Kaplanistas: The Enemy Within

98% well meaning idiots led by 2% vicious thugs

The entire Kaplanista movement is an anti-Israel movement, dedicated to helping Hamas.

Some of them, maybe most, are too stupid to realize it.

Their leaders are not.

Those of you living outside of Israel may not realize who the Kaplanistas are. Those of you living in Israel probably think you know who the Kaplanists are. But you don’t. So I’m going to try and educate you.

The Kaplanistas are a group of anti-government agitators who began their slow-motion civil war the moment the current government was created. They are well funded, in part by billionaire ex-prime minister Ehud Barach, who is on record as stating his intent to bring down this government by any means necessary, and his willingness to see blood run in the streets of Israel if that’s what it takes. They were funded in part by USAID (thank you DOGE, for stomping on the heads of that Deep State funding machine), and are most likely still funded by George Soros and European NGOs.

Their biggest protests (which often get violent) take place on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv. Hence, Kaplanistas. But they aren’t limited to that. They have their well-meaning drones standing at curbsides all around the country holding up signs demanding that the government bring the hostages home. Declaring the guilt of Netanyahu. Telling everyone that the hostages would be home by now if it weren’t for Netanyahu “prolonging the war to stay out of prison”.

The sheer insanity of that last, which is parroted faithfully by foreign news channels to the point that I wouldn’t be surprised if most Americans believed it, only makes sense in the context of a pathological Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome, similar to the Trump Derangement Syndrome plaguing America.

I remember the first round of elections in 2019, when Benny Gantz’s Blue & White party was running against Netanyahu’s Likud. I was a pollwatcher during that election, and I remember people walking past. I asked who they were planning on voting for, and vast numbers of them said, “Anyone but Bibi”.

Democratic and Capitalist Israel

This isn’t the place for it, because it deserves an article of its own. But Binyamin Netanyahu dragged this entire country, kicking and screaming, out of the socialist hell it used to be into the shining light and clear air of a modern, capitalist economy.

And please, understand that when I say “capitalist”, I am not referring to the corrupt crony capitalism where the politicians are in bed with giant corporations. That’s corporate capitalism, or corporatism, and it may come as a surprise to people who throw around the term “fascist” like a magic charm to be aimed at anyone they disagree with, not much different than any other schoolyard taunt, but that’s actually what fascism is. Private ownership of the means of production and government control of those means. It only differs in small degree from the socialist/communist idea of the government actually owning the means of production. Both are horrible offenses against individual freedom and both need to be wiped off the face of the earth.

(No, capitalism, as I’m using it, is nothing more than nothing less than the freedom of people to make their own economic decisions without coercion. Which I’ll grant you exists nowhere in the world at the moment, but is still an ideal that we should all be working towards.

He’s not the only one who has made achievements in this area. But… I first moved to Israel in 1987. And in Fall of that year, I heard reported on Israel News, a very proud announcement by the telephone company that “by the end of the year, there wouldn’t be anyone in all of Israel who had been waiting for a telephone line in their home for longer than ten years.”

I’m not exaggerating.

It’s been 38 years since then, and the lion’s share of the difference in Israel’s economic health can be laid at the feet of former Minister of the Economy Binyamin Netanyahu.

Is Netanyahu Good for Israel?

Is it healthy for anyone to run a country as long as Netanyahu has? Absolutely not. Lord Acton said, “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I would rephrase it. “Power tends to accrete. Accreted power tends to corrupt.” But the accretion is a problem in and of itself. There’s a reason that the United States, which virtually worshipped President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, immediately after his death during his fourth term, amended the Constitution to prohibit anyone from serving more than two terms in that office.

Netanyahu has all but ensured that he has no real successor in the Likud simply by removing any possible challengers. It’s short sighted, and very much in the vein of “After me, the flood.”

Worse yet, Netanyahu lacks the vision that Israel needs as we move into the future. He did a great job with our economy, and deserves the Israel Prize, at a minimum, for that alone. He did a better job at resisting the Biden junta’s obscene pressure tactics during the Gaza War than any other person currently in the Knesset could possibly have done. Smotrich and Ben Gvir would have folded long before Netanyahu did. They have a degree of vision, but they simply lack the strength of character. They have no idea what kinds of pressure are applied to the Prime Minister from every quarter. If they’re lucky, they’ll never find out, either.

So Where Was I?

Right, “Anyone but Bibi.” And that was a combination of the fact that Netanyahu has been leading Israel for too long, and the vicious propaganda campaign against him, including the absurd lawfare being perpetrated against a sitting Prime Minister. A Bugs Bunny doll? A box of cigars? Are you freaking kidding me? Literally refusing to take a bribe from a newspaper owner? It’s just sickening.

The way it works, though, is that if you throw enough shit against the wall, some of it will stick. Show someone that the cases against Netanyahu are absurd, and they pivot to “He’s been in office too long!” Suggest that this is the fault of the Knesset’s own laws, and they pivot to “But he’s corrupt! He accepted a Bugs Bunny doll!”

