How To Get Rid of Netanyahu

Sometimes, I wish I had a right not to care if Israel has a right to exist.

After all, far greater nation-states have vanished into history’s mist. For millennia, everyone from merchants to mapmakers has coped with not having a Carthage. If the Tanakh-addled psychopaths who run the Knesset suddenly found themselves with no realm from which to claim divine sanction for butchering the innocent, humanity would be similarly unencumbered.

That, of course, will never happen. Not while closeted IDF General Lindsey Bubble Wandin Graham has breath left in other people’s bodies.

Still, having to endure the immoral universe of Benjamin Netanyahu and his apologists can grind you down. For them, cause and effect have long since ceased to matter. There is only Israeli power, to be inflicted and gloated over until nothing seems possible for a disinterested resident of the United States but the endless financing of death.

Ironies abound.

I often try imagining today’s parameters of debate if Theodor Herzl had settled for Kenya as the location of a Zionist homeland. The weekly Bret Stephens column urging Trump to reclassify indigenous residents of downtown Nairobi as terrorists. The hourly diatribes from Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro urging Trump to defy UN resolutions and send B-52s to the rabid settlers from Great Neck attempting to seize control of Lake Victoria. The entrepreneurial adventures of Jonathan Greenblatt as he fundraises off the rising tide of collegiate antisemitism he claims to have discovered among Tanzanian exchange students.

If it seems the United States gives Israel anything Netanyahu wants, that’s because it does. When it comes to the land of milk and honey, congressional leaders are little more than sycophantic chatbots, and it’s a genuine miracle legislation hasn’t been proposed forcing all of us to Hebraize our names.

But maybe defenders of Palestinian rights have been approaching this all wrong!? If Netanyahu wants Israel to be the world’s last bastion of unapologetic Iron Age barbarism, perhaps we should embrace it… and crown him King.

Israel has not had an independent king for a very long time. “Greater Israel” – the combined Israel and Judah with Jerusalem as its capital – lasted no more than 80 years and ended around 920 B.C.

Not that factual history matters to Netanyahu. As Israel’s literal prime minister of terror, ancestral rights begin and end in his remaining unincarcerated. He must always have another country to invade and another population to massacre. Otherwise, all that awaits him is a job in the laundry and recreation time in the yard.

That being said, is Netanyahu qualified for kingship? Can he placate the Jewish and Christian zealots whose support he’ll need? Let’s consider.

Where Solomon once threatened to slice an infant in half to settle a dispute, Netanyahu fabricates disputes in order to decapitate toddlers.

Christian Zionists long for the return of Revelation Jesus: with flaming eyes, blood-dipped garments and sword-filled mouth. But if the Son Of God intends to rule for a thousand years on a mountain of skulls beside a sea of boiling bones, he would be emulating Netanyahu’s architectural plan in Gaza.

Nauseatingly, as King of Israel, Netanyahu will have perks. With profound apologies to all women with functioning senses, Netanyahu will have a harem. He will have hundreds of wives and concubines and prostitutes and slaves.

But… in that tolerant age before monotheism took hold, Solomon worshipped all his wives’ gods!

In fact, everyone in the Ancient Near East worshipped numerous gods. Ancestors became household deities. Each town had specific gods and goddesses. If you moved, you needed to take along some soil upon which to place an image of El or Baal Hadad or Astarte or Anat or Dagon so that it could be worshipped in your new town.

It was a saner time.

How much saner? When Solomon dedicated the Temple he sacrificed 22,000 bulls and 120,000 sheep. To maintain dominance over a re-invented country without defined borders or a constitution, Netanyahu sacrificed 75,000 human beings.

It’s easy to despair.

Vile, indeed, are the ways of biblical certainty. When, in the first recorded instance of pure religious fanaticism, Jehu and Jonadab son of Rechab slew the Baalists, tolerance permanently left the “high places” of Israel and was replaced by the Judaic notion of covenant.

That concept of a favorites-playing God, equally embraced by believing Muslims and Christians, may yet succeed in vaporizing us all.

Nevertheless, I choose to find hope in the Bible. Not in the soul restorething or the still water leadithing, but in the accounts of the kings of Israel and Judah.

For amidst those insidious tales of treachery, revenge, slaughter and assassination lies reason enough to anoint Netanyahu king… and hope for the worst.

The post How To Get Rid of Netanyahu appeared first on CounterPunch.org.