An Open Letter to Netanyahu and Gantz: Do your Jobs

by Victor Rosenthal

Over the coming weeks, 100% of the words uttered by our politicians will be lies, obfuscations, spin, dissimulation, disinformation and other forms of useless verbiage. I’ll try not to report on it, because what’s the point? – Ya’akov Lozowick, in a tweet about a week after the recent election

Dear Bibi and Benny:

I’ve had enough of your egos. All of Am Yisrael has had enough.

Seventy years ago, a Jewish state was re-established in the Land of Israel after thousands of years during which the Jewish people were forced to live under one or another foreign regime; years when they did not know what to expect tomorrow; years when they had to keep their suitcases packed.

After the horrors of war and Holocaust, a remnant of European Jewry was saved, here in Eretz Yisrael. When the Muslim world expelled most of its Jewish population in a paroxysm of Jew-hatred, they came and were brought here. Threatened Jews came from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Yemen, Ethiopia, and other places.

Some people believe that the creation of the state and its survival was a miracle, a gift from Hashem. There is no doubt that it also required a price in blood to be paid by our people, our sons and daughters who fought, and continue to fight for it against ever-changing but also ever-vicious enemies. Almost every day our people make payments in blood, on our borders and even on our streets.

The external threats we face are great. Iran advances its project of encircling us with its rockets and proxy armies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, while developing nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. The Palestinian Arabs continue their project of educating generation after generation of young people so that their greatest ambition will be to shed Jewish blood. Hamas throws its people against our border fence every Friday. This spring and summer, they burned hundreds of acres of agricultural land in the south of the country with arson balloons and murdered our citizens with their rockets and mortars. The home front is unprepared for the next war. And the all-encompassing cognitive struggle, paid for in Arab and Iranian petrodollars and European Euros, marches on, conquering hearts and minds in the universities and even grade schools of the West.

Instead of dealing with any of this, or even the price of apartments for young families in Israel, you two – followed by your legions of sycophants – are locked in a struggle for dominance that seems unamenable to compromise. Only total victory will satisfy you. Meanwhile, we’ve had two elections, and neither of them has produced a result. Our government is non-functional, its ministers primarily concerned about their personal futures and the perquisites thereof.

While you both piously pretend to want to establish a unity government, you insist on conditions that you know the other side will be unable to meet. You use the threat of a third election – at the cost of additional months of paralysis and more than a billionshekels (including the cost of the mandated day off) of our money – to play chicken.

We have had enough.

Regarding a third election, know that if – God forbid – it should happen, the results will be even worse for both of you. Many Israelis won’t vote in protest, some will vote for smaller parties, and the Arabs, who have gotten a taste of the power that it can give them, will vote for Arab parties in even greater numbers.

Be aware that the regard both of you are held in your country is dropping rapidly every day that this farce continues. History will judge both of you harshly, especially if the nation goes to war unprepared because you wasted your own and everyone else’s time, money, and attention.

You know what you have to do. Stop lying, obfuscating, spinning, dissimulating, and dis-informing. Sit down with the other side and compromise. That means each of you will have to give up the idea that you will get everything, or even most, of what you want.

Tomorrow is Erev Rosh Hashana. The coming week is the perfect time to put aside your egos and your personal considerations and think about what you owe the Jewish people and their state. Perhaps do tshuva [repentance] for some of the ways in which you have not lived up to your obligations to the state and its people.

Think about the thousands that gave their lives in the War of Independence in order to create the state, and of those who died to preserve it. Think about the defenders of the Emek HaBakha on the Golan Heights in 1973, or the battle of Bint Jbeil in 2006. You have it easy. Nobody is asking you to fall on a grenade to save your comrades like Roi Klein at Bint Jbeil. Just do your jobs.