None of it has any substance, of course, but it’s all very usable if your goal is to bring down his government. And that’s the real goal here.

But I Miss My Absolute Power!

The left is incredibly nostalgic for the halcyon days when they, and they alone, determined how things would go in the State of Israel. They don’t realize that by trying to create a Jewish State bereft of Judaism (and it’s a matter of record that David Ben Gurion’s compromises with the Haredim were only made because he was convinced that they’d disappear as a separate group within a generation or two), they were creating a vacuum that resulted in children filling it with Jewish tradition. See, secular Zionism has no purpose. You can’t build a nation on, “We need to maintain ourselves safely as a separate people” when you dispose of the reason we’re supposed to be a separate people. Without Judaism why be different? Why not just assimilate into the rest of the world and remove one more separation between “us and them” in the world?

And the left could see that as time passed, the public was growing more traditional. And that as time passed, the public was getting more and more fed up with the petty and Nazi-like actions of the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” [sic], and were becoming more of a mind to tell them to go screw themselves. With extreme prejudice.

They knew that eventually, if things continued that way, eventually, even Binyamin Netanyahu would be forced to make a fully right wing government, rather than betray his voters over by keeping people like Smotrich and Ben Gvir in the opposition with one “national unity government” after another.

And when that actually happened, when the current coalition was created, they went into full melt-down.

Leftist “Babysitters”

I’m going to use Einat Wilf as an example here, even though I plan a full article on her elitism and hypocricy.

On Dan Senor’s “Call Me Back” podcast on March 16, 2024, Einat Wilf spoke about her view of the right wing in Israel, which she believes is shared by the left as a whole. The following transcript starts at 15:28 in the “video” (it’s only audio), and ends at 21:15.

Wilf:

So given that I think that that issue was always just a proxy issue, I can say this. The official issue is really not a central issue right now. Judicial reform and all that. I mean, very few people still talk about it. But I actually never thought that that in itself was a real issue, and I just thought that the intensity of feelings that we saw around it was not about how to nominate judges.

The intensity of feelings, I thought, had to do with who governs Israel. And who gets to govern Israel. And my analysis, during that whole period, was that the judicial reform was really a proxy issue for who gets to govern Israel, and that those who were in the streets, calling for, you know, democracy and defending the Israeli Supreme Court, were actually there for a far deeper reason, which I do think has borne itself out, that an extreme right wing government just cannot govern the State of Israel. Period. And that those are people who are just not legi— I mean, they may have official democratic legitimacy, they might have the numbers, they might have won the elections, but they don't have deep legitimacy.

And I think that issue continues in many ways to be the central issue. Like, who really has the legitimacy to govern Israel? Now we see it on the question of, you know, whether ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews will be drafted. And, you know, they’re in government trying to pass a law that will grant them the permanent, essentially, exemption from defending a country that needs defending. And that raises a major question. What kind of legitimacy? You cannot be legitimate governors of a country that needs to defend itself when you literally don't have skin in the game.

Senor:

Skin in the game, defined as...

Wilf:

Their children. Their sons, their daughters, are not serving in Israeli militaries.

Senor:

And this issue has become heightened now because there’s actually real need for manpower. There’s real need for them to serve.

Wilf:

Exactly. So they’re all facets of this same issue, of who essentially governs the country.

And before October 7th, I was in a panel in the UK, and it was about British politics, and I heard a phrase there that I never heard before, but apparently it’s very well known in the UK, that is... in the UK, the Tories are the natural party of governance. And I was told that for the last 120 years, for 90 of them, the Tories were in power, and even for the 30 years when Labour was in power, 10 of them, for example, were with Tony Blair, so kind of “almost Tory”.

And when I heard that phrase, I instinctively thought, “Actually, Israel has a natural party of governance as well,” and that is what is known as Mapai, or basically old Labor. The kind of Ben Gurion, Gold... Eshkol, Labor that governed the country in the pre-State years and in the first 25 years of the state. They’re the natural party of governance. They’re the ones that have a sense of responsibility, of the fragility of the entire project. And the Likud, even when they’re in power, they're the natural party of opposition. Even when they’re in power, they behave as if they have no responsibility.

Senor:

Well, they also view themselves as the outsiders, because they would argue they’re not represented in media, they’re not represented in the academy, you know, they’re not in the academic institutions, they’re not represented in popular cultures, so they... even when they’re in government, sort of culturally and intellectually, they still feel like a minority.

Wilf:

Precisely. And they always channel that sense, even when they're in government, of being the opposition. And I joked, actually, that if you look, historically, Israel had only twice pure right wing governments. The second Begin government of ’81, for which we’re still paying—this is the government of the runaway inflation, releasing all the guardrails on settlement, on Haredi exemptions, of the First Lebanon War—and this government.

