Enlisted soldiers and reservists from across the political spectrum expose the IDF failure in Judea and Samaria stone throwing and firebombing incidents: silence, ignoring reality, conflicting commands, entrenchment and escape.

“What you feel at the frontline is that they’re telling you, really, ‘Be a sponge, be a potted plant, just don’t make us look bad, don’t start fires.’ I can tell you that what happened to our company at this frontline is that people have undergone change. People have been educated into paralysis,” says Master Sergeant Y., 31′ who recently completed his reserves stint in an infantry battalion in Hebron.

The above testimony of a soldiers who has served at the Judea and Samaria front is not unique. It is part of several dozen testimonies accumulated in recent weeks by researchers for Makor Rishon from reserves soldiers and enlisted men, and they all tell a very similar story:

In hundreds of events of Arab provocation which frequently included stone and firebomb throwing at IDF soldiers, the IDF reaction has been silence, ignoring the provocations, entrenchment and escape.

The soldiers who were interviewed belong to the full political and cultural span: religious and secular, left and right wing.

When asked to describe their experiences at the frontline, they all used very similar expressions: “shame,” “humiliation,” “castration,” and “impotence.”

They spoke freely of situations where they ran away or hid from Arabs. “We went out to do a block and check between two villages at one in the morning,” M., 28, a company commander who did his reserve duty near Ramallah, recalled. “After 15 minutes in the field, we strated hearing whistles from the nearby village. We realized they were going to violate the public order. We were eight altogether, I was the chief. I knew it would take time to receive backup if we asked for it. I said, ‘It’s jot for us,” and we pulled out. We simply vanished. We ran.

“I came out of it nervous. I felt defeated. My soldiers told me, there we go again, fleeing the scene. IDF defeatism. I felt we had been brought out there as pawns in a game of chess, just to show up, not to act.”

Many soldiers argue that they aren’t being permitted to take care of violations of the public order, as well as of rock and firebomb throwing, while the number of these events keeps going up.

“You stand there like a dummy with nothing to do,” L., 25, a recently discharged Armor officer who served in Judea and Samaria related. “The policy is ‘Restraint,’ they call it ‘Containment,’ all kind of laundered words and nonsense. We are completely neutralized. We are soldiers with weapons, five magazines each, but our hands are cuffed behind our backs. We’re not permitted to defend ourselves at the most elementary level. How is it even conceivable that someone would raise his hand on an IDF soldiers and would get to remain standing, even smiling? But that’s the atmosphere right now.”

In recent weeks, enlisted and reservist IDF soldiers started a Facebook group called “Let the IDF Win,” whose goal is to educate the public and bring about a substantial change in the rules of engagement.

Senior IDF officers insist there’s nothing wrong with the rules of engagement, only in their application. Many agree that there is a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding, even defeatism, born by a permanent disconnect between the top brass and the fighting men and women on the ground. The most damaging component here is the threat of an investigation, should soldier react forcefully to Arab provocation.

“The spirit has changed,” L. explains. “There’s no longer an eagerness for action, for confrontation. Our feeling, as middle rank officers, is that even when action is called for, you’re better off not acting. If you do something, it’ll only end up with investigations and trouble.”

L. described a situation where an Arab “mooned” him right in front of his face. He says he felt humiliated, but when his soldiers urged him to shoot the Arab with a rubber bullet, preferably right in the “moon,” he told them to calm down.

“Because when the investigators ask me why I shot him, and I said it was because I felt humiliated, that’s not a good enough answer,” he explains.

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Religious Affairs Minister Yair Lapid, who doubles as Finance Minister, are arguing via Facebook over the issue of a women’s minyan at the Western Wall.

Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky has proposed that a Women of the Wall demand for the minyan be allowed at the southern part of the Kotel, called Robinson’s Arch.

Lapid said he is working to approve new regulations but charged Livni with grandstanding. She wrote a letter to Bennett’s office on Shavuot.

Her beef does not concern her views, which are similar to Sharansky, but that no change in the law can be made without her approval.

“I’ll admit that I pray in an Orthodox synagogue…, but I believe that the time is ripe…to apply a pluralistic and tolerant approach at the Western Wall, allowing women to pray according to their customs, mostly because they do so in an area that is intended for women only,” she wrote.

Lapid took to Facebook after the holiday and wrote, “Tzipi Livni, come on.” He chastised Livni for a “provocative spin” and “media trick” by informing Israeli media that she had sent him a letter to his office on the Shavuot holiday, when he could not respond since he was not in his office.

Bennett wrote he has meet with women wanting to pray at the Western Wall with prayer shawls and tefillin that are worn by orthodox men but not women. The meeting was “the first time a religious services minister held talks with the Women of the Wall. And then came Tzipi Livni,” according to Lapid.

