SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: : When the Messiah Comes Jacqueline Rose on her encounter with Benjamin Netanyahu

https://x.com/MaryKostakidis/status/2004160354994344079

Mary Kostakidis

LRB: When the Messiah Comes Jacqueline Rose on her encounter with Benjamin Netanyahu ‘My only meeting with Netanyahu took place in 2002, when I had been invited to make a film for Channel 4 – Dangerous Liaison: Israel and America – that tried to come to grips with Washington’s unconditional military and political support for Israel. No longer prime minister – he had been voted out in 1999 – Netanyahu received me in a small room with the notice ‘Office of the Prime Minister’ affixed to the door. He must have carried the plaque to his new premises with uncanny confidence, not to say patience. Two years had passed since he lost the previous election to Ehud Barak. It would be another seven before he was returned to office to become the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history – a moment reached on 20 July 2019, when he recorded 4876 days (exceeding the record of David Ben-Gurion). … Above all, I was struck by his aura of pragmatism. To get his own way, there was nothing, it seemed, he would not do, nothing he was unwilling to contemplate, no question or challenge to which he did not have a pat reply. When I asked him how he could welcome the support of Christian evangelicals, given their belief that the coming of the Messiah would involve the mass slaughter of Jews on the plain of Armageddon and the conversion of all who remain, he replied without a blink: ‘I say that when the Messiah comes, we will argue about that.’ He could talk himself out of any fix. Not for nothing has hasbara or good-news publicity on behalf of Israel been seen as his special, perhaps only, political gift. … Following the expulsion from Spain, [15th-century sage Don Isaac] Abravanel fervently believed, there would be no redemption, no safe haven or national home for the Jews, without a divine force that would arise at the climax of an apocalyptic catastrophe. According to Avner Ben-Zaken, an Israeli historian of science, Abravanel has attracted followers among political philosophers and Hebraists from the beginning of the modern era to the present day. Fearful for the future, they shared a need and longing for political stability, which could only be achieved by insisting on a political threat, ‘even’, in Ben-Zaken’s words, ‘one that may be fictitious’. Abravanel was anticipating one of the most dangerous components of modern Israeli statehood as it would come to be personified by Netanyahu. Israel is always on the brink of disaster, as indeed are all the Jews. It will take catastrophe and a war of resurrection to save them. What should be aimed for is a ‘restrained catastrophe’, to be managed as a perpetual state of war which will render any definitive settlement impossible. Never ending the conflict with the enemy will act as an ‘adhesive’ to maintain the political unity of the Jews. It is a strategy fraught with risk – a breakdown of all restraint and a slide into new catastrophe. In 2015, when Ben-Zaken wrote his essay, no one was yet talking about genocide. Netanyahu’s abiding fear is not that peace can never be achieved but that it might be. He is the Israeli leader who has most fully actualised Abravanel’s age-old dream. On his way to address Congress in March 2015, Netanyahu stopped off to visit his father’s grave and then released a press statement: ‘My father was never afraid to go out into the storm’ – the exact image used by Benzion Netanyahu to describe Abravanel. Legend has it that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson [Chabad leader], once told Netanyahu that he would be the last prime minister, the one destined to transfer the leadership to the Messiah. Meanwhile, bodies trailing behind him, he still seems to believe he can sweet-talk his way to the stars.’

From lrb.co.uk

11:00 PM · Dec 25, 2025