Death to Yuppiestan, or, Nasrallah was right

[IndianaGreen]

An excellent piece on class differences, and war burdens, in Israel.

Death to Yuppiestan, or, Nasrallah was right

By Bradley Burston

The largest city in Israel is under attack. And not a moment too soon.

The target of these attacks is the tony metroplex that became, in the boom years of the 1990s, Yuppiestan. It is collectively and culturally the garden-gated ghettos of Tel Aviv and the surrounding center of the country, the long-envied and newly-despised upper middle class Comfort Zone of the Jewish state.

Why the anger? Because of the sense that Yuppiestan sat out this war.

Not a strictly geographical Yuppiestan, but a certain sector of the Israeli population. It is the sense that the youth of the largely secular, largely leftist, largely well-educated, largely well-heeled sections of the center, have for some time been all too happy to let the youth of the rest of the country do their fighting - and their dying - for them.

It is the sense that many of the young and smug and, dare we say, spoiled children of Yuppiestan have dodged more than the draft, however convincing their arguments for why they should be allowed to avoid serving in combat units, or allowed to avoid serving their country altogether.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/752138.html

[WCGreen]

1. Sounds like the American Right!!

[IndianaGreen]

2. It is always the children of the working class that spill their blood

while the children of the elites go on with their lives, as IDF Major General Elazar Stern told Army Radio:

"I see the homes that I go to for condolence visits. And then there are the homes that I am not going to, the homes that do not know bereavement, and will not.

"I go much more to kibbutzim, and I hardly go to Tel Aviv at all," Stern said, in an allusion to the high number of war dead who were from kibbutzim, and the remarkably low number from the nation's biggest city.

He also noted the high number of casualties among Ethiopian and Russian immigrants.

[WCGreen]

4. WEll, we have a lot of immagrants or

first generation kids going off to fight our wars...

[Malidictus Maximus]

10. Mothers

Of young Roman men in the early republic would tell their sons "Return with your shield. Or upon it"/
When this custom declined so did the republic, to be replaced by an empire where the lower classes fought while the rich expropriated their lands.

[Lithos]

11. That was actually the Spartans, not Romans

who that is attributed to.

L-

[IntiRaymi]

3. The army is the creator of nations.

This simple statement means that people must participate in service to their country, lest there be cracks in a national identity, which would lead to division and weakness.

[nealmhughes]

6. A national identity is indeed, strongly rooted in a national emergency and

collective efforts to end the state of emergency. France, until after the Franco-Prussian War was a manifestation of various provinces, cultures and languages, with Paris far removed from the reality of life in Bearn or Pau or even Limousin. National conscription and national (French only) education after the disaster of 1871 and the formation of the Third Republic led to a sense of people being "French" rather than Parisians, Bretons, Basque or Occitanians...there is an excellent book on the topic, "Peasants into Frenchmen" by Eugen Weber. Weber's prose is often a bit on the extreme, as are his examples, which I tend to count as hyperbole in his anecdotes of rural provincial life, but his basic thesis is very sound.
Remember, that it was also the formation of Italy from the various kingdoms and duchies and Austrian and Papal states that gave the use of Tuscan a universality to the Italians and its islands, as well as the national navy giving us marinara sauce and daily pasta, when that had been a peasant southern food that Tuscans avoided like the plague, if they even knew what it was!

[enough]

5. This is a fascinating article.

snip>

Everyone here knows what's wrong. We've known it all along.

For years, we have gone along with a system we all know to be untenable. The hallmarks of the system were a grotesque caricature of what Israelis took to be America - bankers who take home a million shekels a year, while milking a burgeoning underclass sinking deeper by the day - combined with a government mired at all levels and in all ministries with apparatchiks who spent most of their time protecting their positions and finding new angles to pad their monthly wage slips.

The war showed, first of all, that the American video-gaming model of bomb from the air, bomb from the air, bomb from the air warfare is as inappropriate, morally disastrous, and ultimately self-defeating in Lebanon as it was in Iraq.

Closer to home, the doctrine of slash and burn economics which managed to deny both the army and the poor needed funds over the last several years, managed to make this a do-it-yourself war.

Soldiers were forced to supply themselves and, in some case, order themselves. On the home front, volunteers of all stripes, secular, ultra-Orthodox, Jewish and Arab, stepping in to help people in the north, sheltering them, feeding them, rescuing them.

There's a clue in this for all of us.

snip>

[gula]

8. Link please.

[bemildred]

9. Read the OP. That's what's being quoted. nt

[mtowngman]

7. ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdRFX863NMA

[breakaleg]

12. Interesting. It sounds very much like the US. n/t

[pelsar]

13. ho hum nothing new....

the israeli rural population: kibbutznikim, moshavnikim (farmers) and outlying settlements have always had the higher ratio in the elite and non elite combat units...since pre1948.....its probably more of a wide spread social phenomenon of all communities world wide