Posted at Hartmann Report on Oct. 17, 2023
Why It's Impossible for Right-Wing Governments to Handle a Crisis
Why right wing crises face incompetence or cynical exploitation. Bush and “heckofajob Brownie”; Netanyahu and Gaza; Trump and Covid, or his cynically tossing paper towels at hurricane victims..
Over at The New York Times yesterday, Jerusalem-based reporter Isabel Kershner writes about the horrors of the past two weeks and the worries Israelis have for how the ongoing war against Hamas may go.
“All this is happening,” she notes in the article’s third paragraph, “amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on.”
She then quotes a Tel Aviv author, Dorit Rabinyan, who speaks of the sobering reality Israelis are facing because they’d chosen Benjamin Netanyahu as their prime minister:
“We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in. … We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there.”
What happened? Instead of taking seriously now-confirmed warnings about a coming Hamas attack shared by Egyptian and, apparently, US intelligence, the prime minister was instead occupied by “months of political and social turmoil over the divisive plans of Mr. Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government to curb the judiciary and undermine the country’s liberal democracy.”