In her article Is Gantz falling
from grace?, Ruthie Blum writes: “The good news is that
Gantz has little to no chance of heading the next government. He couldn’t even
sustain positive press coverage for a full week. “
This is debatable. The constant
attacks at Netanyahu through the years have eroded support for him and the “anybody
but Netanyahu” mindset is spreading.
The fact that Bibi is the
only Israeli leader apart from Michael
Oren who has quoted
Bernard Lewis’s warning
about Mutually Assured Destruction not being a deterrent for the Iranian
leaders is irrelevant to the majority of Israelis. First, most Israelis have never heard of
Bernard Lewis. Second, most Israelis know nothing about Twelver Shisim and their
eschatology and hence many believe that Bibi has being crying wolf regarding Iran
for years. Third, they are convinced
that other Israeli leaders could easily take Netanyahu’s place including
handling the Iranian threat although none of them ever mentioned Iran having no
problem with mutual destruction.
The combination of the above
results in that nobody in Israel ever discusses the possibility of an Iranian nuclear
attack on Israel due to the death of the MAD doctrine which managed to prevent
a nuclear exchange during the Cold War.
To put it in Orwellian terms, “a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc —
should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on
words“ The two words together - Iran and
MAD - do not exist in the vocabulary of Newspeak.
