CrossFireArabia
By Rashad Abu Dawood
Gideon’s chariots are sinking in the Gaza quagmire. Israel is increasingly isolated, becoming a pariah state in the world. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a slap in the face, or rather spat at, as the Israeli media described it, in his speech at the United Nations, where he spoke to walls as most of the delegations left when they saw him take the podium.
He lied and lied and tried to distort the facts of his crimes in Gaza, but the world no longer believes him.
Where is Netanyahu taking the region, the world, and even Israel itself to? His path has no end but death and destruction. This man no longer cares about international law, United Nations, or humanity. Nor, of course, does he care about the truth he tries to conceal with lies that no longer convince most Israelis or the countries and peoples of the world.
He reads from the Torah and impersonates Prophet Moses, Joshua bin Nun, and the kings of Israel, whose kingdoms once reigned but all perished. This was not because of the lack of character of their leaders or their lack of faith, but because their people disobeyed them and angered God. Didn’t they say to Moses: “Go, you and your Lord, and fight. Here we are sitting!”
Netanyahu misrepresents biblical terms. “Blotting out the memory of Amalek” refers to the Canaanite inhabitants of Palestine, and is a call for the Israeli army to act in Gaza exactly as Joshua did in Jericho: Genocide in the name of divine promise. “Iron swords” refer to the conflict between the Israelites and the Philistines during the time of David and Saul, when the Hebrews were forbidden from manufacturing iron weapons as a symbol of sovereignty.
As for the term “Gideon’s Chariots,” which the Netanyahu government has acknowledged as a failure – first its first phase and now second – remains a goal however to wipe out Gaza City including its people and structure. Gideon is the biblical judge who led his people during a moment of moral decline and widespread idolatry, when his enemies, Midian and Amalek, joined forces to destroy the crops. Despite the apprehension, Gideon continued his work in secret, believing in salvation from the Amalekites, and ultimately their kingdom was destroyed and wiped out.
After using most of the biblical terms to cover up his recklessness, failure, and corruption before the Israelis, Netanyahu began searching in history for something to distract them from their reality. He found the experience of “Sparta,” demanding they rely on themselves, manufacture weapons, and isolate themselves from the international community as a solution to the isolation he and his ally US president Donald Trump admitted Israel was experiencing.
As Israeli writer Ben Caspit put it in his Maariv article: “This man has completely lost his inhibitions, his balance, and his connection to reality. That he continues to command our Titanic is a danger to lives. Israel must not become Sparta or North Korea. This is not fate. Israel could have been a leading, beloved, accepted, and renowned country, a beacon of technology, intelligence, leadership, and economics in the Middle East as well, had it not been led by the unruly group of savages that this man brought upon us. How do I know all this? From the fact that we were, not long ago.
But one problem: Sparta has became extinct, lost, and disappeared. It no longer exists today (a small village bearing that name was rebuilt in modern times). What survived was Athens, the same Athens that Netanyahu is trying with all his might to destroy.
By the way, it was the Nazis who embraced Sparta, its culture, and its myths, orally, in writing, and in practice. And here, too, we know how things ended.
Netanyahu is the child who killed his parents, and then later asked for a reduced sentence because he was an orphan!
This column by Rashad Abu Dawood was originally written in Arabic for Addustour newspaper
Saleem Ayoub Quna
