Bad Dream for Bibi?

Image: Bibi can't believe his bad luck - JPost 


​Bad Dream for Bibi?

What about the nightmares he creates for others?

Sorry for the long spell between posts. I allowed myself some R&R, but there's nothing like heartening news to get me percolating.

Netanyahu appears to have lost his strangle-hold on Israel's government.  He and Justin Trudeau have much in common; both now uncomfortably in the minority, with efforts in the works to force Bibi to finally pay for (some of) his sins while Justin resorts to hiding behind Chrystia Freeland.

And Trump cannot possibly do any better in his next run for the US presidency, especially when he clearly bolsters Bibi's abysmal lack of conscience:

Independent: Trump administration expected to approve Israel annexing areas of West Bank

• White House officials and senior lawmakers are operating under the assumption that Israel will soon begin annexing areas of the West Bank,

Eventually, as the saying goes, one's sins will find one out:

JPost: Netanyahu’s bloc stays at 58 seats.

• The Likud won 36 seats. Together with Shas’s nine, United Torah Judaism’s seven and Yamina’s six, the right-wing religious bloc garnered 58 seats – three short of the 61 MKs needed for a Knesset majority.

Rather than just gloat, I'm going to post something I've been saving. I'm somewhat of a fan of Dr. Gabor Maté, especially his views on "how capitalism makes us sick". (See video at the bottom of this page.)

In view of recent events, I thought it might be useful to take a look at where Dr. Maté stands on the insanity of Israel vs the Palestinians. The following is an article he wrote for The Star in July 2014.  I couldn't help hitting the "bold" button frequently as the stark truth of his words slammed into my brain.

To me, the most poignant line is in the second-to-last paragraph as he faces the sadness of how differing opinions on Israel's treatment of Palestinians can create impenetrable barriers between long-time friends that are as real and as concrete as the actual physical wall that Israel has built in its attempt to shut out even the sight of its accusers.

Beautiful dream of Israel has become a nightmare

By Gabor Maté, MD
Tues., July 22, 2014

As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: “How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?”

It was a naïve question, that of a child. I know better now: such is reality. Whether in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does. In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach.

In Israel-Palestine the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators. “They don’t care about life,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, abetted by the Obamas and Harpers of this world, “we do.” Netanyahu, you who with surgical precision slaughter innocents, the young and the old, you who have cruelly blockaded Gaza for years, starving it of necessities, you who deprive Palestinians of more and more of their land, their water, their crops, their trees — you care about life?

There is no understanding Gaza out of context — Hamas rockets or unjustifiable terrorist attacks on civilians — and that context is the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood.

The Palestinians use tunnels? So did my heroes, the poorly armed fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery. Out of impotent defiance, they fire inept rockets, causing terror for innocent Israelis but rarely physical harm. With such a gross imbalance of power, there is no equivalence of culpability.

Israel wants peace? Perhaps, but as the veteran Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has pointed out, it does not want a just peace. Occupation and creeping annexation, an inhumane blockade, the destruction of olive groves, the arbitrary imprisonment of thousands, torture, daily humiliation of civilians, house demolitions: these are not policies compatible with any desire for a just peace. In Tel Aviv Gideon Levy now moves around with a bodyguard, the price of speaking the truth.

I have visited Gaza and the West Bank. I saw multi-generational Palestinian families weeping in hospitals around the bedsides of their wounded, at the graves of their dead. These are not people who do not care about life. They are like us — Canadians, Jews, like anyone: they celebrate life, family, work, education, food, peace, joy. And they are capable of hatred, they can harbour vengeance in the hearts, just like we can.

One could debate details, historical and current, back and forth. Since my days as a young Zionist and, later, as a member of Jews for a Just Peace, I have often done so. I used to believe that if people knew the facts, they would open to the truth. That, too, was naïve. This issue is far too charged with emotion. As the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has pointed out, the accumulated mutual pain in the Middle East is so acute, “a significant part of the population finds itself forced to act it out in an endless cycle of perpetration and retribution.”

“People’s leaders have been misleaders, so they that are led have been confused,” in the words of the prophet Jeremiah. The voices of justice and sanity are not heeded. Netanyahu has his reasons. Harper and Obama have theirs.

And what shall we do, we ordinary people? I pray we can listen to our hearts. My heart tells me that “never again” is not a tribal slogan, that the murder of my grandparents in Auschwitz does not justify the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians, that justice, truth, peace are not tribal prerogatives. That Israel’s “right to defend itself,” unarguable in principle, does not validate mass killing.

A few days ago I met with one of my dearest friends, a comrade from Zionist days and now professor emeritus at an Israeli university. We spoke of everything but the daily savagery depicted on our TV screens. We both feared the rancour that would arise.

But, I want to say to my friend, can we not be sad together at what that beautiful old dream of Jewish redemption has come to? Can we not grieve the death of innocents? I am sad these days. Can we not at least mourn together?