Livni wrote back on her Facebook page, “Naftali Bennett, come on. Minister Bennett is upset. He claims that I didn’t consult him before writing him a letter clarifying my stance on women’s prayer at the wall.”

“Since the Women of the Wall controversy broke out, Minister Bennett hasn’t called me a single time to update me on the compromise attempts that he claims he’s trying to reach on the matter, even though the law requires us both to sign the regulations, so he has no one but himself to blame.”

It is difficult to understand the ultra-Orthodox reaction to its exclusion from the government coalition. After all, that’s how it goes in politics – sometimes you are in, sometimes you are out. For many long years, the ultra-Orthodox were in the coalition and the religious Zionists were out. Now they have changed places.

So what? Why all the lamenting, cries of despair and threats of destruction of the settlements, God forbid? Everybody with some common sense knows that nobody is going to send the yeshiva boys to prison camps and that no serious Torah learner is going to have to stop learning. What is causing such an exaggerated ultra-Orthodox reaction? It doesn’t make them look very good, so why throw years of friendly cooperation into the trashcan? Why incite baseless hatred of their constituency? What is going on here?

To understand the ultra-Orthodox, religious Zionists must remember how they felt and reacted after the Expulsion from Gush Katif. “How can you possibly compare the two?” you may ask. “Entire communities were razed in Gush Katif and with the ultra-Orthodox, it is simply a questions of politics.”

That is true. The destruction experienced by the religious Zionists was entirely real, and the pain of the expelled unbearable. But the intensity of the grief and the religious Zionist reaction to the Expulsion were much more than simple sharing of the pain of those driven from their homes. Settlements were destroyed before Gush Katif – and subsequently, as well.

In Gush Katif something much bigger than houses was destroyed. It seemed that what was destroyed there was ideology. That was the source of the deep pain and grief. That was what motivated the lamentation and the heartbreaking images, images like the picture of the Netzarim expellees carrying the menorah from their synagogue, creating an immediate association with the image of the menorah from the Beit HaMikdash being carried by the Jews exiled from Jerusalem.

That same destruction of ideology is what is being experienced now by the ultra-Orthodox. Interestingly, the reaction of the religious Zionists then and the ultra-Orthodox now are amazingly similar.

Until the expulsion from Gush Katif, the religious Zionists still believed that the redemption process was on “automatic pilot.” True, there were some malfunctions (some of them major) here and there but they could be explained away or ignored.

In Yamit Israel succumbed to the enticement of “peace,” and Oslo could be blamed on the Left. But when the Expulsion took place, Yair Lapid offered this explanation: “We had to teach you a lesson.” In other words, we drove you from your homes and destroyed your communities because we – the mainstream of the return to Zion – are simply unwilling to accept your interpretation, your ideology and your Rabbi Kook. So please get out of our sights and let us live our daily lives without your unbearable Messianism.

That is why we cried so bitterly. Not only about Gush Katif. We cried because they threw us out, threw out our belongings after us, and slammed the door shut – while life in Israel continued as if nothing had happened. It was much more than Gush Katif. It was the ideological breaking point and ultimate humiliation. The tears were meant to make our mainstream “father and mother” open the door for us once again.

Now that we understand what happened to the religious Zionists, we can understand what the ultra-Orthodox are experiencing. Certainly not with the same intensity, for to them Zionism is much less a father and mother than it is to the religious Zionists. But it is the same insult, based on the ultra-Orthodox feeling of belonging to the state. The Neturei Karta sect, for example, vociferously opposed to the state, was not insulted at all.

In other words, the more insulted the ultra-Orthodox are, the more they show how much they belong to the collective. And that is good news.

…To be continued

After decades, perhaps centuries, in which we, Jews, have been able to count on the Arabs to rescue us from the catastrophic errors of our own leaders by committing even worse errors—as the late Abba Eban put it: The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity—we may be up against the first Arab who is a whole lot better than us at using opportunities, and how.

Mahmoud Abbas, whom Arabs and Israelis call by his nom de guerre Abu Mazen, has figured out how to outmaneuver his opponent, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and how to defeat the greatest democracy with the strongest army in the region. Frankly, the only real hope Israel has at the moment is that some Palestinian idiot would assassinate the crafty Abbas, and leave Netanyahu to deal with leaders to whom he can measure up.

Secretary of State John Kerry is coming to town next week, ready to twist Israeli arms, and we might as well face up to it: the Obama and Kerry visits have been planned as a one-two punch, with Abu Mazen being heavily prompted to let America do the job for him.

