JEWISH WORLD

of the 49th state in the union with the reborn state of the Jewish peo- ple. When Palin visited Israel, she didn’t expect to receive a thank you from the descendants of the Alaska Airlines passengers on its Aden-Tel Aviv route. She went to the Western Wall and prayed and traveled the country like a normal tourist enjoying the beautiful state built by the communities of Jewish exiles who returned to their home- land after 2,000 years, communi- ties her state was privileged to have had a hand in bringing home. The story of Palin’s Israeli flag and of Alaska Airlines’ contribu- tion to its early fulfillment of the mission of Zionism came to mind recently after Israeli social media exploded with the publication of a video of an Israeli who participat- ed in another ingathering of exiles — ”Operation Solomon,” the air- lift of Ethiopian Jewry to Israel by the Israel Air Force in 1991. The videos featured retired Brig. Gen. Amir Haskel, who served as a cargo pilot in that oper- ation. Today Haskel leads the left- ist protests against Netanyahu. In the videos, Haskel is seen scream- ing at police officers whose fami- lies came from Ethiopia and who tried to restrain him in recent pro- tests outside the Prime Minister’s Residence in central Jerusalem. “I brought your parents to Israel!” Haskel yelled at a female officer in one clip. “You should be ashamed of yourself! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?!!” The second video showed him doing the same thing to a male officer. Haskel and his comrades have staged wild protests against Ne- tanyahu outside his official resi- dence in Jerusalem, his private res- idence in Caesarea and throughout the country for the past several months. They have repeatedly and deliberately broken legal restric- tions on gatherings duly passed by the government and Knesset in attempts to fight the coronavirus pandemic. In the videos released recently in news coverage of the protests for the past six months, Haskel and his comrades badger and attack police, insisting that every- one who attempts to constrain their protests due to concern regarding the pandemic are “anti- democratic,” and indeed, enemies of the state that they did so much to defend during their military service. I n other words, Haskel and his leftist comrades maintain that their past service to the country puts them in a privileged position in Israeli society. In their view, the laws enforced against their fellow citizens should not be enforced against them because without them, there wouldn’t be an Israel. Haskel has been the darling of the media for the better part of the past year. But since the videos were published, he has been the object of withering criticism. Most of the critics have focused their attacks on his apparent racism and inarguable condescension. But there is a more distressing, and foundational, aspect of his behav- ior. Haskel effectively serves as the commander of the Left’s ground forces in its comprehensive cam- paign to vilify Netanyahu and his supporters. Haskel’s pitch to the country is that his delegitimization of the lawfully elected prime min- ister is legitimate because his story is the personification of Zionism in action. He wrapped himself in Zionist glory when he screamed at the police officers who tried to enforce the law and break up his unlawful protests, “I brought your parents!” But his behavior demon- strated that he has less understand- ing of Zionism than Alaska Airlines and the citizens of “the Last Frontier.” The police officers owe him no gratitude. If anything, he owes them gratitude. By bravely main- taining their devotion to Judaism and the Jewish homeland through thousands of years of exile, the Jews of Ethiopia gave him the opportunity to take part in fulfill- ing the vision of the prophets and ingather the exiles “on the wings of eagles.” And that’s the thing of it. The fight Haskel and his entitled com- rades wage against Netanyahu and his supporters isn’t about who should run the country, it’s about the purpose of the state. And it is the great tragedy and failing of leftist Zionism that they are wag- ing this battle. T he grandparents and great grandparents of the likes of Haskel and his comrades were Labor Zionists who came to Israel in the early decades of the twenti- eth century to rebuild the Jewish commonwealth. True, they wanted the future state to be a socialist state. But they didn’t come to Israel to live as pioneers because they were socialists. Like the Jews from Yemen and Ethiopia and from the four corners of the earth, they came because they were Jews. Their specific Zionism was a reaction to the failure of the European emancipation that brought about mass assimilation of Jews on the one hand and the rise of modern, exterminationist anti- Semitism on the other hand. Had Haskel’s grandparents wanted to live for their socialist rather than their Jewish ideals, they would have immigrated to New York and founded labor unions and pushed socialist policies as so