Gentle reader, have you caught yourself thinking, so many times in the past decade of mounting horrors, that you were glad that somebody you loved who has passed away is not here to see the terrible things that are happening in our country and our world? I have thought this many times in regard to my maternal grandparents. My grandfather on that side of my family, the late Dr. Samuel Lieberman, was a World War II veteran. He was also a medical doctor and abhorred the thought of war and harming anybody, but he also knew the Nazis had to be stopped. So he volunteered for service at the time of Pearl Harbor, even though he was 37 years old, with a wife, a six-year-old daughter, and a baby who was just a few months old at the time (my aunt and my mother). The war damaged his physical and mental health for the rest of his life, for which he never received proper compensation.
I can’t even imagine how angry my Grandpa Sam would be now at the Nazi-like rhetoric and fascist politics corrupting American culture under Donald Trump and his Vichy Republican Party. My grandmother Miriam, a great believer in moderation, would of course also be aghast.
My father, Dr. Harold Gorvine, passed away in November 2022, almost a year before the October 7 Hamas onslaught of atrocities against Israel. Although he and his father-in-law were quite different temperamentally, they shared a burning indignation at injustice until the end of their days. My father was also a proud liberal Zionist, who always critiqued Israeli government policies from a left-wing, human rights-centered perspective, and took some heat for it during his decades-long career teaching history at a Jewish day school.
I am grateful he did not live quite long enough to see October 7 and the terrible aftermath. He would be horrified and very fearful for our Israeli family and friends and the whole Jewish people, which has suffered increasingly violent antisemitism in America and around the world since the Arab-Nazis of Hamas started it. Dad would be beside himself at the obscene spectacle of Harvard University, where he earned his doctorate in history, and a whole range of American universities turning into hotbeds of violent “protests” targeting Jewish students, Jewish faculty and Jewish guest speakers, culminating in the mini-Kristallnacht at Berkeley.
Dad would also be horrified and disgusted at the amount of suffering in Gaza, and enraged at Netanyahu’s attacks throughout 2023, until October 7, on the Israeli judiciary and Israeli democracy. Like me, he would be infuriated that Netanyahu has placed his personal political survival above all other considerations, instead of taking responsibility for allowing the Hamas pogrom to happen through his negligence and arrogance, and stepping down as he should have done immediately after October 7. Six months have passed since then, and it is beyond clear that Netanyahu’s wartime leadership has been disastrous for everyone—for the Israelis he is sworn to protect, for the civilian Palestinian population of Gaza, for Jewish communities the world over. He must be removed from power at once, for every day that he stays on, he does more damage, even as regards the narrower problem of Israel’s immediate war aims, which he is unable to achieve despite all his bluster.
Like most Israelis (I am a dual American-Israeli citizen), I am much more reluctant to criticize the Israeli military than the politicians, especially in the midst of a war of survival. The reason, of course, is that Israel’s is a citizen army. Most Israeli Jews and certain groups of Israeli Arabs are drafted into the army. Unlike the case for many Americans, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) is ourselves and our children.
But the current IDF leadership is the same as it was before October 7, no one having resigned and taken responsibility for the military’s share of blame in failing to anticipate and prevent the Hamas pogrom. This is the same military command that ignored warnings from young women soldiers in observation posts near the Gaza border that Hamas was training and preparing for a major attack. Some of these women were were killed in October 7 or kidnapped to Gaza. As the world now knows, despite lying denials from Hamas and its “progressive” cheerleading squad, these women captives have endured rape and continuous torture for six endless months. Meanwhile Hamas is damaged but undefeated, and the civilian population in Gaza has taken heavy casualties, whatever the true numbers are, and faces widespread hunger.
It is therefore time, it is past time, for me and other Israeli citizens to speak out against the current IDF leadership and demand its replacement. How is it that the open-fire rules were not overhauled months ago, when it became clear that there were far too many Palestinian civilian casualties? How is it that there was no change even after the accidental killing of three escaped Israeli hostages by Israeli soldiers, and now the accidental killing of seven aid workers? The IDF is surely right to have fired a colonel and a major who were directly responsible for the latter incident, but the blame goes all the way up the chain of command, and cashiering two mid-level officers is not nearly enough to fix this.
During the (first?) American Civil War, President Lincoln fired General George McClellan for his failure to win the war. This is an essential part of the commander-in-chief’s job, and one that Dubya Bush, Obama, and Trump all failed to do with unsuccessful generals in Iraq and Afghanistan. Netanyahu is unable to fulfill this duty, even if he realizes how disastrous the IDF leadership has been, because of his political weakness. He knows the Israeli public would not tolerate the failure-in-chief firing the other screw-ups, which is yet one more reason why both the civilian government and the military command need to be replaced. This is essential to Israel’s survival and the safety of Jews all over the world, and yes, I am still grateful that my father and my grandparents are not here to see any of this.
Emanuel Goldstein 