Moshe Yatom, a prominent Israeli psychiatrist who successfully treated the most extreme forms of mental illness throughout his distinguished career, was found dead in his home in Tel Aviv yesterday, apparently from a gunshot wound. A suicide note found beside him indicated that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been his patient for the past nine years, "sucked the life out of me." Yatom wrote: "I can't take it anymore. Theft is redemption, apartheid is freedom, peace activists are terrorists, killing is self-defense, piracy is legitimate, Palestinians are Jordanians, annexation is liberation, and there is no end to his contradictions. Freud said that rationality would dominate instinctual feelings, but he never met Bibi Netanyahu. This man would say that Gandhi invented the iron fist."
The doctor adds in his diaries: "I was stunned by the 'flood of lies' pouring from the most famous patient." His personal journals reveal the continuous disintegration of his once-unassailable personality under the barrage of justifications provided by Netanyahu, which serve his self-interests. Neighbor Yossi Bechor, whose family regularly vacationed with the Yatom family, said: "I am completely shocked. Moshe was an example of an entirely integrated character, having healed dozens of schizophrenia patients before starting to work on Bibi. There were no external indicators that his case was any different from others. But Yatom became increasingly depressed due to his complete lack of progress in convincing the Prime Minister to acknowledge reality, ultimately suffering a series of strokes while trying to understand Netanyahu's thinking, which he described in one of his diaries as a 'black hole of self-contradiction.'
Yatom's first strokes occurred when Netanyahu expressed the opinion that the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York "were good." The second stroke followed a session where Netanyahu insisted that Iran and Nazi Germany were identical. The third occurred after the Prime Minister declared that the Iranian nuclear program was a "flying gas chamber," and that all Jews everywhere "permanently live in Auschwitz." Yatom's efforts to calm Netanyahu's hysteria were emotionally exhausting and routinely ended in failure. He complained in another diary entry that "his absence argument is always the same." "Jews are on the brink of extermination at the hands of racist goyim, and the only way to save them today is to carry out a final massacre."
Yatom seemed to be working on turning his diaries into a book about the Netanyahu case. Several chapters of an incomplete manuscript titled “Methamphetamine Psychosis” were found in his study. The excerpt below provides a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Prime Minister's mind while revealing the immense challenge Yatom faced in his attempt to guide him toward rationality.
Monday, March 8: “Bibi came at three for his afternoon session. He refused to leave at four, claiming that my house is actually his home. Then he locked me in the basement all night while he indulged lavishly with his friends upstairs. When I tried to escape, he labeled me a terrorist and put me in chains. I begged him for mercy, but he said he could not grant it to someone who does not even exist.”
