If Israel can’t get an authentic Jewish prime minister, let’s at least get a prime minister with proper manly fortitude. And I don’t mean a new leader for the Likud, a party that only a Moshe Feiglin can join as a means of Israel’s salvation.

What Israel needs

The Likud, which Feiglin called the “trunk” of the nation, is more treacherous than Labor. It wins the premiership using “right-wing” campaign rhetoric only to shift to the Left when its party chairman becomes prime minister. That was the tactic of Ariel Sharon, and it is with Benjamin Netanyahu.

If you object saying, “Do you want Herzog or Livni to take Bibi’s place?” I answer: Bibi is just another timid variety of these milquetoast Jews. Because:

1. Both supported Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.
2. Both endorsed the “two state solution.” And by the way:
3. For different reasons, both lack manly fortitude!

Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Photo: US Department of State (taken during his visit to the USA, during which Obama had him ushered out the back door of the White House while Obama dined privatelyl with his family.)

Nor is this all. Bibi can’t think straight, else he would not be longing to negotiate a peace deal with that disciple of Mohammad, Mahmoud Abbas, who exalts Jew-killers as heroes.

Bibi is actually a basic obstacle to peace if only because he is a primary obstacle to forming a united nationalist camp. He is a talker, a blabbermouth. He raises hopes, fragments the nation, and emasculates people of the “Right.” The “Right” would not only unite if Livni was PM. It would organize, cripple her government, and pursue, at last, a non-compromising territorial policy conducive to preserving the Jewish character of the state to which Bibi gives nothing more than lip service.

The demise of Bibi might transform and elevate the Likud, because it would then have to align itself with serious right-wing people. Let me not be misunderstood.

Contrary to its image, the Likud – not now and never in the past – does not represent – in Moshe Feiglin’s misleading language – the “trunk” of the nation. The Likud lacks not only testosterone, but its hobnobbing with Palestinian despot Mahmoud Abbas clearly indicates, to all but the deaf and the blind, that Bibi’s Likud also lacks intellectual and moral clarity.

Such clarity can only be derived from the monotheistic ideas and ethical values of the Patriarchs and Prophets of Israel. These ideas and values must be

1. explicitly proclaimed in the Likud’s party program,
2. made known to the people on public forums, and
3. diligently and fearlessly manifested in the actual policies of the Government.

This is beyond the mentality of Likud leader Netanyahu.

The Likud poses as a Jewish nationalist party which once strutted under the banner of Zionism. Zionism was supposed to restore the dignity of the Jewish people. But not only is the Zionism of the Likud basically secular, It has been has been profoundly influenced by the soft nationalism of Christian Europe.

Christianity in Europe is dead, having succumbed to Nihilism. Nationalism in Europe is also dead, having been replaced by Swedish multiculturalism. This is the end to which Bibi is leading Israel via his impossible Obama pleasing two-state solution, which he proclaimed on June 14, 2009 at Bar-Ilan University. How strange: splitting Israel into two states aroused not a whisper of protest from Bar-Ilan, a reputedly orthodox religious institution.

It thus appears that not only is Zionism or Jewish nationalism dead in Israel but, that Judaism itself (God forbid) is now comatose in this democratized country. This makes a travesty of Bibi’s insistence that the fictitious Palestinians headed by Mahmoud Abbas recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people!

Politicians are not statesmen

The founders of the modern state of Israel were politicians. They were party men, not statesmen, Certainly they were not philosophic statesmen, such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, graduates, respectively, of Princeton and Columbia Universities when these institutions provided their students with a classical as well as Hebraic education.

The mentality of modern Israel’s founders was borrowed from the secular nationalism of the Italian patriot Garibaldi, who adopted the politically convenient “religion-state dichotomy” of nascent and feeble Christianity.

This dichotomy falsified and betrayed Judaism. It reduced Judaism to a “religion,” whose role is limited to the personal or private domain in contradistinction to the public or national domain.

One may therefore say, with little hyperbole, that Likud Zionism was imported from Italy, a Catholic country, and that it was given a Yiddish veneer by David Ben-Gurion, who hailed from Poland, another Catholic country! Hence we should not be utterly surprised that Israel, under the premiership of the American-educated Benjamin Netanyahu, a PR-man, does not have a clear sense of national purpose.☼