It's Not Even Past #21 - The End of the Politics of Freedom? - Beginning

I have no idea what to say about Israel except that I fear the very worst is upon us. All the adults have been removed from their ability to supervise and in their wake this corner of the world has been left in the hands of dangerous and savage children.

It seems a bit like this every time, but it must be said, this time feels very different. There is no Obama, no Rabin, not even so much as a Bush or a Sharon on hand to let cooler states of mind prevail. Hamas will continue to throw fanatical protestors straight into the bullets of the Israeli army, and the Israeli army will be all too gleeful to use them. This happens every few years, and the death tolls are usually somewhere around two-thousand with Hamas often finding a way to kill as many Palestinians as Israel does - knowing that Israel will be blamed, but this time gives the sense it will be astronomically higher, and since there is no way to remove Hamas, the consequences will be unstoppable until such time as Netanyahu, indeed the whole Likud party with all those toxic cabinet ministers, is removed from power. If Netanyahu can still remain Prime Minister after the last nine years, who the hell knows what that could actually possibly take - not just untold thousands of casualties on the Arab side, but untold thousands of casualties within Israel. All it takes is one missile with radioactive material on it, one chemical weapon from Syria strapped to a missile and detonated in the air, one container of bioterror. 

And the truth is, there is only one person to whom Netanyahu owes the entirety of his continued reign, and he knows it, and it's driving him absolutely insane. That person is the arch-nemesis of his mind, for his arch-nemesis was not Khaled Mashal or Ayatollah Khameni, nor any of the Leaders of Avodah - the Israeli Labor party. You know who I'm going to say before I say it, his arch-nemesis was Barack Obama. Period. The man who occupied more of his headspace over his second Premiership was not the enemies who could lead to Israel's destruction, nor was it any rival who could unseat him, it was the man who had the potential to show that it was possible to be critical of Israeli policy yet also be a very proud Zionist. Netanyahu categorically rejected that, and as such, so now he faces a left-wing whose Anti-Zionism is much, much larger than it ever would have been. 

When I lived in Israel on an ulpan - one day I'll have to explain what that is, even now I'm not even sure what an ulpan is, I had a politics teacher who made a sweeping declaration on the night Ehud Olmert was elected Prime Minister that The Age of Netanyahu was now over. What an idiot... I have not been to Israel since 2008, the year before Netanyahu returned to power. Everyone I know who's been back has told me the same thing - Israel is prosperous on a level never seen before in its history. 

Right-wing Jews can say that Obama stabbed Israel in the back all they want, but President Obama gave Israel more money than any president in history. The Great Recession shrank America's economy 4.6 percent, but Israel's shrank 0.2 percent. Anybody who thinks that Israel is capable of those economic numbers without American help is as delusional about the extent of Israeli power as any Anti-Zionist who thinks Israel controls American foreign policy. Jews think Obama negotiated a bad deal to get rid of Iranian nuclear capability, but if the deal is bad, then Obama gave Israel all the tools they could ever want to fight Iran - including the bunker busters and the iron dome even George W. Bush kept from them. Anti-Israel leftists always accused Obama of an accusation so low that surely such a slur could not possibly be true - that Obama is a closet Zionist, and yet they were exactly right. All Obama ever asked from Israel was that Israel pursue policies that allow it to thrive, because in the 21st century, the policies that allow Israel to thrive are the same that will let its neighbors begin to do the same. But too many Israelis, too many Jews, have demanded far more than that. They demand a lack of accountability for their actions, they demand they be allowed to pursue a national security utopia in which all threats to Israel's security be eliminated, and so delusionally convinced are they of their potential invincibility that they refuse to see the truth that is obvious to anyone whose two eyes have not been taken by an eye-for-an-eye: that their actions endanger Israel all the more. 

Israeli wars are always overdramatic events, with the stakes always feeling nothing short of existential. But a war of attrition has done in