“Zehu Zeh,” A humorous show on Kan11 TV that used to be funny but since January 2023 became increasingly angry, last week featured a satirical attack on Minister Orit Strook (Religious Zionism). A mock interviewer inquired if she regretted questioning an IDF official in a cabinet meeting regarding news reports that some Air Force pilots refuse to attack targets in Gaza on consciousness grounds. The question was directed at the Head of the Strategy Division Major General Eliezer Toledano, who rebuked the minister, telling her it was a “horrible question.”
Strook is an elected official representing the people, and her question was legitimate: Israelis are well aware of the problems associated with the functioning of the Air Force on October 7 due to the refusal of a hefty portion of pilots to show up for their weekly training in protest of the judicial reform. Also, the rumors about pilots’ refusal to shoot at targets they deem inappropriate come from the front. Strooks sons and sons-in-law serve in Gaza. If anyone hears those rumors it would be she.
General Toledano could have simply answered, “No, madam minister.” The fact that he had to teach her a lesson in manners suggests two Shakespearian notions, both from Hamlet: one about protesting too much, the other about the rotten thing in the state of Denmark.
The sketch represented what used to be the common view in Israel’s militaristic culture, namely that IDF generals are gods who walk among us, and therefore questioning them is tantamount to treason. Granted, the succession of failures on the part of the military, climaxing on October 7 in the greatest loss since the holocaust, diminished this blind faith, but the leftist elites who make up the writers and actors of “Zehu Zeh” hold on to the October 6 concepts lest they be made to accept their responsibility.
And so, Orit Strook asks the interviewer in the sketch if his mother is a whore, because she can ask anyone and anything. Funny? Not in the least. Dripping hate and rage? You bet.
IT’S ALL ABOUT GUSH KATIF
Strook has been raising the tough questions since the mainstream in Israel’s politics turned on the Jewish families of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, blaming them for the conflict with Arab terrorists, and forcing their expulsion. Almost twenty years later, thousands of Israelis paid and continue to the price for that insanity, as the IDF belatedly re-interjects itself into the watchful posts it abandoned back in 2005. The nightmare of the left in Israel is that the Gush Katif disaster be tied with October 7, and that includes Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, the two IDF chiefs of staff who navigated an insane security policy since the army’s flight from Gaza, containing Hamas with the occasional counter-attack, with the protection of the Iron Dome system that made being hit with thousands of rockets acceptable.
Orit Strook, Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and rightwing pundits and panelists on right-wing radio and Channel 14 tirelessly repeat this message these days, marking themselves as the enemy of both the political and military conceptzia barons.
On Thursday, the brewing tension between the people who cried wolf since 2005 and the people who fed the wolf came to an explosion, certainly not the last one. There will be more since the side that abandoned control over Gaza to Hamas is still vying for control over the country, and being shamed on that count angers them.
Thursday night’s meeting of the political-security cabinet ended in a blowout after right-wing ministers attacked the Chief of Staff, General Herzi Halevi, and Minister Benny Gantz for setting up a team to investigate the events of October 7 that include some of the granddaddies of the conceptzia which led to the massacre.
The defense minister during the expulsion of Jews from Gaza, Shaul Mofaz will lead the team, which will also include the former chief of military intelligence during the expulsion Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash––who was an active leader of the push to stop serving in the reserves in protest of the judicial reform, and Shlomo “Sami” Turgeman, who was commander of the southern command from 2013 to 2015, the years when then-IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz invented the latest version of the conceptzia, arguing that after the beatings it absorbed in the 2014 Gaza war, Hamas was deterred and should be plied with cash and jobs.
Needless to say, the only ministers who attacked the conceptzia, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, as well as two prominent Likud ministers, David Amsalem and Miri Regev, were irate and attacked the chief of staff for essentially looking to investigate his own colossal failure that led to the death of thousands of Israelis.
SHE WON’T BE SILENCED
In hindsight, Orit Strook was right and awake, and the IDF and the entire security apparatus were wrong and asleep. Last week, Israel Hayom published a letter she sent the defense minister, chief of staff, and NSA chief on September 5, 2023, one month before the October 7 attack, warning:
A. In January 2023 it was permitted to bring into the Strip boat motors.
B. On May 2023 it was permitted to bring in motorcycle parts.
She noted that during the 2022 IDF attack on the Islamic Jihad, most military correspondents had suggested that the reason Hamas was not helping the Jihad was that the former’s arsenal of rockets was still being replenished. This means, she wrote, that those arsenals are being filled every day, in anticipation of the day of action that would take place according to Hamas’s decision.
Between April and September 2023, Strook warned 15 different times against the criminal negligence of allowing the impost of dual-purpose goods into Gaza, goods Hamas was utilizing in preparation for its attack. However, the negligence began under the Bennett-Lapid-Gantz government which permitted cement imports, steel sheets, and fiberglass.
According to the Israel Hayom report, her nagging about the security apparatus’s carelessness at the Gaza crossing was so numerous that Netanyahu began to call it the Strook protocol.
This is why Orit Strook must be ridiculed and demonized by the mainstream media: she has a meticulous list of where all the skeletons are buried, and she has a big mouth.
God bless her.
