The Curious Case of our Reappearing Commander-in-Chief

Benjamin Netanyahu assures us that he is alive and well from a Tel Aviv Cafe

If a group of ExtraTerrestrials beamed down and requested that they be taken to “our leader” with whom would we arrange a friendly sit-down? I suppose it would depend upon who one asks. Russians would lead them to the Kremlin to meet Putin. Americans would bring them to the White House. We can be sure what would happen in North Korea.

But if an ET civilization was smart enough to find a way to traverse interstellar space, they probably would have been familiar with these kinds of encounters. They would have observed us for a time, they would have researched human history, the present state of the world with regard to the distribution of power, resources and influence.

The United States is the center of military and financial might on the planet. I think they would want to meet with someone who steered the foreign policy of this country. They would know that elected officials have little sway over the most important matters. The real power doesn’t rest with publicly chosen representatives who remain barely relevant for more than a handful of years and then get replaced with somebody else. The power exists in the special interests who exert massive influence over the government for a mere pittance.

But who was really in charge? For the moment, I believe it is this man:

When BiBi Netanyahu visits the President he is treated like royalty. When he addresses our Congress he receives dozens of standing-Os from both sides of the aisle. He’s been in and out of the top spot in Israel for the last thirty years and has likely influenced American interests for longer.

I watched a short clip of his motorcade headed to the White House after he landed at Joint Base Andrews last month. Our authorities closed down the Interstate 495 beltway for his fleet of limos with their hazards flashing in broad view of the public when he could have easily taken a helicopter and saved himself and DC commuters a ton of time. Intended or not, it was a show of power and influence.

I got the feeling that he wasn’t a guest of the POTUS, he was flying in to be briefed by his top lieutenant. Three weeks later America attacked Iran basically because this man got tired of waiting.

And here he is in a more recent candid photo:

That’s him being pulled from a pile of rubble after the IRGC struck his residence. Or to be more accurate, that is an array of pixels of varying colors and intensities on your computer or smartphone which, taken as a whole, depict that story.

This Sunday morning I woke up motivated to write an essay about the apparent disappearance of Israeli PM, our Commander-in-chief, BiBi Netanyahu given the picture above.

On March 2, foreign news agencies first began reporting that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) believed that an attack on the Israeli PM’s residence may have killed him, stating that his fate is “in a cloud of uncertainty”. That is when the disquieting image above began surfacing.

Reuters reported that Netanyahu’s official aircraft, a highly modified Boeing 767-338ER designed for secure, long-range transport of the Prime Minister and President was reported to have left Tel Aviv and landed in Germany on March 1. Sources assured us that his plane landed in Berlin with the flight crew on board with no BiBi.

I queried AI for more information about his specialized airplane:

It’s designed to transport the PM securely, has advanced defensive systems and serves as a secure “flying command post”, but is often moved to secure foreign locations during regional tensions? Why? Shouldn’t that be a vital asset for Israel especially during conflict?

The overview cites Wikipedia for a reference. Wikipedia does not mention any such precautions. It reports, on the other hand, that the Wing of Zion has only been in service to the PM for less than two years. How often could it have been moved in that time?

It’s odd to me that the AI Overview would include such a detail when I never asked about it. It smelled like an AI glitch to me. By “glitch” I mean that somebody somewhere was using AI to sell us another story. Or perhaps it was an AI algorithm itself that activated because of a large number of queries regarding the relocation of the Israeli equivalent of Air Force 1. But who programmed the algorithm?

Does Air Force 1 abandon the President when things get a bit dicey around these parts? The last time that happened was the morning of September 11, 2001. It was reported that President GW Bush spent nine hours on board the outfitted 747 specifically because it was thought that he would be safer in the air. But of course, that is another story…

If that weren’t enough, the PM hadn’t made any public appearances for over a week, and then a synthetic version of him appeared on many media outlets. For an instant he appeared to have six fingers. His lower molars appeared and disappeared as he spoke. It looked like a fake to many people, including me.

Why did this glitchy video surface when his fate was in a cloud of uncertainty?

But it wasn’t the odd departure of his getaway plane without him, nor his extra finger or missing teeth in a video released by the Israeli Government Press Office which motivated me to seriously doubt the well-being of the most powerful person on the planet; it was his son, Yair Netanyahu, a prolific user of X, often posting a dozen times a day. He didn’t post anything on 2/28 or 3/1—the period of time the supposed attacks occurred on his father’s residence. And then he returned to his pattern for a week, yet never mentioned the fate of his father. If that wasn’t strange enough he went back into radio silence on March 8 for a full week.

So, on Sunday morning, March 15th, I confirmed that Yair was still mum on X. He was.

And then, out of nowhere a short clip of the PM exploded on social media:

Netanyahu was not only alive. He was well. Rather than releasing a video of him rallying his generals in a defiant tone, he sent an even stronger message to the IRGC by brushing off any suspicions with a relaxed and carefree attitude. The camera recorded him ordering and drinking a latte, casually speaking to the staff and barely mentioning the rumors of his death while lightheartedly dismissing the questions around the appearance of a sixth finger on a glitchy video by showing his hands to the camera so that we could all verify that he still has only five:

If it is Netanyahu in the video, it must have been recorded after the purported assault on his Tel Aviv compound. The image of him being pulled from the rubble must have been a fake, right? Right?

On the other hand, how do we know that the cameo appearance at this cafe wasn’t a fake too? I for one, would have put more faith in a video which depicted him speaking to a group of prominent and identifiable members of the IDF rather than with a barista in an unknown location.

Conclusion

We are living in a world where we are ever more lost in streaming videos and thirty second long reels. Many people have only a handful of brief periods throughout a day to experience reality as it exists before plunging back into a synthetic one.

