where’s that fire?

Going back over a thousand years ago, no less a figure than Maimonides remarked on the Jewish tendency to denial, a characteristic, he asserted that would only hasten their destruction. Although the context for Maimonides consternation was based on his experiences and understandings of the Muslim mind agitated within Islamic doctrine, it can also be applied to some degree on the wide chasm that separates secular Israeli society and the ultra-orthodox Jews, who, to the former, refuse to be civilized into the secular Zionist ideology yet show remarkable adeptness in exploiting it as outsiders; an auto-colonization known for ingenious forms of parasitism in a now tenuous relationship with the agreed upon and complicit marginalization they had previously found to their benefit.

(see link at end) …A female firefighter was stoned while extinguishing a fire by ultra-Orthodox Jews, according to news media reports.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Meah Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem reportedly assaulted a female firefighter while working with other firefighters to extinguish fires in the predominately ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.

The assault was reported by Israel Army Radio today.

The female firefighter was working together with a larger group of firefighters to put out trash fires when unidentified ultra-Orthodox

Jews threw objects at her, knocking her down to the floor.She was also reported to have been slightly injured but she did not require special medical care. Still, the government of the city of Jerusalem reportedly saw the attack as a serious crime.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish volunteers for extinguishing fires in Jerusalem reportedly are working to negotiate with the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community to avoid similar incidents in the future. Read More:http://www.yourjewishnews.com/Pages/23791.aspx

The writers of the left, of which Gideon Levy and Yossi Sarid are among the most prominent, have an almost visceral hatred for the religious, although they claim a certain embarrassment, there is also an underlying fear of being demographically overwhelmed by kooks that is not entirely misplaced. The old Zionist ethos that did the heavy lifting of statehood in the precarious years now shunted aside electorally by hordes of the great unwashed, and justified criticism of the ultra-orthodox for engaging in holy sanctimonious exploitation by their exclusion from Israeli society both willing and unwillingly as pretext for enga

in political blackmail for military,financial and legal dispensations.

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Israelis feel threatened by Haredim as never before. The source of Israeli insecurity appears to be rooted in the decline of the Zionist ethos. Aslong as Israeli Jews identified fully with their redefinition of Jewish empowerment, they could relate to Haredi subversiveness with contemptuous disregard. But this very subversiveness now threatens to exert a certain perverse charm. It is, after all, undeniable that many of the central arguments of the currently fashionable post-Zionist historians roughly mirror a Haredi critique of Zionist militarism and cultural imperialism that has literally been written on the walls for over half a century. Moreover, the Haredi lifestyle is in many ways resolutely anti-establishment, almost downright Bohemian: they are organized into tight-knit communities, collectively engage in ritualized efforts to induce spiritual highs, attach little symbolic value to work and professional achievement, do not glorify the military, and demonstratively parade their rejection of the dominant culture through distinctive modes of dress and hairstyling. (That Haredi society is also patriarchal, hierarchical, intolerant, and often petty, narrow minded,and self-righteous, is undeniable, but hardly harms the analogy.)

Even if this analogy is a bit fanciful, the blurring line between Haredi chazarah betshuvah and some versions of post-Zionist rebellion (as personified, for example, by Uri Zohar and his friends) does seem to pose an unsettling threat to certain axioms of Israeli self-definition.
At the same time, most post-Zionists safely ensconced in the secular establishment fail to sympathize with, or even acknowledge, Haredi claims which foreshadowed their own. Instead, wishing to simultaneously enjoy both the luxuries of power and the exhilaration of rebellion, they portray Haredim as oppressors and themselves as defiant subversives resisting a powerful religious establishment. But like Whites accusing Black nationalists of racism, they miss the point: it should be plain to all who are the colonizers and who are the colonized. Read More:http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/mamlachtiut-english.pdf