The king has no God: Netanyahu lost the right to rule in his lust for power - opinion

The mighty Nebuchadnezzar’s 43-year reign could not have ended more ironically.

The man who had conquered much of the Near East and built architectural wonders like the Hanging Gardens and Ishtar Gate, now lost his mind and behaved like a beast, “driven away from men” and grazing “like cattle” while “his hair grew like eagle’s feathers and his nails like the talons of birds.” (Daniel 4:30)

While that report’s historicity is debatable, some mighty rulers were clearly insane, from Nero, Caligula, and Joseph Stalin, to Britain’s King George III. These extreme cases were exceptional, but some great leaders, too, were emotionally unstable, most notably Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Menachem Begin, all of whom were depressive.

The common denominator is that their mental conditions did not result from their political careers. That cannot be said of the typical politician who is prone to becoming a victim of his own power and losing touch with morality.

ABSOLUTE RULERS become absolutely corrupt even if they were originally moral. That’s what happened to David, a justice seeker who fumed when told of a rich man who stole a poor man’s sheep, but also an evil emperor who stole another man’s wife and had her husband killed.

Then again, David’s corruption was less surprising than the ruination of his predecessor, Saul. David actively sought power, having fought to unseat and replace another king. Saul did nothing of the sort. Power was not his aim, and he was crowned by someone else, to his own astonishment.

In fact, Saul was a politician’s antithesis. Yes, he was “handsome” and also “a head taller than any of the people” (I Samuel 9:2), but he was so disinterested in politics that his response when assigned to lead was a flat refusal, and also an attempt to hide “among the baggage,” in a futile effort to remain the anonymous farmer he would no longer be.

Eighteen royal years later, after a career of foreign wars, political skirmishing, social turmoil, and mental decline, Saul not only came to love power, he became obsessed with it. The man who once was modest did all he could to cling to power, and while at it suspected everyone, even his beloved son Jonathan, of conspiring to unseat him.

That is how, when he got word that his rivals found food in Nov – a town of priests who had no clue of the king’s rivalries, phobias, and plots – the man who once had no interest in power now ordered 85 priests massacred along with their entire town, “men, women, children, and infants, oxen, donkeys, and sheep, all to the sword.”

No, Bibi Netanyahu has not slain any of his people, let alone a whole town. He has, however, much like Saul, lost the ability to distinguish between good and bad, just and unjust, or even between ally and foe.

Edelstein’s sin, from the viewpoint of his executioner, has been his refusal to table a bill that would etch in stone ultra-Orthodox draft dodging. That alone is both absurd and immoral – we are at war, for heaven’s sake, and Edelstein was demanded to hurt the war effort – but this political execution is altogether appalling when seen through the prism of Edelstein’s biography.

Born in Soviet Chernivtsi, north of today’s Ukrainian-Romanian border, the man who next week turns 67 struggled for 10 years against the mighty USSR – first secretly learning, teaching, and training teachers of Hebrew, and then spending years in Siberian gulags before finally being released in 1987, and immediately landing here.

The result of this is not only an impeccable Hebrew (better than the ordinary Israeli politician’s), but a paragon of what Zionism is all about.

That, to be sure, is what drove Edelstein’s revulsion with the draft-dodging deal that most mainstream Israelis, from Right and Left, are no longer prepared to stomach. But the Zionist instincts that guide Edelstein no longer guide the man who chose to satisfy Zionism’s saboteurs by serving them a Zionist hero’s severed head.

Like Saul in his twilight, Bibi Netanyahu was guided in this move not by the national interest, but by the preservation of his own power. It’s a shame to us all, and it’s a pattern.

Milwidsky is innocent until proven guilty, but there was a time when Netanyahu loudly demanded that a suspect of lighter offenses – one Ehud Olmert – be suspended from public office until exonerated. That is also what Likud did last decade, when it fired Deputy Knesset speaker Oren Hazan following allegations he deployed call girls in a Bulgarian hotel he ran.