Netanyahu: Israel's Worst Nightmare

I have a long family relationship with Israel.

My father’s favorite uncle and aunt, Dr. Max Cramer, his mother’s brother, and his wife Jenny and their three children emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1935. A successful ophthalmologist with clinics throughout Germany, Max and Jenny decided to make the change because they wanted to substitute an agricultural life for the hectic professional lives they had been experiencing.

They sold the clinics and moved to the Geman enclave Nahariya, thirty kilometers north of Haifa, a seaside city founded by German Jews in 1934, and began farming there on a piece of land they purchased. The practice of medicine was no longer in the picture.

Not long after their arrival, Dr. Cramer was approached by the Arab neighbors who asked him to help them. He was adept at the use of argyrol, a drug known to prevent gonorrheal blindness and other pathogenic bacterial and viral infections in the eyes of newborn infants.

Dr. Cramer agreed to help. The Cramers cleaned out the chicken coop and turned it into a medical office where Dr. Cramer treated his neighbors every Wednesday, at no charge.

Suddenly, in 1948, the Cramers noticed Arabs streaming north to Lebanon. Thereafter, after beating Hitler, they lost their only son serving as a soldier in the war of independence.

Thus, I yield to no one in my regard for Israel. My relatives helped to build that nation and I am proud of them.

Now I see an Israel bearing no relation to the country I grew up with and that my relatives helped to found. In the West Bank, racist settlers practice hatred towards Palestinians. In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu has thrown in with racist, Jewish supremacist partners to form a government at war in Gaza.

Despite the fact that over seventy percent of Israelis oppose the war, Netanyahu continues it and plans to occupy Gaza. Who continues a war when seventy percent of the population doesn’t want it? I here repeat my disgust with the October 7 massacres and kidnappings with hostages still being held. These are evils perpetrated by the terrorists of Hamas.

I have no doubt that Netanyahu continues the war because his racist government will fall if he doesn’t. Nor do I doubt that the war continues and the hostages remain imprisoned because Netanyahu fears a conviction in his ongoing criminal case, ending his political career and remitting him to an Israeli prison.

Fortunately, the supply of weapons to Israel by the United States no longer has the overwhelming support in Congress that it used to have.

I recoil at Netanyahu’s lies. His denial of starvation in Gaza (the preposterous “plenty of food” statement) and his claim that a U. N. report confirming the hunger and suffering of Gazans is antisemitic are just two examples of his mendacity.

Netanyahu must go.