The State of Israel is being held together by staples and Scotch tape.
This country has been through a hell of a lot since 1948, but it has never been more fractured, wounded, or traumatized than it is today. The grotesque assault on this country committed on October 7, 2023 by the Hamas death cult has brought Israel to the brink of societal collapse. An enormous contributing factor to this profoundly disturbing state of affairs is that the country is being led by a man who shows every sign of having entered into a fantasy world in which he is not a prime minister but an emperor.
Bibi goes on television to lecture us, the Israeli people, that "my people and I"—by which he means not his fellow citizens who are watching the broadcast, but his cronies, enablers and handlers—will do exactly what they want to this country, and—this next said with a wagging finger, dead eyes boring into the camera—we citizens can yell and protest and carry on all we want, but “it's not going to help you.” Unfortunately, he seems to be right.
Bibi recently caused even more harm to the already badly frayed social fabric here by sacking highly competent and widely respected Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. This was an act of magisterial contempt, a spitting in the face of every soldier who has served in this nightmarish war and indeed of every Israeli citizen who has suffered through it these last awful 13 months. It puts the seal on Bibi’s disdain for his own citizens and soldiers that he is replacing Gallant with Israel Katz, an unqualified yes-man who will rubber-stamp whatever Bibi wants and fetch his coffee into the bargain.
This is a disgrace. Our soldiers and reservists are being sent on tour after tour in Gaza and now Lebanon, going through hell over and over again, risking life and limb, suffering relentless trauma, watching their friends die in front of them. On top of all that, as if that weren't enough, their businesses are shriveling and dying and their relationships with their spouses and partners and children are suffering as the months drag on. Those who manage to come home alive and in one piece have just enough time to paper over the cracks in their disintegrating lives when they get the call to go back yet again. And Bibi fires the one person in a position of influence in this war in whom the soldiers had any reason to have any faith. He is saying to our soldiers, You will do as I, King Bibi, say: You will be fed into the maw of this war for as long as it suits me and the greed-addled zealots who have my nuts in their fists. And you will shut up and take it.
The result of this betrayal is that Israelis are starting to despair of this place in a way I've never seen before. I'm hearing Israelis—solid-as-a-rock Israelis who have served this country with honor again and again, and who have sent their kids to do the same—say they have had it: that they can now imagine leaving Israel and never coming back. Israelis are starting to tell their kids, "Don't enlist—better that you should go to jail than be sent to die by these people." Ideas like these cause the very ground beneath Israel to shake, and they are being drawn out of Israelis by a government that appears to despise them: a government that is fatally corrupted by greed and arrogance and moral rot.
There is much talk of this being an existential war for us, and it is. This country is fighting for its life. But the crisis goes way beyond Iran's and its proxies' desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. The crisis isn't just on the borders, or on the streets of Amsterdam where rampaging mobs hunt Jews like animals, or in the statehouses of American capital cities where elected officials openly thirst to see Israel destroyed, or on college campuses where the best and brightest wrap their heads in keffiyehs and chant genocidal terrorist slogans in some perverse form of virtue-signaling-from-hell.
Our existential crisis isn’t just bearing down on us from all sides. It's inside the house.
This is indeed deeply depressing. I don't have enough knowledge on the situation to argue whether the current government is or is not corrupt, nor whether it hates its people, as you say. But regarding the current war, what do you suggest as an alternative? Are you suggesting an immediate ceasefire? Prosecuting the war differently, and if so, how? I am not asking these questions sarcastically. I am genuinely seeking to understand your point of view on this question.
If it’s really true that Israel is fighting for its life—and I, admittedly an outside observer, believe that to be true—what is the point of this rant? Is it that someone has a better idea than Bibi as to how Israel can win the war? If so, who is that person? What’s the strategy?
If it’s really true that significant numbers of Israelis are thinking of abandoning that Jewish state because the going has gotten rough—what does that say?