His name is Eitan and he’s been driving a taxi here in Israel for more than forty years. He drove us to Jerusalem last week from Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv.
I’m telling you about Eitan because he had a lot to say to us travelers from New York in his SUV taxi for close to an hour. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and there was intermittent traffic at about noon on Thursday.
I don’t know how it happened, maybe it was because I asked him how he was doing and he responded by saying, “How am I doing? How do you think I’m doing? The country is split and falling apart, so how do you think I should be doing?”
The rest of that day I had the opportunity to think about everything Eitan said during that cab ride. In fact, later that night I quoted him at a forum we attended, but first described him as a political analyst I had met earlier that day who also happens to be a taxi driver here in Israel.
No one is happy or even close to being satisfied with the current state of affairs here in Israel. The fighting in Gaza is fierce and young men are dying on the front lines every day. On the day we arrived, there was a friendly fire incident that resulted in the deaths of five young men and injuries of varying degrees to seven more.
On the same day, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant publicly expressed his displeasure with Prime Minister Netanyahu for failing to come up with an implementable plan for the so-called “day after” the war with Hamas. The other war cabinet member, Benny Gantz, issued an ultimatum to Bibi, giving him a deadline of June 8 to come up with a postwar plan or he’ll ditch the coalition.
Across the board, the approach seems to be more than anything else enigmatic. There is a sense that even the U.S. agrees to Netanyahu’s plan of destroying Hamas, but at the same time, they want the terrorists included in the government that will oversee the two million people who live on the Strip after the war. As of now, it seems that no one else wants that thankless, violent job.
So, after climbing into this guy’s van after a long, ten-hour flight from New York, I realized that you can’t just bring your New York harangues and political views and present them to a man who, along with his family, has given his life for our precious state of Israel.
If nothing else, Eitan represents the other side of how so many of us tend to think of Israel today. The one thing he made clear from the outset was that Bibi is the worst thing that ever happened to the State of Israel. I’m an outsider who doesn’t necessarily agree with him, but I respect the fact that he lives here, and aside from everything else, we are still at least a half hour from our destination, so what is there to argue about?
At the same time, I was very interested in what Eitan had to say. It’s not my place to lecture him about Bibi or for that matter any other aspect of Israeli politics or society. But I was curious about who he thought over all his years was a strong and effective Prime Minister of Israel.
It was just after noon, and traffic was flowing nicely, so he was driving at a fairly good speed considering what traffic is like in these parts of Israel. So, I asked him again who he thought was the most effective Prime Minister in the nation’s history. He thought about it for a minute and then blurted out, “Bennett and Olmert.”
I have to admit his answer came out of left field and I was taken by surprise. I didn’t think he would say Ariel Sharon or Menachem Begin, but these two were a complete surprise. I would not have been surprised if he had said Rabin or Peres, but Naftali Bennett and Ehud Olmert? If any Prime Ministers had failed on the job, and in fact did more damage than good, it was these two.
Ehud Olmert was a literal disaster who tried to give away most of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians and ended up serving time in prison for bribery. Bennett mistakenly thought he could rely on an Arab party in the Knesset for a majority to help him pass legislation.
For his part, I believe that Bennett did not intend to harm the country; he just made political miscalculations that did damage and that thankfully lasted just about a year before his government fell.
So, as we drove, I didn’t challenge Eitan’s judgement, but I did not ask him why he thought those two were Israel’s best PM’s when they are arguably probably the worst that Israel has endured.
But Eitan, my friend, was a good and apparently hard-working man. His son is a financial analyst that served in the reserves and spent more than three months in Gaza. He said that he holds Netanyahu responsible for the fiasco of October 7 and the resulting damage that was inflicted on so many families and to the morale of the country as a whole.
Of course, I don’t agree with him, but I cannot debate him. I have no right to do that. As least that is how I feel now. I didn’t tell him that I thought Netanyahu looked bad presently because the Biden administration is trying to pull the political rug out from under him.
To a certain extent, it seems that much of this war is about politics while boys are being killed and injured every week. It looks like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and MK Benny Gantz are working with the Biden administration to undermine Netanyahu.
The Biden people don’t really see this as a difficult humanitarian aid matter with women and children dying of starvation. That has already been demonstrated to be false. Biden (really Obama and a few others) see this as their big chance to create a Palestinian state. Netanyahu said the other day that he categorically rejects that plan.
Gallant and Gantz are pretending to go along with the two-state idea so they can maneuver Bibi out of office and move one of them in. In the end, the good news is that will not happen because that’s not what the Palestinians want. They want to destroy Israel.
And my friendly taxi driver, Eitan, is falling for it all. He thinks two states in this small part of the Middle East is the formula that will finally bring peace. It would be great if he was right and it was that simple, but he’s not right and after all these years, he sadly doesn’t know it.
Read more of Larry Gordon’s articles at 5TJT.com. Follow 5 Towns Jewish Times on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for updates and live videos. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome at 5TJT.com and on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
