There will be those who will say that it happened a long time ago, there will be those who will claim that there are positive sides to this, but the events of the last few months have made it clear to anyone who still had doubts: Israel may be a sovereign state (this too, minus its northern and southwestern borders), but it is no longer truly independent.
Red, terrible and terrible lines stretch across fifty years and one more day, from Yom Kippur of the year 2014 to Simchat Torah of 2014, between Golda Meir and Benjamin Netanyahu, between one loss of deterrence and another loss of deterrence - and above all, perhaps above all, in favor of An internal electoral interest that holds that weighty policy decisions can be suspended, so as not to upset the public or the coalition partners, which turns the State of Israel from the one who initiates and steers the events to the one who is dragged after them, by rules of the game that it does not set.
Then and now: Golda believed that policy decisions could be postponed until after the elections, since the public was moving to the right and this was not the time for what could be interpreted as concessions (which gave rise to Henry Kissinger's famous sentence about the identity of Israel's domestic policy and its foreign policy), in exchange for "a deal Golda gave the Americans the avoidance of a pre-emptive attack - and here, fifty years later, Netanyahu did and continues to do so.
Why upset the bass? Why shock the 1964 coalition with talk of the day after, when you can wait and rattle off silly slogans about "total victory"?
Not right, not left
Before we move on to the classic disputes between left and right, it seems that we need to get rid of these expressions a bit: in my impression, about 80% of the public would be happy to turn the entire Gaza Strip into a demilitarized area (a washed-up expression for "parking lot") in the spirit of "voluntary immigration" proposed by various parties - from There is a future" and to the right that is right to the right, but about 80% of those 80% understand that this is a fantasy.
I want to say, if Netanyahu were to present a vision that was once considered extreme right the day after, we would be condemned. At least we would know that the Israeli government is marching us towards a clear horizon, even if it is not agreed upon.
It is the full right of a large public in Israel to claim that the Palestinian Authority is nothing more than a more sophisticated enemy, who wants to destroy Israel without the religious madness that characterizes Hamas, but even if we agree to this (after all, those who finance terrorism, even if in hindsight by supporting the families of murderers, cannot be Partner for peace), we must say what we do.
This is not an intellectual discussion, but a disastrous procrastination that is already costing us the loss of our independence: it cost us the rejection of a pre-emptive attack in Lebanon, on the fourth day of the war. It cost us the delay of the ground maneuver in Gaza, which as successful as it was - could have been even more successful, it cost us the loss of the main lever of pressure on Hamas in the form of "humanitarian" supplies in a corridor that led directly to its people and preserved its power. It cost us in the failure to complete the mission in Gaza and it costs us now in the considerable reduction of the possibilities of response to the Iranian attack.
Israel known as "State"
So the bad news is that every day that passes and brings us closer to the 76th independence celebrations, we are a little less independent, but the even worse news is that it's not necessarily bad...
because it's a bit like in a shared building whose tenants have trouble getting along with each other about the payments for the elevator, about the landscaping And about the garbage room - until they order an external management company, so is Israel now (and those whose historical vision extends far into the past, understands that this is a kind of "back to the future" - this is not the first time in history that the Jews drag a foreign power to interfere in what is going on among them).
The problem is that this voluntary enslavement to a foreign interest (which also comes with a lot of money and weapons), as obscene as it is in principle, is excellent at the level of practice: if the alternative is that the national security will be managed by Ben Gabir, the economy will be managed by Smotrich, and the security decisions will be made by a government in which a large part None of its members served in the army at all (many of them are representatives of parties that encourage evasion of service and work), perhaps it is better that an American official manages us. Here, too, there will be those who will say "then yes now": when the alternative is religious fanatics, we are better off with a "fax-Romana", a Roman peace.
So it is true that some of those who wish for the rule of contemporary Rome hope that this westernization will permeate not only foreign and security decisions but also domestic policy, for example in the separation between religion and state, but let's leave them alone and look at what is happening around us.
The Palestinian state contract
Yesterday, our colleague Ohad Hammo (News 12) published that behind Israel's back (or more precisely: over its head) negotiations are taking place for the formation of the "day after" settlement, the main point of which is the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza and its rehabilitation with funds from Arab countries, if you will - a pro-Western Sunni alternative to the Shia terrorist state supported by the axis of evil.
In many respects it is possible that this arrangement will be good for Israel, certainly in the short and medium term of a few years to a few decades to come. What will happen next? It is dangerous to gamble.
What is already dangerous is that Israel is almost out of this loop, at most it will be required to sign initials in the margins of the founding document of the first Palestinian sovereignty. Remember Mubarak urging Arafat to "sign already, you dog"? So the main difference between that class and a similar class that may-might be excited about us soon - is that Joe Biden has more style than the Egyptian president at the time.
There will be those who will say that this is proof that history has its own sense of humor: here is Netanyahu, the man who wanted to be remembered as a leader who prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state with his body, he will be the one who will present it to the Gazans in exchange for their support of a murderous terrorist organization (which more than took over them by force of arms, grew from them and with their encouragement), and when all This thing exists precisely because of his leaning on the extreme right, the one that demands to settle Gaza with Jews, this is already a real grotesque. If the joke hadn't been at the expense of all of us, we might have laughed.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is currently convening the cabinet for the management of the war, in Kirya in Tel Aviv/Government Press Office
Fifty years and a day
There will be those who will also mention that it was not Netanyahu who initiated the process that gradually transferred control over the fate of the Jewish people to foreign hands, there will be those who will draw a line (not at all unreasonable!) that is fifty years and one day long, back to the day when Golda transformed Israel from an initiative state to a trailing state, a political entity A self-employed person who takes her fate into her own hands with an American supply junkie who is flown here by air train.
What is certain is that Netanyahu ran this bad movie, in historical terms, on fast-forward to the point where a sky littered with Iranian drones made us the smallest star on the Star-Spangled Banner.
Oh yes, there is still one more, small but significant difference between Rasht That government to the current prime minister:
Golda at least had the decency to resign, while Netanyahu will insist on continuing to wrap the chair restaurant until the bad end of the movie.