In the end it will all blow up

The writing on the walls is smeared in bold red letters, but the prime minister has done nothing, apart from making speeches.

By BEN CASPIT
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem (photo credit: REUTERS)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting at his office in Jerusalem
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sanctifies the status quo and there is nothing new in the steps that he is taking.
The writing on the walls is smeared in bold red letters, but the prime minister has done nothing, apart from making speeches.
Bibi is dividing Jerusalem. This, in fact, is what is happening when the cabinet decides to impose a “breathing closure” on Jerusalem’s eastern neighborhoods and builds a buffer between them and us – a buffer that won’t hold water, and certainly not knife-wielding terrorists.
After the breathing closure breathes its last, a non-breathing closure will be imposed and, if the situation continues to worsen, Israel will consider imposing a curfew.
In the end we’ll have to weigh bringing back a military government.
Other solutions? There aren’t any.
What we are facing is a broadscale grassroots phenomenon – viral, unexpected, immeasurable, and out of control. Not even 1,000 Mahmoud Abbases could put an end to it. Those Palestinians – some of them youngsters – who are attacking us with axes and pitchforks, exist in a completely different reality from ours. Their drive is different from ours; they are living the “Arab Spring” that flooded regimes, boundaries and states, to become the “Arab Fall” that is now flooding the streets from Jerusalem to Ra’anana, and storming the fence separating Israel from Gaza.
At the beginning of this decade, we were warned of a “political tsunami” that is liable to be followed by a tsunami of violence in the region.
Prophesies of doom were proven false and nothing happened. We continued our lives as usual, sanctifying the status quo, living the good life, convinced that everything is just fine. Now everything is blowing up all around us.
Jerusalem has been fermenting for two years. Over the last year, the fermentation has become explosive and violent. All the writing has been smeared in big red letters on the walls, but our prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has done nothing.
Apart from making speeches, of course. All those heroic steps he’s “initiating and advancing” have already been advanced and decided on last year and the year before that. In the end, it is nearly all just public relations. Netanyahu forbids cabinet ministers to be interviewed, except for his “own” ministers (Yuval Steinitz, Miri Regev), scrapes together credit for obscure legislative proposals and leaks to the media “cabinet steps” minutes before the news broadcasts, in an attempt to reassure the public.
But the public is not reassured. It has no reason to be reassured.
Netanyahu threatened that if “Tzipi and Buji” were to rise to power, we’d have to travel to the Western Wall in armored personnel carriers. Half of this prophecy has already been fulfilled. Tzipi and Buji are not in power, but the APCs are definitely making their way to Jerusalem. The security moves Netanyahu is now making are the right ones. He demonstrates restraint and is behaving with caution. The trouble is not what he is doing now, but rather what he didn’t do before.
Anyone who sanctifies the status quo and does nothing on the eve of Shabbat, will on the Sabbath eat the porridge he managed to cook at the last moment.
The Palestinians are incited – brainwashed with hate and fantasies.
Not only are they behaving like barbarians, they are also telling lies and calling murderers martyrs.
We know all this. The trouble is that we ignore our own part in the deterioration. We are turning a blind eye to role of the messianic right, which is talking in a loud voice about building a third Temple on the Temple Mount, who go in increasing numbers to the Mount and provide the Islamic extremists with the basic factual kernel for turning a fly into an elephant, a molehill into a mountain.
I am wondering how many more intifadas will rise out of the Temple Mount before we learn this lesson.
Translated by Ora Cummings.