In the space of just a week, twin failures by Binyamin Netanyahu coalesced into a new menace: the one, a near monstrous failure – the matter of the mufti and Hitler; the other, a small and nearly comic stumble, surveying the Gaza border region through binoculars that still had their lens caps on.
At once it became tangible: anyone, in Israel or abroad, could see the manner in which Netanyahu gazes, when all is said and done – only internally, only within himself.
Anyone who listened to his speech about Hitler and the mufti – in which he essentially acquitted Hitler of hatching the notion of the Final Solution and laid the blame at the feet of the Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini – could discern, in a way that was naked of obstruction, the things that Netanyahu sees within himself: the virtually mechanical apparatus that enables him to erase the facts in order to change – with one quick cartwheel of the consciousness – the condition of occupation and oppression to one of persecution and victimhood.
Revealed, too, was the manner in which he casts his victimhood on reality, like one who casts a dense and hermetic net that offers no way out, no escape, not even to Netanyahu himself.
But this time, more so than in the past, it has become clear to what extent we, the citizens of Israel, are trapped, flailing, in this net of his.
For many years now, ever since he embarked on his journey to the prime minister’s office, he has masterfully mixed and stirred the true dangers facing Israel with the echoes of Holocaust trauma.
Skilfully, with sharp flashes of rhetoric and overwhelming powers of persuasion, he has learned how to ensnare the majority of the Israeli population within a labyrinth constructed of echoes and the true facts of reality. Continue reading
- David Grossman is the author of Death as a Way of Life: Israel Ten Years After Oslo.