A dozen years ago I distinctly remembered playing soccer with my five year old son and his friends in our backyard. When one kid needed to tie his shoe he yelled “Can we pause?”

“PAUSE??”, I laughed, “don’t you mean ‘TIME OUT!’?”

They had no idea what I was talking about. The synthetic world our children had been interfacing with had already bled into their real one.

In the video Bibi is speaking in Hebrew. Of course I had to ask AI to translate what he was saying. It tells me that while showing us his hands he assures the viewers, “See? It’s me.”

Yes. I see. But that doesn’t mean anything anymore. The purveyors of fake stories have opened a Pandora’s box through the use of AI. They have unleashed unmitigated skepticism toward everything. There’s no going back. However there may be way through.

Before we surrender to being perpetually vulnerable because we cannot distinguish what is real from synthetic, I think we do have an internal sense of knowing which we have forgotten how to access.

I started this newsletter three years ago and called it “An Insult to Intuition” because I wanted to explore establishment narratives that I believed were wrong, so wrong in fact that they insulted not just my intelligence but something deeper, my intuition.

Most people would define intuition as an inexplicable sense of knowing which arises from outside your cognitive mind. I cannot be sure such a thing exists for everyone, or even me for that matter. But if intuition does exist, I concluded for myself, it can only be accessed if one first acknowledges the uncertainty in one’s belief system. The goal is to rid oneself of all biases and prejudgements (prejudices), the distortions that drive our cognitive mind to arrive at conclusions prematurely.

At that point one may be lucky enough to get a better sense of what is true. This is where intuition, if it exists at all, may emerge. I went so far as to hypothesize that if my intuition was insulted, so would everyone else’s. Could intuition be universal? It’s just a speculation, but it is a bold one.

Intuition, or something akin to it, is needed more now than it was just six years ago nearly to the day, when the world hunkered down for what was supposed to be a two week shut down to “flatten the curve”. Covid-19 death counts grew by the minute on all TV news media. The country was glued to the clips of overworked health care providers in their chaotic wards pleading the public to take every precaution. Those folks did exist. And they did get swamped, working eighty hours a week or more. I know some of them personally.

But then again, if all hospitals were being overrun why were we, while huddled in our homes and apartments, entertained by nurses and medical professionals doing choreographed dance routines in hospital parking lots and ICUs?

https://x.com/FightWithMemes/status/2011007562322268186?s=20

While I am willing to acknowledge that some centers were slammed with very sick patients, in my 28 years as a physician in a hospital-based practice, I have never seen an evening so slow that everyone on a hospital ward can drop what they are doing for a few hours and learn some coordinated dance moves and then film it. These folks in scrubs with masks on YouTube must have had very little to do for more than a few days.

Something was off. I didn’t know it at first. I intuited it. Perhaps you did too.

Now there is AI created imagery and deep-fake and various other previously unimaginable means of creating alternative realities. If we didn’t have access to something akin to an internal compass we would be completely vulnerable to being shanghaied on just about everything. My point being, if we cannot agree that intuition exists, can we at least come together and hope that it does so that our fate will remain in our own hands and not someone else’s?

So, how can we access our intuition around the health of the Israeli PM at this moment? Here are some suggestions:

• Question your certainty if it exists. One way to identify certainty is to reflect on how you engage with people who disagree with you. Do you feel justified in attacking their character and not just their argument? If so, you may have succumbed to an unjustified level of certainty. It’s one thing to admit you were wrong; it’s much harder to admit you were a jerk. In this case, either the image of him being pulled from the rubble or the video of him sipping a coffee is fake. Which one is it? Or is it both? How can you be sure?

• Don’t obsess over a subset of the evidence while ignoring the rest. If BiBi is actually sipping a latte in a video released on March 15th, how would you explain the lapse in tweets from his son during the most crucial periods in the two weeks prior? Does it make sense that the “Wing of Zion” left without the Prime Minister aboard when his country was under attack? Is it possible that BiBi was on board, perhaps for his own safety or to seek critical medical care without public knowledge? Which story best reconciles all the evidence, not just some of it?

• Nobody likes to be fooled. Ask yourself if you are more worried about being fooled by the conventional narrative or that of the heterodoxy? Why is one worse than the other for you? There are probably many people who refuse to consider the evidence of a conspiracy because they fear being labeled a “conspiracy theorist”.

• Remember that folks who are in the business of deception are not going to lie about everything. In order to deceive, they first have to be trusted.

• Acknowledge the uncertainty in this situation. We are being fed information from third parties. Even if they are well intending, they too can be fooled. I am constantly amazed by the sophistication of AI tools that are at my fingertips for free. I readily admit that I have no idea what other tools are out there, outside of public access. Ask yourself, What would you need to see or experience in order to assure yourself that he is alive and well or that he is dead or injured?

• There is no shame in deferring a conclusion until more can be known, especially when very little can be trusted. It is better to be late to the game than it is to expend energy defending a conclusion that is based on incorrect assumptions from the start.

• Notice if you are attached to a certain story being true. This insidiously leads to confirmation bias, a cognitive weakness that is exploited by misinformation spreaders throughout our history. We want to believe that we are better than them. That justice will prevail at this moment in time. That smart people trust the science and dumb people challenge it. That our government would never intentionally harm its own people. These statements are not necessarily false, but can be seductive because they confirm what we want to be true. And yes, this includes (especially) religious doctrines of all flavors and colors. It’s possible to coerce people into committing heinous acts while losing their own life in the process if they believe in a glorious martyrdom. And it is very comforting to believe in a savior, especially if you are certain that your are irredeemable to begin with.

At this moment I don’t know if BiBi is dead or alive. Until I see him address Congress I am comfortable with my uncertainty. What about you? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.