On ingrates and reaching Italy with dry feet

I feel for Benjamin Netanyahu. That training he underwent as a commando? The exercise where to this day they give trainees a taste of what it’s like to fall into captivity, to see if they can take it? It certainly was no picnic.

He made this clear last week when meeting with a handful of women who had been hostages of Hamas before being released in the initial deals made last November. They now had come to his office, literally begging him to bring home everyone else.

“I was in a hostage simulation,” Netanyahu piped up, as heard in a recording of the encounter that was leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 and translated by the Times of Israel.

“They beat me. It didn’t affect me too much and really hurt,” he related. “I knew I was in an exercise so I’m going to be hit. I knew I wasn’t really in life-threatening danger, and that’s a huge difference, which adds to the suffering and everything else.”

Bibi? You bet he manned up! You can hear it loud and clear in that unscripted, proudly Trumpian riff. He knows what the hostages are going through. First hand. (Okay, almost first hand.) He got through it, so the assumption is so can they.

That’s what I like about our prime minister. Who needs empathy? Give me a leader who leads by personal example, who has been there himself. (Okay, who almost has been there.) A real man. Manly in the extreme. Brave enough to admit to all that he had felt pain, even if it had only been an exercise.

His wife, Sara, was there, too. At the meeting, I mean. And you could absolutely feel her pain.

She listened and listened as the former hostages took her poor husband to task for having failed to protect the many hundreds who were slaughtered on October 7, and the hundreds who were dragged back to the Gaza Strip, whether alive or dead.

Sara took the high road. Like Tammy Wynette. She stood by her man.

“There was also the army,” she told the women – one of whom immediately shot back: “[But] who is the leader [of the country]? He is responsible for the army. He is responsible….”

Sara? She stood strong.

“When they don’t tell him anything,” she replied, referring to the military, “how is he supposed to know?”

Indeed, it’s not him. It’s the people around him. It’s everyone else’s fault. They failed. Not her husband.

One of the women kidnapped from Nir Oz complained that the prime minister had not come to visit the site, saying to him: “Do you want to come with me for a tour? I’ll show you where we were kidnapped…. I’ll show you the suffering I endured.”

And here Sara taught these ingrates what true suffering is.

“All I hear about me is lies,” she said.

She indeed has been through hell. The allegations that she abuses household staff. That she demands expensive gifts and bottles of pink champagne from wealthy Netanyahu backers. That she spends state funds lavishly on gourmet dinners and renovations to the couple’s private home. That and other disgusting innuendo.

“Now,” she went on, “I want to tell you something.”

But she was rudely cut off.

“Okay, let’s hear some lies,” a former hostage sneered.

Strong woman that she is, Sara continued, making sure to remind everyone about her professional credentials.

“Before I met my husband and I was studying psychology, I lived a normal life,” she began quietly – before being brusquely interrupted yet again by one of the former hostages, who blurted out: “I also lived a normal life until they kidnapped my partner. We’ve seen the lack of empathy!”

To which Sara, with the patience and gentleness of a true mental health professional, responded: “It is not a lack of empathy, because you are saying something that is incorrect. I have much empathy, so this is not true. You don’t repeat a lie.”

Before the fraught meeting came to a close, the prime minister, perhaps wishing to alleviate the pressure and unpleasantness that had been placed unfairly on his wife (not to mention on him), took on the former hostages once more, including their demands that he sign a pending deal with Hamas.

“What deal? Which deal?” he demanded to know. “Whoever told you that there was a deal on the table and that we didn’t take it for this reason or that reason, for personal reasons? It’s just a lie!”

And to show just how unreasonable these former hostages were being, Netanyahu rightly put them in their place.

“There are many things we want and they’re hard to get,” he stated. “For example, I’d like to walk to Italy by foot in a straight line… So if that’s what we need to do, it means drying up the ocean. So let’s dry up the ocean! What’s the problem?”

Of course! Many things in life are difficult. Some things are flat out impossible. Like bringing back the rest of the hostages. Can’t these women see this?

All I ask is that when Bibi finally parts the Mediterranean, just as God did for Moses and the Children of Israel at the Red Sea, he brings me back a fresh Neapolitan pizza and bottle of good chianti.

That will show all the sourpusses who claim he can’t deliver.

As for the remaining hostages, they’ll get by on stale pita and humus. Just ask our prime minister. But be nice about it – not like those ingrates he rescued from captivity.