When the other becomes the enemy

Five incidents happened in Israel in two weeks. On April 19, an Israeli soldier in southern Lebanon smashed a statue of Jesus with a sledgehammer.

On April 21, a man wearing a kippah embroidered with both an Israeli and Palestinian flag was detained by Israel Police, his kippah confiscated and reportedly cut by an officer before being returned.

On April 22, a 21-year-old discharged soldier, Yamno Zelka z”l, was murdered by teenage boys outside the pizza shop where he worked.

On the same day, April 22, judges of the Supreme Court of Israel were evacuated to their chambers when an enraged crowd stormed a hearing on establishing a commission of inquiry into October 7.

And on April 27, a journalist posted a video of her mocking two Charedi boys collecting charity to fund the wedding of a deprivileged couple.

Those stories stood out to me – all as one. But do they have a commonality?

At first glance, very little. They belong to different arenas: criminal violence, institutional abuse, political extremism, religious desecration and public humiliation.

And yet they are part of the same moral ecosystem; Each is an expression of a society in which the “other” is no longer encountered as a fellow citizen, but as a threat to be subdued, ridiculed, erased or harmed.

Left and right against each other. Secular and religious against each other. State and public against each other. Tribe against tribe. These are not merely political disagreements. They are symptoms of a deeper corrosion: the normalisation of contempt.

In the age of social media, no act remains local. Every incident creates ripples, echoes, intensifies tribal reflexes and pushes us into the impoverished logic of identity politics: do I identify more with the aggressor or the victim? Which “side” owns this outrage?

But perhaps the more urgent question is why we feel compelled to choose at all. Why can we not condemn all of it, together? Every one of these incidents crosses democratic red lines. Humiliation, intimidation, aggression, desecration, murder. Every one is an attempt to assert superiority over another human being. “An other” human being, is perhaps more accurate.

Israel, after two and a half years of war, is emotionally exhausted. Traumatised societies often become reactive ones. They grow accustomed to identifying enemies, defending against enemies and attacking enemies.

And sometimes, almost imperceptibly, they begin seeing enemies in one another.

A police officer sees a kippah as provocation. A mob sees judges as illegitimate enemies. Teenagers see a man correcting their behaviour as someone deserving death. A journalist sees children as objects of political ridicule. A soldier sees a statue of Jesus as an opportunity to portray superiority.

This feels like moral disorientation. Baseless hatred.

Because what is baseless hatred if not the impulse to degrade another person simply because they belong to a category one has been thought to despise? Because they’re the wrong kind of human? The wrong kind of Jew…?

And yet the tragic irony, maybe the nature of implosive acts, is that these acts gain the opposite of what they seek to. Their purpose is often to threaten, humiliate or deter behaviour seen as coming from an enemy. But their effect is reversed; They harden the resolve of the other side to move further from us, distrust us more deeply, and sometimes harm us in return – whoever “us” is.

These acts all create a cycle of social bloodletting, and they cultivate “otherness” as a component our identity.

The damage here is not only to the immediate victims. It is educational as well: Children are watching. They are learning, from adults and institutions alike, what is permissible. What counts as strength. How disagreement is expressed. Whether humiliation is entertainment. Whether violence is an acceptable response to frustration.

And that should force some uncomfortable questions (which is the most important kind of questions): How do we raise children who refuse contempt? How do we restore the civic and moral discipline required to see disagreement without turning the dissenter into an enemy? How do we encourage dialogue with “others”?

For Jews in the Diaspora, these questions matter no less. Because the fractures of Israeli society do not stay in Israel. They echo through our communities, our schools, our youth movements and our dinner tables.

The antidote is not consensus. Democracies do not require unanimity. They require restraint. They require moral boundaries. And they require a willingness to protect the dignity of those with whom we profoundly disagree.

Jewish tradition teaches that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam – baseless hatred. Whilst we don’t have a temple nowadays – one has to wonder what can else can be ruined by hatred.

Anat Dror is executive officer at the Australasian Zionist Youth Council (AZYC).