Introverted, quiet, calm, modest, studious, without hubris, without skeletons but with a backbone, without slips of the tongue and without the ability to express himself, an excellent strategist, level-headed and thorough, and someone whom the entire security establishment considers to have been the best Chief of Staff in recent decades - and all this packaged inside a potato. A historian by education and an amateur historian, a freak for doctrine and long-term planning documents, married+5 to his sweetheart since age 18, observes kashrut and tradition, managed the largest organization in the country, after being the first to give up (twice) on its leadership when offered to him, but what? A potato
What would happen if we put a potato in the Prime Minister's office? Is a nation of extroverted screamers even capable of placing a potato over them - introverted, boring, smarter than everyone there? What happened the last time the potato was discharged from the army? "Since he didn't really know then which field to pursue, he decided to go get good advice at the 'Til' institute for professional guidance. It cost him quite a bit, he sat for hours in aptitude tests, and when he was called for a summary conversation, where the diagnosis conclusions were presented to him, he was shocked to discover that he was recommended to study alternative medicine... They wanted to make him a reflexologist". Those who know the potato, with the charisma of a potato - understand why (and he of course returned to the army). A Prime Minister who is a reflexologist and masseur, Mr. Security instills calm and confidence. What do you think?
If there is a person who is the absolute opposite of Bibi, hollow and trembling from within, whose entire strength lies in external impression and in speech and language - it's the introverted potato, whose entire strength is in his interiority, and externally gives the impression of a dull person, a bit likable and completely unremarkable. To those who know him closely, the Prime Minister is a very unimpressive person to say the least. It's amusing to hear all those who speak of his genius and superpowers (even negatively) in some field they've invented. We're talking about a rather mediocre person, without exceptional education or intellectual ability, and even without extraordinary social skills, whose main characteristic is motivation - unrestrained and without any boundaries, who sees no one but himself, and is sure he is Israel's savior. As with many leaders and CEOs, it's simply a severe narcissistic personality disorder (please don't confuse narcissism with self-confidence, and certainly don't confuse self-confidence with ability). In addition, he simply has a lot, a lot of experience. And a lot of power, which simply accumulates the longer you're in a position of power. That's it, nothing more than that, and nothing more is needed, to be Bibi (he also has a bit of luck). Get out of the movie.
Sara is just a miserable woman, and quite simple, who is - according to foreign sources, and of course only as a literary character - suffering from borderline personality disorder (I mean, didn't you understand that? There's an underrepresentation in the media of women with such a disorder, like all the stupid secular people who bought the fabricated stories of poor Esti Weinstein z"l, also apparently suffering from the disorder, who committed suicide. This is a statistically quite common disorder in women, the equivalent of narcissism in men, and therefore you can never simply "believe her". Also, it's a known secret in the therapy world that many victims of childhood sexual abuse suffer from this disorder, what's called in therapeutic jargon "Borderlines"). In short, what can you do, there are personality disorders in the world (quite common, folks!), and couples of a narcissist and a woman with borderline personality disorder are not rare. But it's quite a shame for Israeli public discourse that it picks on an obviously ill literary character, because of her husband.
It's even more ridiculous to see intelligent people referring to Yair. If you knew him, or at least his literary character (a retarded and excited child, lacking any social skills, who all his life tries to buy friends with the help of his father, and only against this background can one understand the conversation at Pussycat). If people met him in real life for five minutes of conversation - they would be offended and ashamed that they ever referred to him. And indeed - he's just a miserable child, unpopular, an original slapped kid, and a miserable person, who since he was little was only treated because of his father, and got used to making scenes with the poor security guard on duty (hehehe, Shabaknik), who of course can't stand him. Regarding Avner - the secret is known. Sometimes ABA works wonders, and indeed all credit (without cynicism) to Sara who succeeded - and all the credit goes to her. The narcissist was of course busy with himself. That's it, that's the whole fighting family. And of course we're talking about literary characters only, and this entire text is fictional, and any resemblance to reality is coincidental, and anyway in a post-Kantian world there's no claim about the thing-in-itself.
But if people knew the thing-in-itself - they would be ashamed of all the energy they devoted, of all the waste of time, nerves and life, all the awe they felt, and all the sophisticated analyses they analyzed. People think that if these are up there they must be exceptional human beings, and that it's not possible for a person to succeed in becoming Prime Minister without special skills (otherwise why him and not me? Maybe... because you didn't invest your life in it? And why didn't you invest your life in it? Maybe because you're not psycho?). Bibi is not some demon, he's just obsessive and quite pathetic, fat, smoking and unhealthy - the banality of motivation (which causes a person to practice for years in making an impression, and removes any inhibition whatsoever. You'll never believe how they hide that fat neck on TV). Reality is beyond all imagination.
