Posted on Tuesday 7 April 2009
I had to see my MD yesterday afternoon.
(It’s nothing serious but, if you were wondering, thank you.)
“So,” I greeted him with a smile, “we have a new government.”
“Another jerk running the country,” he smiled back.
Our family doctor since before we began keeping the ‘be fruitful and multiply’ commandment (most folk today treat it as a suggestion), I know him as always friendly and helpful, a conservative practitioner who cares about the person behind the patient. As far as I know, he is a God-fearing Jew and a fully committed Zionist in the best sense of the word.
While I understood him to be serious despite the smile – as he took a jab at his newly-inaugurated prime minister – there wasn’t a whiff of rancor in his voice.
Where others may feel bitterness towards Benjamin Netanyahu, I don’t believe he does.
His statement was matter of fact; simply the way he sees it.
Still, the memory of his words woke me in the early hours of this morning. And I found myself responding:
It isn’t really up to Netanyahu, Doc. It’s up to you. It’s up to the Israeli people.
Bibi was literally my next-door neighbor when, in June 1996, he became prime minister for the first time.
I recall the wildly honking unofficial motorcade that swept into Sokolov Street and circled the park where our toddler sons played on that summer’s day. The procession was led by uncontainable young men who chanted joyously to welcome the victorious Likud leader: “Bibi melech yisrael!” (king of Israel) and “hineh, hineh ba, rosh hamemshalah.” (here comes the prime minister).
This man will be good for the Jews, they told us, and themselves.
Politically right-leaning Israelis had gone to bed dispirited the night before, believing Netanyahu to have lost to Labor Party Chairman Shimon Peres. And logically the veteran peacenik – who ran for election in the aftermath of the Rabin assassination – should have thrashed the upstart.
The morning news – that Bibi had pipped Peres and become Israel’s youngest-ever prime minister – electrified the nation.
It brought life flooding back into many demoralized lovers of the land – those almost despairing at the previous government’s embrace of a process-that-brought-no-peace.
Bibi brought hope, but he did not deliver. As far as those who put their trust in him were concerned, he betrayed them.
Stunned, they watched him buckle under American pressure, rescind his demand for reciprocity, shake the bloody hand of Yasser Arafat, and surrender the sacred city of Hebron to the PLO.
Despite his successful preventing of nearly all terrorism during his term, many can’t forgive him for these grievous sins.
But, 13 years later, he’s been chosen again. And he has again squeaked past the post. In votes, Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni beat him. Netanyahu is only prime minister because more people voted for the right overall than for the left.
{Some see God’s hand in this, as well as in the fact that State President Peres – the man Netanyahu beat before – was now compelled by his office to assign his nemesis the chair. It’s the way I see it too, if unsure of all it portends.}
2009 is not 1996. In the interim years, rivers of Jewish blood have flowed and the nation has been traumatized in wars and thousands of terror attacks. Other right-wing heroes with heels of clay have also come crashing down.
This time there was no dancing, chanting cavalcade to bear Bibi to power. He is no longer young. His past speaks – loudly and painfully – for itself. Few people will have been harboring those earlier illusions.
“Another jerk to govern us.”
Perhaps. We’ll soon see.
I would not be surprised if those who DO have their hopes pinned on Netanyahu see them dashed again.
It’s a serious mistake to depend on him. If his voters think that, should he again “disappoint,” they can just punish him at the next election, they are doubly wrong.
Democracy doesn’t work this way. Not really. Too many people see voting as the full extent of their civic duty. But the ballot box is the starting, not the finishing, line. And I mean for the electorate – not only for the contender!
A strange thing happened in America last year.
For months, as John McCain and Barack Obama battled it out on the campaign trail, increasingly anxious voices were heard from conservative leaders and rightist media personalities about the danger the Democratic candidate posed to the future of the United States.
Some journalists took hold, terrier-like, of Obama’s associations and friendships with America-hating clergy, terrorist-loving academics, and Israel-hating former presidents. Influential Christian leaders and economic experts sounded the alarm louder and louder until, as November 4 approached, a crescendo of concern was reverberating through the land.
