Thank you all again for your support in 5786. Your generosity has allowed me to push out more content and even hire, yes, a real, human editor (if anyone caught my typo last week). You still have a few days left to get 36% (double chai and my age) off paid subscriptions, now through the end of September. That’s the price of two overpriced shawarmas in Tel Aviv. Paid subscribers get access to Notes From Tel Aviv, my weekly series of personal dispatches from Israel. I’m excited to see what we can do at The Middle Ground in 5787. Also, stay tuned later this week for a full sit-down with October 7 hero and Knesset candidate Maj. Gen. (res.) Noam Tibon.
Wishing all those fasting an easy fast and a Gmar Chatima Tova.
— Eli
It feels like a different Israel. It was a time when no one could imagine Ben Gvir as a minister, or even a member of Knesset. It was January 4, 2017. On that day, a military court at the Kirya — the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv — convicted IDF soldier Elor Azaria of manslaughter. A few hundred meters away, a crowd chanted that the Chief of Staff of the IDF Gadi Eisenkot should be assassinated.
The words were “Gadi, be careful, Rabin is looking for a friend.” Oren Hazan, then a Likud MK, was out there with them.
“Gadi, be careful, Rabin is looking for a friend” - January 4, 2017
Back then he was considered one of the most extremist MKs in the Knesset. Today he would be just another Netanyahu-coalition lawmaker. The day before, Eisenkot had said that an eighteen-year-old in the IDF is not everyone’s child. He is a soldier, sent to do what the state sends him to do. That was the provocation.
Eisenkot now leads the polls against Netanyahu. In August, Netanyahu-appointed Shin Bet Chief David Zini turned down his party’s request for a Shin Bet detail, telling the Central Elections Committee the agency held no intelligence that anyone intended to harm him. The advisory committee recommended protection anyway.
The man who was threatened with Rabin’s fate and has been physically confronted during this campaign continues to campaign with private unarmed security guards his own party pays for.
On Saturday, two days before Yom Kippur, Isaac Herzog announced he was expunging Azaria’s record, citing the time that has passed, the sentence served, the statute of limitations, and a man’s wish to work.
The army had told him not to.
The Military Advocate General’s office, the Personnel Directorate and the chief of staff all reviewed Katz’s request and came back the same way. Ten years on, Azaria has never expressed regret or taken responsibility. Rivlin refused an earlier version of the same request, arguing it would damage the resilience of the army and the state.
No one is disputing what Azaria did. Palestinian Abdel Fattah al-Sharif stabbed a soldier and was then shot. That is when Azaria entered the scene, about eleven minutes afterward, when al-Sharif lay on the ground with six bullets in him, and Azaria put one more in his head. The court concluded that Elor Azaria had not fired out of any sense of danger. He fired because he had decided the man deserved to die.
Katz says the expungement tells soldiers and their families that we do not abandon our own and do not leave anyone behind. Interesting…
On August 29, 2024, the security cabinet voted to hold the Philadelphi corridor rather than agree to a hostage deal. You’ll remember Netanyahu said that corridor was of utmost importance. Then-defense minister Yoav Gallant was the only minister who voted against. Two days later, the army recovered six bodies from a tunnel under Rafah. Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Eden Yerushalmi. Carmel Gat. Alexander Lobanov. Almog Sarusi. Ori Danino. Forensic investigations found that they had been shot at close range within 48 to 72 hours of the troops reaching them. Three of them, Goldberg-Polin, Yerushalmi and Gat, were on the humanitarian list under the framework Israel had agreed to that July.
They were left behind.
Israel hasn’t left the corridor since, and there’s been no indication it plans to.
Now, President Herzog called his decision one made in the spirit of these days, alluding to the High Holidays, when Jews traditionally ask God for repentance. The Hebrew word is teshuvah. Teshuvah has a sequence; I remember learning it in elementary school at Vancouver Hebrew Academy. You recognize what you did, you regret it, you say it out loud, you undertake not to do it again. The army’s objection, after a decade, is that Azaria has never done the first three. It is not Herzog’s job to do; it is Azaria’s, and he has refused to. Elor Azaria broke the IDF rules in the IDF uniform, and the army is still saying so this week.
But the case wasn’t just about Azaria. It was about who ultimately decides, it was about where the IDF was headed and what it meant to be an IDF soldier. Azaria made the call that this man deserved to die, and the verdict was that call was not his to make. On Saturday the state reversed itself, over its own objection, with the IDF opposed, five weeks before an election.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, who protested for Azaria after his arrest, called Saturday’s announcement moving and joyful, asked the chief of staff to put him back in uniform, and told Herzog to pardon the prime minister next.
Days after the verdict against Azaria back in 2017, Israelis were called to Rabin Square for a rally against incitement, after the threats against Eisenkot and the judges. “We must all go out tonight,” Herzog wrote beforehand, urging people to attend, “to issue a clear and unequivocal call to stop the madness and fervor, and restore sanity and tolerance to this country.” He was the opposition leader then, and now he's the one who cleared his record. That, more than anything, is a powerful indication of where we are.