Grabbing a plate of humus at my favorite joint down the street from the office on Wednesday, I heard about life according to Menachem, a fellow diner across the aisle.
A gruff, middle-aged Jerusalemite and longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud supporter, he said enough is enough.
“Bibi has to go; his time is up,” he said, munching on a falafel ball. “He’ll never win another election. What has he done? Nothing. The big mistake on October 8 was not leveling Gaza – including the hostages, I’m sorry to say.
“There’s no way to live with these people [the Palestinians], and now, they’re going to get their own terror state,” he added, pointing to the TV screen on the wall as it broadcast the announcement that Norway, Ireland, and Spain would recognize a Palestinian state.
Absurdity has overtaken the world
Indeed, even discounting Menachem’s inexcusably cavalier attitude toward the hostages, his realization of the absurdity that has overtaken the world and its view of the Gaza war has its merit.
Besides the declaration of a Palestinian state and the International Criminal Court’s leveling of the leaders of Hamas and Israel to the same moral plane in requesting arrest warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh, Netanyahu, and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in the same breath – the moral center of the universe is gone.
The United Nations has been a lost cause for a long time already, with most countries no longer abiding by truth and accuracy but by sectarianism, allegiances, and an underlying animosity toward the Jewish state.
That sentiment has merely proliferated since October 7, with outrage expressed at every turn that Israel dared retaliate for the Hamas atrocities.
Wednesday’s release of the horrifying footage of the shocked and battered female IDF observers in their first moments of captivity produced nary a blip of sympathy or understanding for Israel’s just mission to free them and the remaining hostages and to pummel Hamas into a non-threatening entity.
Nor is it going to increase – or even initiate – any pressure on Hamas to release them. The onus is always on Israel, attacked on October 7 and still attacked today.
The swelling of anti-Israel sentiment is instead growing with each day. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that most of the world believes that Hamas was justified in its attack on Israel and is now the hapless victim in the ongoing Gaza war at the hands of a genocidal, starvation-motivated Israel.
The declaration by Norway, Ireland, and Spain calls for a Palestinian state on 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and all the West Bank won by Israel in the Six-Day-War handed over to the Palestinians.
As Salman Rushdie so astutely stated in an interview this week, any Palestinian state coming into being in the foreseeable future would turn into a terrorist state, run and manipulated by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and their like-minded goons – for whom a state is just a means in which to continue their holy war to eradicate Israel.
But if the geopolitical trend continues, that is exactly the situation we’re headed toward. Israel will soon be totally isolated, and even the goodwill of the United States will be helpless against an onslaught of a combined European/Russian/Chinese front that stands in silence in memory of Raisi and justifies Hamas barbarism with rewards of statehood.
When the world no longer cares about differentiating between the victims and the aggressors, it’s clear that a new normal has arrived and that Israel – not Iran or Syria – is a rogue state.
The slippery slope is speeding up, and it’s unclear whether there’s any way to put the brakes on to stop it.
For the first time in some 30 years since moving to Ma’aleh Adumim, built on land won by Israel in 1967, I’m worried that I’ll be forced to leave and move to Israel ‘proper.’
Of course, that will be an Israel with the North and South already unlivable, which will be impossible to defend. With a hostile Hamas-run country on the border, it’s only a matter of a short time before October 7 takes place again and again.
Once Israel ceases to exist, there might even be a moment of silence at the UN.
But don’t count on it.