On August 5, 2025, Israel’s
prime minister, Ben Netanyahu and his cabinet were considering conquering all
of Gaza as cease-fire talks came to naught. According to the Associated Press, he
“hinted at wider military action in devastated Gaza . . . even as former
Israeli army and intelligence chiefs called for an end of to the nearly
22-month war.”[1] Roughly
thirty years earlier, Netanyahu had admitted in an interview that Israel
destroys countries (or peoples) it doesn’t like very slowly. The slow process
of starvation amid Israeli troops and American mercenaries enjoying shooting
Gazans at designated food-distribution sites through at least the summer of
2025 instantiates Netanyahu’s perhaps careless admission of cruelty befitting a
man out for vengeance. Never mind the scriptural passage, Vengeance is mine,
sayeth the Lord; Netanyahu and his cabinet, and even the president of Israel
felt entitled to take that task upon themselves, such that even just death
would be too good for Palestinians, rather than having faith in their deity,
whose vengeance would presumably be narrowly and properly directed to the Hamas
attackers and kidnappers rather than to innocent people, including small children
who could not possibly be considered to have been culpable two months shy of two
years earlier in 2023. The religious depth of the betrayal of Yahweh by
Netanyahu and his cabinet can be gleamed by recalling passages from Maimonides.
The full essay is at "Maimonides on Netanyahu."
1. Julia Frankel and Wafaa Shurafa, “Netanyahu Hints at Expanded War in Gaza but Former Israeli Military and Spy Chiefs Object,” The Associated Press, August 5, 2025.
