What actually happened in Bnei Brak

 by Daas Yochid

It’s high time we acknowledged the real underlying cause behind these riots and stopped falling for the excuses that keep changing. Yesterday it was two female soldiers who dared to enter the nominal no-go zone, a few weeks ago it was autopsies on two babies killed by societal neglect, the week before it was an arrested draft-avoider, and the week before that, it was a phone shop selling unfiltered smartphones in Ramah Dalet.

Who knows what will inspire next week’s hooliganism?

Regardless of the excuse, the reason stays the same, and it is not what most people seem to say out loud.

Secular Israeli media talks about religious extremism, which fundamentally misunderstands the point.

The “moderate” chareidim who feign outrage or try to distance themselves by saying it’s just an extreme sect that takes things too far.

Take what too far? Religion?

If you truly believe in the hashkafah you claim to, then are they wrong?

Or is it just the tactics you object to, but the overall sentiment you agree with? Like the Mishpacha and YWN, and VINnews, who carefully try to tread the line between clear condemnation and tacit support.

Rabbi Hoffman means well here: The Horrifying Chillul Hashem in Bnei Brak

But, by criticizing the IDF, legitimising “peaceful, dignified protest” and implying that violence is the result of righteous indignation gone out of hand, and the only real issue is that it causes a Chillul Hashem, he also shows that he does not understand the real cause.

Nor do the foreign observers who only know chareidim in Borough Park and Monsey and naively think bnei barakers are their ideological kin who are merely pushing back against the evil cantonist tziyoinim and their oppressive regime.

Like this guy who takes a break from defending ICE in Minneapolis to call out the Israeli police, call them thugs, and suggest they weren’t tough enough on Oct 7th, while minimising the behaviour of “a few dozen teens.”

Bottom line, all these takes share one underlying assumption, that somehow religious conviction is the driving force behind the behaviour, and it’s either too extreme, misguided, or justified depending on your priors. But the truth is, it actually has very little to do with it at all.

What you’re looking at is the same thing you’d see in any failed housing estate in Europe, any township, any banlieue, or shanty town. It’s young men with zero real prospects, no skills, little to no autonomy, and no actual pathway to dignity, with a huge amount of unstructured time.

The inevitable result of this situation is frequent BLM-like behaviour, typical of any economically stagnant communities with no upward mobility.

The difference being is that unlike in the US and other places where police do respond with real force, here, the authorities are actually fellow jews, despite being called “Nazis,” who do exercise restraint, and the justice system dispenses a slap on the wrist at worst, and then gifts another billion shekels to yeshivas.

And the same people who defend street executions are up in arms at a few baton strikes to the knee after being pelted with rocks, and their vehicles set ablaze and fire crews attacked when trying to respond.

They weaponise religion as a justification, to soothe their conscience, to frame their slogans of “gevalt” and “lekadeish sheim shoomaayim” while setting dumpsters on fire, stoning buses, and attacking police.

But, the real pretext is poverty, purposelessness, a status system that has no room for most of its inhabitants, and a community that has turned inward so completely that even the people inside it can’t see what it’s doing to its own.

The draft is just the current thing, but this is about something that has been building for decades and has nowhere else to go.

Any community anywhere on earth that has a large population of young men with no economic mobility, no vocational pathway, no physical outlet, no sports, no organized physical activity, and no recreation, just a growing cohort of young men who have nothing and are going nowhere and know it and can’t say it, will frequently erupt into violent outbursts.

The only thing that changes is the localised pretext, but never the behaviour. What we are seeing near weekly in Bnei Brak and elsewhere is a socio-psychological inevitability, religion has next to nothing to do with it.

It’s much more basic, it is just what happens when a crowd forms and there’s shouting and fire and the police show up. What you’re actually looking at is the closest thing to feeling alive that some of these people have experienced in months.

The actual committed learners are not out there chasing women off the street. They may be apathetic, they may be quietly sympathetic, some of them might think the rioters are justified in some way, but they are not in the street larping as a kanoi. The people who are in the street aren’t masmidim answering a mi l’ashem eilai clarion call. They’re just hooligans acting out their aimless, frustrated, purposelessness.

Some people naively assume the gedoilim control this. That if the leadership really wanted it to stop, it would stop, but this gets the power dynamics exactly backwards.

Da’as Toireh was never really about obedience to specific rabbis. What it actually created was an abstract floating standard, “the toireh position,” that everyone must conform to, rabbis included.

Any rav who deviates from the consensus is suspect at best, reviled at worst. Rav Ovadiah Yosef was muktzeh machmas mi’us in Bnei Brak for decades because he wouldn’t bend the knee.

And Rav Landau, the current nominal authority, lacks the gravitas of his predecessors who may have had more success in trying to stop the rot, if they wanted to. So when people demand that “the gedoilim take control,” they are describing a power relationship that does not exist and very likely never did.

Certainly not in the way the mythology would have you believe.