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Iranian Missile Hits Israeli Cargo Ship in the Arabian Sea

By on March 29th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/03/28/iranian-missile-hits-israeli-cargo-ship-in-the-arabian-sea-n1435516

According to a report by Israel’s Channel 12, an Iranian missile struck an Israeli-owned cargo ship in the Arabian Sea on Thursday. The ship sustained little damage and continued on its way to India.

The sea war between Israel and Iran has been heating up in recent weeks. Israel has attacked a dozen Iranian oil tankers in the last several months, causing billions in damages.

Haaretz:

Last month, a ship owned by an Israeli firm, the MV HELIOS RAY, was hit by an explosion in the Gulf of Oman. Israel estimated that the explosion was a targeted attempt against an Israeli-owned ship by Iran.

Iran denied involvement at the time. “We strongly reject this accusation,” Saeed Khatibzadeh, spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Tehran.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Israel and Iran have been trading blows at sea since at least 2019.

Since late 2019, Israel has used weaponry including water mines to strike Iranian vessels or those carrying Iranian cargo as they navigate toward Syria in the Red Sea and in other areas of the region. Iran has continued its oil trade with Syria, shipping millions of barrels and contravening U.S. sanctions against Iran and international sanctions against Syria.

Some of the naval attacks also have targeted Iranian efforts to move other cargo including weaponry through the region, according to U.S. officials.

The attacks on the tankers carrying Iranian oil haven’t been previously disclosed. Iranian officials have reported some of the attacks earlier and have said they suspect Israeli involvement.

The U.S. has gone to court to seize many of those tankers which it alleges are in violation of sanctions on both Iran and Syria. “The purpose of the Iranian operations are to circumvent sanctions on both Iran and Syria to fund IRGC, these court cases say. Such tankers often carry hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil,” reports the Journal.

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We need to stop blaming Bibi for electoral deadlock By Ruthie Blum

By on March 26th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/we-need-to-stop-stop-blaming-bibi-for-electoral-deadlock-663244

For the past two years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s detractors have claimed that if he would only get out of the way – resign, retire or expire – the problem of electoral impasse would instantly be solved. The bulk of the media and left-wing public began chanting the mantra after elections for the 21th Knesset on April 9, 2019. Yet it was actually Yisrael Beytenu Party leader Avigdor Liberman who created the first deadlock.

A member of the Right, Liberman had vowed to support Likud. As soon as the votes were in, however – and Netanyahu needed Yisrael Beytenu to secure a victory over the “anybody-but-Bibi” bloc led by Benny Gantz – Liberman suddenly reneged. Nor did he jump on Gantz’s Blue and White bandwagon.
With neither side able to form a government, a second round of Knesset elections was scheduled and subsequently held on September 17 of that year. This time, Blue and White garnered one seat more than Likud, but with no chance of cobbling together a coalition. Again, had Liberman joined his political camp, Netanyahu would have been able to form a government.

Three months later, on December 26, the Netanyahu naysayers claiming that his popularity had run its course were left with egg on their faces when he won the Likud primary by a landslide. This democratic reaffirmation of his party leadership took place just over two months before the third round of Knesset elections on March 2, 2020, which coincided with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

THIS TIME, voters (some of whom had contracted COVID-19 and were provided special polling stations in protective tents) gave Likud a greater number of mandates than Blue and White, but still not enough for Netanyahu or Gantz to form a coalition. After weeks of wrangling, Gantz finally agreed to enter into a national-unity government with Netanyahu.

The arrangement greatly angered the anybody-but-Bibi crew that he was selected to represent. Those most livid were not really his champions per se; they were a diverse bunch with different political affiliations who had come together for the sole purpose of defeating Netanyahu.

