Waist-deep in the Big Muddy
The question is whether our leaders understand how deep the water truly is – or will the big fool say just push on?
Pete Seeger in New York, 1955. ‘The big fool said push on.’
In 1967, legendary American folk artist Pete Seeger penned a song, “We’re waist-deep in the Big Muddy,” a fictional account of an Army training hike gone wrong in the bayous of Louisiana during World War II.
The captain told us to ford a river, that’s how it all begun. We were knee deep in the Big Muddy, but the big fool said push on.
The sergeant questioned the officer’s judgement. The captain said he had already forded the river, although that crossing had taken place somewhere else. It’ll be a little soggy, but just keep slogging, the captain said. We’ll soon be on dry ground.
The refrain: We were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said push on.
The sergeant noted the heavy loads the trainees were hauling, warning: Sir, with all this equipment, no man will be able to swim. The captain? Sergeant, don’t be a Nervous Nellie… All we need is a little determination. Men, follow me, I’ll lead on.
And the refrain: We were neck deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool said push on.
To make a long story short, the captain drowned and the sergeant turned his men back before they, too, could suffer their leader’s fate.
Nineteen sixty-seven was a time when US involvement in Vietnam was veering out of control, so Seeger continued: [E]very time I read the papers, that old feeling comes on; we’re waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says push on.
I’VE HEARD IT SAID countless times: Hamas knew exactly what Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-right government would do once they collected their wits following the paralysis of October 7, 2023. And do it Bibi & Co. did, with all the fury and vengeance one might expect. And then some.
Now, close to 21 months later, Israel has walked into a trap of its own making.
No, not one in which our soldiers are still dying or being wounded to a point where they might wish they had died. That’s bad enough. Instead, it’s a trap in which the country is losing the last of its friends over scenes of Gaza starvation – some of those scenes surely staged and others certainly manipulated through careless (or perhaps careful) choices of questionable images.
But most are painfully authentic. We can’t deny that.
They’re the product of Hamas’s evil and the United Nations’s cynicism over having been caught one too many times taking sides in a conflict it was meant to mediate and chill. They’re also, however, the product of shortsighted Israeli policies, where humanitarian assistance is turned on and off like a garden hose, and entire Gazan populations are evacuated and moved and then moved again and yet again, with little logic or horizon offered.
In addition, they arise from a situation in which a badly understaffed and exhausted military is thrust into battle and then removed, the process repeating itself over and over to the point where troops no longer know who the enemy is or what their country wants of them.
We’re all now waist-deep in the Big Muddy. The question is whether our leaders understand how deep the water is and whether they possess sufficient common sense to understand the price that they – meaning we – will be paying for their delusions of “total victory” and renewed Jewish settlement.
BOTH PURSUITS, let’s face it, rely on a seriously flawed and entirely immoral approach. Let’s be adults and call the child by its name: ethnic cleansing, whether on behalf of a lunatic American president who can’t quite stop looking at everything through the eyes of a property developer, or on behalf of a God whose self-anointed chosen ones insist they’re allowed to do with their historic homeland as they please.
Into this trap Israel’s leaders walked knowingly, just as Hamas knew what October 7 would bring in response.
Not that Netanyahu wanted to turn Israel into a pariah state. But in having refused to develop a credible plan for the day after, he should have known that this would happen.
It was born of his fear that ending the conflict would mean a probable reckoning, one whose findings would not be kind to his legacy. It was also the fear he’d lose his last bulwark against a possible prison sentence in his corruption trial: an axis of far-right, messianic and ultra-Orthodox parties that well understand quid pro quo, where propping up Netanyahu will require him to cough up precisely the policies they want.
Netanyahu shares with his coalition allies an ingrained disdain for the country’s judiciary, so if neutering the judges keeps him out of jail, it’s just fine with them.
What Netanyahu does not necessarily share with them is, in the case of the far-right messianists, a deep yearning for the removal of the Arabs under Israel’s control, paving the way to widespread Jewish settlement and the annexation of the Gaza Strip. (And let’s not forget about the even more important – to them – West Bank.)
Netanyahu also does not necessarily share the dreams of his ultra-Orthodox partners, which is to say deep and widespread subsidies for their public, which believes in poverty for the sake of piety and continued Torah study rather than service in an army that desperately needs able-bodied boys.
At other times during his lengthy political career, Netanyahu publicly spoke out against such sectoral demands. But a sudden and strong allergy to the prospect of prison time has led him to reconsider, overriding the needs of proper statecraft and diplomacy.
So the tails wag the dog, and ethnic cleansing in favor of Jewish settlement no longer sounds so bad to him. Nor does the prospect of an exhausted and gravely understaffed military as long as this keeps the army-averse ultra-Orthodox parties firmly in his camp.
Needs are needs, and political needs often trump the needs of a nation. But in this case, you can be assured that personal needs trump all.
BIBI, YOUR EXCUSES ring hollow. Argue all you want about anti-Semitism and a world gone berserk. While some of this is true, it is far from universal.
It is you who brought us to this point – and with your eyes wide open. You should have anticipated the global potential for outrage just as Hamas should have anticipated your and your government’s outrage over October 7.
So own it. Don’t pass it off on a world you want us to believe will hate us no matter what we do. It’s not that simple. And we’re not that stupid.
You should have known we’d all end up in a Big Muddy of your making. Now get us out or step aside – because you’re already in way over your head.