Biblical 'Plague' Batters Israel; Not So 'Chosen' Anymore?

Netanyahu keeps reaching for the Bible to glorify war, but once Israel gets hit by a so-called ‘plague’ of bees, the sacred act stops looking so righteous. Right, so back in Old Testament times swarms of bees were seen as a sign of divine wrath and imminent threat, biblical plagues linked to Egypt and the Jewish people are well known too and of course Passover celebrates the culmination of Exodus, following a number of those plagues, and now, the City of Netivot, just to the East of the Gaza Strip, so the optics of location fit nicely here too, has been hit by a huge bee swarm. A plague of bees if you will. A shopping complex in a city in southern Israel has had bees suddenly appear all over it. Cars have had bees on them, balconies have had bees on them, and local authorities have had to tell residents to keep away while the mess got handled. Now you might be thinking, how much sympathy do I have over a few Israelis getting stung, probably not enough to bother to raise a single note on a tiny violin, and yet because of Benjamin Netanyahu, this freak of nature has still carried some weight, as well as ridicule. And that’s because Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years dragging biblical language into modern war politics whenever he wants his atrocities to sound more righteous than the blood-soaked reality we haven take place in Gaza, the West Bank and now increasingly in Lebanon and the wider war spreading across the Middle East, so this thing has gone from local disruption to public mockery in no time at all. Israel has not just had a weird day with insects. Israel has had a weird day with insects inside a symbolic world its own leaders keep feeding, and that leaves the whole chosen-people act looking a lot less convincing than it did before the bees turned up, because where the biblical plagues came to save them before, now they’ve been hit by one of their own. Netanyahu keeps reaching for scripture whenever he wants to dress state violence up as duty. Amalek, the enemy of the Israelites from the Old Testament, who’s erasure from existence came from divine command.