Saturday will be remembered as one of the most devastating days in Israel’s history. . . . These tragic events have one protagonist: Hamas.
But there are two major Israeli blind spots that prevented us from recognizing and forestalling what we should have seen. The first is a policy of trying to appease the enemy, in the hopes that Hamas would eventually grow out of its jihadist origin.
Our second blind spot was letting our internal political differences consume us, distracting us from external threats and dividing both our society and, critically, the army.
In the past five years, as Israel dissolved government after government and held divided election after divided election, and even more so in the past year since Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected prime minister, the nation has been busy tearing itself apart from within. The Jewish state seems to have forgotten its second role in the world, as a place that embodies the idea of Jewish solidarity. Israelis instead found themselves engaged in an all-out war — not against terrorists but against themselves.
As a nation, Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy. We let animosity, demagogy and the poisonous discourse of social media take over our society, rip apart the only Jewish army in the world. This is our tragedy. And it carries a lesson for other polarized democracies: There is someone out there waiting to gain from your self-made weakness. This someone is your enemy.
In Israel, as in America, most of the political divisiveness and fraying of national unity has been caused by the far right trying to inflict its agenda on the majority of the citizenry and its willingness to undermine democratic norms to accomplish this goal. Worse yet, anyone opposing this agenda has been deemed an enemy, much as the MAGA movement sees anyone opposing Der Trumpenfuhrer as an enemy worthy of violence. Meanwhile, the world and especially America's enemies watch as the House of Representatives remains paralyzed and buffoons and/or those favoring autocracy control events. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the sad situation and calls for Americans to wake up to the danger facing the nation. Here are highlights:
Two years ago, I wrote my first newsletter for The Atlantic, in which I worried that the United States was “no longer a serious country.”
Of course, we’re still a powerful country … But when it comes to seriousness—the invaluable discipline and maturity that allows us to discern matters that should transcend self-interest, to set aside churlish ego and emotionalism, and to act with prudence and self-restraint—we’re a weak, impoverished backwater. . . . I was, to say the least, pessimistic about the American future.
Today, the situation is even more dire. The Russians continue an all-out war of conquest in the middle of Europe, a conflict that could engulf the planet if the cowards in the Kremlin remain mired in their imperial delusions. Thousands are dying in Armenia and Sudan. And now Israel is at war, after suffering its worst surprise attack since the Yom Kippur War 50 years ago and with more Israeli citizens killed in a single day than ever in its history.
And yet much of America, and especially the remnants of the Republican Party (a party whose leaders during the Cold War defined themselves as the responsible stewards of U.S. foreign policy), remains in the grip of childish, even inane, politics. The international community in this difficult time needs a United States that is sane, tough, and principled; worthy of the title of leader of the free world; and determined, in the words of President John F. Kennedy, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Instead of Kennedy’s inspiring vision, America has the ignorant and incoherent Donald Trump as an apparent lock to capture the eventual GOP presidential nomination, the House of Representatives without a speaker, and a public that cannot find Ukraine or Iran on a map.. . . “And what kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern? When we’re dysfunctional? When we don’t even have a speaker of the House?”
The idea that someone as ridiculous as Jim Jordan could be in contention to lead the House should make every American pause and wonder how the United States has come to such a moment. Jordan is among Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters—Trump has already endorsed him for the speaker’s job—and one of the most cynical and huckstering members of Congress from either party. . . . But on the central issue of American democracy, he is much more dangerous.
Jordan yesterday threatened another attempt to shut down the government (this time over immigration policies). But more to the point, how can the United States respond as one nation to the various crises around the world when the speaker of the House is an election denier spewing conspiracy theories about the current president?
The situation is no better over in the usually more staid and thoughtful U.S. Senate. As conflicts erupt around the world, hundreds of military promotions, including the chief of naval operations and many other senior appointments, remain frozen. They are being held up by Tommy Tuberville, a former Alabama college football coach who thinks U.S. servicepeople should be denied access to abortion and decries what he thinks is too much “wokeness” in the military.
The old saw about partisanship ending at the water’s edge was never completely true. The right and the left in the United States have argued plenty about foreign policy, but they once did so with a seriousness of purpose and an understanding that millions of lives, the security of the nation—and in the final analysis, the survival of humanity—were at risk. If any adults remain in the GOP, they need to get control of their party and get to work.
America - or more precisely, today's Republican Party - are putting America at risk of suffering its own version of what befell Israel this past Saturday. Frighteningly, the GOP and its cult followers do not seem to care.
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