I hope that all your Seders, with their questions, recitations, foods, and rejoicing were satisfying experiences.
The Sages constructed the festive meal around the Paschal sacrifice. Since, at this time, we are not yet privileged to fulfil that Torah commandment, the last piece of matzah, the afikoman, is the final food eaten and nothing else afterwards. The Talmud relates that Rabbi Eliezer said, “One grabs the matzot on the nights of Passover.” This is a reference to hiding the afikoman for the children to find. The game of hide-and-seek and its anticipation keeps the children alert and participating they are encouraged by knowing they’ll receive a prize. And so, finding the hidden afikoman becomes a central element.
In Israel today, a lot of “grabbing” is going on.
We citizens have placed our trust in those running a “Seder,” that is, our state. It is a Jewish and democratic state, in that order, according to the law. We sit and listen and watch. We learn and even get to ask questions. We participate by voting and protesting. Yet, someone seems to have stolen the afikoman.
Afikoman as a democratic symbol
The afikoman, I suggest, is symbolic of our democracy. We expect our officials to act lawfully. We do not want appointed civil servants and the secret police to presume to set policy, lording over those we elect. We entrust them to guard over our rights – transitorily.
A strong advocate for individual liberty, Lord Acton wrote a bon mot in his famous 1887 letter, that “Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.” In my view, we are now observing a process of corruption by individuals appointed to positions of authority, attempting to replace the government’s sovereignty.
IN RECENT WEEKS, there has been no let-up in unexpected revelations. We have been exposed to the attitude of the Shin Bet’s Jewish Division director in his conversation with the police commander of Judea and Samaria. He assumes proof and evidence are of secondary interest, if any.
While the Prime Minister’s Office issued a response, stating that the recording represents a “real threat to democracy, leading spokespeople from the opposition, the self-declared “guardians of the gate,” as it were, glossed over the event, seeking to emphasize that those arrested, after all, were “settlers” and “pogromists.”
The investigators of the editor of this newspaper, in another instance, did not seem bothered about continuing to hold his cell phone without proper authorization nor whether it was moral or even legal to leak selected extracts from his phone, or phones of others questioned in the Qatar-Gate case. In contrast, when Labor MK Gilad Kariv was accused of an unauthorized leak from a Knesset Security subcommittee, almost two years passed before police took any action.
We are witnessing a perversion of the democracy we citizens thought we possessed. Furthermore, we assumed that the authorities, the administrative officials, and those of the clerkdom were protecting us from those seeking to harm our democratic way of life.
Can we conclude that those of a particular political outlook have limited rights? Do the law and the values of democracy not apply to them? Would these privileged officials and their supporters accept similar treatment, say, in the name of “saving Israel”? Is the secret police only supposed to protect those of the elites? Have they stolen the afikoman?
While there are many who dismiss the even slight possibility that there’s a Shin Bet-facilitated “leftist vendetta against the prime minister,” one must consider the opposing view. Since 1997 and the Roni Baron-Hebron Affair, I have counted over 25 different instances in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been targeted by law officers and judicial procedures with no guilt proven. As off-putting and distasteful as these cases may be – and do Netanyahu no credit – the evidence points to a concerted, ongoing effort to thwart the governments he has led.
If you can believe that Netanyahu is a “traitor” and an “autocrat” who is “destroying Israel,” as Dr. Udi Levy, formerly of the Mossad, asserted during an April 4 Reshet Bet radio interview, saying that he is to be questioned as one acts with a terror organization, you must accept the distinct logical possibility that the Shabak officers, certain figures in the judicial system, and police investigators can also be corrupt and immoral.
Unlike George Sala’s 1859 description of England’s civil servants as a “great army... their knees drawn up to their chins, and their chins resting on their umbrella handles,” Israel’s bureaucrats are energetic, involved in, and pursuing a counter-dominance to politicians by controlling procedure over policy.
The attack by police sources on Magistrate Court Judge Menachem Mizrachi during the early stage of the Ulrich-Feldstein interrogation, suggesting he was playing up to the judges’ selection committee for advancement, was another indication of the rot that has settled into the system.
The High Court of Justice’s decision this month to delay the termination of Ronen Bar’s employment, despite recognizing the government’s lawful authority to remove the Shin Bet head, is another undemocratic “procedure-over-policy” grab of power.
Israel’s democracy is under threat. In Franz Kafka’s phrasing, “Bureaucracy is a slime.” A group of interconnected officials for whom democracy is but an instrument to assure elitist administrative superiority and the control of policies and cultural dominance exists. Their goals are being pursued undemocratically.
The hailed “gatekeepers” are purloining our democracy. The afikoman of Israel’s citizens is being stolen.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.