‘Remember!” – the ancient command that became a Jewish dictum, value, and norm – is in the news again, as what Moses decreed has now fallen into the able hands of his improbable successor, Miri Regev.
The Bible’s usage of this verb 169 times inspired a culture of memory which, according to historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, helps explain the Jewish people’s survival while powerless and landless (Zakhor, 1982, p. 5).
That is why the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre will be fraught with Jewish memories harking back millennia. Despite this cargo’s weight, our transportation minister’s memory has stormed the challenge, losing no time to show that she and the ruling party – despite the past 10 months’ shock, turbulence, and angst – have forgotten nothing and learned even less.
National commemoration is always complex – narratively, psychologically, and architecturally. The Vietnam Memorial, for instance, had to be redesigned after its originally dark, shallow, and faceless design sparked a public outcry for its arguable disrespect for that war’s casualties.
In Europe, the massive monuments commemorating World War I’s fallen, and their astonishing overall number – 176,000 in France alone – reflected a naïve quest to seal that trauma as history’s last war.
Flawed though they were, such projects reflected commemoration’s first prerequisite: solidarity. They tried, and managed, to show that what they saluted affected the entire nation, the way Washington’s World War II Memorial, a circle of 56 granite pillars, is designed to represent all 56 American states and territories, effectively saying: We were all in this together.
Ms. Regev begs to differ
ASSIGNED BY the cabinet to design the first anniversary ceremonies of the October 7 massacre, Regev did three things that add up to mind-boggling insensitivity, cowardice, and sheer idiocy.
First, she hastily introduced a plan without even consulting the communities that survived Hamas’s massacres. It’s hard to think of anything more inconsiderate, arrogant, and oafish one can do, or rather fail to do, in such a delicate situation.
The second decision Regev made was to plan a pre-taped ceremony rather than a live event with an audience. The third was to locate this ceremony in one town, Ofakim. Both choices mean that what guides Regev is not the good of the nation but fear of its wrath.
The idea behind a sterile, staged, and taped event is to avoid the public’s presence – physically, and even more so, emotionally. The choice of Ofakim is meant to distance the event from the heart of the massacre – the five kibbutzim along the Gaza border, where 245 Israelis were murdered, 100 of them in Be’eri alone.
Ofakim was also victimized, having lost 35 residents, and no one is belittling this sacrifice. However, Regev clearly chose it to diminish the centrality of the kibbutzim in this catastrophe. No one paid as dearly as they did, and this government is unwilling to confront this fact. The kibbutzim don’t vote Likud, Regev effectively says. Ofakim does. And for this government, what you vote for is more important than what you suffer.
The kibbutzim suffered, and still suffer, more than anyone, but Regev can’t bring herself to embrace them. And why would she? Her boss hasn’t attended one funeral of any of the slain kibbutzniks or paid a shiva call to even just one of their families.
Tragic though this commemoration saga is in itself, it is but a detail in a broader picture.
WHILE REGEV was fumbling the commemoration challenge in her office in the Transportation Ministry, across town in the Justice Ministry Yariv Levin was plotting to reignite – in the middle of a war – his constitutional revolution, this time by trying to choose the Supreme Court’s next president.
Evidently, Levin doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that the constitutional coup he attempted last year traumatized millions of Israelis. To him, as to Regev, leading Israel is not about bringing its people together but about pitting them against each other. If you didn’t vote for them, you are the enemy, even when the real enemy is firing rockets at the Jewish state.
And why would they think otherwise if the prime minister himself, in the middle of a war, accuses his own defense minister of “adopting the anti-Israeli narrative,” and bickers even with the IDF spokesman, after he said the aim of the war is to release the hostages?
So divisive, stubborn, and deaf are this prime minister and his party that they even ignore the admonitions of their own partners, the ultra-Orthodox parties, as their rabbis finger National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for being the pyromaniac he so patently is.
Understandably, then, the people who are unimpressed with this man’s eagerness to fan a religious war’s flames are the same people who, rather than feel, respect, and share political adversaries’ grief, try to deny its magnitude and manipulate its commemoration. Appeasement, reconciliation, and humility – not to mention repentance, or even just soul searching – are all alien to them, a foreign tongue’s exotic words.
What matters is not what the people feel but what their rulers feel, and what our rulers feel is that they might lose power, a prospect that leads them not to search their souls but to deploy the Ministry of Truth, deluding themselves that we Israelis, like Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984, will ultimately be persuaded to love Big Brother.
Well, we are not just Israelis. We are Jews. No matter what Big Brother, Ministry of Truth, or Ministry of Love stands in the way, we will do what Moses commanded us in his will: “Remember the days of old, consider the years of ages past” (Deuteronomy 32:7). It’s part of our Jewish armor, and no one will pierce it. Not even Miri Regev.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.
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