Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “dramatic” speech to the nation last week was just more of the same investigation chatter. There is no doubt that Netanyahu is being hounded. But who cares?
Netanyahu doesn’t have to go because of cigars and champagne. He has to go because a young couple can’t buy an apartment in Israel. He has to go because he insists on deciding for me where and what my child should study. He has to go because just a month ago, he declared that he would be willing to endanger my son’s life to conquer Gaza, simply to transfer it from one terrorist entity to another.
He has to go because we work the longest hours in the West, earn the least, and pay the most. He has to go because in exchange for his photo-op with Gilad Shalit, he freed thousands of murderers who have already murdered more than 100 Israelis and are at the helm of Hamas in Gaza.
Netanyahu has to go because Israel is in 57th place in the Ease of Doing Business Index. But it seems to be in first place in regulations, standards, laws, committees, cronyism, patronage, and lobbyists.
He has to go because he gave in to cronies and corrupt officials who thwart legalization – while the ill keep dying. He has to go because of false accusations and tens of divorced fathers who commit suicide every year in the face of a browbeating judicial system that separates them from their children.
He has to go because a car here costs twice what it does in the rest of the world. He has to go because of all the amazing Israeli young people who served in elite units, but felt that the state was strangling them and left the country.
Netanyahu is right. They are hounding him. But he has to go because he is creating the scorched earth of a divided society bereft of vision and hope. He has to go because he turned Israeli-ness into a quest for uncompromising success – a society whose whole is smaller than the sum of its parts.
Netanyahu should free us of his futile and interminable rear-guard war.
