What is the feline solution to the dispute over the reform?

On Israel and the West. A demonstration of a million cats demanding and meowing: De-mo-gra-phy!

I dreamed that the masses were shouting: "De-mo-cra-cy", and opposite them the masses were crying: "De-mo-gra-phy" (source)

What is the root cause of Israel's downfall? Israel's problem is that it identifies too much with its problem. And so it becomes its own problem, when there is nothing in it but its problem. Let's take the regime change, for example, is the problem the fault of the right? Maybe the fault of the left? Or, perhaps, the fault itself? Are Israelis more extreme than other nations? No, even less so. But they are more childish: the id and ego are stronger in society than the superego. Israelis are always worried about demographics, at first about that of the Arabs - and finally about the demographics of the Jews. Why? Because children are the upper class in Israeli society, the future. The ultimate Israelis. Therefore they (who are they?) are aggressive, selfish, insolent, ugly, dirty, uninhibited - and free. And their children are the most extreme children in the world. Dad buy me, mom serve me. And what is the children's society? The society of "brothers".

Israel is not a society of adults. It only maintains the fantasy of the responsible adult. But he started it. The whining and complaints - they are the hallmark since the desert. We hereby declare the establishment of a kindergarten. Independence, in Israel, is the idea of childhood (Me! Me!), not of adulthood. Therefore there is no responsibility. Hence the Israeli historical mechanism leads to infantility, and not to any progress. This is not a coming-of-age novel, but a board book. The learning is backwards - a journey to the self, to the impulses, to the subjective sensations. A journey away from external reality, to internal policy - and fantasy. The quarrels of brothers are the quarrels of childhood. But only in pretend, without a civil war, God forbid. And heaven forbid speaking about the connection between childishness and childbirth. Who is an Israeli? A child with a tembel hat. We are not hypocrites like the educated gentiles - we are direct, straightforward, we externalize ourselves - and do not internalize external reality. Our social contract is an experiment in the state of nature - a world without adults. A land desired by sons: here the pleasure principle has triumphed over the reality principle. Demagogy against pedagogy, the freedom movement!

The regime change is not a cause - but a symptom. And Israel is the identification with the symptom. Infantility is not only the domain of the right - the left is also infantile. Therefore it is unable to raise the only demand that the populist right could not refuse, for reasons of internal contradiction (or deny it - like reality, because it is not part of external reality but internal), and if the left had stood behind it, it would have won: the demand for a referendum on the regime change. Like the right, the left can only say: I want! I want! That is, to say again and again (what to say? to shout! and as loud as possible, because that's what will decide) what it would like - and expect to be given what it wants (the idea of demonstration, or even tantrum - to lie down on the floor on the Ayalon Highway and kick in the air). It is unable to conceive of demanding a mechanism of responsibility and consensus-building, that is, one in which it can also not get what it wants. The populist right, which claims that the people are behind it and that the majority decides and that this is democracy (direct!), would have found it extremely difficult to oppose a central and sweeping demand for a referendum, whose very existence would have been a victory for the left, in a win-win method: for the reform to pass it would have had to severely moderate itself, and if it didn't moderate - it wouldn't have passed. People (what people? children!) are averse to changes. But the left also wants to argue - not to win. The supreme Israeli moral imperative: just not to be responsible - but to cast responsibility. Is resistance the means, or perhaps the goal?

Why does such a trivial and obvious solution disappear from the discourse? From the media? Or from the understanding of our best sons? And when it flickers, it refuses to spread and be absorbed in hearts? Because it is self-policing. Super-ego. It requires sophistication - I'm not simply demanding to get what I just want, but something that the other side also identifies with, and sees as its source of legitimacy ("the people"). In fact, this is an intensification of the right's demand - rule of the people - and therefore it is effective. But what if we lose in the referendum, asks the left? What will happen if, God forbid, we don't get what we want? After all, our demand is what we want (tautology! isn't it?) - is it even possible otherwise, logically, or is it a (internal) contradiction? And one who is able to admit to himself - to accept the very possibility - that he might not get what he wants, what he "deserves" - is not a real child. Better to be a righteous child than a mistaken adult. The logic of the infant must be simple - this is its essence, and giving up on this is giving up on infancy itself: the soul bird has a bird's brain.

