A society can produce an Exodus without Egypt — not through borders and overt force, but by quietly altering the conditions under which someone can still feel “at home.”

Israel is currently an unusually sharp laboratory of a mechanism that many democracies still prefer to describe only in moral or political terms. That framing is often sincere, but it misses the instrument panel. Morality can be right yet blind to tools. Politics can see the tools yet pretend it is “just a dispute.” In the background, however, a simple apparatus can switch on: a society can produce an Exodus without Egypt. Not through borders and overt force, but by quietly altering the conditions under which someone can still feel “at home.”

In the biblical Exodus there is Pharaoh. In the contemporary variant, Pharaoh becomes procedure. It does not need a face. It needs language, institutions, media rhythms, and the steady production of labels that stop describing reality and start operating on it. “Kaplanist,” “smolani,” “reformi,” sometimes even “Ashkenazi” used as a slur — these are no longer names. They are levers. At a certain threshold they function as gates. They do not expel you at once. They simply lower your permeability in everyday life: your ease of speech, your legitimacy, your access to professional worlds, your sense that you belong.

Here a mechanistic vocabulary matters: what looks like a one-off insult behaves like a feedback loop. Delegitimization returns, accumulates, and settles into habits — until it becomes procedure, not mood. That is how a society learns to lower someone’s........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)