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Comment by idontwantthis | Hacker News Reader

What confuses me most about Israel’s rising political turmoil is that the faction driving for violence against Muslims (the ultra orthodox) are also exempt from the military.

Say they get everything they want and they become an apartheid, theocracy…how do they expect to survive? Who will defend them from their neighbors and from their Muslim citizens?

How would the country with arguably the greatest need for a strong military in the world expect to continue existing if their most powerful and populous group refuses to fight?

We’re seeing the problem already with reservists resigning in large numbers in protest of the PMs power grab.

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Yours is a frequent misunderstanding outside Israel. Ultra-Orthodox aren’t necessarily driving for violence against Muslims, and some Ultra-Orthodox groups are anti-Zionist. If you visit a West Bank settlement, you meet a lot of plain Orthodox, and also secular Israelis who are on the hawkish end of the spectrum.

When I visited the West Bank, I was invited in by a family who immigrated from former USSR on grounds of Jewish ancestry. They were were not religious Jews, in fact they kept Orthodox Christian icons in their home since that was their vague cultural background. They were attracted to a West Bank settlement just because of cheaper housing than in Israel proper.

Your statement has the same air of statements like "not every man is a sexist", yes but men in general are responsible for how men in general treat women. If Jews do not hold to account the extremist views that lead to murder and violence their brothers have then they are too blame as well.

Your post is needlessly strident and kneejerk, and your claim that an uninvolved third party has to take certain action to avoid blame is obviously not something that everyone would agree on. In any event, Israeli society is extremely divided and, indeed, half of it has been trying hard to hold the other half to account. This is obvious to any visitor to Israel who talks to a wide range of people. Protests have been going on for years, and the current wave of protests has been widely reported in the international news.

Don't Americans have some responsibility for the mass dead Iraqis? Whether they supported the war directly or not they sat by while their country waged war for economic reasons. Why is it ok to accept violence wrought by others? Good that some Israelis protest. But what prevents needless death and pain? What actions bring peace?

You are trying to hijack my reply and turn this thread into a debate on what actions should be taken, who is to blame, etc. Please don't use HN for political battle. The OP made a factual error and I corrected it, no more.

"Sat by" is doing an awful lot of work there. My recollection was not that many Americans actually "sat by" - it was quite divisive. Lazy support like those "support our troops" bracelets was of course positively supporting the war and thus shares in responsibility, but that was by no means the whole country.

He responded directly to my question about religious views plus military service.

> men in general are responsible for how men in general treat women

So many questions.

Why?

Does this rule apply to both genders? What about other things? Nationality, hair color?

If someone transitions into another gender do they lose the original sin that taints their original gender? Is Elliot Page responsible for the sins of men?

I didn't read the comment in any way like "not every man is a sexist", mainly because what the comment says is true - Israeli society is made up of very particular groups, and the political map is complex, its not a single vector of left-wing to right-wing or secular to religious.

The settlement movement is a mix of secular nationalist people and religious Zionist (a group that contains a lot of very religious people but is socially distinct from Haredi/ultra orthodox, and the difference is immediately obvious to anyone who is familiar with the groups based on their dress code alone).

There's even a political party that caters primarily toward immigrants from the former Soviet Union that is simultaneously staunchly secular and anti-Haredi but also right wing and nationalistic.

So I'm personally responsible if you rape someone, based on some nebulous concept that men and only men are responsible for policing men.

And then you choose the phrase "not every man is a sexist" it seems pretty sexist to me to lay the blame purely on gender lines. So I'm I also responsible for you spouting this nonsense?

(Assuming you're a man, but I don't agree with your pov, so even if you're a woman, I'll still call you out)

As they say, the fastest way to get an answer is to say something wrong. I appreciate the info.

The Religious Zionist Party ("faction driving for violence against Muslims") are a separate political bloc from the ultra-Orthodox. The former typically do serve in the army.

> What confuses me most about Israel’s rising political turmoil is that the faction driving for violence against Muslims (the ultra orthodox) are also exempt from the military.

That's mostly inaccurate. Most Haredi people don't "promote" any violence against Palestinians, since they don't see themselves as part of this conflict (they mostly identify as non Zionist), don't go to the army, and in general don't participate in any violence against Palestinians. You might be talking about religious zionists, most of their men actually do go to the army.

Israel is indeed a confusing place.

The Haredi (aka ultra orthodox) parties are not the key drivers of the settlement enterprise. They are mostly ambivalent to the whole thing, their primary focus is preserving their lifestyle, which is less about the land and more about everything else in the religion. In fact, just last week one of the Haredi politicians published a populist rant about how Zionism is terrible, the Zionists are the root of all the problems etc etc.

The two most right-wing parties in the parliament (headed by Smotrich and Ben Gvir, respectively) are not Haredi, and their constituents do serve in the military, by and large (although less than their secular counterparts, as the women don't have to serve and there are programs that allow abbreviated service for men as far as I understand).

It's complicated..

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