Betrayed Again

Like most readers, I suspect, I was upset—but not that shocked—by the decision of the Naftali Bennett government to go back on the P.M.’s unambiguous pre-election promise to implement the 2016 agreement to create a space for non-Orthodox (i.e., non-gender-segregated) prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That agreement, which took years to hammer out, was suspended first by the Netanyahu government in 2017. But many of us, apparently naively, expected P.M. Bennett to be a man of his word and to unfreeze—and actually implement—the agreement when he came to power. And, indeed, after the initial announcement was made, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid did issue a statement in which he vaguely promised—without using anything remotely like the language of real commitment or intention—to implement the agreement sometime within the next four years. We’ll see. I certainly wouldn’t bet on it. In fact, I’ll be amazed if the current government follows through on its own commitment.

The responses were entirely as any savvy observer would have expected. Yes, it was almost amusing to watch members of the government scrambling for cover by blaming their own lack of moral backbone and commitment to their own commitment on anyone other than themselves. (For a survey of those efforts, I recommend David Horovitz’s Times of Israel article on the topic, which you can access by clicking here.) From the leadership of the Conservative/Masorti and Reform movements in Israel came the expected statements of outrage, some more angry and others more wearily depressed. From the leaders of those same movements outside of Israel, some statements issued were more disappointed and others more self-righteous (i.e., in the you-expect-our-unwavering-support-yet-you-feel-free-to-stab-us-in-the-back mode). But the common theme that surfaced in them all were intense irritation at being confronted with yet another broken government promise and, yes, a sense of true betrayal.

I personally feel trapped by decisions like this one: eager to be as supportive of Israel as ever and yet, at the same time, unable to explain to myself how the leaders of Israel’s government can betray their commitments so callously. And this from a government that spends a fortune to maintain an actual Diaspora Affairs Ministry headed by an actual cabinet official, M.K. Omer Yankelevich. At the very least, she should have resigned in protest. But I could not find a single statement from her office responding directly to the Bennett government’s decision to abandon the Kotel agreement.

To explain how the Bennett government can behave so callously towards the very people on whose unwavering support it also wishes to count, I would like to draw my readers’ attention to a historical personality only rarely considered a player in modern Israeli politics: Napoleon Bonaparte, whose two-hundredth yahrtzeit fell just this last May.

There’s a lot to say about Napoleon’s 1797 series of battles in today’s Israel. To understand what the man was doing in the Middle East in the first place, however, it is necessary to step back far enough to take in the larger picture of world politics at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1796, Napolean became the leader of France after undertaking successful campaigns against the Austrians and their Italian allies. But the real objective of French expansionism was neither Austria nor Italy, but England. Nor was the French government unclear about its ultimate objective, talking openly about the idea of a march on London. But invading the British Isles was something that was beyond the capacity of the French forces of the day and they knew it. And so Napolean, then not even thirty years old, was dispatched to fight the British elsewhere than on home soil by making the Mediterranean into a “French lake” that would not tolerate incursions by British ships, thus ruining Britain’s capacity to trade freely in southern Europe and northern Africa. And so ensued a three-year campaign to wrest control of Egypt, and today’s Israel, Lebanon and Syria from the Ottoman Empire.

There were pitched battles in Egypt itself, but also at Jaffa, Akko, Gaza, El Arish, Haifa, and in the Galilee. The whole campaign was a disaster for the French—1,200 killed in action, 1,800 wounded, and another six hundred dead from disease (click here for some fascinating details about that last number). Napolean returned to Egypt and was victorious in some sea-based battles there, but he was ultimately unable to dislodge the Ottomans or the British from the Eastern Mediterranean and finally returned to France in defeat.

There are bits and pieces of Napolean’s legacy scattered around Israel, particularly in Akko. But the key to understanding the larger story—which is far more complicated than the scaled-down version offered above (click here for more details)—is that none of this had anything to do with the Jews of France…or of Israel. This was where Napoleon tried—unsuccessfully—to annihilate the forces arrayed against him. But to try to explain the whole episode as something of tactical or even spiritual importance for the Jews of the Land of Israel, or for the history of the Land itself, is to miss the point entirely: it happened there, but it wasn’t about the place in which it happened. This was about France and England mostly, and a little bit about France and the Ottoman Empire. It just happened in Israel, that’s all.

And the same could be said of the campaign of the British and Australian troops in today’s Israel during the First World War. The Battle of Beersheva is mostly forgotten today—but anyone who visits the Australian War Cemetery in Beersheva and sees the graves of more than 1100 young men, all of whom died on the same day in October 1917, will never forget the experience. Joan and I were there a few years ago and it was beyond chilling and, in its own way, just as suggestive to me of the horrors of war as were my visits to Gettysburg or Antietam. But the Battle of Beersheva, fought on Halloween in 1917, was just one of many battles fought by the British against the Ottomans and their German allies during the course of the First World War. Mostly forgotten or ignored today—when was the last time you read anything about the Battle of Raffa (January 1917) or the First or Second Battles of Gaza (March and April 1917, respectively) or the Battle of Mughar Ridge (November 1917) or even, most amazing of all, the Battle of Jerusalem, fought in the final two months of that same year, 1917?—these were the battles that changed the face of the Middle East permanently and irrevocably. (The best book on the topic I can recommend is David R. Woodward’s Hell in the Holy Land, World War I in the Middle East, published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2006.) But the point is that this had nothing to do with the Jews of Israel or of anywhere, and even less to do with the Holy Land itself: this was just where the Brits encountered the Turks and fought to the finish, not unlike the way that same place served as the setting for Napoleon’s war against the Ottoman Empire.

So that’s how I’m feeling about this week’s betrayal by the Bennett government of the Kotel Agreement: it’s a huge slap in the face of all non-Orthodox Jews and yet it’s not really about us at all and has to do far more meaningfully with the nature of the coalition that brought Bennett to power, a coalition that cannot survive if it alienates the dark forces of ḥareidi fanaticism too seriously…but which sees only benefit to appearing to side with them on an issue that matters to them far more than it does to most secular Israelis. Like Israel itself in Napoleon’s day, we Masorti Jews are just the backdrop to the real drama playing itself out—not the actors with speaking parts and certainly not the playwright. Nonetheless, explaining the repudiation of the Kotel agreement as a function of the Prime Minister’s need to grovel before the ḥareidim doesn’t make it sting less or hurt less. Nor does understanding that the government’s actions were far more cynical than hostile make their betrayal of their own promise any more palatable.

My deep attachment to the State of Israel is not based on any specific personality, political or otherwise. It is a function of my faith in God and my Jewishness on its most basic level. I find it perfectly possible to be disgusted with the government and, at the same time, to feel as allied as ever with the nation it purports to govern and with its people. That, of course, is what the Bennett government is counting on. But how else can I feel?