That the security apparatus of the modern Israeli state has allegedly targeted the legal aid organization Honenu should surprise no one who has observed the state’s philosophical trajectory. This incident is not an aberration or a flaw in the system. It is the system functioning as designed—the inevitable outcome of a state conceived in the shadow of Machiavelli—a secular Zionism that has created a state intrinsically hostile to the very Jewish essence it purports to protect.
Honenu’s work consists of defending Jews—soldiers and civilians—whom the state has deemed inconvenient. These are the individuals who act upon an un-sanitized Jewish identity, one that is not mediated by the sterile rationalism of the High Court or the bureaucratic morality of the state’s managerial class. Honenu represents the very spirit the modern state was created to domesticate: the raw, pre-political Jew who defends himself, his land, and his people without first seeking permission from the proper authorities. This Jew is an intolerable variable in the state’s secular equation.
Therefore, the actions of the Shin Bet’s “Jewish Department” must be understood not as the overreach of a few agents, but as the logical function of the state’s immune system. When its founder, Shmuel Meidad, is warned that the agency will “take Honenu… down,” it is the voice of the totalitarian state itself, which by its nature cannot abide any power center or source of loyalty outside of its own absolute sovereignty. When the state’s interrogators question a man about his legal counsel, they are not merely violating a procedural norm; they are asserting the state’s total authority over every facet of the individual’s existence, dissolving the sacred space between a man and his advocate.
Herein lies the paradox of the Jewish state, a paradox that has now ripened into open hostility. The state was founded on the promise of protecting the Jewish body, but it demanded the Jewish soul as payment. It adopted the Enlightenment’s error—the tyranny of tolerance—which posits a neutral, universalist framework where the particularities of Jewish identity can only be expressed insofar as they do not challenge the supremacy of the secular order.
Honenu’s existence is a direct challenge to that order. It insists that there is a Jewish law, a Jewish solidarity, and a Jewish definition of justice that precedes the state and is not subject to its approval.
In the eyes of the state, this makes Honenu not a legal aid society, but a seditious entity.
The alleged campaign to destroy it is not a political maneuver; it is a philosophical necessity for a regime that must, in the end, crush any remnant of the authentic Jewish sovereignty it was meant to restore.
The conflict between the Shin Bet and Honenu is thus a clear glimpse into the soul of the modern Israeli project—a project now at war with itself.
