RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/opinion/false-depictions-of-israeli-reforms-and-the-fall-of-svb/

You’ve heard about the guy who killed his parents and then wailed about being an orphan, right? Well, what’s going on in Israel right now is even more astounding, with the anti-government protest movement taking the metaphor to a whole new level.
Its masterminds—along with gullible, genuinely scared fellow travelers—are not only premeditating the demise of the very institutions they’re claiming to cherish. They’re staging mass dress rehearsals, replete with costumes from the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” for an I-told-you-so funeral of their own making.

But don’t take my word for it. Radio broadcaster and social activist Aybee Binyamin, a member of opposition leader Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party and a founder of the previous hate-fests against Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, proudly articulates the plot.

“The protest is progressing on several axes,” he tweeted on March 6. “The central axis is the Saturday-night demonstrations. The sub-axis is the ‘days of disruption’ and daily demonstrations. The second axis is the crushing of the economy. The third axis is the crushing of the [Israel Defense Forces] reserves. The fourth axis and the one that will deal the knockout blow is international isolation from democratic countries in general and European Union and United States sanctions in particular! Together we will win!”

Under this manifesto is a photo of a giant banner reading: “The government of the destruction of the Third Temple.” This is intentional projection—with the cynical abuse by secularists of ancient Jewish history to engage in it—at its finest.

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2023/03/israels-judicial-reckoning/

Israel’s court is abnormally powerful and has caused half the nation to lose faith in its government. Reform will help, as long as it doesn’t cause the other half to do the same.

Anyone reading the press out of Israel these days would probably conclude that the country will soon cease being a democracy.

In January 2023, less than a month after taking office, Israel’s government unveiled a sweeping package of reforms to reduce the power of the nation’s Supreme Court, on the grounds that the court has undermined democracy by encroaching on traditional executive and legislative functions. The opposition, claiming that the reforms, not the court, are the true threat to democracy, responded almost immediately with massive protests. As the weeks have passed, the protests have intensified and spread beyond traditional opposition circles, and Israel has begun descending into chaos.

Where did this issue come from? Who is right? And what should Israel do now?

As someone who has written about the need to restrain the court’s excessive activism for three decades now—long before this became a partisan voting issue for many Israelis—in several major essays and dozens of shorter pieces, I consider most of these reforms not only within the bounds of normal democratic practice but in fact essential to bolstering Israel’s democracy. The current situation, in which half the public profoundly distrusts the Supreme Court, is clearly untenable for any country that wants to remain a democracy; because courts are a crucial mechanism for resolving disputes peacefully rather than through force, if they are widely distrusted, resorting to force becomes more likely. Yet at the same time, some of the concerns raised by opponents are valid and deserve to be taken seriously. Given the universal conviction that Israeli society is at a breaking point, balancing these two imperatives is an urgent task.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/denouncing-israels-judicial-reforms-wont-have-the-effect-herzog-desires/

 Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s latest plea for judicial-reform compromise was more than merely impassioned. Indeed, his speech to the nation on Thursday evening was downright angry, and with good reason.

As he pointed out in his concise address—delivered with a cracking voice and grim facial expression—he spent the previous 10 weeks “working around the clock, meeting with everybody, including with those who don’t agree with [him], even those who refuse to admit it.” He also mentioned the “harsh and hurtful” criticism he’s received for his efforts, though he claimed to take it “with love.”

That’s a bit hard to believe, given the wrath he incurred from anti-government protesters last month, when he dared to express sympathy for “both sides” of the debate. As a former head of the Labor Party, he wasn’t accustomed to the level of vitriol typically reserved for the right in general and Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu in particular.

But all he had to do to spark hate-filled demonstrations outside his residence—rife with threats against him and his wife—was acknowledge the concerns of each camp. The one that favors judicial reforms, he said on Feb. 12, “feels that an imbalance has developed between the branches [of government] and that lines have been crossed for years,” while the opposition considers the bills put forth by Justice Minister Yariv Levin to be “a real threat to Israeli democracy.”

To ignore either, he stressed—before presenting a five-point alternative plan as a “basis for immediate and decisive negotiations”—would be a “grave mistake.”

https://www.israel365news.com/368136/biden-state-department-giving-funds-to-anti-government-protests-in-israel/?

