Neo-Conservative & Zionist Fellow Traveler, Bret Stephens opines: 'Netanyahu Must Go'
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As the former editor of The Jerusalem Post, Stephens was not just a Zionist Loyalist, but a propagandist for Israel. So these quoted paragraphs must not surprise!
It’s no secret to readers of this column where I stand on Israel’s war in Gaza.
Israel must destroy Hamas as a military and political force in the territory while minimizing harm to civilians. It must do what it can to rescue its hostages without jeopardizing the overriding goal of destroying Hamas. It must, by diplomacy or force, push Hezbollah back from Lebanon’s southern border, so that 60,000 Israelis can return safely to their homes in the north. It must take the battle directly, as it did last week in Damascus, to Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s patrons, whether in Syria, Qatar or Iran.
And for all of that to happen effectively, Benjamin Netanyahu must go.
I’ve written versions of this column before, but Netanyahu’s disastrous engagement with Hamas before it carried out the Oct. 7 massacre and his conduct of the war since have made it vital. The need was again made painfully obvious last Thursday, when Nir Barkat, a center-right Israeli minister and former Jerusalem mayor, got destroyed on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Barkat is a decent and courageous man who could be a credible future prime minister. But he crumbled when the program’s host Joe Scarborough challenged him to explain Netanyahu’s policies before Oct. 7.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/opinion/netanyahu-israel.html
The Reader might just find herself wondering about Stephens potted history followed, by the imperative of ‘Benjamin Netanyahu must go’ . And the mention of ‘Morning Joe’ , the least watched Legacy Media, bound to the National Security State’s imperatives!
The strike last week that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers was surely an accident, much like the U.S. strike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Afghanistan in 2015 that killed 42 people. But the command-and-control failures that produced the W.C.K. tragedy show that Israel’s military leadership doesn’t realize they can’t afford those kinds of fiascos, as other militaries can. A double standard, but that’s another reality under which Israel has always operated.
The Patient Reader need only wait for the final three final paragraphs of Stephen’s essay. I have, in the interest of brevity, and the imperative of foreshortening of Mr. Stephens maladroit explanatory frame, for the Zionist Faschist State’s Genocide. That takes shape in these paragraph, featuring the evocative Historical Props of : World War I, H.H. Asquith , David Lloyd George, David Lloyd George, Neville Chamberlain.
It’s also a bad argument. Parliamentary democracies that find themselves saddled with bad leaders in moments of national emergency do well when they get rid of those leaders. That’s what Britain did in World War I when it cashiered H.H. Asquith in favor of David Lloyd George, and in David Lloyd George when it got rid of Neville Chamberlain in favor of Winston Churchill. Netanyahu might aspire to be Winston, but is really more of a Neville, whose bad deals with bad guys led to bad things.
It’s dangerous for a country at war to be led by someone the people neither support nor trust. Seventy-one percent of Israelis want Netanyahu booted from office, according to polls released Sunday, and 66 percent want elections called early, which could happen if a handful of members of the ruling coalition defected. Wishing Netanyahu gone is the most mainstream position possible — and one sincere friends of Israel should never be afraid to express.
I hope Barkat reflects on his “Morning Joe” embarrassment and asks whether sticking by his party’s leader is a price he’s willing to pay. I hope other senior members in Israel’s government also consider their sense of national responsibility above their political positions. Israel cannot afford to lose this war. But it needs to lose a leader who isn’t winning it.
Mr. Stephens carefully avoids mention of the Bombing, Genocide and Famine under the rubric of ‘Israeli The Self-Defence’.
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