JUSTBIBI Virus, More Dangerous Than Coronavirus
by Tsvi Sadan
Israel Today
March 20, 2020
Truly, there is something sinister going on now in Israel. At first, the “Just Not Bibi” left-wing bloc partnered up with the anti-Zionist Joint Arab List. Though before the election “Blue and White” leaders vowed never to lean on the Joint List, as soon as the election was over, party leader Benny Gantz and his friends broke this vow, with the excuse that this was done to protect Israel’s democracy.
Instead of apologizing, Blue and White’s Moshe Yaalon both acknowledged the promises and breaking them. Just a few days ago he said that “in the decision of which promise to break – not to sit with Netanyahu or not be supported by the Joint Arab List – we preferred the second.”
In plain language it means that the JUSTBIBI bloc is more dangerous to Israel’s future than the JUSTNOTBIBI bloc. This division means that Blue and White took a conscious decision that preferred to alter the “Jewish” part of the “Jewish and Democratic” equation.
Democracy is all that matters now, even at the cost of the Jewish state.
This is not an exaggeration, as a March 17 post from Dov Elboim clearly shows. Elboim is not just anybody. Among other things he has been hosting for decades the popular Friday Portion of the Week public TV program, where he discusses with a variety of guests the meaning of the weekly Torah portion. Additionally, his non-profit organization Binah has been invited to instill his worldview in IDF soldiers and officers. In short, Elboim’s influence can’t be underestimated.
Morally inferior foes
In his aforementioned Facebook post, Elboim, a self-proclaimed Zionist, recalls the last visit to his dentist, a Bibi supporter. Elboim said to him while getting ready for a tooth removal that he wonders about the government’s methods of fighting the Coronavirus, which have included shutting down the courts, a move seen by many as an attempt by Netanyahu to postpone his own trial.
Elboim further commented that the 61 JUSTNOTBIBI members of Knesset, which includes the anti-Zionist Joint Arab List, effectively makes Netanyahu’s government illegitimate. In response, the dentist said that he doesn’t count the Joint Arab List, which implicitly means he does not consider the Arab parties as part of the center-left Zionist majority.
That was a moment of revelation for Elboim. Refusing the doctor’s help, he got out of the chair and left the clinic. He later wrote that “Providence sent me a clear warning to escape from dangerously contaminated dentist clinics … I left the place because I realized I can’t be treated by a person who does not see Arabs as equal citizens … I asked my family never to be medically treated by spiritually and morally inferior [racist] people … time has come to tell it to all service givers who think they have the right to enter our space and contaminate it … if there is anything this current [Corona] plague can teach us [it is this]: The time has come for all those who are spreading spiritual contamination to be isolated from us.”
This now is the frame of reference: There are two viruses creating havoc in Israel, the spiritual JUSTBIBI virus and the biological Coronavirus, which is far less dangerous than the first.
And a series of tweets from Blue and White co-leader Yair Lapid now remove any doubt that the JUSTBIBI virus is seen by the JUSTNOTBIBI crowd as the real and imminent threat to Israel’s democracy. Instead of supporting the government’s measures to contain the Coronavirus, Lapid tweeted that “true for now, March 17 2020, you no longer live in a democracy … the unelected government of Israel told us today … that we are prohibited from leaving our homes. There is no one who can now challenge this decision.”
This is just short of calling on Israelis to disobey the government’s instructions aimed at defeating this virus, all in the name of an imagined danger to our democracy, which now turned out to be more important than our very lives, Arabs included.
Spiritual war
Seeing the JUSTBIBI movement as a spiritual virus reveals the true source of the antagonism between the anti- and the pro-Netanyahu camps. What we are witnessing today is a spiritual war, which brings to mind the 10th chapter of the Book of Daniel, where the angel Michael fights the angel of Persia.
The battle taking place today in Israel is not about democracy. This is just the pretense, the “moral” justification to bring the Jewish state to its end.
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