When Barack Obama was making nice with our children in Jerusalem, he made a statement that, at the time, sounded like a rebuke to the Palestinians, who had been insisting that the precondition to renewing talks on peace with the Israelis is a new settlement freeze.

That one was right out of Abba Eban’s book of missing opportunities. Netanyahu tried a settlement freeze early on in his second term. It didn’t bring the Arabs to the table, but it did create a fervent resentment against him among settlers, who responded by doubling Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home Knesset faction, all at the expense of Bibi’s Likud party.

Palestinian sovereignty and Israeli security are “the core issue,” Obama told Abbas in Ramallah. “If we solve those two problems, the settlement problem will be solved.”

It wasn’t a rebuke, it was golden advise, it was the kind of strategic thinking the Palestinians had not been able to generate, with the glaring exception of the UN assembly statehood vote – which was Abu Mazen’s brainchild, he managed to break the fundamental rules of the Oslo Accords and got away with it relatively unscathed.

Now the PA president has announced that he won’t be asking for settlements freeze as a precondition, he wants to see a map instead. Let Mr. Netanyahu bring to the first meeting of the new round of negotiations his version of where the new Palestinian state should be.

It sounds so harmless. After all, what’s more logical than starting the wheeling and dealing with each side showing where they think the new border should run in the future. One side wants this much, the other side wants only this much – and they’ll reach a compromise.

In reality, this demand robs Netanyahu of his entire arsenal of negotiation moves. In Netanyahu’s play book, you get to map drawing in the distant future, years from now, after a lengthy series of small moves, tweaks, minute gestures, back and forth. If he shows his map at the start, then the future borders become the one and only topic of negotiations, everything else is moot, the battle has been lost before it began.

Meanwhile, AFP reports, President Mahmoud Abbas will temporarily refrain from unilateral action against Israel at the UN and other international arenas, to give U.S.-brokered peace talks a chance to resume.

For a couple of months, the Palestinians will nobly “refrain from taking a case against Israel to the International Criminal Court,” an anonymous Palestinian source told AFP.

But the same official warned that if Israel failed to halt settlement building, the PA would immediately begin working through the international bodies again.

“Settlement building in E1 is a red line and erecting so much as one stone in the area … would destroy the two-state solution,” he said.

Speaking of stones, the PA has been utilizing those very well, along with firebombs, sending bands of angry, unemployed youths to literally get themselves killed by challenging IDF units all across Judea and Samaria. Two Arab teenagers have already been killed, and young Arabs in the Hebron area continued to clash with Israeli troops all day Thursday, protesting the death of Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh, who was serving a long prison sentence for attempted murder, in Israeli custody. Abu Hamdiyeh died from cancer which the Israeli prison system failed to cure.

An annual quota of approximately 7,000 Haredim would be paid while learning in yeshiva for three years before serving in the IDF or doing national service, under a plan by Industry and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the Jewish Home party.

He also proposed that 1,800 of them would be exempt from service and would continue to be paid to learn Torah.

Speaking at the annual Ramle Conference, Bennett urged Haredim to join the work force but to choose occupations that can produce an income instead of looking for highly-paid but highly competitive jobs, such as lawyers and accountants.

He added that, the State of Israel for the first time recognizes the value and importance of Torah study.

Bennett urged employers to hire Arab and Haredim women and said they represent an untapped potential in the work force.

Bennett’s plan differs from that of Yesh Atid chairman and Finance Ministry Yair Lapid, who wants to defer Haredim from national service until 2017, followed by enlistment in the IDF or national service.

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The Knesset Monday evening officially approved by a 68-48 vote the 33rd Knesset in what a Meretz Knesset Member Zahava Gal-on correctly called a “celebratory affair” that was long on pomp and circumstance and short on government leaders “telling it as it is.”

The Opposition did not lose any time getting in its digs, with Labor party leader Shelly Yechimovich attacking the new coalition as a bunch of “rich capitalists,” pinpointing her disgust at Jewish Home leader and millionaire Naftali Bennett and former journalist and TV news celebrity Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid (Future) party. Looking to Lapid, she said he earned $700,000 last year. She did not mention how much she earned as a journalist.

Netanyahu took the podium to warn for the umpteenth time that Iran is getting closer to the “red line” he drew in his speech to the United Nations last September.

Speaking less than two days before President Barack Obama arrives for a short visit, Prime Minister Netanyahu made sure to say, “We stretch out our hand to the Palestinians” for a “historic compromise,” a nice diplomatic phrase for saying that the United States can forget about any peace deal with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, whose only suggestion of compromise is that Israel accept all of his demands.

Even Tzipi Livni, Netanyahu’s de facto “Minister of the Peace Process” told Israeli television that successfully completing the peace process will be “very difficult,” the understatement of the day.