Police clashed with anti-government protesters who attempted to shut down the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv on Thursday. As some recent reports have highlighted, some of the funding for the protests and the organizations behind them comes from foreign sources, including the US State Department. 

One of the major organizations behind the protests is the Movement for Quality Government (MQG). The organization, which  has received over $38,000 in funding from the US State Department, public Israeli records show.

The group describes itself as “an independent, non-partisan, grassroots, non-profit organization that has been defending Israeli democracy since 1990.” The group however, has brought numerous court cases against Prime Minister Netanyahu, including a petition to the Supreme Court that called for declaring him unfit to hold public office. In addition, MQG is primarily funded by the New Israel Fund, a US NGO that funds many anti-Israel organizations that promote a narrative portraying Israel as an apartheid state.

“The State Department should never fund foreign partisan organizations in allied democracies,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Washingoton Free Beacon, which published a report on the issue. “If the shoe was on the other foot, the Biden administration would accuse Israel of interfering in our elections. Congress should absolutely review the State Department’s potential funding of partisan politics in Israel.”

While acknowledging to the Free Beacon that they had provided the funding, the State Department refused to comment on what the funding was used for. 

“The State Department has provided small grants to the Movement for Quality Government, including a grant signed in 2020 during the previous administration and continued under the Biden administration that focused on teaching civic education and supporting good governance,” a State Department official said.

Grant information shows that MQG received grants of around $10,000 to $15,000 dollars in 2020, 2021, and 2022. In each of those years, the State Department under President Biden was listed as the group’s sole foreign donor. The grant information does not show State Department funding before 2020.

The last tranche of funding was awarded in September 2022. The money was meant to be used for democracy training programs in the Israeli school system.

https://unitedwithisrael.org/i-firmly-say-yes-italys-deputy-pm-enthusiastic-about-recognizing-jerusalem-as-israels-capital/

“I believe the time has come for Rome to recognize Jerusalem as the ancestral capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years,” Netanyahu said ahead of his trip to Italy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he will ask his Italian counterpart to recognize Jerusalem as the Jewish state’s capital, prompting immediate backing from Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini.

“I believe the time has come for Rome to recognize Jerusalem as the ancestral capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years, as the United States did with a gesture of great friendship,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper published ahead of his departure on Thursday, referring to the Trump administration’s 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and its subsequent embassy move.

Salvini expressed enthusiastic support for Netanyahu’s bid. “I firmly say yes to Jerusalem, capital of Israel, in the name of peace, history and truth,” he posted on Twitter.

Netanyahu also told the newspaper that Israel has “plenty” of natural gas, which he seeks to bring to Italy “to support its economic growth.”

In light of the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Italy has committed to seeking energy alternatives.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19450/israel-biden-coup

“U.S. support for demonstrations in Tel Aviv isn’t about the future of Israel’s judiciary. It’s about handcuffing Israel while Iran gets the bomb.” — Lee Smith, Tablet Magazine, March 2, 2023.

In reality, Iran’s mullahs will most likely blackmail the Biden Administration for billions of dollars not to use their new bombs “on my watch”, as then President Barack Obama put it in 2015. With a new administration, there can be a new blackmail.

The Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” jobs-program, paid for by “over $200 million” fungible U.S. taxpayer dollars in funding reinstated by President Joe Biden, incentivizes and rewards the murder of Jews.

Abbas’ Fatah faction boasted of carrying out 7,200 terror attacks in 2022 against Israel, while criticizing Hamas for not attacking Israel.

Many Israelis have no illusions anymore. They see that the Palestinian Authority incites Jew-hate, whips up terrorism and tells Arab children and adults that to be a martyr for Islam allows them direct access not only to paradise, but also to generous funds for the terrorists and their families.

Israelis can also see that the Biden Administration has continually made decisions hostile to Israel, including once again funding the Palestinian Authority without even requiring that it renounce terrorism. The Administration also brought back the goal of a “two-state solution”: if a Palestinian state were to emerge, it could — and most likely would — be used as a launching pad from which to attack Israel, as promoted in the Palestinian “Phased Plan”: Get whatever land you can, then use that to get the rest.

Mainly, Israelis saw that the Biden administration never gave up trying to enable to enable the mullahs’ regime in Iran to have unlimited nuclear weapons — all while the mullahs have made the genocidal destruction of Israel their overriding goal.

