War Games: Mass Casualties from the Master of Distraction

We, the Israeli and Iranian people, who are not enemies, find ourselves living – and dying – in a deadly war zone. 600 Iranians and 24 Israelis killed so far. Who profits from these war games?

This sudden war was so obviously instigated by Bibi in his never-ending effort to distract us and delay his political demise. https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahus-political-woes-take-back-seat-as-critics-unite-behind-him-over-iran/

And what about the hostages? 53 hostages are still trapped in Gaza, at least 20 of them still alive, but for how long? Our hostages are starving to death. They have no access to safe rooms, no protective shelters. How many will be left when the Iranian dust clears? The sudden war with Iran has given the world an excuse to look away: away from Gaza; away from our hostages dying in tunnels; away from hundreds of Israeli soldiers senselessly killed in this unwinnable war; away from thousands of Gazan civilians starving and dying.

Just as he has been playing Russian Roulette with the lives of our hostages, Bibi is now playing this deadly game with the lives of his citizens. He knows very well that Iran has an arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles and deadly drones. He knows that Iran is aiming at population centers, despite its claims that the missiles are aimed at military targets. Bibi knows well that Israel cannot intercept every incoming missile. Israelis are being killed in their homes. Civil defense teams search for bodies beneath the rubble of residential buildings. Our homes, our havens, have now become death traps.

Another fact that Bibi knows is that 28% of Israelis do not have access to a safe room or nearby shelter. Add to this the fact that many disabled civilians have no means of getting into a shelter, even if there is one nearby, because of the insurmountable challenge of exiting their apartments and descending the stairs. Yes, Bibi callously plays with our lives, knowing there will be many civilian casualties. Bibi’s war games profit only himself.

The first night of this war was quite harrowing – 4 barrages, one of which leveled an entire neighborhood in Ramat Gan, not far from me, killing 2 and injuring 14. On that night, we did not yet have access to an underground shelter. As we huddled in our stairwell, the building shook. Babies wailed. Distressed parents hugged them tight. Yet, we were the lucky ones. As Civil Defense kept warning us, ballistic missiles are far more destructive than the short-range missiles we were used to in the past. No air defense system can intercept absolutely every missile that gets through. So far, 24 Israelis have been killed and thousands displaced by the rockets that made it through our air defenses.

And now, the war is at our front door. Yesterday, a warhead landed in front of the entrance to my apartment building. This was evidently part of an Iranian cluster bomb missile, engineered to separate before impact, spreading its destruction over a wide area. Our building is less than 1 km – about a half mile – from the main impact site. When we emerged from our underground shelter, we found part of a missile warhead glowing, smoldering right in front of our building’s main entrance. As we waited for the authorities to come and dispose of the ordinance, I stood at a safe distance, shouting to keep my curious neighbors from approaching it with their smartphone cameras. Have they never heard of a zoom lens? Nobody ever nominated me class monitor, yet I always seem to be giving people instructions. I guess it’s not for nothing that my friends call me bossy boots. https://www.timesofisrael.com/like-an-earthquake-ramat-gan-reels-after-missile-slams-into-financial-district

This war with Iran is the perfect distraction, coming just in time to save Bibi from the parliamentary crisis threatening his regime. As if Israel did not have enough trouble to deal with. A preemptive war with Iran. Why now? For over a decade, Bibi has been screaming that Iran is just weeks away from developing a nuclear bomb. He said it in 2012. https://www.timesofisrael.com/bibi-and-the-bomb/ He said it in 2015. He said it in 2018. He foamed at the mouth, shouting about it in his many theatrical demonstrations – complete with idiotic illustrations of cartoon bombs. Where is that Iranian nuclear bomb? It is clear that the imminent danger was actually to Bibi’s coalition government.

Netanyahu has long ranted about Israel fighting a war on 7 fronts. And for anyone who doubted this number, he drove his claim home by attacking Iran in the sudden blitz he initiated on Friday, June 13^th. Yes, Friday the 13^th. One wonders if the choice of this date was part of Bibi’s twisted sense of humor. Anything for applause. Bibi, the egomaniac, revels in his delusional self-image of the master, the smartest man in the room.

Bibi is a war monger. One of his favorite hobbies is naming wars with grandiose phrases, full of biblical references and sly double meanings. Last winter, as Israeli soldiers and Gazan civilians were losing their lives, Netanyahu’s cabinet spent hours debating the name they would give the October 7^th war. What a waste of precious time. Of course, that war, which still rages, already has a name, because of the date traumatically embedded in the minds of Israelis, Gazans, and many others throughout the world. And now Bibi smirks as he pronounces the clever name given to this deadly war with Iran: Operation Rising Lion.

Bibi, ever the showman, ever the master manipulator. He just loves deception – and Operation Rising Lion was a masterstroke of guile. The day before the attack, Bibi visited the Western Wall and put a note in the wall with the words: “The people shall rise up as a great lion.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-an-israeli-american-deception-campaign-lulled-iran-into-a-false-sense-of-security/

The war’s name comes from a passage in Deuteronomy. The full verse is chilling:  “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion: he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain,”

And Bibi’s beloved double entendre is in full play here: The lion is an age-old symbol of both the ancient Israelites as well as the ancient Persians, the people of Iran. Just before the attack, Bibi, master of deception, made false announcements about progress in hostage release talks. This, while the cabinet meeting supposedly held to discuss hostage negotiations was actually a top-secret briefing about the Iran attack. This subterfuge, this callous use of our hostages, and of us, the Israeli people, is so Bibi. We huddle in stairwells, in underground train stations, and in crowded bomb shelters while Bibi and his family sip champagne in their comfortable air-conditioned bunker. And the war games play on.