By Femi Fani-Kayode
My dear Prime Minister Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu (@netanyahu), I trust this open letter meets you well despite the challenges that both you and your nation are presently facing.
Let me begin by asking you to forgive me for communicating with you through this rather unorthodox medium but I have no other way of reaching you and I fear that a formal, private letter and communication to your office in Tel Aviv may never make it past your Chief of Staff or to your desk.
Such is the gravity of unfolding events in the Middle East and your nation Israel that I am constrained to ensure that you hear some home truths, no matter how bitter, and I hope that your Ambassador to our country Nigeria, His Excellency Mr. Micheal Freeman, together with the numerous operatives, informants and spooks that you have planted here will have the good sense, decency, foresight and courage to intimate you of its contents.
Now to the point.
Your Excellency, permit me to tell you that I have respect for your office but I have no respect for you. You are the greatest disaster that has befallen your nation since its establishment in 1948 and rather than refer to you as Prime Minister of Israel I will henceforth refer to you as the butcher of our age and the child-slayer of Gaza.
Your killing spree, genocidal binge, murderous disposition, blind rage & unconscionable desire to wipe out, ethnically cleanse and totally exterminate the entire Palestinian race has resulted in the mass murder of 26,000 innocent and defenceless Palestinans (which represents over 1% of the entire population of Gaza), 97 journalists (including Samer Abu Daqqa of Al Jazeera @AJEnglish) and 3 Israeli hostages (whilst they were shirtless, begging for help and waiving a white flag) in Gaza all in just 2 months!
Of the 26,000 Palestinians that have been killed 10,000 of them were children and 6,400 of them were women whilst 20,000 of them were found above the rubble and 6,000 remain below it. 24,000 Palestinian children have lost one or both parents in Israeli attacks, 18,000 have been injured with some in critical condition and 60% of the people of Gaza are facing starvation.
300 Palestinian health workers, 134 staffers of the United Nations and a French Foreign Ministry official have been killed and 1.9 million Gazans have been displaced, hundreds of thousands of them are without food, clean water and shelter and 85% of them have been forced to leave their homes. 288 Palestinians have been killed in the neighbouring occupied West Bank and 4,570 have been detained there since October 7th.
Over 100,000 buildings have been destroyed in Gaza, thousands of refugees have been bombed and butchered in its refugee camps and a Palestinian woman and her daughter were targeted and shot dead in a Church by an Israeli sniper. The latter is a particularly despicable and heinous crime which Pope Francis has described as an act of “terrorism”. 12,000 bombs and 40,000 TONS of bombs have been dropped on Gaza and half of all its buildings have been totally destroyed whilst the Israeli Airforce says it struck at least 12,000 targets across the besieged Palestinian territory BETWEEN OCTOBER 7 TO NOVEMBER 1 ALONE (only God knows how high that number is today) making it one of the most intense bombing campaigns in recent history. 71% of Gaza’s population are suffering from acute hunger, 98% are suffering from insufficient food consumption and 64% eat grass, fruit and undercooked and expired food stuffs to satisfy their hunger.
As Christmas approaches, Bethlehem, the birthplace of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, is under siege and you have decided to sacrifice and forsake the remaining 130 Israeli hostages that are still with Hamas. Of a truth, it is only those who do not have children that cannot feel the pain of the Palestinian people.
Can you dispute the words of Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a former Minister of Information in the Palestinian Unity Government and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, when he said “no human being in Palestine has any value to Israel, whether Muslim or Christian. The whole world now knows how it treats Palestinians and why it is killing journalists that are reporting the truth”.
All we see in Gaza is death, blood, body fluids and innards spilt, pasted and spread all over the streets and buildings, human limbs that have been shattered, scattered and torn apart, tears, mayhem, carnage, barbarity, cold-blooded mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity, unadulterated cruelty, unrelenting callousness, undiluted perfidy and the most graphic and extreme form of wickedness that has been unleashed against a defenceless and innocent civilian population which comprises primarily women and children.
You told the civilians to flee from Northern Gaza to Southern Gaza where you said they would be safe. After over one million of them took you at your word and did so, you started bombing Southern Gaza as well killing thousands of them in the process. You have killed more civilians in Gaza in two months than the Americans killed civilians in their twenty years of occupation and waging war against the Taliban in Afghanistan!
Even the mortuaries and cemeteries were not spared and the bodies of the dead were not allowed to rest in peace. Instead they were bombed, blown apart, strewn all over the floor and burial grounds and desecrated. Under your leadership Israel has become what the American commentator and presidential candidate, Mr. Cent Uygar, has rightly described as a “mass assassination factory”.
Tell me Bibi, with all this, how do you sleep at night?
What horrors do you see and what nightmares do you experience when you close your eyes? How do you look at your wife and children first thing in the morning and pray to your God with so much innocent blood on your hands?
When will your chronic madness and psychotic, insatiable desire for the shedding of Palestinan blood be cured? When will your psychopathic obsession for vengeance and the crushing, subjugation, enslavement and elimination of the Palestinian people be abated?
