BIBI CAME TO TOWN

ISRAELI DEFENSE FORCES THROW ONE STONE TOO MANY INSIDE GAZA

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The citadel of democracy has at no time been in greater peril than during the time of the rising power of the global autocrats.

Autocrats run large political power blocks like China and Russia. And autocrats, of a slightly different sort, operate large electronic social machines like Google. The power of Google CEO Sundar Pichai to unilaterally shape society is exceeded only by that of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The common link between the people is the driving adrenaline of unchecked power, if even for the briefest of algorithmic dream like moments.

In a sense, the classic democratic structures that play home to the representatives of the people, not just in the United States, but also in Israel, have become more and more shallow symbols of ornamentalism.

Like the surviving structures of antiquity, the Pyramids in Giza and the Acropolis in Athens, the Capitol buildings are mere matter underneath the electronic metaverse that has enveloped the democracy of day to day living.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his Address to a Joint Session of Congress, on Wednesday, personified that shift in values in which the ways of the past are becoming increasingly lost in the competing interests of the future.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed no shame for Gaza.

Netanyahu instead continually shored up the moral imperative of Israel as the holy defenders of the Jewish people and the holy sites of Jerusalem.

The smallest of moments between the past and the future could not have been better defined.

United States President Joseph Biden resigned today, or was it yesterday, just a few hours after Netanyahu’s assertion that the Jews were part of some kind of Triumvirate between Jerusalem and Washington and God.

Netanyahu has appeared four times before Congress, but at no time before has he appeared to be so melting away like the wax insides of a holy candle, incrementally disappearing from all the psychotropic images of all the blood being shed inside Gaza.

One can barely shore up the necessary sleep, during the warm hot summer nights along the sea, despite the righteousness of the cause of freedom, justice and democracy. That human burden may just be that great.

Biden has Ukraine to rub his hands about like MacBeth. And Netanyahu has Gaza.

On Wednesday, at mid-day, Netanyahu talked about humanity being at the crossroads of history with the world in such upheaval.

The current conflicts are not a clash of civilizations but ‘a clash of barbarism against civilization’, he said, referencing the eternal battle between those people enslaved to an ideology of death and those free people who cherish the sanctity of life.

Bibi, as Netanyahu is affectionately known as, stated: “America and Israel must stand together, because when we stand together, we win, and they lose.”

Bibi benefits from one of the great military defensive machines ever designed. The Iron Dome intercepts inbound missiles of every sort. This defensive military machine has proven to be so effective that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants one. Europe already has a de facto one with the NATO fighter jets and the line of nuclear missiles along the East/West political divide.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the machine could not prevent the ground invasion of Israel that resulted in the death of 1139 people on October 7, 2023. Netanyahu underscored that Jewish people had been butchered and raped on that day – including babies being burned alive and families slaughtered in front of each other.

The 3000 Hamas terrorists also took 255 hostages. And only 135 hostages have been freed over the 9 months of waiting.

No doubt that any assault on Israel and the Jewish community anywhere in the world triggers the intergenerational trauma embedded, not just as a result of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered, but by centuries of Jewish persecution.

Israel formed as a sanctuary for the Jewish people amidst a world-wide conspiracy that existed in the many years prior, silently rippling the gentle winds amidst the whispers.

Netanyahu reiterated Israel’s purpose of defending Jewry by exclaiming that the soldiers of Israel remain ‘undaunted and unafraid, and that they shall rise like Lions, like the Lions of Juda.’

The scourge of antisemitism must be fought without exception, Netanyahu stated.

After about 45 minutes of Joint American-Israel political vitriol, the Address to Congress being about 52 minutes in total, Netanyahu began a series of blanket denials about human rights violations and atrocities being committed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) inside Gaza.

The International Criminal Court has indicted Netanyahu. but apparently Hamas is the cause of all the hunger, and all the bloodshed, and Israel has been entrapped, according to Bibi.

‘Hamas caused the famine. Hamas killed 39,000 people, not Israel.’

Israel will not relent though, not until victory has been achieved in defense of liberty – not until good triumphs over evil, according to Netanyahu.

The United States Congress must hear Netanyahu out, them being a major arms dealer to the Middle East conflict, and having invited him and all, to the protests at Washington DC.

But 39 members of Congress abstained by not being present, after 9 months of Pro-Palestinian Protests.

Gaza will undoubtably be transformed, like Europe after two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, with no place left to go after city after city were leveled into rubble like Yemen and Hiroshima and so many other places in the world.

People struggle to survive in the aftermath, inevitably replacing the past, brick by brick, if they must. But humanity never forgets, especially not those tortured souls so compelled by hatred that vengeance may only be left for another day.

Netanyahu has decided that, after looking around, even skulking a bit at his own shadow, that the IDF has passed that point. Israel has made so many enemies by the breadth of the military operations inside Gaza that the IDF must reduce everything to zero capacity.

The method, hardly one of peaceful persuasion, has proven successful in post-World War Japan and Germany. And the madness still occurs, like Russia in Ukraine.

But nevertheless, Israel may be more in danger from a world undergoing a tangential generation shift during which the victors and the vanquished remain unidentified with an indeterminate fate.