Why are Israelis becoming “Zohan”s? The Many Questions

People around me have been talking of this movie called the “Zohan”. I’m not exactly sure of the whole story in the movie (the actual movie does not seem very appealing or appropriate), but the plot basically is about an Israeli, who was at the very top of the Israeli military, who decided to do yerida – go to chutz laaretz, in order to become a hair dresser. The fact that they now made a movie about a “Yored” is testimony to the number of “Yordim” which are currently present in the world. The last estimate I saw numbered over 700 000 “yordim”! For a country as small as Israel, a country which was built by ideological Aliyah, these numbers are unacceptable!

This gets worse!

Even those who do stay in Israel speak a lot about going to Chutz Laaretz to get the “easy life”- make more money, not have any security issues etc... Therefore, a large part of the population that stays in Israel stays because it does not currently have the option to leave.

Why this negative trend in Zionist spirit? What happened to all the idealism of the past century?

Unfortunately, it gets even worse!

A recent article on Jpost revealed that only 52% of Israeli teenagers still go to the army. Not so long ago, the one praise that all the Jewish World, even a large part of the chareidi world, would give to secular Israelis was their willingness to risk their lives for Klal Israel. What happened to this incredible spirit?

Finally, how can we ignore the incredible number of people who want to give land away to the Palestinians, not for moral reasons – because those people might still hold on to some sort of ideology even though I disagree with them, not for security reasons – because those people might simply be pragmatic, but simply because they want a quick fix to the current conflict. They want to give land away because they feel a feeling of desperation, “Yeush” in Hebrew, asking for all of this to be over – It’s not worth it to fight like pioneers anymore – lets just call it quits and keep what we can (Interestingly enough, this is precisely the rhetoric used by Olmert (as opposed to Sharon) to encourage land concessions – not moral arguments, not security arguments (like Sharon), but simply the expression of a desperation saying let’s quit trying to stay in Eretz Israel and just take what we can.

How can one explain all these facts?

I hope to post an answer to all these questions sometime in the next 15 hours on this very blog. Feel free to share your own, meaningful, thoughts with us.