But from whom is the Israeli child running? What is his adult world that so deters him? Is the root his Jewish roots, in which the sons of the Lord your God, became (in His absence) quarreling brothers who turn the house upside down? After all, Jews have not lived under their heavenly father for two thousand years, but existed in earthly subordination to general society, and lived within it in a childish existence, under the mother society, father culture or the protection of the squire (who were often abusive parents). What is, at the societal level, the childish equivalent of civil society? The daughter company - the community. Unlike a nation-state responsible for its actions and master of its fate, the eternal Jew became an eternal child - and perpetually rejected: forever weak, dependent, unloved, stepchild, unwanted. And when such a one is liberated, does he want to be an adult and grown-up, like the gentile, or rather prefers to return to liberated childhood, where he can be a real child? What will happen to one who no longer desperately tries to belong and be loved, to the black sheep that has turned its skin to spots? For Jews, unlike Christians, God was not the oppressive parent (but perhaps the imaginary childhood friend). Who was the father? The West.

If so, the Sabra project should be understood in the opposite way to what was declared: the negation of the diaspora is not growing pains or normalization - but an Oedipal-infantile movement. This is not an adolescent rebellion against the father - but a childish rebellion. The negation of the exile is the negation of the West, which is: the negation of culture. For (and here it is appropriate to say the unpopular truth): there is no other culture. Contrary to all the flattering pluralistic beautification, there is no culture other than Western (in the true sense of the word, that is, a culture in which the sphere of culture really lives, and in which the concept of "culture" exists at all, in its cultural sense, that is, Western). The causality is reversed: it was not the judicial revolution that brought about the end of Israeli culture, but its (anti) cultural revolution, the diaper revolution of meow. And this was actually completed already about a generation ago, about three decades (does anyone remember one great work born since then and until now?).

Therefore, it's not such a pity about Israel, for Zion has not created anything worthy of mention or of value in the 2000s, and there is no scene here that would be a pity to disappear in any field. The high-tech enterprise of secular Zionism is a glorious enterprise about as much as the settlement enterprise of religious Zionism. It is all narrow-minded engineering trickery lacking vision (that's why it uses that word endlessly - and pretends, as all cultural pollutants use its name in vain), and success in it is materialistic and shamelessly nouveau riche and of no importance whatsoever. The Israeli dream is as hollow as Israel. It has no creative depth or real innovation but is applicative and placative - and indeed it's all applications and implementations. Not breakthroughs - but the most trivial applications that can be sold (as innovative). Its perception as the pinnacle of Israeli achievements and as an obvious miracle that must be preserved testifies to the low level and bestiality of the state more than any "reform". On the contrary, one can see the Jewish hope precisely in the renewal of traditional migration, and wanderings to the next station, since nothing will grow here anymore. Hence the rift created by the reform is actually an opportunity for creative destruction: the destruction of the high-tech enterprise and the transfer of Jewish culture (and Hebrew!) abroad, for its reconnection to the great culture - Western culture. Back to the great achievement that Judaism was in the modern era. We tried. It's time for soul-searching, to look in the mirror - and move on. Onward Israel.

Maturity is the ability to recognize reality - and give up. But what really happened to us around the early nineties? A whole generation of creators died, the last to create formal innovation here: Wallach and Avot, Leskly and Avidan, Aviva Uri committed suicide, the Sabbateans were stricken in their hearts - one star returned his soul and the other sold it to cursed Tanya, Paul Ben-Haim and Gershom Scholem were early, Levin and Perlov were late, Leibowitz the Yekke was precise, perhaps Infiltration or Life According to Agfa (very flawed works) were still of value, Keret (the promising child from that period?) fell silent and got stuck (as a child of course), and even the old ones became childish - Karavan went abroad to play with blocks, Gershuni with gouache, Zach faded, and that's about it... (did we forget someone?). And to tell the truth, one cannot find any cultural field other than literature (and especially poetry) in which Israel as a society had any significant achievement even before then. True, there have been some achievements in science and intelligence since then, but these are not achievements of Israeli culture and do not live in its sphere (and indeed their contact with it is negligible): the first is international - and the second is secret. Could there have been significant achievements in the world of yeshivas? Indeed there were. But they were not Israeli achievements. Nothing would have been missing in the world if the State of Israel had not existed in the three decades since. The generation of European-born and European-cultured children died, and who remained? The barbarian children and savage natives. But who are these Europeans anyway? They have no children!

