The Sabra's Lawless Legacy

In the absence of any genuine appreciation for the rule of law, the political and security establishment of the young state took an essentially utilitarian attitude toward legality. Israel’s decision makers viewed the law as little more than a tool for the advancement of their national and social objectives, and when those came into conflict, the “larger” concerns almost always took precedence over juridical remonstrations. At the heart of this approach, writes Pnina Lahav in Judgment in Jerusalem (1997), “lay the belief, widely shared by both members of Left and Right, that what really mattered was ‘what the Jews do.’ Not values, norms, or words, but action made the difference, and everything else was diminished before the main, colossal task of surviving as a sovereign state.”

This view suited the circumstances of the young state and, unfortunately, is still relevant in today’s Israel as well. There is no denying that in certain situations, national security must take precedence over all other considerations. Nonetheless, such thinking has bred a rather permissive attitude toward displays of public and private lawlessness. Siegfried Moses, Israel’s first state comptroller, clearly understood the risks posed by the utilitarian approach to Law when he warned that:

There is an attitude amongst us which gravely endangers ethical standards in no small amount of cases. It is the accepted view in certain circles that a forbidden action is usually permissible if it is done in the name of a cause that is deemed by the perpetrator to be of national or ideological importance... but experience teaches us that a man who commits illegal acts for altruistic purposes will often commit illegal acts for his own personal benefit.

Unfortunately, time has proven Moses right. The trickle of corruption already apparent in the early 1950s is now a veritable torrent, and his successors at the state comptroller’s office have repeatedly found themselves with their fingers in the dike, trying desperately to stave off the flood.

The anti-legalistic inclinations of the Zionist pioneers might not have had such a lasting effect were they not accompanied by an extensive educational and cultural effort to create a “new Jew,” a type defined in many ways by a rather unruly disposition. As history has shown, this effort was successful—perhaps too much so.

The new Jew—the native sabra—was designed to be the antithesis of his diaspora forefather, who was often portrayed as a passive, weak, and obedient nebbech. The sabra, by contrast, was a noble savage, endowed with an independent and rebellious spirit. Inspired by this ideal, the elite youth of the Yishuv developed a tradition of boldness and grit but also of occasional mischief and lawbreaking: stealing livestock from farms, raiding orchards and groves, “lifting” equipment from offices and army bases, defacing signposts—all were par for the course. Moreover, such actions were not condemned or denounced; instead, they became the stuff of legend, the raw material for what would become a national folklore. In his comprehensive study The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew (2000), the sociologist Oz Almog explains:

It was not just the sabras who viewed their pranks as the legitimate privilege of an elite—most of the adult representatives of the establishment and the moral norm-setters (teachers, commanders, political leaders) did so too. As far as they were concerned, these were venial sins—even positive character attributes—that expressed the lovable, playful, cunning, rough-hewn, anti-establishment character of the native, his youthful charm and grinning sociability.

The organizational frameworks in which this lawless subculture thrived—youth movements, militias, agronomic schools—were far from marginal. They were, in fact, training grounds for future generations of Israeli leaders. Moreover, the undisciplined and often borderline-criminal norms cultivated by the Yishuv’s elite youth were inherited by top units in the newly formed IDF. And so a glorified Israeli tradition of misconduct was formed.

The story of Meir Har-Tzion and his blood vendetta is perhaps the most famous example of illicit behavior being tolerated and even protected by the establishment. Har-Tzion was a legendary warrior, a decorated officer in the elite commando Unit 101 and the paratroopers’ brigade. In December 1954, Har-Tzion’s sister and her friend were murdered by Bedouins while hiking in the Judean desert. In retaliation, Har-Tzion and three fellow soldiers went to the area where the bodies were found (which was then under Jordanian rule) and killed a group of Bedouins from the same tribe, leaving only one old man alive to tell the tale. Israeli police arrested Har-Tzion and his friends, but, following the intervention of Ben-Gurion and then-IDF chief of staff Moshe Dayan, the four were released without trial. Har-Tzion, whom Dayan called “the finest of our soldiers,” was suspended from the military for six months—the equivalent of a slap on the wrist—but his private act of revenge made him into a hero in the eyes of many Israelis.

As Israeli society underwent profound political, economic, and cultural changes, the figure of the sabra evolved along with it. And as Israel became more individualistic, liberal, and materialistic, so too did the sabra—the cultural embodiment of “Israeliness”—become more egocentric, hedonistic, and ambitious. Tales of heroism and self-sacrifice gave way to stories of personal success in business, entertainment, and politics. At the same time, the old-guard Labor party elite lost its ability to shape Israeli identity in accordance with its ideals. In a climate of ideological tension and social fragmentation, this identity has become a battleground between different groups and sectors: Ashkenazim and Sephardim, secular and religious Jews, and political Right and Left.

Nonetheless, in the realm of popular imagery the “authentic” Israeli personality retained some of its old attributes: a tough character, brazenness (or arrogance), and an inability or refusal to “follow the rules.” A weakening of the public’s trust in its state institutions has merely added to the mix an anti-establishment fervor absent in the 1940s and 1950s. Indeed, it is no coincidence that many icons of Israeli pop culture from the 1970s onward have been characters who’ve walked a fine line between the legal and the illegal and often crossed it altogether. Popular Israeli cinema and television of the past decades features a rogues’ gallery of hustlers, petty criminals, and thugs who became, particularly in the eyes of the country’s youth, role models to be quoted and emulated. On the other side, representatives of the law—judges, lawyers, and police officers—were depicted in these same films and television shows as cranky, hypocritical, and useless bureaucrats.

No doubt, at least for a time, Israel benefited from its image as a society that nurtures fearlessness and lack of inhibition. Moreover, the public clearly deemed the rewards of such an image great enough to tolerate the gradual but inexorable erosion of public norms and moral standards. In the early 1970s, for instance, the journalist Amos Elon wrote with obvious fondness about Israelis’ aversion to authority. In his collective portrait Israelis: Founders and Sons (1971), Elon pointed out “the advantages of living in a society which continues to maintain a remarkably low level of coercive discipline without disintegrating into sheer chaos.” He continued:

It is not that the authorities, whoever they may be, are flagrantly negligent in their exercise of their tasks. But it is possible at times to observe, in the manner in which authorities go about their duties, a kind of mischievous gentlemen’s agreement with the governed which allows a relatively high but still tolerable amount of disorder, and a violation of civil discipline in the interests of the mannerism, selfishness, eccentricity, custom, or anomaly of the individual. There is a baroque quality in the elaborate ritual through which this is achieved, in the histrionics of both enforcers of the law and the enforced, the appellants and the appellees. In fact, though not in theory, Israel is a permissive society. Notwithstanding the pressures for change, in the name of order and efficiency, it has continued so long because it apparently agrees with one of the deepest national traits.

Decades later, Elon has left Israel in disgust, and the “permissive” quality he once praised has undermined much of what was best in the Jewish state. The mischievousness of the sabra has long since lost its youthful charm. Now, it is nothing more than a weak pretext for criminal behavior. Indeed, Israelis of all stripes are party to this attitude—politicians and bureaucrats, businessmen and plumbers, professors and taxi drivers. Only in such an atmosphere of personal and public lawlessness could Minister Ruhama Avraham-Balila, the government liaison to the Knesset, respond to the police investigation of Olmert by saying: “So what? True, this is not the first investigation, and not the second, and not the third, and not the fourth, and I don’t know whether it will be the last. But what’s the big deal? Who exactly is bothered by it?”

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