Dear Israelis,
As you know, we just had one of our most remarkable elections ever. Americans of all political stripes rose up to reject a president who thought being elected made him untouchable — free to abuse our sacred institutions, free to appoint incompetent sycophants to the most important Cabinet posts, free to use his office to enrich himself, his cronies and his children, free to turn US foreign policy from an obligation to pay any price and bear any burden in the defence of freedom into a deal-making gig with dictators, free to inadvertently kill more than 120 children in an elementary school in Iran and never apologise, free to fire generals because they would not put his politics ahead of their duty to country, free to claim that any election he lost was “stolen” and free to pervert a noble Justice Department into his personal lawfare attack dog.
Some of those sound familiar?
Well, we defeated our Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s now time for you to defeat yours.
In our system, we cannot throw our Bibi out of office in midterm elections, but we would have if we could have. After your recent full-term election, you can. The opportunity is right in front of you now — and if you miss it because of petty squabbling among your opposition parties, which have the votes to finally liberate Israel from the grip of the worst leader in Jewish history, you are inviting a future of permanent crisis with your most important ally.
Because Americans did not just have elections. They had a rebellion — a rebellion against indecency, a rebellion against impunity, a rebellion against the corruption of President Donald Trump, the very man Netanyahu called “the greatest friend the state of Israel has ever had in the White House.”
So Israel was a loser, too, in our elections — twice. First, because in the eyes of many Americans, your country is now seen as being in league with this odious man we’ve just repudiated, and second, because this odious man was true to form: To save himself at the eleventh hour, he sold you down the river. He tried to beat the appeal of Michigan Democrat Abdul El Sayed by abruptly promising to end $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel by “the end of the year.”
Yes, the greatest friend Israel ever had promised to end all military aid in a few months — while you are in the middle of a multifront war that Netanyahu has deliberately kept multifront in order to sap your strength to oppose him. Trump did this because he smelled that his friendship with you had become a liability with many young Republican voters.
That Trump thought such a cynical move would win him quick and dirty favour with his base is just one signal of what is coming for you if you don’t change course. If you have any doubt, just read what his vice-president, JD Vance, said the morning after the elections: support for Israel is one of the four reasons that Republicans lost. Attention: Vance, who sold his soul to Trump to become vice-president, would sell you out for a quick headline. In fact, he just did.
There is little tolerance here anymore for an Israeli government that asks us for billions of dollars a year to make the Middle East safe for a Jewish democracy and then diverts billions of those dollars since 1967 to try to make the West Bank safe for Jewish messianism.
As the Bible teaches, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
A powerful American majority just sent that message to Trump: The season for your duplicity, your corruption and your lazy, do-no-homework leadership is over. This was our season for choosing, and Americans chose country over party, decency over ideology, competence over sycophancy.
You need to rally around the very decent centrist retired general Gadi Eisenkot’s leadership. You need to bring the very decent Mansour Abbas’ Israeli Arab party into the governing coalition — as you did once before. And yes, you need to form a minority government backed by a safety net from other Arab lawmakers to get this new coalition across the finish line and into power.
Let Netanyahu scream that you are creating a government that is dependent on non-Zionist Israeli Arabs. It’s time for the Israeli political centre to confront Bibi’s racism head-on. Don’t just tell him that he has been relying forever on non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox parties; do something more.
Tell him, and tell the world, the truth that every Israeli knows: that 25 per cent of Israeli doctors and 27 per cent of Israeli nurses and 49 per cent of Israeli pharmacists today are Israeli Arabs.
Tell them the truth that this Israeli Arab community has been 100 times more loyal to the state of Israel than the ultra-Orthodox fanatics, who over decades have milked billions of shekels in subsidies from the state for their schools, which don’t teach modern subjects, and who refuse to serve in the Israeli army to defend their fellow Jews.
Finally, tell them the truth that only Israeli Arabs today can save the Jewish state — can save Israel as a Jewish-led democracy. Millions of Republicans in America had the courage to say: Only by voting for a Democrat can I save American democracy today.
Today’s Israel has only one chance to make a second impression. Forming a coalition made up of centre-left and centre-right Israeli Jewish and Arab parties is the necessary first step for Israel to get the new governing coalition in the United States to give Israel a second look.
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