And what does all this have to do with the potato? Really nothing. It's simply about a boring person, about whom there's nothing to write. Who couldn't be a character in any literary work. About whom there's really nothing to say. Who has no mental disorder, no delusions of grandeur, despite (and perhaps because) it's really about a great person, or more precisely, a great potato. But in reality, this nation simply doesn't deserve to get a potato as Prime Minister. If the potato was in this position, for example - there would be no coronavirus in Israel. Period. We would be South Korea. And suppressing the coronavirus, by the way, is very similar systemically to suppressing the Intifada of individuals (yes, this is the only Chief of Staff who managed to suppress an Intifada, and not inflame it. Reflexologist, we already said?). It's not clear at all how such a one grew in our garden. The opposite of everything Israeli in your eyes. But if he'll be up there, there will really be a need to bless with name and kingdom: Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe - who creates the fruit of the earth.
Because already the book of Samuel identified the main problem concerning leadership: Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart. And in modern society the problem only worsens, because people simply don't know "these" people, meaning not through media mediation, which idolizes them for its needs, exactly as it does to every model, celebrity and psychic. The main problem in our society is that motivation is the main parameter determining success in it - and not only for the position of CEO or PM, but even if it's about receiving an academic appointment or even to be a well-known contemporary writer - and not talent. The motivation method - confused with meritocracy - causes most likely that the people who manage to get "there" are psychos, because you need psychotic motivation to get there, not rare talent. And this is true even for art, and this is the reason artists are narcissists and psychos - because the barriers are so high that motivation is more important than talent. And therefore many people see the correlation and think that psychosis causes talent. This is true exactly like Bibi is talented. Therefore the most important thing that can happen to our society is to become a society of potatoes.
The root of all sin is the expression that success comes from 1% talent and 99% hard work. If we put such high barriers of "hard work" - indeed all positions in society will be reached by people of little talent, who are psychotic motivation bombs. Therefore the ethos of motivation, externally by nature (which indeed flatters the many untalented - "if you only want - you'll succeed!") needs to be replaced with the ethos of talent - the internal quality. We should actually lower advancement barriers that measure motivation - non-qualitative barriers, but very easy to set, of "hard work" - in all societal systems aspiring for excellence (academia, culture, commercial companies, and even - alas - public servants). Here, for about 20 years already (since being Golani Brigade commander) the entire military system has been aware of the rare internal qualities of our potato, who enjoys general admiration from wall to wall, and the public hasn't heard about them at all (and has no green idea about the huge debt it owes him, in almost all the junctions of national security in the last twenty years, which he managed with the inner cool of cold mashed potatoes).
The stupid public doesn't know that the one responsible here for the quiet (which allowed relative prosperity) in recent years is the potato - and not Bibi, and that the potato also exerted all his weight and the enormous prestige he enjoys to prevent Bibi and Barak from attacking Iran (but invented the campaign between wars that changed the results of the war in Syria), rebuilt deterrence against Hezbollah that created the long quiet as Northern Command chief (and the only one who functioned in the Second Lebanon War), and was the key figure in suppressing the Second Intifada (appointed commander of the West Bank Division in 2003) and who wrote with his own hands the doctrine for suppressing terrorism ("mowing the lawn") since then and onwards, not to mention his important contribution to the withdrawal from Lebanon (in a bold position then in internal discussions, and later as Barak's military secretary), or the severe defeat he inflicted on Hezbollah in 2018 (in a war the public didn't hear about - how typical). And all this without mentioning his integrity, with a brilliant and almost unique record in the military system in recent decades (from neutralizing the culture of rebellions in Golani to neutralizing "Defense Minister" Lieberman). There's no comparison between the potato, who inspires awe and cross-camp admiration, to his two predecessors, about whom opinions in the system are very divided to say the least, and who were appointed as Chiefs of Staff almost by mistake, due to exceptional and unexpected circumstances, after being skipped over. It's like comparing apples to cucumbers.
Currently, it seems that Bibi's hubris is causing him to consider a fourth election, instead of trembling with fear from the potato, whose entry into politics is an earthquake (we always thought he was apolitical and anti-politician, so much was he matter-of-fact, and with the oratory skills of a sleep-inducing potato). Bibi is stupid, and the public is stupid too, but the potato is very smart, and the closest thing we have to a strategic genius, and perhaps the most worthy person to lead the country since Ben-Gurion or Eshkol roughly. His embodiment in a potato of the ideal of the longed-for responsible conservative, with iron-cast values and impeccable conduct, that Assaf Sagiv so yearned for his arrival - is approaching and rolling into the arena. It's hard to know how and why, and how long it will take him (the potato is a marathon runner, and green in politics, and doesn't pass the threshold), but there is for the first time a well-founded and real hope that Israel's #1 strategist will succeed in defeating Israel's #1 tactician - and that long-term vision will defeat short-term vision. Because in the end, in the long run, strategy always defeats tactics - and this is the most important lesson that the potato can teach the Israeli public. Changing the ethos. It simply doesn't befit Israelis, a crude nation of potato eaters, to have a potato as their leader, but we must hope that sometimes we get what we don't deserve. Falafel with chips.
References:
Iron Patton (Haaretz, 1999)Everything you need to know about Gadi Eisenkot, the general who didn't see anyone from a meter away (Ben Caspit, 2014)Eisenkot (Kan Docu, 2019)