Accordingly, on November 1, 2022, millions of Israelis elected Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s Prime Minister, heading a broad coalition government. The coalition also pledged to restore the balance between the Knesset and the Supreme Court.

In the United Kingdom, Parliament has the final say — not the High Court. For the last 30 years, this has not been the situation in Israel.

In the 1990s, Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, declaring that “everything is justiciable,” executed a “judicial revolution,” through which the Court has arrogated virtually all political power, including the ability to override laws and even operational decisions by the Ministry of Defense and the IDF.

The government’s proposed reforms would simply restore the checks and balances and the separation of powers that Israel had before Barak’s “revolution.”

Since Barak’s tenure, Israel’s Supreme Court and the Attorney General have become a self-selecting group, unelected by the public or their representatives. Their decisions, lacking a constitution, were increasingly based not on law but on their invented doctrine of “reasonableness” — often resulting in “whatever I think is reasonable”.

At present, Israel’s Supreme Court, among other freewheeling entitlements, may overrule a quasi-constitutional Basic Law based on ‘reasonableness”; accept petitions from anyone regardless of standing (even if the petitioner would not be directly affected by the outcome — a provision that has resulted in a firehose of lawsuits by “concerned” non-governmental-organizations); and veto political appointments.

For years, many Israelis had gotten used to turning to the Supreme Court for favorable “final say” decisions that they were not able to obtain through the elected parliament, the Knesset. Overnight, they now find themselves losing their perch.

The new Israeli government has not violated any of the rules of Israeli democracy. In a democratic country that held a free and fair election, the one thing that does not seem democratic is to demand that the decision of the voters be overthrown.

Demonstrations continue, but even if 100,000 protestors turn out, it is still only a small number compared to the 2.4 million citizens who voted for Israel’s new government.

Behind this subversion, it turns out, is none other than the U.S. State Department, which for years has reportedly been channeling funding to a “far left”, “anti-Netanyahu” non-profit organization, the Movement for Quality Government (MQG) .

“Never mind that the justices have a conflict of interest since it is their powers the government’s proposed reforms would check. Never mind that in a bid to prevent politicized judges and prosecutors from overturning the will of the voters, the law explicitly permits prime ministers to serve not only while standing trial, but even if convicted. And never mind that the charges against Netanyahu have fallen apart in Jerusalem District Court…. Since MQG’s primary activity is subverting democracy in Israel by waging lawfare and sowing chaos in a bid to block democratically elected right-wing governments from fulfilling their pledges to voters, it’s fairly clear that when MQG refers to ‘democracy education,’ it doesn’t mean majority rule”. — Caroline Glick, JNS, January 17, 2023.

Ironically, in Washington D.C., a “January 6th Committee”, without due process — no cross examination, no independent selection of members, no right to counsel, no exculpatory evidence — pretended to “investigate” as criminal the very same activity that the Biden Administration is backing in Israel: trying to change the outcome of a free and fair election.

Israel is and will remain a very much a democracy – just as it was before Justice Aharon Barak arrogated virtually unlimited powers to its Supreme Court. Calls for uprisings and civil disobedience, combined with false accusations of “fascism” — and the whole focus-group supermarket of pejoratives — appear to be just sore-loser propaganda.

The demonstrations — despite what the Biden Administration might wish — are just the loud last gasp of upper-class “elites” who have been entrenched in powerful unelected positions for decades.

That all this undemocratic disruption being done in the name of “defending democracy” just makes matters worse. The reality, sadly, is quite the opposite.

At a time when terrorism has struck and with a U.S. administration unfriendly to Israel, it is revealing that professed friends of Israel can talk in such an irresponsible way. They speak of a threat to Israeli democracy? They are a threat to Israeli democracy.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in Israel at the time of two of the Jerusalem terror attacks, rather than condemn them clearly and unambiguously, spoke mushily of a “horrifying surge in violence… we will be encouraging the parties to take steps to calm things down”, as if Israel had been the one promoting violence…. He was giving a lesson in democracy to Prime Minister Netanyahu — not Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who openly calls for Palestinians to murder Israelis. How thoughtful.

The Israeli government is trying to restore the democratic institutions that it used to have, of which it has been stripped.

The Israeli government is trying to prevent the murder of innocent Jews and to stop terrorist attacks. Those, however, do not appear to be the goals that everyone has.