How funny it is that the founder of Israel's central brutalization movement was a brilliant, refined translator, who would have been better off engaging in literature and not politics, and not being released from prison but finishing translating Dante. Jabotinsky wanted to expand Europe to the Euphrates ("the fashion of arabesques"), and got a Jewish-Arab state that buried the Western sensitivity that was in it - and in him, the bespectacled one. Israeli comedy is built on a vulgar popular Eastern figure who is astonishingly rude and runs over the Ashkenazi, and the West is, after all, primarily a certain aesthetic atmosphere, of what is appropriate and what is not, originating from the Greeks - not us. For what characterizes the Greeks? That same grace, which is lacking in the high-tech enterprise exactly like in the settlement enterprise, and that same aversion to ugliness, which is common to both the construction in the territories and the superficial construction of the Israeli engineer, of which he is proud - he cuts corners with irresponsible ease, an expert in shoddy work and improvises and progresses quickly and breaks things, without any comprehensive and harmonious understanding, or pretension to it. Beauty! For him it's a cynical expression. Israel is essentially an engineering achievement - not a spiritual one. Israeliness is an anti-aesthetic achievement, and therefore one should not be surprised by the disgust it arouses in Europeans.

After all, who is that West that Israelis love to look down upon? We're talking about about a billion people - in Europe, North America and East-East Asia - everything we have in our world is essentially their achievement. China is a spiritual dwarf compared to the West, while Jews contributed to the West like the French and Germans and English, but there are none like the Israelis to inflate with self-pride and delusions of grandeur due to the achievements of diaspora Jews - and to shame them boundlessly. Israelis will always blame the West for the Holocaust, and tell themselves that the most cultured nations turned out to be the most barbaric, in order to shed all cultural yoke. But in general the Holocaust in Western Europe (and even Germany) was a completely different phenomenon from the Holocaust in the East, with significantly higher survival rates, less cooperation and without real ghettos - Western culture did serve as a restraining factor. Why was even the total destruction caused by the war quickly replaced by an economic miracle, in all the Axis countries? Because it's easier to rehabilitate infrastructure than to build non-existent infrastructure, and so it is with spiritual destruction. But the Israeli will always tell himself that if only the IDF had existed it would have inflicted defeat on the Wehrmacht or defeated the Roman Empire, saved us from the West, and then we would light Hanukkah menorahs in the Temple on Christmas. Here I remained what I was once long ago. What else always brings me back to that forgotten childhood... Don't you see the spiritual superiority of the people of Israel over Greek material culture?

And here's a Jewish question: Why did the gymnasium really care so much about body aesthetics, no less than the aesthetics of the spirit (in musical education)? Precisely because it's about aesthetic education, and aesthetics is sensitivity to the whole, to harmony, to balance, to correct proportions (and hence it also has a deep moral meaning - ethics that stems from aesthetics), and therefore also to the combination of form and content, matter and spirit. In all of human history, there have been only three significant cultures, to which all the rest do not even come close in their achievements. Two of them were cultures of the Iron Age - Greek culture and Jewish culture, and their combination was modern Western culture. Do we "want" to be part of the West? The current struggle in Israel over the reform is between those who want to think they belong to the West and those who want to think they don't belong to the West, while both are engaged in make-believe. We have another country - but we have no other culture. The great mistake of Israeli education was not that they didn't teach the Bible, but that they didn't teach Homer, which would have allowed a healthy secular approach to the Bible as well: an aesthetic approach. Was the error a lack of "civics studies in high school", or not studying Plato's Republic?

But here we have no learning - we have education. And you shall tell your son became And you shall tell yourself, through infantile identification with the child, with all the mush and grandmother's tales, and not mature identification of the child with the culture. So who here is the light and who is the darkness? Maccabi against Panathinaikos (which is almost like Antiochus!). Did you hear, children? The steaming cultural poverty of Israel, which slid into general poverty of thought, did not stem from a lack of depth in the sources of Jewish or Hebrew culture, but from a lack of fusion with Greek culture - which would have hybridized with them into Western culture. There is no new culture - there is lack of culture. There is currently no more Jewish culture disconnected from the Greek, that is, from the Western. We cannot not be part (however angry we are about the Holocaust, which is known to be a result of Hellenism).