many Jewish socialists from eastern Europe were doing at the time. Now, revoltingly, a mere hundred years after their forebears began arriving at the ports of Jaffa and Haifa, and 29 years after “Oper- ation Solomon,” Haskel and his comrades have lost contact with their mother ship. “Zionism” for them is not an article of faith or even an ideological position. It is a marketing tool they use to present themselves as the rightful rulers of Israel. For the past decade, leftist parties have used it to hide their radical positions. In 2015 the leftist party called itself “The Zionist Union” while pushing a post-Zionist plat- form. In 2019, the leftist party called itself “Blue and White” to hide its ideological nihilism and blind quest for power. The “Ingathering of Exiles” ( kib- butz galuyot ) that captivated the imaginations and steered the dreams of Jews through millennia of persecution, expulsions and massacres is for Haskel and his col- leagues merely the name of a high- way junction in Tel Aviv that they send protesters to block on a semi- regular basis. Haskel instinctively attacked the police officers as ungrateful wretches because he either forgot or never really understood the pur- pose of the country. For him, the fight is about taking power away from the irritating Jews who keep faith with his grandparents’ vision and seizing it for himself and his friends in the name of his grandpar- ents’ legacy. A side from the media that gives slobbering coverage to anyone who opposes Netanyahu, Haskel and his comrades’ most powerful ally in their lawbreaking, contemp- tuous protests is Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit. Like them, Mandelblit uses loaded language to try to give an ideological veneer to his self-aggrandizing behavior. Mandelblit’s contempt for the public was on prominent display last month in remarks he made at a Rosh Hashanah toast to his subor- dinates. Referring to himself as the “guardian of democracy,” Mandel- blit spent most of his speech attack- ing his critics, who view his deci- sion to indict Netanyahu on bribery and breach of trust charges for his alleged efforts to win positive cov- erage from news outlets as legally and normatively defective. Di- inishing studied criticism as mere background noise, Mandelblit said derisively, “the windows [of this building] are sealed off from the noises outside.” Mandelblit expressed pure con- tempt for Israel’s elected leaders, whose criticism of his actions he attacked as anti-democratic and worse. He referred to Public Security Minister Amir Ohana’s criticism of his behavior as “a ter- ror attack against democracy.” But then at the end of his remarks he turned to the anti- Netanyahu protests organized by Haskel and his comrades. Re-fer- ring to them, Mandelblit waxed poetic about the “foundational right to protest” in a democracy. In recent weeks Mandelblit’s subordinates have instructed the police not to charge Haskel and his fellow Netanyahu haters for breaking the laws in the course of their protests, lest their democratic right to protest be trampled. The glaring contradiction in Mandelblit’s remarks — his seething dismissal of “noises from outside” made by those who oppose his deeply controversial efforts to criminalize otherwise lawful political behavior to oust Netanyahu from power on the one hand, and his self-righteous defense of the “foundational right to protest” in speaking about Haskel and his band of Netanyahu haters on the other — is dis- turbingly similar to the tale revealed by Haskel’s videos. Haskel rejected the foundation of Zionism by demanding the gratitude of the children of Ethiopian Jewry while glorifying the contribution he made to one of its greatest triumphs — the airlift of Ethiopian Jewry to Israel. Mandelblit revealed his contempt for democracy by rejecting the legitimacy of elected leaders while upholding the right of anti- Netanyahu protesters to break the laws in the name of “democracy.” Haskel’s anti-Zionist outbursts and Mandelblit’s anti-democratic speech show that Israel is not in the throes of an ideological battle between two competing ideologi- cal camps. Instead, a large major- ity of Israelis joined in their dedi- cation to Zionism and democratic norms is being assaulted by an aggressive, hateful and arrogant minority whose leaders cynically exploit Zionist concepts and the language of democracy to under- mine both to advance their naked, nihilistic bid for power. Caroline Glick is an award- winning columnist and author of “The Israeli Solution: A One- State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.” Infamy continued from page 4 “I brought your parents to Israel,” Haskel yelled at an Ethiopian officer. “You should be ashamed.” 26 JEWISH WORLD • OCTOBER 16-22, 2020 Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, Haskel and his fellow protesters’ most powerful ally, is leading the effort to dislodge Prime Minister Netanyahu from office by legal means, although some describe it as a “coup d’etat.”