by Justine Hemmestad
2-15-24
Our Wednesday night paper route leads to Shakespeare Avenue in Stratford, close to where I received a missive from my friend Itamar Ben David in answer to my query about Netanyahu. Itamar pulls no punches when he says, “Netanyahu is a disaster.” He then described the people that make up Netanyahu’s family: “His father, who passed away [his father was a professor of history at Cornell University]; his hero brother, Yoni [killed while on a rescue mission in 1976], his crazy wife, Sarah; his insane son Yair, who is hated by Israelis; and his low profile son Avner, who is viewed as a good boy by many Israelis. His family is the source of his weakness. I thought immediately of King Lear, (especially being near Shakespeare Avenue). The analogy seemed easy to me, so I looked up whether anyone else had made a connection between Shakespeare and Netanyahu. I immediately found, “The Shakespearean tragedy of Netanyahu” from the Jerusalem Post; “Alas, poor Bibi … Shakespeare’s Netanyahu” from the Australian Jewish News; and “Netanyahu’s end? A Shakespearean tragedy,” from the San Diego Jewish World. Even back in 2019, The Australian Jewish News found the humor in the Shakespeare comparison by stating, “the Bard could have written a comedy about Bibi, Sarah, son Yair, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, the cigars, the Hollywood connection, and the ice-cream account. And he would have called the play The Tempest.” The Australian Jewish News continues to draw a comparison to The Tempest by analyzing Netanyahu’s longevity in government: “Some call this political magic. For others it merely proves he’s a wizard at practicing populism’s dark arts. Whatever this ‘talent’ - smart campaigning or illiberalism mobilized - it’s worked. At least until the second election this year. When Netanyahu faltered. Now the big question is whether he can somehow still conjure up the magic. Or whether the play is nearly over. Enter Prospero. For this purpose, aka Bibi.” But a current Israeli publication pulls back the illusion of Prospero by writing, “... the days of the government in its current form are numbered. And meanwhile, on the northern front, Israel is paying for the neglect that lasted for generations.” Netanyahu’s policies were at the heart of that neglect. In fact, a petition of impeachment was recently submitted to the High Court, though the author of the piece says that Netanya- hu has been quite literally impeached for a long time. “He errs in hallucinations and delusions, oscillates between mania and depression, tossing between the waves and crises like a ship without sails, masts or rudders. This man has only one anchor at the moment: a desperate instinct for survival to which must be added his eternal lust for power and of his family… “...Netanyahu needs to be removed from the Israeli government complex in a democratic way: early elections, constructive distrust, disillusionment within the Likud or a mass protest like it has never been here, which would have all of these.” The same article continues to say, “We are in the middle of the hardest war in our history, since the war of independence. Hundreds of thousands of refugees in their country are living in hotel rooms and makeshift solutions. 136 abductees, among them women, elderly and sick, are still dying in the Hamas tunnels in Gaza. The IDF continues to fight and soldiers continue to fall. The south and the north are deserted. Hezbollah turned the border line into a private range. The economy is groaning, unemployment is rising, national depression is skyrocketing and no one sees any ray of light at the end of the tunnel.” The author says how, while all of this is going on, the most important thing to Netanyahu is that he and his family have all the comforts in life - such as renovations to their private pool. Netanyahu has said about recent hostage negotiations, “’We will not release thousands of prisoners.’ That is, he put the issue of numbers on the table. He violated all the summaries, kicked the action plan, mocked the negotiation strategy that had been drawn up.” His contradictory nature infuriates many Israelis. “When he’s in front of Biden, he wants a deal, when he’s in front of his right-wing base, he doesn’t.” And Itamar bluntly adds, “It is really hard to imagine a worse prime minister and a worse government to deal with the worst crisis this country has ever experienced since its establishment, than what we have. “I can tell you that the fact he didn’t take responsibility for this catastrophic situation is outrageous to many Israelis, and as low as our expectations for him are, this sets a new low.” Though the IDF is the only hope of the hostages still in Gaza, the Israeli article says of the current strategy, “The IDF’s military presence in the Gaza Strip has been significantly reduced. The reserves were released. Most of the massive work has been done, now we need to continue small, steady fire, until the destruction of the governmental and military infrastructure of Hamas is complete… “In Israel there is talk of entering into a round of fighting against Hezbollah that will be ‘lower in terms of intensity than an all-out war.’ The parties will maintain their boundaries, such as not harming Beirut and Tel Aviv, but they will cause each other considerable damage.” Coming full circle back to Shakespeare in relation to Netanyahu - the comparison is quite apt, since the Bard himself is listed in Jewish Gen (an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the premier site for Jewish genealogy). The history behind Shakespeare’s listing in Jewish Gen is in the fact that though Jews were banned from England during his lifetime, there were secret Jews, or Crypto Jews, who remained in England within the guise of Christianity for survival’s sake (including Shakespeare’s family), though they were in fact Jews. Editor’s note: The IDF special forces rescued two hostages, Fernando Merman and Luis Har, from the second floor of a building in Rafah on 2/12. The hostages were kidnapped and held by Hamas for 4 months. Merman and Har were both taken to the Sheba Medical Center, as per the Jerusalem Post.
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