Bibi’s vindication emerges with the annihilation of Hezbollah
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Bibi’s vindication emerges with the annihilation of Hezbollah

Much has been made about the Shabbat dinner that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended in New York City with his wife, Sara, prior to their departure on Shabbat. He never travels on Shabbat but leaving became a necessity due to the threat of a response from Hezbollah after the Israel Defense Forces assassinated arch-terrorist Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut earlier that day.

The Israeli media, which never misses an opportunity to bash the prime minister, was in high dudgeon, unwilling to credit him even with the intelligence coup and flawless execution of the operation that sent Hassan Nasrallah to his much deserved reward after a 30-year career leading the terrorist organization that murdered Jews and was responsible for the bombings that killed 16 Americans at the U.S. Embassy and 241 Marines in their barracks in Beirut.

I had the great honor and privilege of being asked to introduce the prime minister at the Shabbat dinner in Manhattan before he left for the airport. Later, I would marvel over the Israeli media’s fixation, condemning a prime minister who had just enjoyed one of the most victorious days for Israel in its history — along with one of his most eloquent and defiant U.N. speeches ever — for simply honoring the Shabbat for an hour: saying the Kiddush, Hamotzi, and having a bowl of chicken soup with some 30 Jewish leaders, influencers, and friends. Oh, what a wicked man.

But enough of that. The prime minister was poised to offer a few words — in essence a d’var Torah — prior to rushing to the airport for his expedited return journey to Israel. I was asked to introduce him.

I have known Bibi since I was 22 years old, when I first hosted him as a speaker who electrified an otherwise hostile Oxford Union and brought the crowd of Israel haters to a standing ovation because Oxford has a tradition —  no matter how much they hate you — of recognizing excellence when they see it. I had introduced the prime minister to large audiences on many occasions. But this time, before this tiny audience, I  was overcome with a sense of profound admiration and gratitude.

Bibi and Sarah sat a few seats away. I began.

“This morning at the U.N., Prime Minister, you reminded the world that this Shabbat we are reading from the book of Deuteronomy. I attended your U.N. speech where you quoted, for the second year running, the most important encapsulation of Judaism, which Moses enunciates as a blessing and a curse to the Jewish people, on the last day of his life. Prime Minister, you repeated that Moses had laid out a choice between a blessing and a curse, life and death. Like Moses, you said, Jews and the rest of the world must choose life.

“Moses was not the leader of the Jewish people because he was the wisest or most charismatic person. He had a speech impediment and was far from eloquent. Rather, like us American Jews who join you tonight, he grew up with a joint identity and was accused of dual loyalties. He was both a Hebrew and an Egyptian. But one day he was forced to choose between the two. He went out to the fields and saw an Egyptian taskmaster brutalizing a Jewish slave and had to choose between his Egyptian and Jewish identity.

“The Torah famously says, ‘Moses looked this way and that way. And then he saw that there was no man. So he smote the Egyptian.’

“He looked this way, Prime Minister, at the U.N. He looked the other way at the E.U. He looked this way at the New York Times. He looked the other way at CNN and the BBC. What would he choose? He looked left at the ICC and saw they would issue an arrest warrant against him. He looked right at the ICJ and saw they would do the same. And he saw that as long as he cared more for public approbation or condemnation, more for international acclaim than righteousness and justice, there was no man. He was not even a person. So he showed exemplary moral courage. He smote Hamas. He struck at Hezbollah. He punished Iran. He hit back at the Houtis. He told the world to go to hell and he saved the Israelite, he rescued his nation.

“That man is you, Prime Minister.”

I reminded Bibi that he and I had that exact experience the very first time we met.

Back in 1989 when I was just 22 and the first ever rabbi in residence at the University of Oxford, sent by the Lubavitcher rebbe, we rode together in a police car the British had assigned to Israel’s young and still single deputy foreign minister for his protection. As we drove through hallowed halls of that distinguished university, I pointed to its major landmarks. “Here’s University College where Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar just 20 years ago. And here’s Queens College, where our student president, Cory Booker, studies. And here’s Magdalen College.”

Bibi turned to me, steely-eyed and said, “Shmuley, with all of these dreaming Oxford spires for which this university is world-renowned, I cannot but recall the utter hypocrisy of the British who, after six years of the Holocaust, where 10,000 Jews were murdered every day, they interned the survivors in Cyprus, left them rotting on ships, and barred them from entering their ancestral homeland. They didn’t even allow these emaciated scarecrows, these walking corpses, to come to Israel. The hypocrisy!”

While Bibi said this, I turned this way and that way, to the two plainclothes Special Branch detectives sitting in the front seat to protect him. I was thinking that I would have to live with these officers after he was gone. But if there was a single damn to give, Bibi never gave it. He never looked this way or that way but stared straight ahead, uncowed and utterly unintimidated. I looked at him and thought, “This man is Mordechai, who ‘will not bow and who will not bend.’

“Prime Minister,” I continued at the Shabbat dinner, “you have shown that same moral courage time and time again, but never more so than the decision you made early this morning to destroy the Jewish people’s foremost enemy, Hassan Nasrallah.

“After Israel suffered the greatest tragedy since the Holocaust when Hamas massacred 1,200 people on October 7 and kidnapped 251 others — including 12 Americans — you had a choice to make. It was a difficult one that would place thousands of Israeli soldiers, like my two sons, in harm’s way and draw the opprobrium of the U.N., the E.U., and the New York Times. You did not look for their approval, you said that Israel will destroy Hamas.

