Cry, the once-beloved country

Beautiful British Columbia has lush forests and intoxicating islands. Vermont and Maine have their verdant vistas and long, lovely shorelines. London has Shakespeare and pubs and parks, and Australia has everything the heart could desire. And Israel has hot desert winds, pesky mosquitoes, and drivers from hell. We have neighbors who hate us. And punitive taxes. And house prices that keep us shackled to mortgages for decades.

Yet, from all over the world we have flowed in to pitch our tents here, right in the center of the world, to drain the swamps and wipe out malaria, to build roads, and trains to get drivers off the roads, to speak Hebrew and to close our schools on our Haggim. We came, and we stayed, because no amount of heavenly nature, and no sum of lovely money, could compare with being at home, being where we belong, being where we should be.

Israel was our country, our miracle dream come true. And we knew that no matter how we voted or what we thought, Israel cared about us. If an Israeli went missing in the forests of Colombia our search-and-rescue team would find him and bring him home; if an Israeli was arrested on false charges abroad our lawyers would fight to get her home too. If a plane was hijacked in Entebbe our pilots would swoop in and our crack soldiers would bring us all home. We were safe here, we were embraced, we were where we should be.

Until this cursed government landed on our hearts and suffocated us. This coalition of shame and lunacy, of exclusion and cult; a coalition of incompetents and crazies. What does Smotrich, our Minister of Finance, know about finance? What does Ben Gvir know about security, except how to wreck it on all fronts? Who is he and who is he representing? It’s true that I don’t go much to synagogue anymore, but I used to, a lot; did I miss something about prostrating our bodies on the floor during prayer? I remember that on Yom Kippur the cantor would prostrate himself on the bimah, for a brief kneel, and then straighten up again, but lying there on the floor on the Temple Mount – what is this? Are they trying to out-Muslim the Muslims?

And is that what we need now – the right to lie in the dirt? Is that a reason to spark another intifada? In whose name?

The unspeakable balagan bangs on every front. Secular teachers are on strike while Haredim grab ever-growing budgets, doctors are fleeing the country, our credit rating has dropped. The Justice Ministry is in shambles, and so is our Police.

Of course, the arch-enemy, the orchestrator of the vicious divide between different populations, the determiner of who will live and who will die, and who will get money and who will need to strike, and who will get security (and we’re not even talking bodyguards for sons in Miami) and who will need to live on borders that are continuously bombed – the architect of all the chaos, the weaselly wicked causer of the collapse of Israel, is our Supreme and Eternal Leader, Binyamin Netanyahu.

He is the one who decrees that Israel no longer brings her captives home; he is the one who insists that our soldiers continue to die to continue the war. We can’t have elections in a time of war, he snarls, and without elections he will not go to jail. So we die, and our hostages languish and die, and he asks for money to fix his swimming pool.

The world has known evil leaders before – it’s not that unusual. But the world has not known a Jewish State before, not for two thousand years. How can we let one man bring about its collapse? We realize that he needs to cling to power by his shaking fingertips; he doesn’t want a guilty verdict, he doesn’t want to admit responsibility for the chaos he has caused. But he doesn’t (yet) rule the country alone.

Where oh where are the sane voices in his coalition – apart from the brave Gallant – how do these MKs sleep at night? Nir Barkat, Yuli Edelstein? They don’t need more money, one would assume, nor are they messianic, or so hypnotized by our tyrant that they can’t see what’s happening here on every front. Why don’t they stop him, or topple him? Do they also want the whole country to implode?

Of course, Hamas took our darlings captive, of course, Hamas tortured them and murdered them. It is not in Hamas’s charter to look after Israelis; we don’t expect Hamas to bring us home.

We expect our government to do that, especially a government that got us into this appalling catastrophe in the first place. We want to heal, and go to movies and not demos on a Saturday night; we are bone-weary and spirit exhausted from fighting our enemies in the Knesset.

Netanyahu, take your muppet wife, and your cigars and champagne, and go and join your beloved son in Miami. We will pay for your bodyguards for the rest of your life.

Just stop killing us. And give us our country back.