Letters to the Editor, December 9, 2024: Your own dime

Your own dime

Regarding “Protesters decry assault on free press at ministry chain-in” (December 6): The protesters want to have their cake and eat it too. The government is proposing to privatize the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, a public-funded broadcasting corporation. The unstated, but obvious, reason is that the IPBC is staffed primarily by left-wing people, who abhor the present democratically elected right-wing government, and do not refrain from saying so.

A dictatorial government would have fired all the employees and replaced them with people who would unquestionably support government policies; that is what a dictator does. Instead, this government is saying: do what you want, say what you will, but do it on your own dime, a perfectly reasonable decision.

All the IPBC has to do is find financial backers to invest in the company, and then attract advertisers to keep it going. That is democracy at work. It may turn out that the network will fail to attract enough viewers and listeners, and hence fail to get advertisers to pay their costs, in which case the IPBC will go bankrupt. On the other hand, it may turn out that the network will be very successful. That is how a free economy in a free society works.

The protesters seem to think that taxpayers, whether they like it or not, should subsidize the IPBC so that the journalists can continue to oppose government policies even if these are policies which taxpayers like, policies of which the majority of citizens approve. That is not democracy; it’s anarchy.

STEPHEN COHENMa’aleh Adumim

Rules of engagement

I was shocked to read that Amnesty Israel semi-agreed with Amnesty International, noting that Israel had killed too many Gazans but also accusing Amnesty International of not having proved that Israel had genocidal intent (“Amnesty Israel rejects parent body,” December 6). I thought that all Israelis would surely agree that the October 7 attacks changed the rules of engagement between Israel and its enemies.

When rockets were being fired at Israeli population centers, there were few casualties and minimal property damage because Israel has excellent anti-missile defenses and Israelis are accustomed to getting to shelter quickly when alarms come in on their cell phones. But, on October 7, 2023, families were burned alive in their safe rooms and having a personal weapon or two was no defense against gangs of rapists and murderers who set houses afire or shot through the locks on safe room doors.

While Israeli leaders correctly concluded that, this time, Israel needed to win a decisive victory over Hamas, to be followed by demilitarization of Gaza and a deradicalization of Palestinians (who cheered Hamas’s vow to inflict 1,000 October 7s on Israelis), the IDF has remained the most moral army in the world, in the opinion of Major (ret.) John Spencer, head of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point. 

Maj. Spencer has noted that the ratio of civilians killed to combatants killed in the current war (1.5:1) is the lowest ever observed for fighting in a densely populated area like Gaza. He also notes that this achievement is greatly deserving of praise because Hamas deliberately designed its extensive network of terror tunnels in a manner that actually ensures that Israel’s exemplary efforts to avoid hurting civilians is guaranteed to be less than 100% effective. With connections between the tunnels and schools, hospitals, mosques, homes, and businesses, Hamas has destroyed all distinctions between civilian areas and legitimate military targets.

Like all people and institutions of goodwill, both Amnesty International and Amnesty Israel should be urging Hamas to release the hostages and to order its fighters to surrender. If Hamas survives to fight another day, it will surely take more hostages, steal more humanitarian aid from the people in Gaza, and commit more crimes against humanity, using the Gazans as human shields while directly attacking civilians in Israel.

TOBY F. BLOCKAtlanta

Deep state

Kudos to David Kirshenbaum for “Cult worship and the Tower of Babel” (December 3), on the hero worship of Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara. Rarely have I read a piece in the Post which is clear and concise on the subject of the use of the law and the interpretation of the law to further a political agenda.

Most of the time we read of the dangers of tampering with the legal system, as if any reform endangers democracy. In fact, as Mr. Kirshenbaum alludes to, the present system is empowering the deep state and endangering individual rights.

LEONARD LUBINPetah Tikva

Astonishing inversion

In an astonishing inversion of reality worthy of George Orwell’s 1984, Avi Abelow (“Cleaning up corruption here too,” December 8) would have us believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu is a righteous crusader against the corruption that has permeated the justice system, the intelligence agencies, and the media to destroy his paragon of virtue and honesty, thus not allowing the will of the people to run the country without any distraction by the rule of law.

The fact is, Netanyahu has been the primary source of corruption and division in Israel for over a decade. His capitulation and obsequiousness to those who “stand on the blood of their neighbors,” his attempts to destroy the rule of law by the subjugation of the Supreme Court and the attorney-general, his strategy of divide and conquer to diminish any opposition, and his dispatching of any opposition within Likud to political oblivion, not to mention his and his family’s obnoxious sense of entitlement, stand as testament to his overwhelming sense of self-importance and belief that he is above the law.

When the history of his time is written, he will be seen as the worst prime minister in our history. For a story that began with such hope and promise, Netanyahu has taken the classic road of all demagogues down to disappointment and disgrace.

YISRAEL GUTTMANJerusalem