It’s almost my birthday! What’s not to celebrate?

Unlike those born on a date which everyone remembers, like a relative who entered the world on Yom Kippur and a friend started life on January 1^st, my birthday is ordinary. The date is however significant in my family’s history. On that day in 1948 my mother, a survivor of Auschwitz who left Hungary shortly before the Iron Curtain came down, arrived in Israel. Marriage and parenthood in a recently established independent Jewish state were a forceful expression not only of personal recovery but also of national rehabilitation.

Alas, December 29 is no longer unremarkable. On that date two years ago, the current government was sworn in. When future historians will ask what happened to Israel, a wonder which flourished until it didn’t, “my” date will play a major part in their answers.

Research will also point to other dates. Among them November 2022, when the current Knesset was elected. Due to sectorial voting patterns and surplus vote agreements, a gap of 30,000 voters, some one half of one percent of ballots, gave the government a solid majority. We can go back a few months, to when Idit Silman and Amichai Chikli, now Likud cabinet ministers, deserted their party and brought down the only recent non-Netanyahu government.

Another approach will take us to 2016 and the opening of criminal investigations against Netanyahu. Subsequently, the leader who previously championed an independent judiciary began to undermine it and to eviscerate other gatekeepers. Some would revert to the end of the previous millennium, when he managed to get away with legal complications and subsequently (allegedly) continued with questionable practices.

Other historians will focus not on an individual but on processes. They will point to permission to conduct a Passover Seder in the Park Hotel in Hebron, the first step in what was to become a movement to settle the entire Land of Israel, come what may. Or they could turn to Israel’s first prime minister David Ben Gurion, who exempted several hundred Yeshiva students from the military, and then to Menachem begin, who eliminated the quota in order to include an ultra-orthodox party in his coalition.

One could look to a recent government headed by Netanyahu, who was supposed to trade places with Benny Gantz. This did not happen, trust with the political center was broken, Bibi partnered with the extremists. Memory might take us to July 4, 1976. Not only the bicentennial of America’s Declaration of Independence but also the death in Entebbe of Yoni Netanyahu, which opened the public path to the supposedly less promising brother.

I will not presume to determine the relative weight of each explanation. But it would seem that dread of the ongoing criminal trial and its potential outcome has led Netanyahu to surround himself with political factions, a legal ring of fire. His part of the deal is to protect them and their interests, surrendering to their every whim, at any cost.

Since that unfortunate December 29, 2022, we witness a growing gap between the public will as it is expressed in countless polls, and the actions of the government whose job is to look after us. For almost two years, it acts as though a slim electoral victory permits it to do anything it wants in every field, to make commitments and to distribute resources, to ignore the consequences of its decisions and to scornfully shrug away clear and immediate dangers.

All that badness crystalized on my birthday. It has been downhill ever since.

Therefore, as the date approaches, and despite my family story which gives December 29 unique personal meaning, I kindly ask not to be reminded of it and request congratulations (gifts are also ok) only according to the Hebrew calendar, during the month of Tevet.