My government wants me dead - opinion

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. 

So begins Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s lyrical novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, currently being magically serialized on Netflix. I recently watched the opening scene and, as the poetry of the book washed over me, I wondered again, as I did when I first encountered the words at 16, what it must be like to face a firing squad. 

And then, with a jolt, I realized: We know. We’ve been staring down disaster and death for so long now, and it doesn’t seem to be finishing anytime soon. Hamas and the Houthis, Hezbollah and the Syrians, Iran, various jihadists, and others are all after our blood.

But for me, the most threatening part of the horror is not any of the seven fronts on which we’ve been forced to fight in our ongoing war of survival. For me, the most dreadful pain comes from realizing that my own government wants me dead.

Let me rephrase. It’s not that this coalition of shame actually desires to kill me or see people who think like me pushing up the daisies; it just isn’t making much of an effort to stop it from happening.

Let’s take Miri Regev, for example, our esteemed minister of transport. Under her watch, traffic fatalities have gone up 20% in one year – that’s a lot of dead kids, and dead parents. Regev goes gallivanting around the globe gobsmackingly frequently, evading her security personnel (did anyone ever find out the reason?), patronizing fancy hotels and jewelry stores, while day after day people get pulverized on our roads. She finds time to show up at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial, organize tekes (ceremony) after unwanted tekes, while fatalities keep rising and rising. She doesn’t seem to care much how many of us are crushed or crippled in our cars or buses; she’s too busy looking after our cursed coalition.

The government seems hell-bent on continuing the war in Gaza; incredibly, after a year plus of fighting, there is no clear plan for the day after the fighting stops. Illogically, our leaders, including the haredi MKs, keep sending our sons into the killing fields, some of them making statements that are just jaw-droppingly ungraspable. United Torah Judaism MK Yitzhak Pindrus opined that Religious Zionist soldiers, who have died in catastrophic numbers over this last ghastly year, have paid the price of abandoning religion. What can you even say to counter that craziness? 

And the craziness is killing us. Our government sends our boys back again, and back again, and back again to the front, while plotting and planning how to sanction haredi draft evasion, and throwing money at them to buy their support.

And now, at this heart-shattering time, when empty chairs in our university classes shriek that some students are in cemeteries or rehabilitation hospitals, when others drag themselves to class fresh from the mud of Gaza, Lebanon, or even Syria, at this point Yariv Levin is hauling out his contentious, divisive, horrific judicial reform again – to further lacerate our hearts. While we are running to shelters at night, and wondering how our shrinking salaries will cover our rocketing expenses, and aching over our unreturned hostages and shaking for our soldiers, this is the time to rehash the chaos and make us all mad?

If this government isn’t actually sticking a knife into our ribs, it is most definitely suffocating our fast-fading strength. 

What a coalition of losers and louts. Gideon Sa’ar – what words are there to describe the hideousness of rushing back to the man whom he so despised, in a desperate effort to keep his backside on a Knesset bench, despite poll after poll declaring that nobody wants him there? And Yoav Kisch, our minister of education, who’s overseen Israel’s international educational standing plummeting dramatically, contorting himself into the strangest positions in Netanyahu’s courtroom trial, frantically waving so his lord and master would notice his sycophantic salutations. Tally Gotliv, May Golan, an endless list of indictments and indignities... what has happened to us? How did we sink so low? The defense minister fighting with the IDF chief of staff, the hostage families being barred from the Knesset, the fighting and the yelling and the insults... it overwhelms all human coping mechanisms. 

You just simply cannot make this stuff up. 

'You take my life'

There’s a scene toward the end of The Merchant of Venice where Shylock wails: “Nay, take my life and all. Pardon not that./ You take my house when you do take the prop / That doth sustain my house. / You take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live.” 

Shylock prefers death to abject poverty – what good is a house when you can’t afford to live in it? 

Our coalition of shame is sending our kids back to their kibbutz homes on the border, back to the second-class cities in the northern periphery of our bleeding country, with the minimum of minimum of compensation. Those who choose to stay in the Center till the end of the school year, after all the terrible disruption, will get nothing when they go home. They will return to the rivers and valleys of the North and have no way of replanting their lawns, rebuilding their lives, recharging their souls. 

And they will wonder how they can afford cottage cheese and a new fridge in which to put it, and how they can wash away the mold in their cupboards and their hearts. And, while they are scrubbing the sticky gunk off their walls, they will watch our cursed government chucking billions at the haredim who’d rather die than serve the country.

I could go on and on for pages, but I am making myself too sick. And we need to be strong to live until the next elections, when hopefully we will step out of the line of fire aimed at us constantly by our leaders and start to heal.

May the day come speedily upon us. 

The writer lectures at the Reichman University. peledpam@gmail.com