What endangers the State of Israel or any nation is not a government dedicated to the safety of its citizens, but people who seem blind to the real dangers: whether from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Iranian regime, the Chinese Communist Party.

The greatest danger comes from those who cling to the illusion that diplomacy without the credible threat of military consequences will have any effect. These irresponsible individuals seem to prefer avoiding conversation about such dangers, or else try to downplay them. It is much less frightening to talk about gender pronouns than China’s preparations for war.

Iran must not be allowed to get the bomb — “or maybe just a few”.

“U.S. support for demonstrations in Tel Aviv isn’t about the future of Israel’s judiciary. It’s about handcuffing Israel while Iran gets the bomb,” writes Lee Smith in Tablet Magazine.

The world has learned a lot watching America’s Middle East freedom agenda…. The first of these lessons is that when U.S. policymakers selectively deploy the rhetoric of democracy and human rights against target governments, their words are typically accompanied by practical measures to destabilize those governments, including U.S. allies….

“In reality, the maritime agreement was just the latest in a series of initiatives to realign U.S. interests with those of the terror regime in Tehran while alternately sweet-talking and threatening traditional U.S. allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia to fall into line…

“Netanyahu, however, is a problem for an administration still determined to reenter the nuclear deal from which Donald Trump withdrew… But there’s no guarantee the famously cautious Netanyahu wouldn’t launch an attack now, especially with a right-wing government at his back and the U.S. seemingly preparing to accept Iran as a member of the nuclear club, so long as the terror regime’s capacity is limited to just one bomb, or maybe just a few.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19467/eu-obsession-israel

What [EU] Representative [Sven] Koopmans forgot to mention that it is the Palestinians who have built tens of thousands of illegal structures in the West Bank, especially in Area C, which, according to the Oslo Accords, is under full Israeli security and civilian jurisdiction.

Koopmans also forgot to mention that the EU is helping the Palestinian Authority (PA) with the mass-scale illegal construction, paving the way for the de facto annexation of the territory.

The EU does not interfere anyplace else on the planet other than Area C — not for the Kurds, the Assyrians, the Yazidis, the Uyghurs, the Kashmiris, the Tibetans or the Greek Cypriots. The Palestinians continue to be the only group on the EU’s list of people with whom to interfere. This inordinate attention appears to stem not so much from love for the Palestinians as from hatred for Israel.

The EU, it seems, has funded literally thousands of illegal Palestinian modular buildings in territory that is legally under Israeli jurisdiction.

Lately, the EU has been concentrating more on agricultural land: one can acquire a much larger area for a much smaller investment.

By doing so, the EU is encouraging the Palestinians to engage in unilateral actions in violation of the agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel.

This is the same EU that continues to warn Israel not to take any “unilateral actions,” and that continues to criticize Israel for building and expanding “illegal” settlements in the West Bank.

As of 2022, the EU has built 81,317 illegal structures in Area C….

The EU’s commitment to the expansion of illegal Palestinian settlement in Area C persists in full disregard of the Oslo Accords, which the EU purports to uphold.

“The object is to create continuous Palestinian settlement throughout the West Bank and thereby isolate and strangle Israeli communities,” wrote Hillel Frisch, professor of Political Science and Middle Eastern History at Bar-Ilan University, in 2019.

The 2009 “Fayyad Plan” (officially titled “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State”) was — and remains — a proposal to create facts on the ground that would end up as a Palestinian state if negotiations do not work out, thereby bypassing the need to negotiate with Israel as agreed to in the Oslo Accords.

The catch is: If the Palestinians believe that they can be handed a state by some external entity, such as the EU, at no cost to themselves, why should they ever bother to negotiate? For years, in fact, they have avoided coming to the negotiating table, presumably in the hope of precisely such a windfall.

The best interests of the Jahalin Bedouin were not the main concern of the Palestinian Authority. What was important to the PA was the land — to take possession of it and then make whatever was built on it appear irreversible.

[T]hese new facts on the ground, of course, encourage the Palestinians not to negotiate. Why should they, if they can get everything they want by just taking it?

Fayyad’s unilateral plan to create facts on the ground is totally in violation of the Oslo Accords, which state that “neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”

At the end of last year, a secret document by the EU’s mission in east Jerusalem showed that Brussels is also actively working with, and on behalf of, the Palestinian Authority to take over Area C of the West Bank.

