If you blinked during the first few seconds of the video above, which was posted by YNet on its Facebook Reels, you missed the important part. So watch it again …
What you’ll see are two women wearing white shirts, being hurried away by police from a menacing crowd in Bnai Brak, a Haredi section of greater Tel Aviv.
What’s with the white shirts? That’s what many women soldiers wear under their uniforms.
So what happened to their uniforms? They took them off, hoping that the gathering crowd might get confused and not realize that they were the soldiers that the enraged Jews were hunting for. Why were they in danger? Because a huge, seething, menacing crowd of Haredim—who incorrectly thought the women were there to hand out draft notices—were after them.
The police came and extracted the soldiers. From Bnai Brak, right near Tel Aviv. Remember when we used to extract soldiers from some Arab village that they’d mistakenly entered over the green line? No more. Now, soldiers still aren’t safe in Arab villages, but they’re not safe in Bnai Brak either.
And the police? Note that they’re fleeing too. Not turning around and facing down the crowd. The police had weapons. Had this been Arabs, what would they have done? Perhaps, some people are asking, it’s time to spread that net wider?
Amazingly, the police (ultimately under the command of Itamar Ben-Gvir) had an explanation for the violence—the army screwed up.
Main Heading (Red): The Chaos in Bnei Brak
Main Headline: Tel Aviv District Commander Accuses: “The female soldiers passed through the city without coordination”
Sub-headline: The Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Attacked: “We will not tolerate harm to soldiers” | The reactions to the riots
The blame, they said, lay with the army (and not with the marauding Haredim), because the army should have coordinated with the police before sending soldiers into Bnai Brak.
But soldiers in Israel go everywhere … to get home, to the playground with their kids at the end of the day, to the mall. What, to protect Haredi sensibilities, the IDF should get permission to enter parts of Israel?
And what about when they are there to serve draft notices. Then it will be OK for the Haredim to attack them?
You can only say that if you’ve given up on the idea of Israel as a sovereign state.
Chili Tropper, whom we cite often in these columns, reminded his readers that this was no one-off incident, and made absolutely clear why it’s happening:
How crazy is this? To the extent that the Central District Police Commander says that “the army must coordinate its entry into the city with us.” A police commander says that IDF female soldiers need to coordinate entry into a city in the sovereign Jewish State of Israel.
How disturbed is this? To the extent that in recent months, Major General (Res.) David Zini, the Bnei Brak Brigade Commander, Avinoam Emunah, fighters from the Hasmonean Battalion, and now female soldiers have been attacked in Bnei Brak. This is absolutely not a one-time event. It is systematic anarchy.
How delusional is this? To the extent that in the name of religion, protesters set fire to a police motorcycle, overturn a patrol car, and burn tefillin and prayer books. The furthest thing from Judaism.
How extreme is this? To the extent that Haredi leaders have been commanding people for months to tear up enlistment orders, threatening to leave the country, dancing to the lyrics of the song “We will die and not enlist,” and comparing [the situation] to the Yellow Patch.
And then they wonder why female soldiers are being chased in the heart of Bnei Brak.
Many people on the political right and in religious camps came to the partial defense of the Haredim. Sure, they said, they went too far, but let’s keep things in perspective. No one was hurt; no one touched those women.
First of all, it’s quite possible that they escaped physical harm only because a few stray police officers came in to rescue them. But leaving that aside, imagine for a moment that it was your daughter, doing her job because she was called on to serve her country, facing a crowd like that. Would you say it wasn’t such a big deal at the end of day, knowing that the fear and the trauma of those endless minutes will likely stay with her for years to come?
I suspect not.
I would hope not.
The American armada assembled within striking distance of Iran is off most of the front pages in the US, but it’s most certainly not out of people’s minds here. Israelis are mixed. About 44% say they hope that Trump will attack, and many more agree that if the US does launch an attack, that Israel should join.
Almost everyone here knows that we can’t live with Iran having either nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles that can reach Israel. What’s amazing, even though people know that we’re likely to get hit badly if there’s a war, is that there’s a broad swathe of Israelis that has confidence that the army can and will do what’s needed, sooner or later, when the timing is right. And they support that, even if we get badly whacked.
Ironically, the existential threat about which most Israelis have neither confidence nor concrete suggestions is not external, but internal. It’s the Haredim who they worry might cause the state to collapse.
The Israel Democracy Institute just published (in Hebrew) a study about Haredim in Israel, Haredim in Israel 2050: Demographic Projections and Economic and Security Scenarios. In it, among much more, they illustrated varying projections of the percentage of Israel’s population that will be Haredi. There’s not a huge disparity:
In twenty-four years, about a quarter of Israel will be Haredi. If that’s really what’s about to play out, then the Palestinians just need to hold on. Some people reading this may be old enough to remember the days when Yasser Arafat would say that “the womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon.”
Babies are still the answer to their dreams, but now it’s not their babies that will make the difference. It’s ours.
The socio-economic-national contract with the Haredim is unsustainable. Everyone knows it.
The coalition knows it, too. But as even many Israeli conservatives acknowledge, to recall the days when Netanyahu was guided by what was good for Israel rather than what was good for him, you’d have to go back almost as far as Arafat’s quote. Not quite, but a long, long time.
Years of capitulation to Jewish and Israeli anti-Zionism are beginning to come home to roost.
What’s going to happen next time? What if the police don’t get there in time?
That is not a question that a functioning society should ever have to think about.
The next time you’re in Beit She’an, go to Falafel Zahava and give them a very big tip. Soldiers asked Hanouch Daum to pass this on, so why not help him do it?
“Hi Hanoch, we are a group from advanced training, Company 601 Combat Engineering, just about to get our silver berets.
We were on a culture day and and went to Bahalatz [the training base], and we stopped at Falafel Zahava in Beit She’an. 30 soldiers, and the owner didn’t let anyone pay – he opened a table [and served everyone] with such great love!
I’d be happy if you could tell the people of Israel about these righteous people and their big hearts. It gave us a lot of strength.”
