When Our Leadership Fails Us  

 As I write this on Thursday afternoon in Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu, his wife of course, and an entourage of others who travel with him are landing in New York after flying there on Israel’s equivalent (well, almost equivalent) of Air Force One so that he can deliver an address to the UN General Assembly on Friday.

My first question is why? Why would he leave Israel in the middle of a continuing war with Hamas in Gaza along with a serious escalation of the war with Hezbollah (there is no other name for it) as well as sporadic attacks by other proxies of Iran such as the Houthis, one of whose drones hit the Port of Eilat this morning causing serious damage to the infrastructure there?

His press office will say that it is important for him to make Israel’s case on the world stage. Seriously? Will anybody be listening? More importantly will anyone’s mind be changed? I would bet that every single person in the hall tomorrow could write Netanyahu’s speech today and, when compared to the final text, will have it 90% accurate.

Will there by anyone in the hall who trusts our Prime Minister enough to be open to hearing his message? No doubt Israel’s UN mission will make sure to have some of the parents of the American hostages still held by Hamas present there so Netanyahu can point them out as part of his message. Do they trust the Prime Minister?

In addition, our strongest allies will also be in the room as a courtesy, but it is quite obvious that while they need to deal with him, they certainly don’t trust him.

There is also enormous cost involved in a trip like this which we, as taxpayers, end up being the ones footing the bill, including his need to extend the visit into the weekend in order not to violate the Sabbath. Couldn’t our government have prevailed on the schedulers there to give him a speaking slot on Thursday instead of Friday if the Prime Minister wanted that to be the case so he could be back here on Friday?

As columnist Dan Perry, the former Chief Editor of the Associated Press in Europe wrote earlier this month: “This is the sixth time since Netanyahu’s calamitous return to office in Dec. 2022 that he has found an excuse to extend an international trip over the weekend, including, most recently, in the US following his July address to Congress. The trips have included jaunts to London, Berlin and Rome, where he stayed on despite a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. They are enormously expensive: He and his entourage take over entire floors at luxury hotels.”

If it is important for Israel to have someone make its case to the world body, and I would argue that it does have value even if no minds are changed, then the Prime Minister should have remained in Israel to handle the current and ongoing crisis and sent someone who enjoys at least partial trust by diplomats worldwide.

President Yitzchak Herzog would have been a good candidate as he has earned the respect of world leaders, even many of those who are critical of how we are conducting our current wars. In a setting like the General Assembly of the UN, it would not matter that much that his role is mostly ceremonial, because to many of us, he is the “adult” in the room in the current framework of or government.

There are many ways that our present government has failed us, and this is only one example. Over the coming days I’ll deal with other examples as well. But with war raging on all of our borders and hundreds of thousands of Israelis demonstrating regularly against the policies of this government, in my opinion, the Prime Minister sets a bad example leaving the country in a time of crisis with no perceptible possibility of benefit from this seemingly worthless visit. This is just a diversion with no meaningful outcome expected or realized.