Reading is believing: Smotrich tells the negotiators to butt out

“You’ve got to read it to believe it,” Israel’s far-right finance minister Betzalel Smotrich wrote Friday morning in a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter. And yes, you do have to read it. Smotrich’s post, that is.

He was upset by a joint statement issued the day before by the parties trying to mediate a deal between Israel and Hamas.

“It is time to bring immediate relief both to the long-suffering people of Gaza as well as the long-suffering hostages and their families,” it said. “The time has come to conclude the ceasefire and hostages and detainees release deal.”

That’s it. That’s what’s got Smotrich in a snit. The statement creates, he complains, a “delusional symmetry” between the hostages, “men, women and children who were kidnapped from their beds with horrific cruelty,” and the “heinous terrorists who murdered Jews and are imprisoned as punishment.”

Can you believe it? How can there be a deal when the mediators themselves are issuing palaver that places hostages being held by Hamas in the same sentence with convicted terrorists doing time in Israeli jails?

Clearly, the guy cares about the hostages, who have been rotting in tunnels and dungeons for the past 10 months. They are superior to those jailed terrorists, you see. And their release, he adds for necessary effect, is “long overdue.”

Thank you, Mr. Smotrich! So kind! So endearing! Wear that yellow ribbon with pride!

As for the rest of us, let’s go ahead and read the remainder of Smotrich’s post. Any such deal, he maintains, would be “a dangerous trap in which the ‘intermediaries’ dictate a ‘formula’ to us and impose a surrender agreement on us that will drain the blood we shed in this most just war we are waging.”

Imagine that! The intermediaries – in quotes, because they, especially Washington, are actually rooting for our demise – are telling Israel what to do! Diktats! Formulas! And the coup de grace: surrender!

He’s on more solid ground when he warns that a deal would be “a prize for terror” and would “reduce Israel’s power of deterrence and its image in the Middle East.” What’s more, he states, it would present Israel as “a weak patron state” and “distance its friends in moderate Arab states.”

On the surface you cannot argue with these points. Yet one can also argue that under the government in which Smotrich is a senior and very verbose member, Israel’s current power of deterrence and image can’t get much lower. He should have thought of this sooner.

And “patron state”? Are we the United States to anyone? Britain? Russia even? Thanks to Smotrich and his government and coalition associates, we have become a pariah, a laughing stock at best that can’t protect its citizens, bites off more than it can chew on the battlefield and then threatens to engulf the entire region in war.

Trust me: Those “friends in moderate Arab states” have opted for deep cover and won’t be seen palling around with Israel anytime soon.

So the hostages must pay the price. The “men, women and children who were kidnapped from their beds with horrific cruelty.” Not Smotrich. And certainly not the criminal defendant Benjamin Netanyahu, who orchestrated a perfect storm by bestowing power upon far-right clowns, blowhards and God-fearing messianists like Smotrich solely for their votes to keep himself in power and out of jail.

Yup, you’ve got to read it to believe it. The same man who just a couple of weeks ago said it would be no big deal to starve millions of Palestinians to death if this would win the war (and, oh yes, get the hostages back) thinks he’s some kind of military expert and strategic analyst, a man who barely spent a day in uniform and whose chief allegiance is not to the law of the land but to the creator of the universe.

For if you listen carefully and read closely most of Smotrich’s declarations, they usually end with “…God willing.” So there you have it. The hostages are not in his hands nor in those of Netanyahu. They are in the hands of God. It’s all up to the big, mysterious guy upstairs.

Like I said, you have to read it to believe it.

May God help us.