Bibi the Berserker
Bibi Netanyahu’s endless Gaza war is having the effect, intended or not, of increasing and spreading anti-Jewish hatred all over the world.
Of course it’s not fair for anti-war activists to blame Jews in America, England, Australia, France, or anywhere else for Bibi’s war. You don’t see people harassing and assaulting Russians because Putin invaded Ukraine, Chinese because Communist China is oppressing Tibet and trying to erase its cultural identity, or Indians because they’re discriminating against and assaulting its Muslim population whenever its citizens feel like it.
But there is a perception that all Jews are somehow connected into this tightly knit tribe that acts as one organism. Fair or not, this is the reality for diaspora Jews.
One outcome of all this anti-Jewish hatred could well drive Jews to emigrate to Israel. I’m sure that would make Bibi and his coalition quite happy.
The other effect of the forever war in Gaza is to create even more potentially violent enemies for Israel among the Palestinian population and the greater Muslim world in the Mideast. Is Bibi comfortable with this possibility? Maybe so. It helps demonstrate that Israel is surrounded by hostile actors, which must of course defend itself from these rabid, fanatical killers.
It’s sick and twisted, but Bibi’s war is creating this very scenario. I’m a strong supporter of Israel, but I can’t defend the widespread hunger in Gaza, the killing of reporters and the recent hospital bombing in Khan Younis, which was supposedly the result of an accident. When even Donald Trump expresses concern about a bombing, Bibi needs to reassess what he’s doing.
The Israeli armed forces are not defending the country from attack. They’re just destroying and killing.
What is the point of the war now? What is Bibi’s objective? He doesn’t say. And what are the costs? More Israeli soldiers and Palestinians are going to die and for what?
After almost two years of war, Hamas is decimated. Sinwar is dead. His brother is dead. Gaza is a smoking ruin. But Hamas has survived all that is and holding about fifty hostages in its tunnel network.
I’ve read that Bibi wants to continue the war to indefinitely postpone his corruption trial. That feels true, sure, but I’m sure he has other reasons too.
His stated goal of destroying Hamas seems unrealistic, to be polite. And Hamas has already won the propaganda war. Israel is seen as a barbaric and genocidal killer by hundreds of millions of people. The American public in general doesn’t seem to feel that same level of outrage about Hamas. And the rest of the world certainly isn’t on Israel’s side at this stage of the conflict.
Bibi has alienated most of the Democratic Party in the U.S., particularly the younger members. Does he think they’re not going to remember what Israel has done when they win back power? How do you think they’re going to vote when a new Israeli arms sale comes up for debate in Congress?
Bibi is now blaming Biden for October 7th, claiming that Hamas never would have attacked Israel if Trump were President.
Oh, really?
Attacking Biden as at fault here is a great way to divert attention from the failures of Bibi’s own government to anticipate and fend off Hamas’ attacks on that awful day.
It’s so obvious, obnoxious and embarrassing to see Bibi sucking up to Trump this way, as is his nomination of Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Can you really win a Nobel Peace Prize when you build a concentration camp for undocumented immigrants, direct masked agents to grab innocent people off the streets and send them to El Salvadoran prisons or dump them in Africa, order the FBI to visit the homes of political adversaries, extort money from the press over frivolous lawsuits, investigate opposition politicians, attack journalists and generally decimate the Constitution virtually every day? Not to mention mobilizing National Guard units to occupy Washington, D.C., and planning to do this in other cities too?
Many hours of the day, I try to pretend that what’s happening in the United States isn’t actually happening, or I will go insane. When I see the news each morning, it feels like I’m being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson.
So I read books on baseball to distract myself. The United States, the world’s oldest democracy, has become unrecognizable.
Israel is similarly rendering itself into a country I don’t know or understand.
With the Israel Defense Forces’ imminent invasion of Gaza City, the approval of the massive new E1 settlement in the West Bank, and serious talk about implanting Israeli settlers in Gaza, all Bibi is doing now is digging a much deeper hole for the Jewish state, both from within Israel and the world.
Let’s contemplate this nightmare future – even more Israeli settlers spread out all over the West Bank, and even living in Gaza again, with the army keeping millions of Palestinians under a giant Israeli thumb.
