https://www.jns.org/opinion/an-israel-prize-laureates-anti-government-stance-reveals-a-sinister-view-of-the-jewish-state/
Anyone still puzzled by the outcome of the Nov. 1 Knesset elections should listen to professor Asa Kasher’s interview on Sunday with Kan radio. A fierce opponent of the new government in Jerusalem, the Israel Prize laureate, author of the Israel Defense Forces’ Code of Conduct, inadvertently did more to explain the victory of the right than most of its own champions.
Though not a jurist, the esteemed philosopher and linguist was invited by the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation to discuss (i.e. bash) Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s plan, unveiled last week, to reform the judicial system.
Clipping the wings of the overly interventionist, politically biased Supreme Court—to restore the power vested in the legislature—was among the campaign vows that drew voters. Nevertheless, oppositionists have been decrying it as the beginning of the end of Israeli democracy. The opposite is the case, of course. Yet that’s of little concern to the naysayers engaged in literal and figurative demonstrations against their loss at the ballot box.
Kasher, famous for crafting the IDF’s “purity of arms” credo—and criticized in the past for backing the targeted assassination of terrorists—is a particularly noteworthy protester. It’s not that his false claims are more original than those of his colleagues in academia, like-minded members of the media or politicians in the “anybody but Bibi” camp who failed to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners. On the contrary, they’ve all been invoking the same platitudes.
But Kasher used his microphone to rattle off the tired talking points in a way that reveals just how dim a view he and his cohorts have of Israel.
