Irish Examiner view: Netanyahu's aim is war without end
Israelis march in a protest against prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his plans to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet internal security service, on Wednesday, March 19, 2025. Picture: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP
The melancholy statistics that yesterday’s Israeli airstrikes in Gaza took the death toll from nearly 18 months of conflict to more than 50,000 is chilling testimony to the reality that, without leadership change in Jerusalem, the region is condemned to war without end.
After nearly eight weeks of tension but relative calm, it appears that the ceasefire has effectively been abandoned amid the new air and ground campaign against Hamas.
For many critics, it reinforces the belief that Benjamin Netanyahu had no intention of entering the second stage of the truce because his political position depends on the continuation of hostilities.
In Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, thousands of protestors — some observers put the figure as high as 100,000 — have clashed with police wielding water cannon. Smoke from flares hangs over the cities.
Anger has peaked because of the dismissal of the director of the Israeli security agency, commonly known as Shin Bet. Mr Netanyahu’s coalition cabinet voted unanimously to sack him claiming a “lack of trust”.
Opponents assert it is another step towards a constitutional crisis in the Middle East’s only democracy. A temporary injunction issued by Israel’s high court putting a stay on the dismissal is being ignored. There is dark talk about removing the country’s attorney general.
From the outside, all of this looks like a path towards dictatorship and only underpins the claim that there will be no end to carnage while Mr Netanyahu, emboldened by the involvement and style of Donald Trump, remains in charge.
War improves his chances, for now, of holding on to the levers of power. QED — quod erat demonstrandum — as the Latin scholars like to say.
The idea that age is no barrier is one of the most powerful forces in modern life. Yet, in a society in which ever increasing numbers of ageing citizens feel lonely and depressed, it is a maxim which justifies daily repetition.
We have just witnessed three unforgettable examples of the determination which can be mustered by older people. The eulogies which accompanied the death of the heavyweight champion George Foreman — who recovered his world title at the age of 45 — might be considered the output of an imaginative Runyonesque fiction writer were it not for the little matter of truth.
Foreman, 76, was raised by his mother in the tough Houston, Texas district known as ‘Bloody 5th’ because of the murders and violence which were a near daily facet of life. He was a teenage mugger who dropped out of school before enrolling for the Job Corps, a federal programme of the kind which might now be axed by the current administration. It offered free education and vocational training for people between 16 and 24.
Foreman was trained as a carpenter and bricklayer but his mentor also introduced him to boxing. By the age of 19, he was gold medal winner at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Five years later he knocked out the fearsome ‘Smokin’ Joe Frazier in the second round to become world champion only to lose it in the legendary Rumble in the Jungle to Muhammad Ali in Zaire in 1974. When he was unable to get a rematch, Foreman quit the ring. His weight ballooned to nearly 160kg.
He became a church minister in the town of Humble after a moment of epiphany in a locker room. In difficult financial straits, he rekindled his boxing career, shed all his excess fat, and became the oldest man ever to win the world title — his second — at the age of 45. He also made hundreds of millions of dollars by endorsing the George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine, telling the BBC’s Desert Island Discs no one would ever starve “if they knew how to sell”.
Foreman, who visited Limerick in 1999 at the request of a friend, had 12 children, with his five sons each named George. “When you’ve had a career in boxing,” he told an interviewer, “memory management becomes kinda important.” If that is a remarkable life story, it is no less than the account of the 109-year-old life of Ireland’s oldest person, Ruby Druce, who died at her home in Donegal. Mrs Druce lived through two world wars and two pandemics. A non-smoker and teetotaller, she only ever had one sip of poitín — and that was for medicinal purposes when she had a bad cold. She may have concluded, as some people do, that one taste is enough for a lifetime.
The third representative of our indomitable trio is, of course, the 88-year-old Pope who left hospital after five weeks of treatment for a life-threatening attack of double pneumonia. Frail but capable of giving a thumbs-up and a blessing, his qualities during his illness have been inspirational.
As are the examples of many old people who live among us.
There are likely to be few people who will disagree with the assertion that “using anonymous social media accounts to mount reputational attacks is a coward’s charter”.
The prevalence of unnamed assertions circulated on digital platforms, and the reluctance of Big Tech providers to moderate their services, is a principal contribution to poisoning the wells of communication which were once such a source of promise. That principle is at the core of a defamation case in Belfast, where a solicitor has obtained a court order compelling Elon Musk’s X to reveal the identity of an account holder operating under the name “Malachy O”.
Postings from that account, which is now no longer operational, have focused on former garda officers who have become whistleblowers. The Belfast-based solicitor, Kevin Winters, of KRW Law, has won an order requiring X to provide details connected to the account. It was Mr Winters who described anonymity as a “coward’s charter”.
KRW Law represents five people who are thought to include the whistleblower John Wilson, who drew attention to the “fixing” of traffic tickets in the Republic more than a decade ago. X has until April 15 to comply with the order which is known as a ‘Norwich Pharmacal’, named after a case in Britain which went to the House of Lords in 1974.
If the information is handed over, it will assist those who feel they have been libelled to seek redress.
