RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-734578

President Isaac Herzog began his much-anticipated address to the nation on Wednesday evening – to present his plan for judicial-reform compromise – by mentioning the revelation earlier in the day about a terrorist infiltration from Lebanon.

“The serious security incident that became public a few hours ago is clear proof that our enemies well recognize the severing of Israeli unity, and are acting accordingly,” he said.

“Nor is this the only threat,” he added, as a segue to discussing the dangers of internecine strife.

“The [events of] last few weeks are tearing us apart,” he continued. “They are harming Israel’s economy, security, political ties and especially Israeli cohesion. Shabbat meals have become a battlefield; friends and neighbors have become rivals. The conflicts are getting worse. Worry, fear and anxiety are more tangible than ever.”

Fair enough. Yet he didn’t go on to reprimand the “resistance” for its protests and appeals to foreign governments to delegitimize the state’s democratically elected officials.

No, he simply bemoaned the societal schism and warned against the possibility of an actual civil war that includes casualties.

https://www.jns.org/judicial-reform-protests-threaten-to-undermine-idf-former-commanders-say/

“You cannot have an army where people say that if the government doesn’t do what I want, I won’t serve. Today, it will be judicial reform. Tomorrow, it will be removal of settlements,” said Maj. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi.

None of the anti-judicial reform protests that have roiled Israel in recent weeks have been so worrisome as Israeli soldiers’ refusal to serve. The most dramatic example was a squadron of over 30 F-15 reserve pilots who declared last week that they wouldn’t show up for exercises. They eventually backed down and agreed to show up to base (not to drill, to talk).

Israel Defense Forces Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, CEO and founder of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF), a group comprising thousands of former security officers, told JNS that the refusal to serve “poses an existential danger. If there is one thing that unites us all, it’s the army.”

“The IDF is not a professional army but an army of the people, where everyone sends their sons and daughters to serve. People need to set politics aside when they don their uniforms. When people bring politics into their units, which is what’s happening now, it breaks apart the very foundation that enables our army to function, because we will always have governments pushing policies that some people won’t agree with,” he said.

“There were times when the government did things that I, and everyone who was a part of our group, IDSF, felt was against our values. But it never crossed our minds even for one second to involve the army,” he continued. “Two years ago, there was a government that basically handed the keys to the Muslim Brotherhood. For many, that went 100% against the most basic principles of Zionism. Yet, they didn’t pull the army into it. You cannot have an army where people say that if the government doesn’t do what I want, I won’t serve. Today, it will be judicial reform. Tomorrow, it will be removal of settlements.”

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israels-two-faced-allies/

America and Britain claim to be allies of Israel. There is no gainsaying the deep links between them of military assistance, intelligence and trade. Israel is the invaluable strategic asset for America and Britain in the Middle East, a crucial bulwark in the defense of the West.

And yet, both America and Britain undermine Israel’s security and defense against existential attack by sanitizing, promoting and funding Palestinian Arabs, whose active cause remains the destruction of the Jewish state.

A recent event illustrated this particularly sharply when British diplomatic officials in Jerusalem effectively endorsed the Palestinian Authority’s agenda to eradicate Israel.

Palestinian Media Watch has revealed that at last Friday’s annual “Palestine Marathon” held by the P.A., seven British officials taking part as “#TeamUK” wore marathon T-shirts displaying the P.A.’s map that erases Israel and represents the whole country as Palestine.

The Jewish Chronicle reports that the team consisted of the UK’s Deputy Consul General Alison McEwen and Foreign Office colleagues. A picture of the team was tweeted from the official account of the British Consulate in Jerusalem, hailing “the incredible Palestine Marathon to support #FREEDOMOFMOVEMENT for all Palestinians.”

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.”