Koopmans and other senior EU officials apparently know they are acting illicitly: they are doing their utmost to hide the fact that they are actively helping the Palestinians to break the law and violate the agreements signed with Israel.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-733911

Following pressure last month from the Israel-based Zionist NGO Im Tirtzu, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem rector Tamir Sheafer informed all members of his staff that they were not at liberty to promote their political agendas through the open-source-learning platform Moodle.

“Contact with students through [this online tool] is intended only for pedagogical purposes that are directly related to course content,” he wrote. “It may not be used for other purposes, even if those appear very justified and important to the course lecturer.”

It doesn’t take a PhD to realize that the issue at hand, which spurred complaints in the first place, was – what else? – judicial reform. More precisely, it was a call to action against what the “resistance” has been referring ridiculously to as the government’s evil moves to become a theocratic dictatorship.

Sheafer can be commended for reminding educators on the government-funded HU payroll to reserve their ideological pursuits for their free time, an abundance of which happens to be a perk of their profession. But he’s got a lot more to confront at the moment than professors imposing their views on malleable minds. That phenomenon is practically taken for granted these days on campuses around the world, including in Israel.

No, he and his fellow HU honchos need to go well beyond such a mild measure as a memo where the latest, far worse, transgression is concerned. The fact that it emanated from the “diversity” department, however, likely means it will be glossed over or excused through some rhetorical trick.

THE TRAVESTY was revealed on Monday, when an e-mail – signed by HU Vice President for Strategy and Diversity Prof. Mona Khoury and Diversity Unit director Sharon Ben-Aryeh – listed “Nakba Day” as one of the holidays/days of mourning coming up in the next semester.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19440/palestinians-new-terror-groups

If the Biden Administration were serious about de-escalating tensions and preventing further violence between Israelis and Palestinians, it could have achieved this goal by demanding that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas take action against the numerous armed gangs roaming Palestinian streets.

Instead of holding a summit in Jordan or any other country, the Biden Administration needs to make clear to Abbas that he cannot have it both ways. He cannot turn a blind eye to the terror groups operating under his nose, and at the same time condemn Israel for launching counter-terrorism operations to protect Jews and prevent further terrorist attacks.

The Biden Administration could at least have demanded that Abbas rein in the terror attacks against Jews instead of glorifying terrorists and rewarding them and their families financially as part of his “pay-for-slay” incentive to go murder Jews.

Instead of condemning terrorism, Abbas and senior Palestinian officials… regularly castigate Israel for launching pre-emptive operations to prevent terror attacks that harm its people.

The Biden administration seems not to understand that by failing to condemn the murder of innocent Israeli civilians, Abbas is signaling to his people that he has no problem with the terrorists so long as they target only Jews and not him.

“Except for the Palestinian Police and Israeli military forces, no other armed forces shall be established or operate in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” — Oslo Accords Interim Agreement, September 28, 1995.

[N]ot only do both the West Bank and Gaza Strip have dozens of militias and terror groups; worse, the Gaza Strip — which was handed by Israel to the Palestinian Authority in 2005 — is currently controlled by terror organizations such as the Iranian-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Abbas is saying that the Israelis have no right to defend themselves or go after those who are planning to kill Jews.

[I]t means that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization, which is backed by Iran, could penetrate the security forces of Abbas’s Fatah.

The US State Department, after the summit in Jordan, published a “joint communiqué” that totally ignored the role of the Palestinian terror groups in the latest flare-up of violence. The communiqué did not include a commitment by the Palestinian leadership to rein in the terrorists operating in Palestinian-controlled areas. It did not include a demand to the Palestinian leaders to halt their poisonous incitement against Israel. It did not even call for Abbas to stop financially rewarding terrorists for murdering Jews.

The communiqué instead talked about the need for Israelis and Palestinians to “end unilateral measures for a period of 3-6 months.” The only measure it mentions, however, is the building of new housing for Jews.

The Biden Administration appears to believe that building a home for a Jew constitutes a greater threat than gangs and terror groups carrying out lethal attacks against Jews.

As part of its effort to de-escalate tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, the Biden Administration invited the two parties to a summit in Jordan on February 26 to discuss ways to “prevent further violence.”