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‘Money Laundering’ for Terrorists Shoshana Bryen

By on March 24th, 2021

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has been meeting with American, European and Israeli government representatives to end-run both the American Taylor Force Act (anti-“pay for slay”) and the Israeli law prohibiting financial transfers to the Palestinians in the amount the PA remunerates terrorist “salaries.” Why are Western governments having this discussion? Generally, the Israeli government treats the PA like a slightly leprous cousin—odious, but better than the cousin with guinea worm disease. There is a fear among some Westerners that if the PA loses control of its own people, then Hamas—the “worse” Palestinians, with both links to Iran and serious weapons—will make its move from Gaza to the West Bank.

It is not an unreasonable fear, but it undermines the rules of both money and morality.

Money doesn’t care where it’s spent—or by whom on what. While we talk about “dirty money” or “laundering money” to make it clean, the morality of money is with the people who spend it. People who spend money doing inoffensive—or even good—things with their money are still behaving immorally if their money helps bad people do bad things with other money.

It’s a sort of “money laundering” in reverse. If you can make dirty money clean, you can make clean money dirty. Good money becomes bad by virtue of its impact. And otherwise-good people become tainted by their willingness to help bad people do bad things.

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Passover and the Mutually-Beneficial US-Israel Bond Yoram Ettinger

By on March 24th, 2021

Passover recap

1. According to Heinrich Heine, the 19th century German poet, “Since the Exodus, freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent.”  

2. Prof. Yehudah Elitzur, one of Israel’s pioneers of Biblical research, maintained that the Exodus occurred in the second half of the 15th century BCE, during the reign of Egypt’s Amenhotep II.  Joshua reestablished the Jewish Commonwealth in the Land of Israel when Egypt’s rulers, Amenhotep III and Amenhotep IV, were preoccupied domestically. Moreover, the Tel el Amarna tablets, which were discovered in Egypt’s ancient capital city, documented a 14th century BCE military offensive launched by the “Habirus” (Hebrews and other Semitic tribes), corresponding to Joshua’s battles.

3. Passover is a Jewish national liberation holiday, highlighting faith, humility and solidarity. It emphasizes patriotism, optimism, defiance of the odds, liberty, gratitude and education; the historic legacy which is the foundation for an enhanced future, and the ancient Jewish roots in the Land of Israel. Passover is one of the three historic Jewish pilgrimages to Jerusalem, in addition to Shavou’ot (Pentecost) and Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles). 

4. Passover spotlights the centrality of women. Yocheved, Moses’ mother, hid Moses and then breastfed him at the palace of Pharaoh, posing as a nursemaid.  Miriam was Moses’ older sister and advisor.  Batyah, the daughter of Pharaoh, saved and adopted Moses (Numbers 2:1-10).  Shifrah and Pou’ah, two Jewish midwives, risked their lives, sparing the lives of Jewish male babies, in violation of Pharaoh’s command (Numbers 1:15-19).  Tziporah, a daughter of Jethro and Moses’ wife, saved Moses’ life and set him back on the Jewish course (Numbers, 4:24-27).

Da’ye’noo Passover hymn and the US-Israel bond

Da’ye’noo (“it would suffice” in Hebrew) is a Passover hymn, which expresses appreciation for 15 benefits bestowed by God upon the Jewish people – though one benefit would have sufficed – such as the Exodus, the Parting of the Sea, the historical events at Mount Sinai, and the return to the Land of Israel.

The US-Israel bond may be assessed in a similar manner:

*If the US Founding Fathers had considered the United States as “the modern day Promised Land” and the Biblical Jubilee as a role model of liberty; but had not been inspired by the legacy of Moses in the formulation of the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and US civic culture; it would suffice (Da’ye’noo).

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Biden Torpedoes Abraham Accords Summit The new administration turns its back on peace between Israel and Arab states in order to pursue deal with Iran Lee Smith

By on March 23rd, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/biden-torpedoes-abraham-accords-summit

Media reports on March 18 revealed that the United Arab Emirates has suspended its plans for an Abraham Accords summit in Abu Dhabi with Israel, the United States, and other Arab signatories to the historic peace agreements brokered by the Donald Trump administration. Supposedly, the Emiratis are angry with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for using the UAE’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Zayed as a “prop in his election campaign.”

