Failure of the Elite

For those of you, especially in America, who are trying to figure out where Israel went wrong in this war, here is an article that spells it out.

Ari Shavit writes passionately in Haaretz that the current fiasco is "not a failure of the IDF but a failure of the elites that turned their backs on the IDF". He goes on to spell out that the average Israeli has stayed strong and realistic, but that the intellectual elite here has lived in a bubble - which has led to the dreadful mistakes made by the politicians.

Those of us on the religious right here in Israel have been warning about this for years - about 13 years in fact - since the beginning of the Oslo Accords. I can't remember how many demonstrations I have attended over the last decade (plus) where we tried to make our voices heard, and were dismissed as "propellors" - Yitchak Rabin's name for us (as in, keep spinning) - or as right wing fanatics, or religious fanatics, or racist settlers (you get the message). These names were meant to demonize us - and make it possible for the elites to dismiss our rational warnings as so many rantings.

Not exactly "kill the messenger" - but close. We watched the approaching train wreck with mounting fear, but we proved powerless to stop it. In the meantime we stood strong in Yesha (Judea and Samaria) despite the terror, and we sent our sons to fight alongside everyone else, even though we knew the policies of the elites in control of the government put our lives and those of our soldiers in peril.

I can only hope that those reading Shavit in Haaretz will agree with him - and we can work to fix the problems before we head into another disaster.