“And after nearly a year of criticism from every direction,  most especially but not perhaps not surprisingly from your own people (Moses himself said to God, ‘In another minute, the Jews will stone me to death!’) you did not flinch when it was time to begin the destruction of both Hamas and Hezbollah. The world that sees Jewish life as cheap said nothing for all those months when terrorists from Lebanon bombarded northern Israel with rockets, forcing nearly 100,000 people to leave their homes.

“Ceasefire! ceasefire!” demand the U.N., and the E.U., and even the United States. But it is only Israel that is pressured to surrender to the terrorists. But the prime minister has stood tall and fast against unimaginable pressure. And who knows better than you the need to rescue the hostages while still somehow forging ahead against the murderers who seek the Jewish people’s genocide when your beloved brother Yoni paid with his life to free the hostages from Entebbe.

“Prime Minister,” I said, “at the moment that Moses refused to look ‘this way and that way’ he became, according to the Torah, ‘a man.’ What is a man. It is not an angel. It is not a divine and perfect Jesus-like figure. No, it is simply someone, unlike a four-legged creature, who walks erect and tall.

“The greatest praise in the Jewish religion is to become a human, to walk tall and upright, because all would expect and understand if, after 2000 years of persecution, the Jews were hunchbacked.

“Throughout the Bible Moses is called ‘Ish Elokim,’ not an angel but ‘a man of God.’ Before he dies, King David summons his teenage son Solomon and says to him, ‘You are about to become a king. You must be strong and be a man.’

“Prime Minister, we here around the world have born witness to one MAN, to one Jew, who stood strong and tall while the whole has pummeled him. And today more than ever, with the evisceration of the Nasrallah, you have become the man.”

But then I reached the most important point I wished to make.

“Prime Minister, in your speech today you said that Moses commanded us to choose between life and death. But you, who loves history and is the son of Ben-Zion Netanyahu, one of the greatest Jewish academic historians of our time, know full well that we Jews for two thousand years have had no such choice.

“Yes, we could choose. But not between life and death. But only between death and death. The only choice given to us by an inhuman, reptilian, antisemitic world was how we would die.

“It was the choice faced even by great Jewish warriors like Elazar Ben Yair at Masada, when, seeing that Roman General Flavius Silva’s death ramp was finally complete, summoned his remaining 700 brave fighters, who held off the mighty Romans for four years, before recognizing they could not survive. He told them, according to Josephus, that although they would all die, they could choose how to. They could steal the Roman victory from them. And they committed mass suicide in what was seen as a great act of courage.

“Fast forward 2,000 years to May of 1943, and the incomparable Mordechai Anielewicz, after three weeks of battling SS General Jurgen Stroop’s troops to a virtual standstill at the Warsaw Ghetto — longer than the entire French Army lasted against Hitler — is now being burned out of the ghetto. At Mila 18 he gathers together almost the same number of courageous fighters, 700 in all of the Warsaw, and is forced to make the decision. We can either die as sheep to the slaughter, he tells them, we can be put on trains where they’ll gas us, or we can die and kill as many of these monsters as possible. Nearly all died when, at the last moment, they blew themselves up with their remaining grenades, but not before they sent hundreds of Nazi SS to the nether regions of hell.

“Now, Prime Minister, on the same day that you told the U.N. that the world must choose between life and death, you, guided by God and in command of the bravest Jewish army in history, the IDF, have finally restored the original promise of Moses. Not a choice between death and death, but between life and death.

“Everyone said that Hezbollah would overwhelm Iron Dome, David’s Sling, the Arrow Missile system, and the Israeli Air Force itself once Nasrallah pushed the button. But there is now not much of Nasrallah left to push any buttons.

“You have restored life to your people. You have restored dignity to the Jewish person. And you have restored the infinite value of life to an eternal nation who just 70 years ago was turned into smoked ash.

“By your actions, Prime Minister, you have restored to the Jewish people the choice between life and death that was stolen from us for so long. No longer must we resign ourselves to the choice of death and death, as did the brave fighters of Masada and the Warsaw Ghetto. Now, we can choose life, protected by the incomparable bravery of the IDF and the steadfast leadership of a prime minister who looks not this way and that way but is rather a man who looks promisingly toward the future. A promised land of Jews living in peace in their homeland having vanquished — slowly but surely — their genocidal enemies once and for all.

“God, acting through Moses, brought 10 plagues upon the Egyptians, and they were the ones forced to surrender. I don’t know if God is acting through the prime minister as he visits plagues upon Hamas and Hezbollah, from exploding pagers to targeted strikes to decapitate the terrorist leadership, but I do know his defense of the Jewish people will be remembered for millennia to come.”

When I finished speaking, Bibi got up from his chair and embraced me. We had hugged many times throughout our decades-long friendship. But this time it was a grateful short Jew holding a leader who was a man in full. As I embraced the prime minister that day, I told him that for 35 years he has inspired me to fight on. His courage, his wisdom, and his love for the Jewish people have uplifted me beyond measure.

And then I finished. “And how does Moses’ life end, Prime Minister? He is sent by God, alone and forlorn, up a mountain at the edge of the promised land. No one accompanies him. There is no 21-gun salute. No Nobel peace prize. My God, till today, we cannot even pay homage to him because no one even knows where he is buried.

“And the message: Only the greatest of leaders get to do what’s right simply because it is right and never for public acclimation.

“It is enough, Prime Minister, that the God of Israel sees how nobly and selflessly you lead his people and how your father, Ben-Zion, the warrior-scholar whom I was so privileged to know and who now rests in heaven, looks down at you, along with your brother Yoni, Israel’s most revered warrior, and salutes your courage, your stamina, and your truth.

“You are the greatest leader the State of Israel has ever produced, and we are forever in your debt.”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of Englewood is the author of the newly published guide to fighting for the Jewish State, “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

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