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John spoke for me here several years ago. Tried to get is father, Norman, but he demurred due to health issues and age.
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The Mess in Israel
John Podhoretz is Editor of Commentary Magazine and a Member of the JPC Board of Fellows.
In November 2022, for the first time in a nearly a decade, an election in Israel had a decisive outcome. The government that emerged from that election two months later was instantly unacceptable to other Israelis, who have since taken to the streets.
Over the past two months, the question I have been asked more than any other is: Can you explain what’s going on in Israel? The answer is not difficult: The right is seeking to enact an activist agenda, and that agenda angers, alarms, and/or terrifies everybody who didn’t vote for the parties of the right.
Those parties, together with the Likud party under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, won 64 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Thus, the results constituted a winning margin for the Netanyahu bloc of about 3 percent, roughly the same spread that separated George W. Bush from John Kerry in 2004.
The Sixth Time is the Charm
This was the sixth national election in Israel since 2013, a year in which Netanyahu’s coalition scored 68 seats. That seven-seat margin appears to be a colossal majority by today’s standards, but that seemingly strong government lasted only 18 months. Netanyahu found it necessary to call early elections in 2015, and they went badly for him; his new coalition hit only the bare 61-seat minimum. From 2015 to 2019, Bibi hung on, defying electoral gravity by deploying dazzling political skills that kept his own always restive right flank from bringing his government down while concentrating his attention on foreign-policy matters that were decidedly nonideological.
Then an inconclusive election in 2019 ushered in a period of staggering political and partisan stagnation during which four more elections were held. Netanyahu, who led a caretaker government, spent the years between 2019 and 2021 holding on to power like Harold Lloyd clinging to the minute hand of the skyscraper clock above Los Angeles. In 2021, a coalition united solely in its desire to unseat Netanyahu managed to glom itself together in slapdash fashion for a year or so, until it could no longer survive its internal contradictions. And finally, when the dust settled in the early morning of November 2, 2022, the anti-Bibi forces had fallen short and Netanyahu had won the day.
The "Bibi Bloc"
It’s easy to see how an election in which the “Bibi bloc” not only prevailed but did so by three seats might feel to the victors like an overwhelming national endorsement of their goals and aims. That view was only strengthened by the petty weakness of some pretty blatant sore-loser arguments. The most ludicrous was that Bibi had received only 30,000 more votes in aggregate than the anti-Bibi bloc. Um, no. Hundreds of thousands of ballots were cast for two major Arab parties, Balad and Hadash-Ta’al, and those votes cannot be assigned to the anti-Bibi team because those parties would never agree to be part of any government (nor could any government have them). They cannot be assigned to the anti-Bibi camp because they are fundamentally in the anti-Israel camp.
The simple fact was that the domestic political stalemate inside Israel had finally come to an end. The right won. And there were a lot of pent-up policy desires, partisan and in-group interests, and just the simple desire to stick it to the other team that exploded outward during the negotiations over the new government’s composition. As soon as the new team was sworn in, it hit the ground running.
Now, it is entirely normal for a winning government to come into office eager to implement the policies it ran on, even if those policies are controversial. We need to keep that fact in the front of our minds as we consider the behavior of Israel’s leftist body politic and the intellectual elite since the government took power. It is the people in the streets who are behaving in unprecedented ways in a functioning democracy, not the democratically elected government they oppose.
The people in the streets are claiming that the new government’s proposed policies amount to a coup against Israel’s governing system. That is rich in irony. By attempting to use mob action to change the rules of the very game they would happily have endorsed had the election results gone their way, it is the protesters who are seeking extra-democratic change, not the government.
This government came to power through the same process as every other government in Israel’s history. Had the situation been reversed—had rightists taken to the streets against a legitimately elected left-of-center government—everyone from Haaretz’s anti-Zionists to Danny Gordis would have been awash in outrage at the attempt to interfere with proper democratic processes. But the protesters believe (or at least enough of them believe) that their country’s descent into fascism and tyranny is upon them, and they are therefore in the right. The emergency they perceive has not only liberated them from conventional norms; in their minds, it has elevated their cause into a crusade.
These protests are not righteous. They are self-righteous.
A Colossal Mistake
And yet, it is also clear that the new government’s flurry of activity was a colossal mistake.
After seven years of profound political stagnation, a country cannot simply go from zero to 60 in one direction in a minute—and certainly not with a three-seat majority, which, though decisive, is not a game-changing landslide by any means. The gears of power grew rusty, the political machinery grew sluggish, and when the ignition was turned on and the government slammed on the gas pedal, the engine caught fire—and not in the part of the car most of us would have expected.
What we thought was that the trouble would come from the new government’s policies toward the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount. Indeed, among Jewish liberals and leftists, the government induced a performative panic even before it was sworn in, typified by my own (now-ex-) rabbi announcing in the virtual pages of the Forward that he would no longer recite the prayer for the State of Israel at my (now-ex-) shul because the new government was “dastardly” when it came to its views of Arabs, the West Bank, and the (long-ex) “peace process.” And yet the first move related to those matters—a trip to the Temple Mount by the incendiary Itamar Ben-Gvir—produced no blowback. What’s more, the first real challenge faced by the government on the West Bank came not from its extreme ministers but through the testing of its resolve by Palestinian terrorists. That, in turn, led to extreme anti-Palestinian rhetoric from those extreme ministers, which immediately became part of the growing indictment of this nascent government.hn spoke for me here many years ago. I invited his father, Norman, but he demurred due to age and health factors.
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Netanyahu fires defense minister who called for halt to judicial overhaul
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant publicly said on Saturday night that plans to overhaul Israel's judiciary were a threat to the country's security.
By Shira Rubin
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant publicly said on Saturday night that plans to overhaul Israel's judiciary were a threat to the country's security.
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For years I have been warning about the rise by China and it's threat to our nation. I did not come to this conclusion because I am smart. I simply read. China has allowed Democrats to spend like drunks, China released a virus and we responded like fools by shutting the world's largest economy down. The scientist we listened to and followed made questionable decisions and remains suspect regarding his financial relationships.
Then, as liberals always do, they began to decimate our military and flood it with social nonsense. They made sure we ignored our constitution, while Xi built his fleet, army and hardened his civilians.
Xi is preparing for war, both military and commercial one, and we are being surrounded as Xi builds relationships and we fade away because Biden is a weak fool and his entire team runs the gamut from appeasers to some of the dumbest people to inhabit government.
We have lost control of the Middle East, are a day late and dollar short in Ukraine, have allowed Xi to become a significant influence in Africa and The South China Sea among other regions.
Taiwanese should be shaking in their boots and then comes S Korea as a former American allies fall like dominoes.
This is why Bibi needs to strike and point the way.
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