So who’s on first in Israel, now that another government has collapsed?
My American followers are puzzled by the latest development in Israel, which, quite suddenly, finds Naftali Bennett out as prime minister.
Caught me by surprise, too.
New elections, again? This would be the fifth time in some three years.
It’s a wonder that a country that is so successful on the world stage, can, at the same time, be such a miserable flop politically.
Israel is a country populated with Einsteins in nearly every sphere, yet for politics, expect no Nobel Prizes.
The short answer is that each man is in it for himself. Everybody wants to be the king. Hence the brawling, the backbiting, and the double-crossing without manners or pity.
Every Jewish person “knows better.” This is historic.
So, these friends are asking if there is an answer to the ongoing political strife and chaos up to this moment.
I just gave one, I gave an answer, but as for real wisdom, why pick on me?
On Israeli politics, I’m a spectator just like everybody else…not even front-row, but way up there in the bleachers.
True, I used to know the parties, and the individuals, yes, I could tell them apart, but after so much party-switching, yes, musical chairs, I gave up, tuned out.
Let the best man or woman win, and so long as Israel’s destiny moves forward on all cylinders, strength to strength, it’s okay whoever is on top.
Let them bicker inside or outside the Knesset, so long as, without interference, Israel remains a light to the nations.
Sometimes it does seem that Israel operates, and operates best, on automatic pilot. Too much tinkering and Oslo and Gaza is what you get.
Too bad, then, when the wrong man makes it to the top to serve himself and not the people, and my readers are free to choose from the menu.
On bickering, I’ll say this again…better to be squabbling in the comforts of home, Israel, rather than at Auschwitz over the last piece of bread.
How beautiful it is to say that!
If you say we can do without the people being so stiff-necked…
I say it is the proof that today’s Israelis are the pure and direct descendants of the Hebrews who griped against Moses in the Wilderness.
The behavior is consistent throughout the generations. Customs live on.
Griping we did, and griping we do, and Moses still loved his people, and passed up a big chance to start all over through his own family.
For further reading on what makes Israeli politics so disorderly, I suggest the usual experts, but for a quick course, I suggest Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First?”
It’s a hilarious routine pertaining to a mix-up about baseball…but it may as well be about Israeli politics.
Or, check out “Professor” Irwin Corey who used to regale audiences with his professorial gibberish that sounded like something, but was really about nothing.
Some people, unaware that he was really a comedian, believed he was for real. That way, he once fooled a convention of psychiatrists, who gave him a standing ovation.
Something like that can happen again on our topic.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
