Netanyahu is not Pharaoh. He's also no Moses
If anything, he's Titus.
This is the second installment of mini-series looking at the narrative icons of Israel’s political tumult. Here’s part one:
I hope you don’t mind me writing about Israel from time to time, it’s on my mind a lot, and it’s important to me. I also think what happens here has a big regional and global effect. Still, this is The Dejargonizer, so I’ll do this in a way that hopefully makes sense and that you appreciate.
///NEW///Iconography of Israel’s Constitutional Struggle
The Jews have a saying: Avarnu et Paro, na’avor gam et zeh. In English, that would be: “We endured Pharaoh, we’ll endure this too.” The Pharaoh they’re referring to is the one from the Book of Exodus in the Bible.
This guy:
Quick sync so we’re all on the same page about just how bad this guy really was. Pharaoh was the last in a line of Egyptian absolute monarchs to have kept the Jews enslaved for ~400 years. During that time, the Jews were subjected to forced labor, forced abortion, and infanticide (Jewish boy babies were thrown into the Nile). Too horrible for words.
Fast forward ~5,800 years. It is now Passover 2023, and half the House of Israel believes that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a twisted embodiment of the Jews’ original tormentor.
To me, this image is astonishing. It is essentially the face of the leader of the sovereign Jewish state, the first one in over 2,000 years, on the head of their most terrible oppressor. And it was put there by hundreds of thousands of the descendants of the people who were liberated from Egypt. Think about that, it’s some statement. The Jews of Exodus must be turning in their graves.
Why would Jews paint Bibi Netanyahu, their longest-serving leader, longer even than Israel’s founding leader David Ben-Gurion, as Pharaoh?? They could have chosen Hitler (too soon?), Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar (tricky spelling, even worse than Pharaoh), Seleucid King Antiochus IV “The Madman” Epiphanes (name’s a mouthful).
They could have chosen Amalek, a local tribal king who ambushed the stragglers from Egypt, which is like attacking a bunch of fleeing refugees, a dastardly thing to do (Amalek attacked “all the stragglers in your rear” (Deuteronomy 25:18).
In Judaism, the Amalekites came to represent the archetypal enemy of the Jews, the symbol and embodiment of evil. Except nobody knows what Amalek looked like, and all we really have is the image of Moses being helped to keep his arms up while the Jews fight the Amalekites. As long as Moses’ arms are up, the Jews are winning. When his arms go down, the tide of battle turns in the enemy’s favor.
But this Passover, many Israelis feel Netanyahu is leading the country into the abyss.
Over his 15 years in power, Netanyahu has racked up a number of corruption allegations, but none have really stuck. Bibi seemed never to be absolutely corrupted by his growing power. But he is currently on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges, and so far these seem to be sticking.
Netanyahu, who denies all the charges, says he is the target of obsessive deep-state persecution. But he’s clearly worried. What else can explain his obsessive Blitzkrieg against the country’s judiciary?
Netanyahu’s government has spent its first hundred days in power dragging the country along an ill-advised, divisive, and dangerous attempt to weaken the judicial branch.
Is he hoping to escape his trial by, amongst other things, electing the Supreme Court judges who would hear his corruption case? Is that even possible? It’s unclear, but many people believe this to be the case. To those people, me included, Netanyahu has crossed the Rubicon. He is seeking absolute power.
Netanyahu has said that he will not use his authority to upend the legal process in his corruption trial. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.
In reality, the Prime Minister of the State of Israel is currently in violation of an Attorney General order to remove himself from the judicial reform process his government has fixated on (at the expense of everything else Israelis also care about, like rampant lawlessness and the cost of living crisis).
This headline should be framed, it’s unprecedented and, crucially, unresolved.
Meanwhile, as internal pressure grows, our volatile region is threatening to explode.
Terror attacks are multiplying.
And Israel’s greatest ally is losing patience at the worst possible moment.
Has Bibi lost it?
But this is of course only half the story.
The other half of Israel —it wouldn’t be ‘The Jews’ unless there was another half which held the exact opposite opinion—tend to see Bibi more like this.
According to this very widely held narrative, Netanyahu is liberating the Jews from enslavement to a tyrannical, leftist, elitist First Class that has used its hold over the courts, the media, the army, the Central Bank, and hi-tech to keep everyone else in perpetual Economy Class.
Bibi’s made it “cool” to be a “Second Class Citizen” taking the power back.
Bibi fanned the flames of this Israeli Brexit and used it to get elected. He’s fanning it even harder now to boost his base.
We are in stalemate. A Mexican standoff in the Jewish state.
The state’s Attorney General says the state’s Prime Minister is breaking the law, but is not being charged with a crime on some technicalities. Netanyahu has paused his legislative push for the duration of the two-week Passover holidays (during which parliament is in recess anyway), and is focusing on the severe security situation.
But there many guns on our table and we are heading into Scene 2.
////Prelude?///
There’s no doubt that Pharaoh was seriously bad for the Jews. However, to my Israelite mind, a more apt framing for Bibi would be Titus, the Roman General (later Emperor) who embodies total destruction and misery for the ages.
Exploiting divisions within the Jews, Titus sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, massacred almost everyone in Judea, and sent the ragged survivors into Exile for the next ~2,016 years, 9 months, and 13 days, until the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948.
So while Pharaoh fixed the Jews for around 400 years, Titus condemned them to over 2,000 years of statelessness and persecution. That’s 5X over Pharaoh.
Pharaoh is the only Really Bad (for the Jews) Guy we’ve actually managed to beat (unless you count Nasser and Arafat). Titus is much worse. I don’t think Pharaoh goes far enough.
This is harsh, I know. Netanyahu used to be Mr. Security, a safe pair of hands. But I am very, very concerned that Netanyahu is destroying the cohesiveness of Israeli society, splitting apart its tribes instead of uniting them, weakening the army and security services, damaging the economy, and destroying our most important international alliances, without which we cannot defend ourselves here. And he’s not doing it out of ideology, he’s doing it to get out of jail. If this doesn’t stop soon, the damage may be irreversible, and history shows us what happens to the Jews when they are vulnerable and weak.
///depressing post ends///