I choose to say the bitter truth that few dare to voice and that truth is that you have lost touch with reality and you are not a leader but rather a bloodthirsty, bloodlusting, vengeful, hateful, venal, vicious, relentless, wicked, uncompromising & barbaric megalomaniac who is satanically-inspired & controlled by the demons of hell & the forces of darkness. That is why many call you “Netanyahu” to your face and “Satanyahu” behind your back.
You have failed in all your military objectives in Gaza and other than slaughtering thousands of innocent women and children and destroying its infrastructures you have achieved nothing and only confirmed your fascistic disposition and insane cruelty to the world. You refuse to see the advantage, the importance and the strategic and moral imperative of a lasting ceasefire and you have rejected the laudable concept, noble vision and equitable objective of a two-state solution.
Your heart’s desire is to totally and completely eliminate and exterminate the Palestinian people, throw them into the dustbin of history, erase all memory of them, drive them into the desert, drown them in the sea, scatter them all over the nations of the earth and engender and facilitate their total and complete extinction all in a futile attempt to establish an ancient biblical Zionist state which shares a border with Egypt in the South and Iran in the North, which considers the Jews to be the master race and the chosen people, which views others, including Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Africans and Asians as sub-human monkeys that have no rights and that must be treated as nothing but field hands, canon fodder, slaves, servants, cheap labour, hewers of the wood and drawers of the water.
Again your heart’s desire is to establish what your fellow Zionists have described as ‘Greater Israel’, to balkanise the Middle East and to cause the Arabs to bend the knee to the evil Zionist and apartheid State. Clearly these are fanciful delusions and unattainable objectives which shall never happen or ever come to pass.
If the truth be told, you and those that think like you are nothing but a cancerous affliction. You are not the ‘defender of Israel’ as you often describe yourself but a caricature of failure and hopelessness, a pitiful champion of the despicable, hateful and racist philosophy of Zionism and a curse to the Jewish people and the Jewish state.
You have brought nothing but opprobium, shame, notoriety and disgrace to your nation and by the time this war is over you will be the most hated leader in the history of Israel and the most despised man in the world. You are not and have never been the champion of Israel but rather can best be described as the “Butcher of our Age” and the “Child Slayer of Gaza”.
Like all butchers, I have little doubt that you will end up in hell and you may well pull your nation Israel down there with you. I hope that I have not hurt your feelings Bibi but the truth must be told and sometimes it is painful.
Your Finance Minister, Mr. Bezalel Smotrich, recently delivered a speech behind a podium which displays “Greater Israel” and during the course of that speech he said some very interesting and provocative things.
For those that do not know, “Greater Israel” encompasses the entirety of Palestine, the entirety of Jordan and parts of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
It is clear that you and your people have a hideous, expansionist hidden agenda and if not resisted you will not stop at gobbling up just Palestine.
In addition to that your National Heritage Minister, Mr. Amihay Eliyahu, recently said that he believes that a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Gaza and that the Palestinians should either be driven into the desert, the sea or thrown out and scattered amongst the nations of the world at 25,000 Palestinans per nation.
On his part, your Minister for National Security, Mr. Itamar Ben-Gvir, said the only thing that should enter Gaza until all the hostages are released are “hundreds of tons of explosives” from the Israeli Air Force and “not an ounce of humanitarian aid.” He also distributed guns to the right wing and extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank and urged them to kill as many Palestinians as possible.
Clearly your cabinet is filled with sociopaths, psychopaths and a good number of insane people who are suffering from serious mental health issues and the sooner you kick them out and send them to a psychiatric hospital the better.
In October you yourself said “There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip. This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness”. You continued by saying, “we are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world. You must remember what Amalek has done to you says our Holy Bible and WE DO REMEMBER. 1 Samuel 15:3 says ‘Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass’”.
If this is not a call for and a statement of intent to commit genocide against an entire nation then I do not know what is.
Even the centrist President of your nation, Mr. Isaac Herzog, who is, under normal circumstances, far more cerebral, restrained and level headed than you, dropped the ball and let himself down very badly by saying, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible for October 7th. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime.”
This is clearly yet another call for the collective punishment and extermination of the Palestinian people and not just the elimination of Hamas and that makes it not just a war crime or a crime against humanity but also the expression of an unlawful and wilful intention to commit the heinous crime of ethnic cleansing.
Sadly it does not stop there. Your Agriculture Minister, Mr. Avi Dichter, told Israeli Channel 12 that the war would be “Gaza’s Nakba,” using the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that many use to describe the 1948 displacement of roughly 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled from their land in what became Israel.
He said, “we are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba. From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war as the Israeli Army seeks to do in Gaza with masses of people between the tanks and the soldiers. Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it will end.”
Not to be outdone, Mr. Danny Neumann, a former Knesset member and close political associate of yours advocated for the extermination of every man, woman and child in Gaza. On national television he said, “The Palestinians are ALL terrorists, sons of dogs. They must be exterminated, ALL of them killed.”
