This Independence Day, Israel Has Split Into Two Incompatible Jewish States

[Beastly Boy]

3. A compelling analogy, but another one may be more accurate

I see a greater resemblance between Israel today and Judea just before the fall of the Second Temple, which the article has eluded to but did not, in my opinion, sufficiently appreciate.

There is Jerusalem, full of radicals, zealots, sicaris, each sect being small in numbers but big on rhetoric, claiming divine right to murder the other, and little Messiah wannabes ruling over them, each claiming to be ordained by God to grant absolution and possession of the Holy Land to their followers.

And then there is the rest of Judea and Samaria, pleading before the motley collection of the lunatics behind the thick walls of Jerusalem, like Josephus Flavius did in his days, to come to their senses for the sake of the nation.

Netanyahu is nowhere close to being the king of Jerusalem. He is the prisoner of the little messiah wannabes. He managed to temporarily unite them to keep him in power for selfish reasons, but now he is completely beholden to them and their whims: if just one of them leaves his coalition, Netanyahu is finished, both personally and politically. As obscene as it sounds, he is the left wing of his coalition, and he pander to its right wing.

I don't see this government being sustainable, let alone the division of Israel, as it is presented in the article, being permanent. Netanyahu is the peg that is holding the current government together, but he is a rotten peg. He will break under pressure, and then, as it happened in 70 AD, Jerusalem will fall.

But this time it will not fall to the foreign invader but to the "high-tech, secular, outward-looking, imperfect but liberal state" just outside of today's entrenched Jerusalem. There is no other force to fill in the vacuum in post-Netanyahu Israel. The right wingers are too small in numbers and are too compromised to retain their malignant influence on the country as they have done in the last few years. Even a small move to the left will bring about big changes.

BTW, thank you for taking a small but meaningful part in making the difference.