In fact, as the theme of “election interference” should make clear (the UAE doesn’t have elections), and as has been substantiated by Israeli reporting, the source of the upset isn’t in Abu Dhabi but in Washington. In other words, the Biden administration is interfering in Israel’s upcoming election by strong-arming the Emiratis into publicly distancing themselves from Bibi.

Next week Israel will hold its fourth election in a little more than two years, so in effect Netanyahu has been campaigning for more than 24 months—including in August when he and MBZ signed the agreement. Should the Emiratis have shunned the deal since Netanyahu, like any Israeli prime minister, would invariably present his accomplishment to voters? What about sending an ambassador to Israel, as it did at the beginning of March? What about investing $10 billion, as MBZ told Netanyahu he would? So how does a photo op with the prime minister glad-handing the crown prince of Abu Dhabi on his home turf cross the line?

Plainly, the Obama-Biden team doesn’t care about interfering in Israeli elections or else Barack Obama’s State Department wouldn’t have funneled money to an NGO that campaigned against Netanyahu in 2015. Nor do Arab royals sitting atop petro-kingdoms have much theoretical or practical reason to worry about appearing to back one candidate against another. Smaller powers like the UAE make alliances not with factions but with states—and all parties in Israel support the Abraham Accords. Israel’s strategic class, its political, military, and intelligence echelons, as well as Israeli voters consider relations with Gulf Cooperation Council members a strategic boon. It is difficult to imagine any circumstances short of war under which an Israeli prime minister would think it politically wise to abandon a normalization agreement with any Arab state, never mind a major oil producer.

No, “election interference” is a staple of American political discourse. More particularly it is the rhetoric through which the Democratic Party now pushes information operations, like the Russiagate conspiracy theory holding that Russia interfered with the 2016 vote to put Trump in the White House. News of the canceled visit by the Israeli prime minister was eagerly pushed in the press and on social media by Obama’s Israel point man Dan Shapiro through his proprietary Israel wing of the echo chamber.

Trump and Kushner wondered why the wise men held them in contempt for making peace. What they didn’t understand was that making peace meant the wise men were fired.

But there’s a bigger play here than interfering in Israeli politics by denying Bibi a preelection photo op with Israel’s peace partners in the Gulf. Their larger goal is to weaken or dismantle the Abraham Accords, which by assembling a treaty structure that binds Israel together with the Gulf states structurally interferes with the administration’s stated goal of realigning the United States with Iran—and therefore against Israel and the Gulf—by reentering Obama’s nuclear deal.

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When Cultural Appropriation and Historical Revisionism Are Acts of War “If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse.” Caroline Glick

By on March 23rd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/when-cultural-appropriation-and-historical-caroline-glick/

Two weeks ago, a bus filled with veteran Israeli generals from the Bithonistim, a grassroots national security organization, slowly made its way up the slopes of Mt. Ebal in Northern Samaria to visit a biblical-era site that was severely damaged by a Palestinian Authority contractor in late January.

They came to draw the public’s attention to the strategic implications of the war the Palestinians are waging against Jewish history.

The site was excavated between 1980 and 1989 by the late Professor Adam Zertal, who identified it as Joshua’s Altar as described in the Books of Deuteronomy, (27; 1-9) and Joshua (8; 30-35). The animal remains at the site contained thousands of burnt bones of year-old male, exclusively kosher, animals. They were burned in an open flame 3,250 years ago—the time generally identified as the period of ancient Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel under Joshua. Other remains found at the site included earrings and scarabs made in Egypt at the time of Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh often associated with the story of the Exodus from Egypt.

As Zertal explained in a lecture in 2013, the altar was buried under a layer of rocks, in keeping with Jewish prescriptions for preventing the desecration of abandoned holy sites. In keeping with the biblical narrative, the altar is made of unhewn stones; instead of steps, there are two ramps for the priests to alight to the platform—blocks of plaster were found nearby. The altar at Mt. Ebal also matches a Talmudic description of an altar from the Second Temple period, around 900 years later, indicating a continuity of Jewish practices throughout the biblical period.