Netanyahu was closer to the truth when he said that Israel will take advantage of Obama’s visit to thank America for its support.

The Knesset easily elected Yuri Edelstein as the new Speaker, replacing Reuven Rivlin, who hid his rage at being dumped by Prime Minister Netanyahu and instead silently accepted praise for having served in the post.

Arab MKs, as usual, were good for headlines.  Jamal Zahalka charged Lapid with “racism” because he was not in the Opposition. Hanin Zoabi later told Israeli television that the coalition will be “racist,” in other words, just like the previous one, in her view.

One interesting comment came from Arab MK Ahmed Tibi. With the Haredi parties in the Opposition for the first time in recent memory, he suddenly saw a common cause between them and the Arabs on social issues, meaning more money for their sectors.

On Monday evening, the Knesset will host the swearing in ceremony for Israel’s 33rd government, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s third term—second consecutive—as prime minister (his first term ran from June 1996 to July 1999).

Immediately after the ceremony, Netanyahu will convene a brief cabinet meeting, with a toast. Then the bunch (22 ministers and 8 deputies) will travel to the presidential residence, for the traditional group picture.

The Knesset session will open with the selection of the Speaker of the House. It will likely be Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, who will replace the former Speaker, Reuven Rivlin, who wanted very much to continue in his post but, unfortunately, had committed the ultimate sin of criticizing the Prime Minister’s anti-democratic tendencies, not the kind of slight which Netanyahu’s wife Sara easily forgives.

As usual, Netanyahu never shared with Rivlin his plan to depose him. In fact, as far back as a year ago, he assured the popular Speaker—who is also closely associated with the Settlement movement—that he’d have his support for the post of President when Shimon Peres completes his 7-year term, 2014.

Yuli Edelstein’s life’s story is fascinating: Born in the Soviet Union to Jewish parents who converted to Christianity (his father is a Russian Orthodox priest), Edelstein discovered his Jewish connection through his grandparents. He studied Hebrew back when that was considered a subversive act, for which, in 1984, he was sent to Siberia (the charges were drug related, but everybody knew it was the Hebrew thing). He made aliyah with his wife, Tanya, served in the army, and entered politics, ending up in the Knesset in 1996. He has switched between several parties, until finally landing in the Likud, and has held several ministerial portfolios. And if he doesn’t catch Sara’s ire, he could become as memorable a Speaker as Rubie Rivlin.

But the biggest losers, without a doubt, are the Haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism. They were almost literally kicked out by Yair Lapid, who stated openly that, should he be seen in the government group picture with the Haredim, his voters would abandon him. Surprisingly, Naftali Bennett, his newly found brother from a different father (Yair’s father, the late MK Tommy Lapid, was a true hater of the religion), supported the dubious position that, in order to truly help the Haredi public, government had to first be cleared of Haredi partners.

Shas, a party that depends completely on patronage for its very existence, is seething with anger over Bennett’s “betrayal.” It’s hard, however, to take seriously the victimized self-pity of Shas, whose spiritual father Rav Ovadia Yosef dubbed the Jewish Home party a “Goy Home.” Altogether, it appears that, perhaps counter intuitively, the National Religious leaders as well as the rank and file, have been harboring heaps of resentment against the Haredim. The Haredi slights of several decades, including their occupation of the Ministry of Religious Services and the Chief rabbinate, doling out jobs to Haredi officials who reigned over a population that looks nothing like them—those slighted chickens have been coming back to roost.

Take for instance Rabbi Hayim Drukman, who responded to both the Haredi pols and to Netanyahu, who accused the Lapid-Bennett axis of “boycotting” the Haredi parties. Rabbi Drukman Argued that “the Haredi public are the biggest boycotters, boycotting for years the Torah of the national religious public.”

“Any Haredi apparatchik who gets elected to the Knesset, immediately becomes a rabbi, while the real rabbis of the national religious public are noted in the Haredi press by their first names (without the title ‘Rabbi’). Is this not boycotting?” Rabbi Druckman wrote in the Saturday shul paper “Olam Katan.”

Inside Shas, the short knives have already been drawn and they’re aimed at MK Aryeh Deri, the former convict who came back from the cold to lead Shas into a glorious stalemate (11 seats before, 11 after).

“We were very disappointed in Deri,” a senior Shas pol told Ma’ariv. “He did not bring the votes he promised Rav Ovadia, there was no significant change in seats, and, in fact, Deri is responsible for our failure.”

In United Torah Judaism they also seem to regret their alliance with Shas, it’s highly likely that, in a few months, they’ll opt to enter the government without Shas.