Bibi, given all this, you cannot but agree with me that both you, your political associates and your entire cabinet are indulging in nothing but hateful rhetoric and violent madness and, as leaders, it reduces you all to the unenenviable level of some of the other monsters of world history like Genghis Khan, Atilla the Hun, Adolf Hitler, King Leopold 11, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.
At this juncture permit me to share the moving words of Dr. Omar Suleiman (@Omarsuleiman504) who is an Imam, an American Palestinian and the President of the Yaqeen Institute and who wrote the following on X a few days ago:
“Thousands of children are dead. Thousands of children are under the rubble. Thousands of children are missing limbs. Thousands of children are missing parents. Thousands of children are fighting disease. Thousands of children are having surgeries performed on them without anaesthesia. Thousands of children have been starved. Thousands of children have been bombed out of their homes. Every single child in Gaza has been forever traumatised. All of the above are war crimes. We can keep letting human rights organisations count them or we can finally hold them accountable”.
This is a timely, insightful and moving contribution from Omar and he has successfully reflected the minds and thoughts of millions of people from all over the world.
If his heartfelt and compassionate submission does not prick your conscience, soften your heart and move you to tears Binyamin then nothing ever will and you are lost forever.
Permit me to conclude with the following.
Given the fact that Her Excellency Mrs. Tzipi Hotovely, your Ambassador to the United Kingdom, has finally confirmed our worst fears that the Zionist state has ruled out any possibility of a two-state solution and given the fact that she has proclaimed that the Oslo Accords “have failed” and “are no longer relevant”, it is clear to me that the die is cast, Caesar has crossed the Rubicon and war is inevitable.
Of a truth the attack on your nation by Hamas on October 7th which sparked off this war was horrific and unacceptable and it has been rightly condemned by all right-thinking people including yours truly.
Yet as barbaric and heinous as it was it pales in comparison to what your forces are doing in Gaza today.
Israel has the right to defend herself against Hamas but she does not have the right to target and slaughter innocent Palestinian civilians and ethnically cleanse an entire race! The extent of havoc and damage that you have unleashed on the Palestinians is unprecedented and mind-boggling and as a consequence of that millions consider you and your IDF to be even worse and more barbaric than Hamas ever was.
And sadly it goes even further than that because, as inconceivable as it appears, your actions have turned Hamas into heroes in the eyes of millions of those that support the Palestinian cause. Simply put your lack of restraint, rage, folly and insistence on imposing a policy of collective punishment on the Palestinian people have made demons look like angels.
The bitter truth that most of us refuse to acknowledge is the fact that, as a consequence of the genocide that has been unleashed on Gaza by your forces over the last two months, the Al Qassam Brigade, Hamas’ armed wing, is now viewed by the overwhelming majority of people in the Arab world as gallant warriors who dared to rise up against the oppressive and fascistic Zionist state and who, on October 7th, struck what they consider to be a deadly blow against a brutal and unrelenting occupying force and evil entity that has held their people in bondage for the last 75 years, stripped them of their dignity and humanity, robbed them of their identity, heritage and self-respect, stolen their land and destroyed their collective future.
Even if the whole of Gaza is bombed into smithereens and totally flattened and every Palestinian man, woman and child is slaughtered by the IDF (@IDF), the myth of Israeli invincibility has been proved to be fallacious and been forever shattered and the spiritual seed of resistance and defiance against the most cruel and brutal occupation in history has been planted in the heart of every Arab on the planet and they will continue the fight.
To much of the world Hamas is nothing but a bloodthirsty and callous terrorist organisation but to the overwhelming majority of Arabs and Muslims they are regarded as courageous freedom fighters who are resisting the evil of occupation and genocide and who are fighting a worthy cause.
They view Hamas in precisely the same way that the black majority population in South Africa and the African continent viewed the ANC and its armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe (the Spear of the Nation) during the bitter struggle against apartheid and white minority rule.
They view them in the same way that the world viewed the Allied Forces of America, the Soviet Union, the UK, France, Australia, Canada, Holland, Belgium, Poland and the rest of the civilised world in their bitter struggle against the tyranny and occupation forces of the Axis Powers of Nazi Germany, Japan and Italy during World War 11.
The idea that you can wipe out such a movement and ideology by killing everyone in it and that espouses it’s philosophy and by exterminating the Palestinian race and the notion that you can wipe out the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people for the right to exist and the right to self-determination simply because you have the support of the Americans is the greatest mistake and gravest error that the country you lead has made in it’s 75 year history.
There is no gainsaying that this mistake will cost you and your beloved nation dearly in the not too distant future.
May the God of Heaven, the Ancient of Days, the Lord of Hosts and He that is more than able touch your stubborn heart and renew a right spirit within you before it is too late.
Shalom.
Femi Fani-Kayode, a lawyer, is a former federal minister.
More Stories
Nigeria feeds citizens’ bodies to pigs
President Tinubu, time is going
Ghost of the witchfinder General