By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

The Israelis are pissed off and for once they’re not just pissed off at the Arabs. They’re pissed off at Bibi. They made this pretty clear during the final days of the first month of 2023 when they welcomed the new gangster coalition of Israel’s longest serving prime minister with massive protests against their announced plans to overhaul the nation’s justice system and reduce its courts to the glorified playthings of any simple majority powerful enough to hijack the Knesset.

Over 130,000 Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa. Among their ranks were some the biggest names in Israeli politics, including Bibi’s own former deputy prime minister, Benny Gantz, and former defense minister Moshe Yaalon. The latter seemed to capture the spirit of the event with his defiant proclamation, “A country where the prime minister appoints all the judges and is responsible for promoting and firing them has a name, it’s called a dictatorship. When this prime minister is also a defendant who the state of Israel is accusing of serious crimes, it has a name, it’s called a dictatorship of criminals.”

Stirring stuff, and the motherfucker isn’t wrong. Facing down the barrel of being sent up the Dead Sea for charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, the man who used to be the most powerful man in the Holy Land since Saul wore jackboots essentially made a Faustian bargain with a bushel of fascist creeps and religious zealots to keep his ass from being mowed like grass. Why else would any sane human being hand over the Middle East’s most ferocious (and nuclear armed) military machine to celebrated kooks like Bezalol Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir whose lives would read like one long hate crime if they didn’t take the Sabbath?

Still, something was very wrong with this picture. I couldn’t quite place my finger on it at first but as hundreds of thousands of well-dressed Europeans took to the streets of the Middle East’s toniest neighborhoods, waving blue and white flags emblazoned with the Star of David, it finally hit me with a flash like a burning bush, “Holy shit, these people have no idea that they’re white supremacists bitching about their squandered privileges in the world’s worst apartheid state.”

Moshe Yaalon, a man who once called Palestinians a cancer that needs to be severed, doubled down on this sick irony as he rambled on to his adoring audience, “The Jewish people paid a heavy price for the fact that in democratic elections in Germany a government came to power that eliminated democracy.” And it took less than a week for the Palestinians to pay yet another installment in a long receipt of heavy prices for Israel’s so-called democracy when the soldiers Yaalon once led raided the besieged refugee camp of Jenin.

During a five-hour raid, the IDF slaughtered nine people including a 61-year-old woman and two children in a totally unprovoked attack on one of the poorest square miles on earth. They added another body later that night when they murdered an unarmed protestor just north of Jerusalem. This massacre was just the latest tragedy in a killing spree that has murdered more Palestinians in 2022 alone than in any year since the Second Intifada, 220 civilians, including 48 children and many of these deaths were presided over by Israel’s very own champion of liberal democracy, Benny Gantz.

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