain why many Israelis, looking down the road here, assume that the future political leadership of this country will be made of people whose names we’ve never heard of, who are now wearing olive green at the front, but will be in civvies one day, and then will continue their work of making this country better not from Gaza, but from Jerusalem.
An army increasingly under scrutiny, but still filled with extraordinary people