The Demise of the Yiddishe Kup

In case you aren’t following it, Gaza is leaking. You can bet that the tide of humans rushing into Egypt will have monumental consequences for the Middle East and Israel.

For some time I’ve thought that the Jews (full disclosure: I am one) have lost their Yiddishe Kup. By tradition, a Jew with a Yiddishe Kup is smart, savvy, and capable of finding creative solutions to what seem like insoluable problems. A yiddishe kup is especially useful to survival.

A recent article in Ha’aretz, an Israeli newpaper, laid out the strategy of collective punishment recently undertaken by the Israeli government. I urge you to read the entire article, but this excerpt hit home:

“When Israel cut fuel shipments to Gaza this month, the same defense establishment which had been given weeks and months to plan for the step, found itself taken aback that water and sewage pumps stopped
working not because of Hamas subterfuge or Hamas hyperbole, but because Israel stopped supplying fuel to Palestinian power plants. Many Gazans, non-combatants, were left without water in a public health crisis akin to a natural disaster.

There's a certain perverse justice to how this works. When it comes to terrorism, the Palestinians practice intentional killing of civilians. When we kill civilians in the context of military activity, we view it as incidental, the regrettable by-product of necessary self-defense. In the case of collective punishment, the opposite situation obtains. We practice collective punishment as an intentional tactic, believing it to be more humane than outright invasion and carpet bombing holding, as we do, to the preposterous hope that after 40 years of failing at it, we will persuade the people of Gaza to bring their own militants to heel.

The Palestinians who fire Qassams, meanwhile, see them not as collective punishment but as legitimate self-defense, employed because they have no other alternative. They are wrong. Dead wrong. And so are
we. Collective punishment is abhorrent. It is morally reprehensible. It is functionally self-defeating. It destroys the moral fiber of those who order it,practice it, countenance it, turn a blind eye to it.”

This was written on January 15th. Last night, Gazans blew a hole in the wall and streamed through it, like water through a Dutch dike. No one has a finger big enough to plug this hole. Clearly, the leaders in Israel have lost any semblance of a yiddishe kup.

Worse, it further cements my fear that as long-term occupiers, we have become morally bankrupt. Amira Hass writes in Ha’artez today, an outstanding article on how escalation works, the selective memory that helps Israelis recognize the flaws in their strategy. Writing “They Neither See Nor Remember” she states:

"Those who champion escalation ignore the fact that hermetic closure of all crossings into Gaza reminds the world what it loves to forget: Israel is the occupier. The aggressor. The learning disabled and the short-sighted do not see the moral - and not just security - bankruptcy of the escalation policy. Others will do that in their place."

No question. This will come to bite us in the ass. I do not pretend to have a solution, but it is clear, as many Progressive Israelis believe, we have lost our minds — our Yiddishe Kup. We have emulated our US ally to our detriment, forgetting that in the end, all occupiers lose. And in the process, we will also lose our soul.