The Danger of Ignoring Problems

And the folly of shallow Hasbara

Discussing pedophilia in the Orthodox Jewish community used to be unthinkable. (In some sectors of the community, it still is.) When people started to call attention to it, they were condemned as creating a chillul Hashem and giving fodder to antisemites. Eventually, at least in more enlightened sectors of the community, it was recognized that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Refusing to discuss the problem enabled it to fester and worsen; calling attention to it helped it be dealt with. As for the antisemites, there are those that you can never win with, but for more reasonable people, showing that Orthodox Jewry recognizes the problem and deals with it is far more effective.

The same is true for the violence inflicted by a small but far from insignificant number of Jews against Palestinian Arabs. Many people are adamantly against discussing it, for two reasons. First is that they are unaware of the extent to which it is a serious problem (and they do not even realize that they should not be opining on things while lacking knowledge about them). Second is that they think that discussing it empowers opposition to Israel.

Of course, added to this is that the problem is indeed very much exaggerated and wrongly used to delegitimize Israel. There are plenty of haters of Israel (including Jews) who use falsified stories, exaggerate the number of people involved, tarnish all residents of Judea and Samaria with the same brush, and ignore or deny the wider context of how the whole situation came to exist (i.e. because the West Bank of the Jordan was used to attack Israel in 1967) and why it’s so difficult to resolve (i.e. because of the 3 “no’s” of Khartoum and Palestinian rejectionism).

(For my own part, I regret using the term “settler violence,” because it feeds into the narrative that all or most settlers are involved, even though I always take pains to stress that this is not the case. I’m not sure what the best term is - perhaps extremist settler violence. As for the term “settler” itself, while some people object to it, many residents of Judea and Samaria refer to themselves this way. And we must keep in mind that the State has not annexed the land, for good reasons.)

In response to my last post on this topic, a prominent hasbara influencer with a large following declared me to be a “self-hating Jew,” a “traitor” and a “Kapo.” It’s shocking that someone could use such terms, and many people feel that someone who does so is not fit to be in a public position (and I am not the only person that he has wrongfully attacked). But putting the vile insults aside, where did this person’s heated opposition come from? The answer is that it’s both of the above factors mentioned. The person has no idea of the extent of the problem - he claimed that it’s just 50 people - and he believes that discussing it empowers opposition to Israel.

With regard to the extent of the problem, if only people would look into it before giving opinions. It’s not 50 people - it’s in the hundreds and possibly thousands. They describe the government - the most right-wing in Israel’s history - as “the evil regime” (shilton harasha) and they attack IDF soldiers. They boast of their violence and random property destruction on WhatsApp channels that you can see for yourself.

And it’s enormously consequential. I’ve heard soldiers and police officers bemoan how much precious resources need to be spent dealing with Jewish violence. An entire IDF battalion just had to be diverted to it. And, of course, it causes massive international damage, with consequences for our economy and military.

Does discussing it empower anti-Israel hatred? First of all, even if it does, that wouldn’t necessarily be sufficient counter the very valuable reasons to discuss it and place pressure on the government to deal with it. But in any case, one could counter-argue that it actually decreases anti-Israel sentiment. Because people who innately hate Israel will always do so anyway, whereas people who are on the fence and persuadable are likely to be more swayed by seeing that Jews acknowledge and denounce problems rather than deny them. And it also gives us more credibility when we explain that while the problem does indeed exist and is serious, it is not as huge as portrayed by Israel haters, many cases are distorted, the police are in the middle of multiple serious investigations which are under gag order so as to be successful, and it does not change anything in the bigger picture of why the overall situation exists and is so difficult to solve.

But for many people, these arguments fall on deaf ears. I just did a radio interview on the Zev Brenner show in which I presented all this, and someone called in and called me a rodef, a halachic category which means that I am a pursuer of Jews that people should kill.

We have to bear in mind that there are different types of people - on both sides. There are the tribalists, for whom everything about the home team is good, everything about the enemy team is bad, one must only ever cheer the home team, and nothing will change their minds. And then there are the more thoughtful people, who are able to recognize that even the overall good team can have problems, and will respect that team more if it recognizes those problems and tries to deal with them.

It’s time to join with those rabbis and community leaders who are taking this problem seriously. In the Hebrew-speaking world, while many people are unfortunately supportive of it and others are in denial, more and more people are waking up to the extent of the problem. The latest issue of Mekor Rishon had several articles denouncing it, and prominent (and pro-Bibi) journalist Amit Segal just described it as “Jewish terrorism.” Ambassador Rabbi Yechiel Leiter, a resident of Eli, just spoke out against it. The IDF is already suffering from a terrible manpower shortage due to the charedi refusal to enlist - it’s a tragedy that IDF soldiers also have to be dealing with Jewish violence.