Although initially controversial, Zertal’s general finding that the site is around 3,300 years old and is a Jewish historical site, where sacrifices were carried out in keeping with biblical guidelines, has become widely accepted—although many continue to dispute the specific identification with Joshua.

In late January, the Palestinian Authority (PA) posted a video on its website of 60 meters of the ancient wall surrounding the altar being destroyed to pave a road connecting the Palestinian village of Asira ash-Shamaliya to Nablus. Nablus, built on the ruins of the biblical city of Shechem, is located in northern Samaria between Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerizim.

Zertal was a fiercely secular son of hardcore socialists. Yet, he explained in a 2013 lecture, his scientific work compelled him to accept that the biblical narrative “from Deuteronomy through the Books of Kings was historically accurate.”

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The Lie of Israelis Being the New Nazis Exposing the grotesque and evil campaign of nazifying Israelis. Richard L. Cravatts

By on March 22nd, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/lie-israelis-being-new-nazis-part-ii-richard-l-cravatts/

Editor’s note: Below is Part 2 in this author’s 2-Part Series on ‘Lies in the Cognitive War Against Israel’. See Part 1: HERE.]

When SJP activists and their invited speakers demonstrate against Israel, their speech and literature is peppered with allegations about Israel’s alleged “crimes against humanity, “massacres,” genocide,” and, echoing comments by Turkey’s prime minister Tayyip Erdoğan, in their treatment of the Palestinians, Israel has demonstrated that “. . . their barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

The Nazification of Israelis—and by extension Jews—is both breathtaking in its moral inversion and cruel in the way it makes the actual victims of the Third Reich’s horrors a modern-day reincarnation of that same barbarity, at once ahistorical, disingenuous, and grotesque in its moral and factual inaccuracy.

What is the purpose of this grotesque campaign to transmogrify the Jewish state into the Third Reich? The insidious answer is that once Israel has been tarred with the libels of racism and Nazism, the Jewish state has been made an international outlaw, a pariah, losing its moral right to even exist—exactly, of course, what its foes have consistently sought.  

What is more troubling is that the characterization of the Israeli as Nazi is a trope now promulgated by Western elites and so-called intellectuals, including a broad contingent of academics who are complicit in, and in fact intellectual enablers of, the campaign to defame Israel by Nazifying its people and accusing Jews again as being the world’s moral and existential enemies as demonstrated by their oppression and brutality toward the ‘long-suffering Palestinians’. Thus, campus anti-Israel hate-fests sponsored by radical student groups have such repellant names as “Holocaust in the Holy Land,” “Israel: The Politics of Genocide,” or “Israel: The Fourth Reich,” creating a clear, though mendacious, linkage between Nazism and Zionism—clear examples of both Holocaust minimization and inversion and both contemporary versions of anti-Semitic thought and expression.

That same trope is repeated and reinforced by other academics, such as Richard Falk, professor emeritus of International Law and Policy at Princeton University and the UN’s former, preposterously-titled “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,” who wondered aloud if it was “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, “I think not.”

At Columbia University’s department of Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics, as another example, never misses an opportunity to denigrate the Jewish state as a racist, colonial enterprise, a moral stain on the world without any semblance of legitimacy, and Israelis, as he never tires of mentioning, have become the new Nazis and the Palestinians the new Jews. “As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands,” he wrote after Operation Cast Lead when Israel was defending itself against some relentless rockets attacks from Gaza into civilian neighborhoods, “world powers are cheering on . . , and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding.”

