"At noon, Elijah began to taunt them. 'Shout louder!' he said. 'Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened" (1 Kings 18:17).
I recalled this biblical episode, in which Elijah proved that the followers of Baal were worshipping a false god, while watching Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the other day. Netanyahu had decided to go out of his way to answer questions from reporters. "Please, call your newsrooms, they will send you some embarrassing questions," he said when he spoke at an event that was supposed to be limited to economic matters. The reporters present were taken aback and eventually resorted to asking the boring questions on the various investigations Netanyahu faces.
Netanyahu's implied mockery of those reporters underscored the sorry state of the Israeli media, which has lost depth and creativity. To the defense of the economic reporters at the event, they were not expected to be versed with matters beyond their beat, and that's why they didn't ask Netanyahu political questions.
But even on economic matters, they could have done better. They could have, for example, asked why the government has been pursuing a policy that only encourages overpopulation in central Israel rather than incentivizing Israelis to settle in the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.
In the 1930s, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature André Paul Guillaume Gide visited the Soviet Union. Some 20 years later, he wrote what he saw in his book "The God That Failed": "In the Soviet Union it is accepted once and for all that on every subject – whatever may be the issue – there can only be one opinion, the right one. And each morning Pravda tells the people what they need to know, and must believe and think."
In totalitarian regimes, you could expect the media to take its marching orders from Big Brother, for fear of what may happen to reporters if they defy the rulers.
But what is most troubling is that in Israel, a democracy despite the scars of Mapai's 30-year rule, some media outlets still have a monolithic approach to various issues, regardless of who is broadcasting or writing. As the famous Shalom Hanoch song goes, "Same answers, same questions, they are small from there and are big from here, and they all say exactly the same thing."
This is why the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal is so relevant in our time, with the false media prophets who are deceiving the public. Let's not forget the doom and gloom about how Israel would be destroyed because of the "demographic threat" and the "corrupting occupation." Such rhetoric has often resulted in Israel making suicidal decisions, such as its decision to disengage from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria in 2005.
These are not isolated incidents but an ongoing trend of messianism that has inspired think tanks to formulate peace plans. Amos Yadlin, the head of the Institute for National Security Studies, recently unveiled a new plan that read as follows: "The goal is to create the conditions that would foster a two-state reality that would safeguard a democratic, Jewish, safe and moral Israel."
This single sentence clearly demonstrates the impact of those false prophecies about the demographic threat and moral corruption. Yadlin also says that the peace plan will be complemented with an "economic program that would, in the short run, seek to bolster Palestinians' quality of life."
But perhaps, against this utopian vision, Yadlin should be reminded that in the years since the 2005 disengagement, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been facing a humanitarian crisis.
The tireless effort to promote the false promise of the two-state solution, even as incendiary balloons from the Gaza Strip set the fields of nearby kibbutzim ablaze, attests to the lack of morality on the part of those two-state dreamers and proves that their false messianism is still not a thing of the past.
