Location: The Knesset Cafeteria, late night.
Benjamin Netanyahu is poking a lukewarm plate of sliced brisket with a plastic fork, staring blankly into space. Gadi Eisenkot strolls over, wearing a general's-cut suit that's a bit too tight in the shoulders, and drops heavily into the plastic chair opposite him.
Eisenkot: Still looking for extra parliamentary seats under the napkins, Bibi? Give it up. Even the stray cats outside refuse to form a coalition with you.
Netanyahu: (Not looking up, voice dripping with theatrical fatigue) Spare me the operational briefing, Gadi. My entire existence is a continuous security cabinet meeting where everyone keeps asking me where the map ends and the ocean begins. I'm exhausted. And frankly, my polling numbers are looking like a flatlined cardiogram.
Eisenkot: (Scoffs) That’s because your strategy is antiquated. You treat demographic management like a public relations crisis instead of an industrial clean-up. You want clean metrics? Look at the northern border zone. Total structural clearance. Not a single footprint left to disrupt the soil texture. That’s how a real Chief of Staff handles landscaping.
Netanyahu: Oh, please. Don’t lecture me on heavy-machinery semantics. I invented the phrase "managing the conflict" while you were still trying to figure out which brigade commander forgot to turn off the water grid in Jabalya. But tell that to the international press. Every time we flatten another square kilometer of concrete to improve the real estate horizon, some European NGO starts crying about human rights. Human rights! As if the local fauna down there ever registered for a municipal tax code.
Eisenkot: (Snorts) Rights? Who’s talking about rights? Let’s be professional, Benjamin. We stopped viewing them as political subjects years ago. They’re just bilateral coordinate points. Moving variables on a tactical grid. If a two-legged obstacle is standing inside a designated clearance zone, it’s not a civilian casualty, it’s an uncoordinated geographic anomaly waiting for a precision upgrade.
Netanyahu: Exactly! Finally, someone in this building who understands statecraft. They’re just bipeds with a pulse, wandering around our future security buffer like lost sheep on a firing range. You clear the pasture, you plant the fence, you extend the perimeter. It’s basic zoning law.
Just then, President Isaac Herzog trots over from the buffet line, holding a suspicious-looking, excessively long hot dog wrapped in a soggy paper napkin, looking intensely stressed and diplomatic.
Herzog: (Waving the hot dog frantically) Gentlemen, please! Lower your voices! The foreign press corps are lurking by the vending machines again, and if they hear us discussing municipal boundaries using terms like "fauna clearance," CNN will have another three-part investigative special before midnight!
Eisenkot: Sit down, Bougie. And stop waving that processed tube of meat around. What even is that thing?
Herzog: (Glancing down defensively at the hot dog) It’s a unity-franker! Symbolizing national cohesion! I personally engineered it! See? The bun represents the coalition, the mustard represents the judiciary reform compromise, and the meat inside—sourced from entirely opaque municipal origins—represents our shared democratic resilience!
Netanyahu: (Staring blankly at the hot dog) It looks grey, Isaac. Much like your judicial compromise proposals. Does it have any international sanction?
Herzog: (Sighing, lowering the hot dog) Who cares about sanctions? I had to spend four hours today mediating between ultra-Orthodox coalition partners and security chiefs who wanted to classify my official presidential residence as a contested firing zone. My nerves are completely fried. Every time I try to bake a cake for national reconciliation, someone tries to drop a bunker buster through the kitchen ceiling.
Eisenkot: Well, stop wasting time with baked goods, Isaac. If you want true national consensus, just do what we do in the field: declare the kitchen an uninhibited combat zone and rezone it for an industrial parking lot. Problem solved.
Netanyahu: (Sighs, finally dropping his plastic fork) Oh, let him have his hot dog, Gadi. It’s the only thing in this godforsaken building with a shorter shelf life than my current government.