Obama would murder more babies both in the womb and out; Obama would throw in the towel in Iraq, making a mockery of the American lives sacrificed and massive effort spent to plant democracy there; Obama would appease Iran’s Hitler, enabling him to get a nuclear bomb; Obama would turn America into a socialist state; Obama would betray American values, apologize to the world for America’s behavior, and sell America’s birthright to curry favor around the globe.
The night before the election the tumult had become a torrent. And then, on the morning after: silence. Obama had won, and except for a few dogged individuals, the race was quickly on to backtrack from all the horror tales and dire predictions, and swear allegiance to the man who was, after all, to be “our president.”
Nothing had changed, mind you. Obama still threatened to make all those nightmares reality for the US, and in fact is now well on the way to doing so. But the Republicans had fought him, and now they could retire to lick their wounds and regroup in order to fight the next elections when they arrive.
Fools and blind! If it was right to fight the man before he moved into the White House, surely it is even more important to fight him now that he is there. Or are most those, until recently “desperately worried,” Americans resigned now to allowing Obama four years of freedom to ruin their country?
In America, citizens on the right should be fighting the ungodly policies of their president – doing everything in their power to hinder and delay him in his efforts to remake that country in his own image.
Back here in Israel, citizens on the right should be gathering around the prime minister they helped – directly or indirectly – to place in power. By their encouragement and through their activism, they can strengthen him to withstand the ungodly pressures and threats that are already rearing against their land.
In 1997, one of Netanyahu’s senior advisors complained about how the left wing members of that coalition were tying Bibi’s hands – blocking every attempt the prime minister made to slow down the “peace” process; threatening to cause the collapse of his government if he moved ahead.
Instead of empowering him to withstand the increasing American pressure and dislike, those who could have helped pulled back and disowned him – leaving him to stand alone.
He could’nt. He was not strong enough then. He is not strong enough now. No single man could be.
I believe it is less up to Netanyahu. If you are an Israeli, a Zionist, a loyal lover of your land, it’s more up to you.
Now that he is in the Prime Minister’s Office, resist the temptation to sit back and criticize. Rather, come forward and in droves give him the message he can clearly convey to Obama himself, when the president comes calling in May.
“My countrymen – citizens and government – insist that I withstand every effort to surrender more of our historic homeland for empty promises of peace. As the leader of the greatest democracy in he world, you will agree with me, Mr. President, that my first responsibility is to them, and not to America.
If you, reader, are an American Christian or Jew, it is past time to begin your assault on the corridors of power in your land wherein wicked men are plotting the delivery of Israel to the Arabs.
As we all know: All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.
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Well said Stan.
I will be moving back to America and I am worried about what Obama is REALLY up to and you are also right on the point when people just wait for the next election just to be bullied by a powerful media machine again.
And who knows who the other guy is going to be.
We of course need to pray and ask for the blessing of the Lord as well as to call the nations to repend and believe in the Son of God.
Keep up the good work and the Lord Jesus be with you all the time and with your family.
God bless.
Stan, I guess we’ll never stop resisting the evil here in America, but as you said, of Isael, the same is true here - most of us see it as the hand of God. I believe without any shadow of doubt that Obama IS God’s judgment on America. We saw it coming, we yelled and screamed and shouted, and spoke and wrote and prayed, yet few listened. The heart of America has turned away from her God and commanded Him to leave. And it appears, he’s left. And when God leaves, what can man do?
As for Bibi, I’m really glad he’s back in the Prime Minister’s seat because this “head and shoulders man” has been looked to as some kind of savior and that image needs to fall. You said there’s no man on earth who could bear up against the pressures he is and will be under. And that’s very true. But also, there’s no man on earth who can do what ONLY the Messiah will do. And the Messiah is not going to share his glory with any man.
I believe that Israel has had to see men of every quarter arise to the Prime Minister’s seat, from the far right to the far left and back again, so that the Jewish people will see from the stark evidence that putting their trust in ANY man will prove disastrous. At some point, Israel will be forced to turn to their God -.after all men, all kinds of men, will have failed.
We celebrated Passover here in my home tonight. We prayed for Israel. We prayed for the Jews both in Israel and worldwide. Of all the things we could have prayed for, we prayed for their redemption. We asked for the veil to be removed. We asked for their eyes to be opened.
That’s the bottom line, isn’t it?