Letters addressed to God in Jerusalem. Israel’s postal service typically receives dozens of letters each year from around the world addressed to God, photo released by the Israel Government Press Office on September 21, 2016. (Government Press Office via AP)
Howard Epstein – LETTER FROM ISRAEL – THE ENIGMATIC NATION
As the political corpus of Binyamin Netanyahu appears to be entering its final death throes – I have been on the cusp of reporting on the post-Bibi age for a month now – his would-be usurpers still hold their collective breath lest he arises yet like Glenn Close from the bath in Fatal Attraction, which (for some) encapsulates his relationship with the Israeli electorate.
Perhaps, by the time you read this, Israel will, for the first time in over a decade, have a new prime minister. Doubtless, when that day finally arrives, Bibi’s final words will be, “You’re gonna miss me now I’ve gone”, or “Après moi, le deluge” or some other warm words of encouragement for his successor.
And he may well be right. The last twelve years under “King Bibi” have seen Israel’s commercial, fiscal, hi-tech, military and infrastructural landscape (and much more) change beyond all recognition for the better and, in many ways, the best. Those who do not argue that everything comes from the top – think Alex Ferguson (no explanation necessary), Thatcher (thoroughly-modernising Maggie) and JFK (inspired the 1969 moon landing in 1961) – readily accept that it was on Netanyahu’s watch that Israel took the greatest strides to become a regional super-power, that punches way above its weight globally too.
At a time when Israel is trending towards pariah nation status again, it may seem complaisant to wax lyrical about Israel’s achievements. There would seem, however, little purpose in being able to pancake a ten-storey building from the air as though Blaster Bates had prepared its demolition for a month, in being able to take out the leading lights of terrorist missile manufacture in their underground hideouts and in setting back an armed camp dedicated to your destruction by several years, and not doing so. (Does this seem unnecessary to laud war? Tell it to the residents of Sderot, Ashdod and Ashkelon.) And the small problem of pariah nation status? That’s simply a matter of anti-Jewish racism, for which no one has found a cure these past two millennia.
You do not need to take my word for that one. Even non-practising Jew, David Baddiel, who published last February “Jews Don’t Count”, suddenly got it. He had written, quite trenchantly, you may think: “I kind of think: F*** Israel. I call Israel, on Twitter, stupid f***ing Israel, which tends to upset some Jews“. Well, readers of his Sunday Times’ article last weekend saw that it only took 120,000 people blaming Jews (like him) for the perceived transgressions of Israel to bring on his epiphany. Now even Baddiel has no doubt that hatred of Israel is indistinguishable from hatred of Jews. Quite a journey you might think, certainly if you read his book, and watched his conversation with Howard Jacobson, whose finest literary work is “When Will the Jews be Forgiven the Holocaust” (a particularly incisive exposé of the problems some gentiles have with Jews and their unreasonable obsession with survival). Quite a journey for Baddiel, and one taken at warp speed.
Yet pariahood is where we are again. Within months of being flavour of the month (or perhaps the moment) for leading the world in vaccination success (by investing two days’ GDP to gain several months’ more, rather earlier than any other nation), we find ourselves vilified, and in purely anti-Jewish racist terms, for issuing a response to four thousand missiles.
In strict lockstep, Muslim Brotherhood devotee, Erdogan of Turkey, issues blood-curdling anti-Jewish curses and threats against Israel and the Jews, whilst his forces bomb the … well, the life, actually … out of Kurdish civilians; and 120,000 Jew-haters latterly on the streets of London – yes, Corbyn, you were one – do not even bother to get out of bed to protest. In fact, as you and I know, a hundred thousand atrocities get a free pass but, as soon as a Jewish finger is perceived to be on the trigger, all hell is visited on Jews, from the West Coast of the USA to the centre of Jerusalem.
But it is different now. And worse. Previously, we knew where the enemy was. All those neo-Nazis and Hitler apologists were there where we expected them to be: on the Right. Now, however, the Left too clearly express their Jew-hatred and Israel-has-no-right-to-exist hatred, too. We are trapped in a classic pincer movement, so beloved of Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
Still, while Arabs and Moslems and let’s face it, Christian Europeans, and the woke, “progressive liberal”, left-wing, post-modernist, universalist, coastal “elites” of the USA, wish Israel away, we have grown from less than a million in 1948 to approaching ten million in a couple of years’ time. Perhaps that is why the UAE signed a Double Taxation Prevention Treaty with Israel this week. This week’s take-away? An enigma for Hamas. They plot our extinction while our new, Arab, markets blossom. Not exactly, with their four thousand rockets, the boom they had in mind.
Howard Epstein is the author of Israel at Seventy: In Weizmann’s Image (Amazon/Kindle)
© Howard D Epstein – June 2021
