Cartoon by Rice Araujo

For God’s Sake, Go Already! 

By B. Michael

Haaretz: In the name of God, Mister Prime Minister, go! Leave us alone. Pack your things, the members of your household and everything you own. And go. Go to do in your own home what you have been doing to us and all of Israel for over four years. Go, and release us from your yoke. Redeem us at last from your torments. Because your problems, Bibi, are your problems. Yours alone. Stop piling them onto us. Stop harnessing us, against our will, to your “defense team.” (If the tycoons in your pocket were at least to pay us a retainer as well, that would be a different story. But like this? With your favorite method of payment? Free of charge?).

We’re sick and tired of one person, just one, who is driving an entire country mad just to evade prosecution. After all, there is, and was, no other reason for the pair of elections you put us through and the hysterical circus you continue to conduct before our eyes. With unfounded warmongering, strange shows of deception and a disgusting festival of unbridled incitement.

Do you really not have even a drop of self-respect left? Of majesty? Of awareness? Try to look beneath the mountains of arrogance, lies, boasting and egotism that have accumulated in your soul. Maybe there is still an iota of decency there. A remote bit of some good quality, the kind that makes a person a mensch, which will help you to make the right decision: to leave standing tall, and not in a police van. To go back home insulted, angry, victimized and proud, and not expelled from the city, battered and emitting a smell of rotten fish.

Have you really ceased to be aware of the empty nonsense that you are spouting out of the depths of fear?

“There are only two options: Either a government headed by me, or great danger,” you declared on television. Louis XIV was the epitome of humility compared to you. But don’t worry, you’d be surprised how fast a replacement for you will be found, and how quickly the collection of zeroes who dance to your tune will come in droves to dance to his.

You also declared that you would form a government “only with Zionist parties.” You must have deeply insulted the respected MKs of United Torah Judaism. Their party is avowedly non-Zionist (not to say anti-Zionist). For them “Zionist” is almost a slur. The Zionism of Shas and of the varied kinds of ultra-Orthodox Zionists is not particularly enthusiastic. Zionism, may I remind you, was once a dyed-in-the-wool secular ideology. For them, as for you, “Zionists” is nothing more than a euphemism for “Jews.”

So go, Bibi, go. Finally let someone else form any kind of government. It will probably be a “secular-religious-broad-liberal-Zionist-national-unity-government,” or some other meaningless combination. A surefire recipe for total paralysis. But after years of the Caligula-like insanity of your reign, complete paralysis would be a welcome change.

An immediate pardon for Netanyahu, or the promise to make him president at some point in the future, if he agrees to resign, is now being discussed seriously. A package deal is probably in the works: Make him president immediately, so he can pardon himself now.

In a half-sane country there would already be tens of thousands of protesters, regardless of religion, nationality, gender and party, standing outside the official residence rhythmically chanting: “Go! Go! Go! Go!,” and staying there until the moving truck leaves for Caesarea.

(The investigation as to who paid the movers and what happened to the fancy porcelain dinner service in the living room china cabinet will be conducted at a date to be announced).

Michael Brizon, who writes under the pen name of B. Michael, was born in 1947 and has written satirical columns and op-eds for Haaretz for close to 20 years.