Israel's Mafia Government Is Employing the Hannibal Directive Against the Nation
Raviv Drucker's investigative report on the madness of Miri Regev's management of the Transportation Ministry is deeply frustrating not just due to the facts as they were reported, but to the realization that this is almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg.
It is not only the minister who has allegedly engaged in this malfeasance (but why "allegedly," since the minister's own words speak for themselves). When you look at the activities of all the 33 ministers and five deputy ministers in the current government, you are not going out on a limb in assuming that they preside over a deep and disgusting quagmire of corruption that swallows up huge budgets, all of which are aimed at one goal: to ensure the continued rule of the government, which increasingly resembles a criminal organization and its don.
That is how the Neapolitan Camorra, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, operated. But perhaps the more appropriate term is "thieves in law" (in Russian, vorami v zakone), whose name evokes the horror of the Russian mafia that was established in the prison camps of the Stalinist era and whose leader, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, penetrated to the top of politics and business in Russia and former Soviet countries.
However, if in Italy and the United States honest citizens could hope that the government would fight criminal organizations, or at least show the willingness and determination to keep them under control, in Israel such hopes are an illusion.
When the prime minister himself is a criminal suspect and the minister in charge of the police is both a super-police commissioner and a convicted criminal, who continues to (allegedly) commit crimes and the police itself trembles before him, the ordinary citizen has no choice but to pay protection money and keep quiet. That protection money costs a lot.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition at a government meeting in 2023.Credit: Mark Israel Salem
The "Hamakor" investigation shows that Regev's political machinations endangered, if not actually cost, the lives of tens or hundreds of pedestrians and drivers – because traffic lights, proper roads and appropriate intersections were not budgeted by the ministry if they were to be located in towns and cities whose mayors did not subscribe to the government's ideology, and/or did not show sufficient fealty to the minister. It is akin to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir's policy of handing tens of thousands of citizens deadly weapons, without proper inspection and probably in violation of the law, thereby risking a rise in homicides.
The problem is that focusing on Regev and Ben-Gvir leaves us with the illusion that, after all, these are two ministers in an otherwise benign government, since most ministers have no direct responsibility for human life. The reality is that the Israeli government, including the ministers who see themselves as its emergency brakes but continue to be members of it, is a criminal gang whose members subscribe to the principle, formulated by Netanyahu, that "responsibility is not guilt."
It is an organization that values survival above all else, and for that purpose applies Regev's "traffic light" system not to towns and cities but to the entire country. In its eyes, the country is not a favored "diamond," rather its place is in the unwanted "white column," like the local authorities that were subject to systematic neglect by the Transportation Ministry, and whose letters of protest were summarily deposited in the wastebasket.
Members of Israel's coalition in the Knesset.Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg
This is the corrupt worldview of a gang that considers itself a "diamond" and ordinary citizens as gravel stuck in their shoe. Regev looked out for No. 1, but the thinking behind the government's national "traffic light" outline applies to the entire world. It dictates the prolongation of the Gaza war, even when its military usefulness is questionable, provided that it ensures the peace of the government and its leader. Out of this came the attitude towards "non-diamonds" – the hostages, their families and the victims of the war. It is the substratum on which grew the historic failure that turned tens of thousands of Israelis into refugees in their own country.
The "thieves in law" know only one war – the war against those who seek to remove them from power and the gatekeepers who restrain their worst instincts. In such a war, all is fair – the Hannibal directive can be used against the entire country to prevent the transfer of power to anyone who isn't a member of the organization.