You and I, dear readers, are together trying to recover from the gross injury, insult and injustice of the Expulsion of 5765/2005, aka the Disengagement from Gaza and Northern Shomron. To do this we must ask a few questions. First, what made this evil decree possible? And second, what basic things can we do and must we do to change the tide and prevent these things from happening again as they did before.
At the end of the Six Day War the government announced that it would hand everything back if the Arab governments would just get on the telephone and say, okay, let's make peace. Shortly thereafter, Moshe Dayan, without consulting anyone, gave the holiest place in the world and the central locus of all Jewish prayers and yearnings, the Temple Mount, over into the hands of the Muslim Wakf. Thereafter followed a steady progression of withdrawals and shows of weakness. Israel was self-sufficient in oil resources which she herself developed in Sinai. The government of Israel in the separation of forces agreement after the Yom Kippur War gave over these oil fields which were already producing oil in commercial quantities to Egypt. That oil was ours, both because we won the land in a defensive war and because we got it out of the ground.
In the peace agreement with Egypt in 1978 Israel agreed to uproot Jews from all of Sinai, thereby creating the precedents that a) peace is made by conceding land to Arab states and b) that territory must be handed over Judenrein, without any Jews living in it. That is not peace. Peace is the state in which former enemies live together peacefully, not separated by barbed wire.
Most of Israeli opinion is convinced that we have to be on one side of the border and the Arabs on the other. But what about the so-called Israeli Arabs in the Galil and the Bedouins in the Negev? Some of them are outwardly as adamantly opposed to the idea of Israel as a Jewish State as are the Arabs of Judea and Samaria. The truth is that they all want to benefit from living in the modern, democratic state of Israel, where they have a better economic position and more political rights than Arabs have anywhere in the Arab world.
Whenever a gross injustice has been committed in the world, it is first preceded by a propaganda onslaught to prepare both the perpetrators and the victims for their proper roles. The perpetrators must be filled with anger and a sense of power, the victims with fear and a sense of powerlessness. This was the case in Nazi Germany, in the Soviet Union, in Turkish-controlled Armenia, China, Cambodia, Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Here there are no massacres or concentration camps, but the psychology is the same, just with a lower level of violence.
Now I'm finally getting to the point of "what we need". We need a Jewish institute for the study of media and propaganda. We need to bring the wisdom of Torah to bear on the questions of how media affect the senses and mold opinion, how media purveyors play on our expectations of the carrot and stick, pleasure and pain. We need rabbis and Torah scholars who will articulate the issues from the sources in the way that they can be understood by ordinary people in such a way as to provoke them to ask questions. This way they will be innoculated against propaganda and not swallow it whole. By the way, advertising is a form of propaganda, playing on fear of appearing ugly, desire to look beautiful and be loved and popular, taste physical pleasures and so on. The beginning of Rav Moshe Haim Luzzatto's Mesilat Yesharim warns us that true pleasure is only in the next world and that the pleasures of this world are an illusion. What would happen to the purveyors of junk food, fashion and the latest cars and their advertisers if a significant portion of the population had those thoughts in mind a little more of the time? Would there be an economic crash? Would we all learn to get along better with less? We need people to study these questions. Our communities are proud that they are just beginning to produce a corps of media people in news, literature, drama and broadcasting. But do they understand what they are doing, or are they merely going with the flow?
The answer remains to be seen. The question has yet to be asked.
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