Cake and/or Death

Eddie Izzard is a comic god. Less visible than she was a few years ago, she has shifted gears to a one-person performance schedule. I saw her do Great Expectations in Manhattan, a perfect match to her gender-fluid persona. When I first encountered her, she was a man in a cocktail dress. No conventional strictures could effectively contain her.

If you’ve seen her at all, you will remember “Cake or Death,” her take on terrorism in the Church of England. It imagined Anglican extremists offering cake to their enemies at the reception following a decorous church service. The idea was that you could take the cake, but if you refused the offer, you would be killed. At least that’s how I remember the bit. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen, but I’m sure that some of the details have gotten lost in memory.

This is a long-winded intro to another cake story which has none of the comic punch of Izzard. Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli extremist, recently celebrated his birthday in Jerusalem. In honor of their cult leader, his friends and followers presented him with a cake that perfectly captured his radicalism. Instead of banal blessings for the day, it was frosted with the image of a hangman’s noose, a reference to the legislation Ben-Gvir has forced through the Knesset. It permits the government to execute Arab terrorists after an expedient trial in a military court.

I’ve got no sympathy for any sort of terrorist, but the noose cake feels particularly savage to me. With the exception of Eichmann, Israel has never executed anyone, in keeping with the standards of the liberal West (the U.S. excluded). This represents a significant step toward the other end of spectrum, toward a fearful, nationalist law-making frenzy. What clinches the deal is that there are other kinds of terrorism which the new law most certainly does not address. According to report, the language of the Ben-Gvir law makes it essentially impossible to punish Israeli terrorists, like the kind who are currently marauding through the West Bank. The mayhem they practice is now protected mayhem, even if it results in the death of Palestinians.

I don’t know what Izzard would have to say about all of this, but she would certainly remark on the savagery and surrealism of it. However justified their anger with Arab terrorism, Israelis have once again placed themselves on the wrong side of history and celebrated their folly in sugar and buttercream. The reputational damage will be severe and long-lasting. Indeed, the process has already begun.

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Written without the use of Artificial Intelligence, this is the actual product of a struggling human mind.