Remember how the world rallied around the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? The headline in the French newspaper Le Monde probably said it best: "We are all Americans." For the first time in a long time, everyone was in our corner.
Then, in just the next two years, George W. Bush — who we used to call, pre-Trump, The Worst Person Who's Ever Lived — squandered all that goodwill by invading Iraq, a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the destruction of the World Trade Center.
Benjamin Netanyahu has done nearly the same thing to Israel. Immediately after the attacks by Hamas on October 7, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, we were all leaping to Israel's side. But Netanyahu's scorched-earth campaign in Gaza has been turning sympathizers away for some time. And now, an IDF killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers threatens to alienate whoever is left.
Netanyahu's actions have not only killed countless Gazans but have also helped blind the world to Hamas's innate culpability. This is enraging. Hamas fighters built — and have been hiding in — miles of tunnels under Gaza. They were perfectly willing from the get-go to sacrifice civilians on the surface. But Netanyahu's awfulness obscures that. The World Central Kitchen debacle, a tragedy in and of itself, makes it even worse.
The good news is that Israelis, angry about the deaths, the mismanagement, and the failure to get their hostages back, have been demonstrating against their government by the thousands. Can they force their much-loathed Prime Minister to resign? We cats live for the day that Netanyahu's out of office (and, we hope, hauled off to the hoosegow). That would make us PURR.
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