Senor:

Was the second Begin government viewed as more hardline right wing than the first Begin government?

Wilf:

Well, the first Begin government had Dash [later Shinui —Lisa] in it, which was essentially this new centrist party that was created. So you actually only have two right wing governments in Israeli history, and they’re both a colossal disaster*, and in many ways, even when Likud was in power, you always had what I call a “Labor babysitter”. So essentially, someone from the natural party of governance, who came to babysit those who could not be trusted to govern.

And during judicial reform, I think this was what basically happened. That the people in the streets calling for democracy, they were not really calling for democracy. At least, that was my interpretation.

My interpretation, they were basically saying that with all due respect, you, this right wing government, this coalition of extreme right wingers and settlers and Haredis who don’t have skin in the game, you do not get to govern the Jewish State, because you don’t actually get what it means to govern it. And I think they were right.

Senor:

Yeah, I mean even in all of Netanyahu’s governments, even if there wasn't someone from Labor, there were always moderating forces. You had Tzipi Livni, you had...

Wilf:

Yair Lapid, Kachlon, yeah. Always. Always a babysitter.

Senor:

Yair Lapid, right. And now in this government, Netanyahu's the most left wing member of this government. Ironically.

Wilf:

And by the way, the reason that Gantz, who rushed into the government after October 7th, is the understanding that they cannot be left to govern. It’s just irresponsible.

I’m sorry that was so long, but it’s important that you grasp the depth of the left’s arrogant assumption that it doesn’t matter what the people want; it only matters what the “natural party of governance” wants (which, incidentally, is the party Einat Wilf is from, and is a party that really no longer exists, because there simply weren’t enough people in the entire country to vote for Labor any more).

And she’s absolutely right. The people marching against the judicial reform were not marching for democracy. They were literally marching against democracy, and for the sort of elitism that Wilf explains—and exemplifies—so well.

And in case you think that Wilf herself isn’t in touch with the leftist “reality”, listen to the whole video. You can see that she is smart as a whip. That she is brilliant and analytical. She simply has this obscene leftist superiority complex that’s so common among leftists the world over.

Here, though, it explains why the oligarchs of the left are funding the Kaplanistas.

Funding

Let’s not pretend that we don’t all see the same thing. The quality and quantity of the materiel being churned out and posted by the left is beyond anything any grassroots movement could manage. During the judicial reform phase of the anti-government protests, hundreds of costumes from The Handmaid’s Tale were supplied. You can see about 75 of them in the photo here. Those are professional costumes. The radio and television ads were professionally done, in studios, with directors and editors. The posters, be they the ones on billboards, the ones on highway overpasses, or the ones clutched by the “useful idiots” of the leftist oligarchs at intersections and roadsides, are clearly professionally designed and printed.

This is a concerted effort by very wealthy elites to bring down the government.

I wrote here over a year ago about “Ehud Barak’s Plot Against Israel”. There, too, you can read a transcript in which the cowardly oligarch discusses his plans for bringing down the government. He is, according to an article in the Jerusalem Post, the third wealthiest politician in the country, and he has on numerous occasions stated—publicly—his willingness to bring the government down, even at the cost of dead Jewish bodies in the streets. If you think I’m exaggerating, Google it.

Summing Up

So that’s about it. When you see a yellow flag flying over a highway, understand that it is not there to remind us about the hostages. Not a single person in this country forgets the hostages. Not for a single day. Not for a single hour. No, that flag is a flag of surrender. It’s a flag that says we need to surrender to the Gazan Nazis, and hope and pray that they answer our surrender by returning our hostages.

Because isn’t that what history teaches us? That when we make concessions to the enemy, they match those concessions with acts of mercy? Kindness?

No. What history teaches us is that every single time we make the slightest concession to the beasts who call themselves “Palestinian”, their response is to immediately accelerate their aggression against us. Surrender to them, and we’ll be lucky to get any hostages back with their skin still on their bodies. Those are the kinds of monsters we are dealing with. And those are the kinds of monsters that every single person waving a yellow flag or yammering BRING THEM HOME NOW wants to give in to.

Here’s some homework for you. The next time you see someone like that, ask them why they aren’t saying RELEASE THEM NOW. Because BRING THEM HOME NOW puts the onus on the government. Ask them what they think the government isn’t doing to bring them home that they should be doing. Don’t let them weasel out of it with distractions like, “Asking meanie questions like that means you don’t care about the hostages!” Or, “I’m only expressing a desire to have the hostages back!” Because that doesn’t explain it at all. If they are capable of rational thought, they need to be made to think about what they’re doing. And more to the point, whether they are or not, you need to know the nature of the enemy that stands behind them.

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*I’d be remiss if I didn’t address the insane claim that the hyperinflation of the 1980s was because of the second Begin government. The biggest cause was the intricate system of indexation that had been created by Wilf’s magical Labor “natural governors”. Every time prices went up, government spending increased to match it, and so did wages, which, of course, made prices go up again.