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GOOD NEWS FROM AMAZING ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

By on March 21st, 2021

https://verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com/

 

On March 27, the holiday of Passover begins in the evening. Families will tell the story of how the Jewish people fled the cruelties and tyranny of the Pharaoh to make their way to Israel. As the Egyptian armies pursued them close behind, the sea parted for their escape, drowning their oppressors. Millennia later after the Holocaust which claimed the lives of one in every three Jews in the world another miracle occurred when the steel hulls of ships parted the waters of oceans on their way to liberated and restored Israel in 1948. Who could have dreamed of the amazing research and development which Michael Ordman catalogs for us every week? To all who celebrate Passover, I wish a wonderful and sweet holiday and to all who celebrate Easter I wish all the blessings of peace and good times.

RSK

 

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Huge drop in infections. (TY UWI) Israel’s Covid-19 infection rate has fallen such that hospitals are now closing their coronavirus wards. 50% of Israelis are now fully vaccinated against Covid-19. See also the YouTube animation showing relative percentages of each country’s vaccinations over the last 3 months. 

https://www.ynetnews.com/article/HJbiwkpmd

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/298855

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MzBmOURnB8

Together we can do miracles. Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer explains why he chose Israel as the priority destination for his company’s SARS-COV-2 vaccine.  A small population, a good healthcare system, a high degree of electronic data and an obsessive Prime Minister. And the scientific partnership has a great future.

https://www.israelunwired.com/pfizer-ceo-we-placed-the-bet-with-israel-and-we-are-so-happy-with-the-results/

 

The Covid-19 benefits of Aspirin. (TY UWI) A joint team from Israel’s Leumit Health Services, Bar-Ilan University, and Barzilai Medical Center analyzed records of over 10,000 Leumit patients. They found low-dose aspirin (75mg) reduced Covid-19 infection risk by 29% and shortened virus duration by about two days.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/aspirin-may-protect-against-covid-19-israeli-research-finds/

 

Successful UK trial of anti-Covid-19 nose spray. Israel’s SaNOtize (reported here previously) has announced that UK trials showed its Nitric Oxide nose spray successfully reduced virus severity in infected patients and prevented it being transmitted to others. Emergency deployment is now being sought in Britain and Canada.

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/israeli-maker-of-nose-spray-that-kills-covid-19-applies-for-uk-rollout/

 

Portable blood count system for UK hospital. Israel’s Sight Diagnostics (reported here previously) has deployed its lab-grade Sight OLO solution to the UK’s John Radcliffe Hospital, part of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation. The portable system delivers Full Blood Count (FBC) results in just a few minutes.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3898111,00.html

Guiding catheters to the tumor. Israel’s Cortica (reported here previously) has launched another medical spinoff – CORDiguide. It is developing AI-based technology to navigate catheters, using angiographic imaging, to transport miniature treatment devices to a cancer target, along a road map of blood vessels.

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3897691,00.html

Reducing nerve damage from cancer treatments. A study of 500 cancer patients at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky (Ichilov) Medical Center found that those who took cannabis prior to oxaliplatin chemotherapy suffered 40% less nerve damage than those who didn’t. Oxaliplatin’s neurological side effects affect 70% of cancer patients.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/cannabis-can-prevent-major-chemotherapy-side-effect-israeli-study-suggest/

Faster recovery from strokes. Israel’s BrainQ (reported here May 2018) reported that the double-blind trial of its AI-based electromagnetic therapy shows that patients recovered 77% faster from the disabilities caused by the stroke and were able to resume normal life. The therapy now has FDA Breakthrough Device Designation.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/study-of-25-stroke-patients-shows-brainqs-wave-therapy-can-reduce-disability/

Safe insertion of feeding tubes. (TY WIN & I24 News) Thirty million feeding tubes are inserted into patients annually. One million are inserted incorrectly, many with tragic consequences. The ENVue electromagnetic wave-guided system from Israel’s Envizion prevents those mistakes. Its use is mandatory at many US hospitals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAyaP0zWOOU  https://www.envizionmed.com/

Saving Eli. Scientists at Tel Aviv University’s Blavatnik Center (see here) are racing to find a cure for 2-year-old Eli Reich from New York, who suffers from the rare FOXG1 syndrome that damages brain development. They have already identified several FDA-approved medications that could repair Eli’s faulty FOXG1 proteins.

https://www.jpost.com/health-science/can-israeli-innovation-save-the-life-of-a-2-year-old-jew-from-new-york-662070    http://www.webelieveinacure.org/our-story

Paramedics save Jerusalem mother at 3am. Just before 3:00 a.m., a 56-year-old mother suffered a heart attack at her Jerusalem home. A total of eight United Hatzalah volunteer EMTs ran up five floors to administer CPR and defibrillator shocks. After 12 minutes, the woman’s pulse returned, and she opened her eyes.