Despite the facts of history, that the Palestinians were offered a state in 1948, and turned it down, that Arafat was offered a state in the waning days of the Clinton Presidency in 2000, and turned it down, that during the two intifadas Palestinians slaughtered thousands of Israelis and terrorized the country, and the bloody horrors Hamas inflicted on October 7th, Israel still has the freedom to choose a future that could enhance the chances for peace in the neighborhood.
Yes, somebody could write a very long book about all the Palestinian atrocities against the Israelis. But can Israel afford to enact a tyranny over the Arab inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank?
Israel’s right-wing government seems to be choosing eternal despotism over the Palestinians. What will they do without hope? Treating them like objects that can be permanently ignored or trampled on is a false god.
Has Netanyahu forgotten how the Jews were treated in Europe and the Middle East for centuries? We sure didn’t like being scorned, persecuted and murdered. Do you think the Palestinians feel differently?
To me, the situation in Israel and the West Bank bears some resemblance to Czarist Russia. My grandfather, Max, left there in the early 1900s after he was drafted by the Russian Army at the age of 17. The 1905 pogroms against the Jews may have been just one factor pushing him out. General social discrimination against Jews was another thing that probably preyed on his mind.
Why should Max have served the Czar for an astounding 25-year enlistment, when the Russian government treated him and his landsmen like filth?
The Russians gave my grandfather no hope. But he could leave, to go to America, the golden land. The Palestinians don’t have that option. They can’t go anywhere.
It’s impossible to guess how Israel will maintain its strength of will in the coming decades. All I know is that relying on the military as the only way to live with your neighbors doesn’t give the state super powers for eternity.
Israel’s military is unmatched in the region right now. Will it be able to keep this up? For how long?
There is a black hole in Israeli government attitudes toward the Palestinians where at least a sliver of empathy is supposed to be.
We’ve all heard the disclaimers. Israel is a small country, just about the size of New Jersey. The Israelis and the Palestinians have hated each other to the depths of their souls ever since Jews started coming back to the land in sizable numbers in the early twentieth century. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem lived in Berlin in World War II and collaborated with Hitler.
Various Arab countries tried to destroy Israel in 1948, 1967, then 1973.
Hamas has decreed the destruction of Israel in its charter. Hezbollah is likewise devoted to blowing Israel off the map. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are creatures of Iran.
Iran’s entire foreign policy is predicated on eliminating Israel. Iran’s theocracy cannot stomach the existence of what it calls the Zionist entity. Iran is always there, lurking, enriching uranium, trying to build an atom bomb, conspiring with terrorists to attack Israel.
And the Jews have nowhere else to go.
These things are all true, yet Israel must do something difficult and deploy its moral strength to give the Palestinians something resembling hope.
Colin Powell once said of Iraq, “you break it, you own it.” Israel has broken Gaza. It has broken the West Bank.
The vast majority of the Israeli public thinks that Israel cannot live in peace with a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Only 21 percent of Israeli adults think a Palestinian state can coexist with Israel, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this past winter.
As they say about relationships, it takes two to tango. We don’t know what’s possible unless the Israelis try to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority. Right now, there’s no talking between the two unless it comes from the barrel of an Israeli gun.
Psalm 23:4 states, “Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me…”
When I was a kid, we used to see a few men walking around the mall on Saturdays with tee-shirts that played off the psalm. But it went like this: “Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley.”
Israel is the meanest son of a bitch in the valley today. But can’t the government bring some new and expansive thinking to what the next decades of Israeli life with the Palestinians will be like, as opposed to the knee-jerk oppression dictated by the current right-wing extremists in power?
Bibi can’t do it. He’ll lose his grip with the right-wingers with whom he’s tied up. It will have to be up to some as yet unknown politician out there to try a different approach that doesn’t cement in place an Israeli dictatorship. He or she has got to offer a more compelling vision than what’s coming out of Netanyahu’s government.
As a counter-narrative to the hate and violence directed at Israel, consider that Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco have all signed peace treaties or normalized diplomatic relations with Israel. All these efforts took imagination and courage that seem to elude Netanyahu’s government.
Bibi’s only strategy right now is single-minded destruction. Israel has to be smarter than this.