Living in Germany I am amazed, almost on a daily basis, by the similarities between Germany and Israel. Growing up, I guess I never understood how much influence German culture, structure and customs had on the people who ran away from it to Israel.

One of this things is the inability to let others critic your own country. I might be the staunchest opponent to Israel’s policies, and I would allow myself to write and talk about my views on any platform, but whenever I will run into a foreigner criticizing Israel I will immediately and automatically jump to the opposition and and defend it. I can’t really rationalize this stupid behavior, but I accept it now, and I noticed that Germans tend to behave the same.

But sometimes it is just too much. I don’t know how many of you read about the latest scandal involving a former secretary for an Israeli general who stole secret documents from the office she was working at and gave it to a journalist who publish them. (here’s a link to the story).

Let me summarize this: the Israeli supreme court made a decision that the IDF should avoid killing suspects if it can arrest them. The Israeli army decides that this decision is not for him, and proceed to order the field soldiers to go on with the killing, even if they can arrest the suspects. a secretary decides that she wouldn’t cooperate with an army that undermine the Israeli court of law and makes a brave decision to let the world know about it, And the Israeli security branches are going after her and the journalist?

It used to be, when I went on the defense, that I used to point out the differences between the Palestinians and us. We have laws, a court of law, we have balances. That’s what I used to claim. It used to be true. The Israeli legal system brought to the universal stage some of the greatest ethical minds, it checked and balanced the army and government.

This incident is beyond defense. It is taken directly from the 1970’s in Argentine. Israel walked for a very long time on the tip of this valley. now it fell. We are officially a banana republic.