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/298489

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Lies in the Cognitive War Against Israel Striking down the falsehoods – one libel at a time. Richard L. Cravatts

By on March 19th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/lies-cognitive-war-against-israel-richard-l-cravatts/

Editor’s note: Below is Part I in a 2-Part Series on ‘Lies in the Cognitive War Against Israel’. Part 2 will run in our next issue.

“That Israel has become of the embodiment of evil, that its racism, militarism, and oppression now are so powerful that they cross borders and infect minority communities in America, and that the Jewish state can now be held responsible for bigotry on campuses far from its own borders indicates how powerful the anti-Israel narrative has become, and how the obsessive hatred by activists against the Jewish state ensures that the oldest hatred shows itself in yet another hateful permutation.”

In the cognitive war against Israel, supporters of what historian Bat Ye’or called Palestinianism have come to accept the fact that Israel will not be defeated employing traditional tools of warfare. Instead, the Jewish state’s enemies, abetted by the academic and media elites in the West, have been using different, but equally dangerous, tactics to delegitimize and eventually destroy Israel in a cognitive war.

By dressing up old hatreds against Jews and transforming it into what comprises the “new anti-Semitism,” combined with a purported goal of seeking social justice for the oppressed and repackaging ugly biases as academic scholarship, professors, student activist groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and Israel’s other ideological foes have found an effective, but odious, way to ensure that the Jew of nations, Israel, is still accused of being: a racist, apartheid oppressor of an indigenous people; white European Jews with no historical connection to the Holy Land who are colonial usurpers of Muslim land; the main impediment to Middle East peace; and a brutal military occupier of land on which illegal “settlements” are built as a way of subjugating an existing innocent population in the quest for a Great Israel that will swallow even more territory to which the Jews have no legitimate claim.

This is the current narrative in what Melanie Phillips has called “the world turned upside down,” an inversion of truth and fiction, calumnies and lies targeting the Jewish state in an effort to elevate the Palestinian cause, delegitimize Israel, and make Israel a pariah in the world community. But this narrative, unfortunately, is based on a presentation of lies, a series of repeated tropes about the malignancy and illegality of Israel that has little to do with facts, history, or reason. These lies are repeated promiscuously until they accepted as fact, a Goebbel-esque tradition which creates a new truth through the unrelenting repetition of falsity, disingenuity, and distortions of reality.

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Who’s Really Running in Israel’s Elections? How the Attorney General and the Supreme Court are devouring Knesset. Caroline Glick

By on March 19th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/whos-really-running-israels-elections-caroline-glick/

In about a week, Israel’s polling stations will open and Israelis will elect their representatives to the Knesset for the fourth time in two years. As was the case in the last three elections, the upcoming elections revolve around one issue—Israel’s legal fraternity.

All aspects of public life in Israel today are dictated by the attorney general and the Supreme Court, which have devoured the powers of the Knesset and the government. Over the years, the legal fraternity has acted through judicial and bureaucratic fiat to cancel the checks and balances on its power. Today, the attorney general and the court justices determine their own powers. Not surprisingly, as far as both are concerned, their powers are unlimited.

Whether the issue is deciding who is a Jew, public funding of cultural institutions, public health policy, land use, economic priorities, military rules of engagement, immigration policy, counter-terror policies, or other questions from the mundane to the existential, the only decision makers in Israel are the attorney general and the Supreme Court justices. Elected leaders are at best advisers.

Justice system inspires fear

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