Shabbat shalom!
Growing up, I was not much of a reader. That was my sister’s domain (still is!). But my reading interests ticked up a bit after I was introduced to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a deceptively breezy barnyard allegory published eighty years ago today.
It was one of the first books that grabbed my attention as a young adult, and it turned into a gateway drug to Orwell’s 1984, quickly followed by Huxley’s Brave New World, and then, eventually, further readings in the dystopian literature category. But I digress.
Eighty years ago, Orwell gave the world Animal Farm, a simple but clever allegory about revolution gone rotten. What started as a cry for equality ended in authoritarian rule, historical erasure, and propaganda that would even impress Goebbels. Fast forward to 2025, and Orwell’s pigs have gone kosher. Welcome to Israel’s own Animal Farm! The Israeli version stars a prime minister who won’t leave, loyal horses sent to the political glue factory, and a government that insists corruption is patriotism if it wears a kippah.
In Orwell’s tale, the animals overthrow their human masters to build a fairer society. But soon, the pigs seize power, rewrite the rules, and crush dissent all while the other animals cheer. In Israel, it wasn’t a revolution. It was a slow burn. A frog-boiling, court-sacking, coalition-pandering, power-hoarding slide into religious-nationalist absurdity. And at the helm of it all? Bibi Napoleon.
Like Orwell’s Napoleon, Netanyahu’s genius lies in self-preservation disguised as ideology. No indictment, no war, no hostage crisis, no protest movement can unseat him. He floats above it all like a teflon pig in an Armani suit. And when things go south, say, hundreds dead on October 7 or tens of thousands marching for democracy, it’s always someone else’s fault. The courts. The media. The Ashkenazi elite. Obama. Biden. Hamas. The left. The deep state. His own shadow.
Orwell had Squealer, the propaganda pig who could justify anything with a snort and a spin. In Bibi’s barnyard, Squealer is played by a rotating cast of right wing nut jobs: Itamar Ben-Gvir shrieking about Arab crime, Bezalel Smotrich rewriting Palestinian history, or Miri Regev redefining loyalty to mean “silence.” Add Channel 14 (Israel’s Fox News equivalent), and you’ve got the full Orwellian orchestra playing a classical authoritarian symphony.
But the tragedy of Animal Farm isn’t just about the rulers. It’s about Boxer—the workhorse who keeps his head down, trusts the process, and repeats the regime’s slogans until he drops. In Israel, Boxer is every reservist who showed up on October 8, every parent who buried a child from Nova or Nahal Oz, every kibbutznik still farming under fire, every secular Zionist who thought “this too shall pass.” What they got instead: abandonment, political exploitation, and a front-row seat to a government more interested in legal immunity than national unity.
The judicial overhaul? That was the pigs deciding that “some animals are more equal than others.” The selective drafting of Haredi men? That’s Boxer doing all the fighting while the pigs hold Torah scrolls over their heads and call it divine exemption. The attempt to fire the Attorney General, the weakening of liberal education, cultural institutions, and the press? That’s the sheep bleating “Bibi good, Left bad” on command.
And yet, despite all this, the banner still hangs: “The only democracy in the Middle East.”But if you squint, it now reads like Orwell’s commandment: “All citizens are equal, but some are more equal than others.” Settler violence gets ignored. Anti-occupation protesters get water cannons. Hostages get slogans. The people get gaslit.
And still the pigs walk upright.
Because what’s happening in Israel today isn’t just a political crisis. It’s a spiritual one. The Zionist project, founded on the ashes of exile and the dream of collective dignity, is being slowly butchered by a regime that thinks survival equals righteousness, and democracy is just a speed bump on the road to messianic deliverance. This isn’t left vs. right anymore. It’s “rule of law” vs. “rule BY law”. It’s Orwell with tefillin.
We Jews know tyranny. We’ve run from it, resisted it, been crushed by it. But now we’re watching it grow from within. Not with jackboots, but with coalition agreements. Not with camps, but with cynical deals that trade hostages for headlines and votes for silence. The glue factory isn’t a place, it’s a policy.
So let’s end, as Orwell did, with a chilling mirror:
“The creatures outside looked from the pig to Netanyahu, and from Netanyahu to the pig, and from the pig to Netanyahu again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Happy 80th Animal Farm!
And hey, let’s be careful out there, but don’t be a sheep. And have a great weekend everyone!
Brad out
Jew News Review 