The Sum of All Fears

Our present government and its vociferous sympathizers are constantly engaging in fear mongering of the worst kind. These days they are generating fear of being overrun by 600,000 African natives who will flood the State of Israel, steal our property, molest our children, infect our food and drink with disease and rape our women. If that is not enough, the threat of cancer is thrown in for good measure. For somebody with European ancestry like me, this terminology does sound oddly familiar.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, at Yad Vashem, a judicious choice of venue if there ever was one, King Bibi warned us obliquely that unless Iran is stopped now, a nuclear catastrophe might be in store for us to end, once and for all, the Zionist enterprise. No doubt this fear will be driven home again and again (and again) as long as the negotiations with the Iranians are ongoing.

Following that, it was pressed upon us by hysterical government ministers and  Knesset members that the memorial of the Nakba might do us in. After all, empathizing with the enemy can be extremely dangerous, weaken us beyond repair and empower the forces of delegitimization so they will pull the legal plug on us, leaving our army of lawyers speechless and the Jewish State high and dry.

If that isn’t enough, every once in a while Eli Yishai or one of his henchmen from the Interior Ministry or the Population Registry will remind  us of the terminal threat posed by Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinian spouses and thus are practicing their “Right of Return” in a particular devious form. But do not fear:  Even our left-wing Supreme Court is duly impressed by this substantial threat and keeps letting the government get away with preventing Palestinian spouses from obtaining Israeli citizenship, something granted routinely to every non-Palestinian spouse.

And I haven’t even mentioned the elections in Egypt.
For some strange reason, much more mundane things like the deterioration of public education, the constant relative decrease of wages, the disappearance of the welfare state, the absence of a Peace Process with the Palestinians and the ongoing and accelerating harm done to the relations with about any foreign country that comes to mind leave King Bibi cold. It’s as if all these things aren’t enough to strike fear in every citizen’s heart. It’s as if King Bibi needs a special kind of fear – King Size, inflated beyond all reason. Thanks but no thanks – Joe Citizen is scared enough with the real challenges at hand. Joe Citizen has no need for any special thrills. The actual number of asylum seekers is enough to keep us awake at night. So is the deterioration of almost everything else that concerns our life on a daily basis.

After having obtained Independence in 1948, we have created an incredibly powerful and successful state that brought home millions of Jews from all over the world. The citizens of this state are now indoctrinated, on a daily basis, to live in fear. Whoever doesn’t want to live in fear has to help remove this government. Now, before the fear drives us mad.