Netanyahu Needs to Be Weaned of His Welfarist Mentality

While the decision by the hardline Likud Coalition Government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to immediately and roundly retaliate for the Hamas-staged bloody acts of terrorism that ravaged parts of Southern Israel, on October 7, 2023, cannot be morally impeached, not by any objective measure, it still constitutes the very height of arrogance for the legally embattled Mr. Netanyahu to virulently and self-righteously accuse the United States and, in particular, the Biden Administration of being culpable of “propping up Hamas and Iran” in order to deliberately threaten the security and the sovereignty of the Jewish State of Israel, a country that the United States and its Allies spend more fiscal and military resources to defend, maintain and stabilize than any other country in the world (See “Torres Blasts Netanyahu after Israeli Leader Accuses US of Delaying Weapons Shipments” The Hill 6/19/24).

The fact of the matter is that there is readily accessible evidence pointing to the fact of the Israeli government’s having in the past strategically used the Hamas-dominated government on the Gaza Strip to checkmate and even seriously undermine and destabilize the leadership of the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. In other words, in the words of the immortalized Muslim African American Civil and Human Rights Leader, Minister Malcolm X, the October 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Southern Israel was decidedly a matter of the proverbial chickens coming home to roost. In short, the Israeli government cannot claim total innocence about the long chain and series of wanton and brutal military atrocities unleashed against the Palestinian people, over the course of approximately a century, that culminated in the apocalyptic events of the Hamas-staged October 7 assault, as pointedly observed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations and former Portuguese Prime Minister, Mr. Antonio Guterres.

If anybody had, indeed, propped up Hamas and the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is definitely the uneven handling of the age-old Israeli-Palestinian Question by the White-Supremacist NATO Allies, in much the same way that not very long ago, the United States and its European Allies staunchly and hermetically propped up and blindly promoted the erstwhile White-Racist Apartheid Regime in South Africa. Which also primarily explains the conspicuous absence of the Ramaphosa Coalition Government and the latter’s apparently flat refusal to send any representatives to the recent Swiss Government-hosted Global Peace Summit on The Ukraine. It is far past time for the Biden Administration and its European Allies to send unmistakable signal to the Netanyahu-led Likud Coalition Zionist Government of Israel that while the United States and its NATO Allies have the existence and the wellbeing of the Israeli people deeply at heart, nonetheless, Washington and its NATO Allies are not perpetually obligated to supply weapons of mass destruction for the wanton slaughtering of the criminally dispossessed Palestinian people.

Indeed, even as Vice-President Kamala Harris declared to the global community during her presidential-nomination acceptance address at the most recent quadrennial Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, just as the State and the people of Israel have an inalienable human right to exist, the people of the Israeli-Occupied Land of Palestine equally have an inalienable human right to peacefully coexist with Isarel and the rest of their neighbors, as well as a non-negotiable right to self-determination in their own Allah/God-given land. The existence of each group or nationality of humans must not under any circumstances whatsoever be subject to the instance or the pleasure or the beck of the other and vice versa. This was what Afro-Latino US Congressional Representative Ritche Torres, the New York State Democrat, ought to have unreservedly pointed out in his otherwise diplomatically well-calibrated riposte to an insufferably presumptuous Prime Minister Netanyahu who, by the way, well before the October 7, 2023, Hamas-staged paramilitary assault, was fiercely locked in a battle of wills with the Israeli Supreme Court, a to-do that had been fast shaping up to a crescendo akin to the level of a constitutional crisis.

As well, Mr. Netanyahu has been wracked with dozens of corruption scandals and allegations and may very well have envisaged the Hamas attack as a political life-jacket to save his hitherto violently wobbling career, thus his adamant refusal to promptly and rationally negotiate a ceasefire with the Palestinians, one that was brokered by the Biden Administration and the Egyptians and other Arab neighbors, in the opinion of many pundits and specialists on Middle-Eastern Affairs.

Maybe the megalomaniacal and pathologically narcissistic Prime Minister Netanyahu needs to be told boldly and upfront that he has long crossed over and beyond the border between justifiable retaliation and fast heading towards genocide, with more than 50,000 Palestinians, largely defenseless women and children and the very old and frail and vulnerable being brutally massacred by Israel’s Defense Forces. Enough already, Mr. Netanyahu!

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New Yorkof
September 4, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]