Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. As signs of an imminent Israeli invasion of Rafah grow in southern Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a Passover speech over the weekend in which he suggested that Hamas is playing the role of the Pharaoh in the biblical Exodus story; the existential threat to the Jewish people who stands at the heart of the holiday.
Netanyahu:
“Instead of withdrawing from its extreme positions, the Hamas counts on internal divisions among us, it draws encouragement from the pressures that are turned against Israel’s government. Thus, it only toughens its terms for the release of our hostages. It hardens its heart, and refuses to let our people go. Therefore, we will land additional and painful plagues upon it – and this will happen soon. In the coming days we will increase the military and political pressure on Hamas, because this is the only way to release our hostages and achieve our victory”.
I have chosen to translate Netanyahu’s Hebrew “makot”, as “plagues”, rather than “hits,” because it is crystal clear that he is evoking a very specific biblical context, where the divine answer to Pharaoh’s “hardening of heart” is the ten plagues, “eser hamakot” in Hebrew. ….more
