Why waste all this energy on small victories against the powerful right? Let them hit the wall. Hard.
The social networks today were all abuzz with a big victory for the left over the right. Bank Leumi, the largest bank in Israel, was forced to freeze a charity campaign when customers discovered that money they raised could have gone to Im Tirtzu, an extreme right wing political group. My colleague Dahlia Scheindlin has a post here explaining the issue in depth.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t join the party on Twitter and Facebook. To be honest – I just wasn’t that impressed. To me it seemed like such a small victory, such a minuscule battle in a much larger war. What was the point of all this gloating?
When I began to understand the meaninglessness of it all, I suddenly started to have thoughts about simply letting them win. Just do it, let the bad guys do whatever they want. If this is the best opposition we can give, why even bother? Why not just let it implode? As I struggled to find the words for these feelings, I came across a post by Shalom Boguslavsky, where he compares the current events in Russia to what is going on in Israel. For Hebrew readers, it’s a must read – as are all of Boguslavsky’s writings. He’s top notch.
Although the post was mostly a comparison, the final paragraph summed up perfectly what I was thinking about just hours before:
There’s a traditional Russian thing that should be considered. Is it really right to keep dealing with small defense battles? You know, “to succeed” in watering down the “silencing law”, so that the amount of damages to be paid for libel without proof will be multiplied by “only” 3 instead of 6? Stuff like that. Wow. Or maybe just let them invade, let them burn all their fuel and stretch their supply lines, let their tanks sink in the mud when the roads defrost in the summer. And during all this time, not block – but prepare. And in the end, don’t stop them in the middle of the way, but conquer Berlin. Napoleon said that one should never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake. The regime in Israel, like in Russia, is making a big mistake and re-inventing its opposition. Very good”.
I think it’s great. Because I don’t fall for the whole good cop, bad cop schtick that Bibi is feeding this country. The Danny Danons, the Ze’ev Elkins, the Tzipi Hotovelis, the Yisrael Beiteinus, they’re all horses pulling Bibi’s wagon full steam ahead. And Bibi just sits on top of that coach and leans back, pulls on the reigns every once in a while to make the passengers inside feel a bit safer. “Whoa, whoa!”, he makes sure the passengers hear his attempts to slow down – as he whips the horses to speed up. Faster or slower, it doesn’t matter. His direction is very clear.
I’m starting to think we should let the horses run. Stop putting those occasional speed bumps. They’re too much of an effort, and basically do nothing.
Let’s wait for them at the end.
Prepared.