Yes - we have only one cultural option, and we have - never had - the possibility of establishing a new culture (Western? Eastern? Hebrew? Israeli? Judean? Canaanite?) from scratch. A great illusion. Hubris - and original sin - and now: tragedy, ending in catharsis. Hebrew can be written in Paris and also in Rome. Therefore, one should welcome the reform, which is an opportunity to refill the dwindling Jewish communities in Europe with intellectual forces and creative minds that were wasted here in vain and emptiness, and leave behind all the crap. With one last hope for Israel: that the great beast will not shame the Jewish brand with too many war crimes. Although Israel is an anti-cultural project, it has not yet completely disintegrated from human culture, even though the idea of "beautiful behavior" does not exist here. Morality is righteousness - self-justification - not aesthetics.

But only aesthetics (and not law) prevents free individualism from turning into childish egocentricity. Because self-aesthetics is the foundation of culture - and self-morality is the source of barbarism. A person behaves beautifully for himself, regardless of others, while moral behavior is for others, regardless of the person himself. What do the street beasts have to do with the house cat? They have neither elegance, nor cleanliness, nor nobility, nor delicate velvety fur. There is no grace. In the modern democratic regime, the demos is the id, the government and politicians are the ego, and the constitutional-legal system is the super ego. What wonder that Israel is trying to remove all restrictions on impulses? I'm already a real child - I'm coming down from the strings. There is no form to this behavior. Because formalism is limitations, aesthetics is environment and atmosphere, and the ideal of "beautiful" is located in the "surrounding lights". From the urban ugliness here, flowers will no longer grow.

And what if we are a foreign plant in the West? Anyone who asks this does not understand the essence of the West, whose strength is in its division, its decentralization, and the individual competition within it (the split is not a bug, it's a feature). Just like the political split and the constant struggle and competition between the poleis in ancient Greece, and the obsessive institutionalized competitions practiced in it from education to adulthood, both in athletics and in the fields of the muse (if only we had literary competitions as the tribal bonfire). How does the Greek celebrate? In competition. This is the ritual. And why, of all sports, did the Greeks concentrate on and fall in love with wrestling? Precisely because of the struggle - the most direct personal exposed (and naked!) and competitive confrontation with another person, body to body (even more than the dangerous boxing), in a zero-sum game by its very nature. Unlike running (time) or discus throwing (distance), there is no wrestling alone. This is the sport of subjects. Skin against skin.

And what prevents disintegration into atoms - and a war of all against all? The framework that preserved Greece and the West is the aesthetic view, and under it competition sheltered, like a mother over children, to the sound of flutes (and not tam-tam drums). The split in Europe and personal competitiveness were the learning engine, and sheltered under beauty concepts like a beautiful scientific explanation, fine art, belles-lettres, the beautiful lady, or the Enlightenment (beautiful!). In fact, this split is common to almost every known effective learning mechanism, until it was formulated in the fourth Nathanian postulate as competition for (female!) appreciation. And what was weak in the country? Strong evaluation mechanisms. There is no one to evaluate, because there is no aesthetic conception. Every rebellion against dad - needs a connection to mom. And when there is no aesthetics - there is no judgment.

For what is the source of the power of judgment? Not from the law, but from aesthetics, which precisely because it is not legality - the law stems from it. It is forbidden to lie because it is ugly, to spill blood is disgusting, and to steal is contemptible, just as it is forbidden to write clichés, to express oneself with pomposity, to create crude analogies or to squeak like a mouse. Aesthetics is a form for life - a way of life, therefore it cannot grow out of nothing - there is no synthetic aesthetics. The moment Jews disconnected from all cultures and societies of origin, no new culture was created. Only new crudeness. Not a melting pot - an ass hole. Not a fusion of exiles - mutual cancellation and destructive interference.

Culture is a learning system, which grows over generations, and it cannot have a zero generation (that's why a generation that is zero was born here). There was no dominant culture here that absorbed the immigrants, because everyone was an immigrant. But learning never starts from nothing, it must have a system. There is no meaning to learning from scratch, because there is nothing that makes it learning (precisely, and not a cat), except for the context of the system. Just as every learning move and sentence in this text is built on the previous ones, which give it its context. Including the first sentence. And if there isn't enough context, or common ground with the reader - it's just nonsense. Cat meow.

The common basis for all exiles, and especially after secularization, was narrow, and therefore aspired to the lowest common denominator, the state and ethnic and boureki, and not the aesthetic. And the only high common basis available to everyone in the world today - the great system of Western culture - was abandoned. Israeli "culture" focused on the lowest needs - food, security and reproduction. And Jewish culture in Europe, which was built over two thousand years, was destroyed in half a jubilee. And when you move away from the Greeks - the barbarians come. Straight from kindergarten. Demographics against democracy - the next generation.