It is midday Yom Haatzma’ut 78th (Israel Independence Day) as I sit and write this post. On this 78th Independence Day in Israel, I, personally, am not able to celebrate. Not when the man standing at the helm of our country is a criminally indicted Prime Minister—someone who should be answering charges in a courtroom, not presiding over a nation in mourning. Not when he dares to frame the return of the hostages as his personal success story, as if their abduction was a plot twist and their release a finale. There is no humility in his voice. No acknowledgment that those 251 innocent people—elders, children, young people at a music festival, on kibbutzim, moshavim and army bases—were taken on his watch. His narrative is horribly corrupt because it erases responsibility entirely. It asks us to applaud while ignoring the fact that the disaster happened under his leadership, with his policies, and because of his choices.

His poison machine—the coordinated media outlets, the digital army of trolls, the ministers who parrot every deflection—works overtime to black out the truth. They want us to forget the 1,200 murdered victims of October 7, whose bodies were burned, mutilated, and broken. They want us to forget the 900 soldiers who have fallen since that day—not in a war of necessity, but in a war of negligence. Each name erased from public discourse is a small victory for their propaganda. They replace memory with slogans. They replace grief with nationalism.

We are still in a war with Iran and Hezbollah that Netanyahu brought upon us. Not because they suddenly decided to attack—but because he spent years provoking a multi-front confrontation while neglecting deterrence, bringing his buddy Trump into a war without any strategy, moving objectives, no exit plan........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)