January 8, 2023

You could say that Israel overdoes democracy. Governments are sworn in with head-spinning alacrity – 37 in 75 years, and elections exceed that number. This ought to be a consolation for   critics outraged by what many call a “far-right” and “undemocratic” coalition. It surely can’t be too long before a moderate one, patched-up and terminal, comes to power.

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Besides, a week is held to be a long time in politics; the government may defy the predicted plague on the house of Israel. For one thing allies and investors could force moderation on it. For another, US Secretary of State Blinken has praised the election and promised that Washington will not turn on Israel, negating the hue and cry from sour grape opponents.

What is a crook and fanatic or two in government when not too many in the free world are  better. The President of America heads a crime family, for heaven sake.  

As regards elections, how many countries can better Israel’s in terms of free and fair? Not the US. The Twitter files courtesy of Elon Musk prove censorship and collusion to rig Biden’s 2020 narrow victory over Trump.  In short, why make Israel a lone wolf offender?

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Obstinate clamour and hysteria over a poll that was above board smell rancid. For the Palestinian Authority there’s not been even a corrupt election since… who remembers the year it was held? Those who consider the new government abhorrent – outgoing Prime Minister Lapid tells the whole world it’s a “dark” one – bite their tongue at the inability of the PA’s perpetual leader to cope with his need to be elected. They may warn their heads off about dire consequences for Israel; are they, the doomsayers, worth their salt?  

Israel’s President Herzog alluded to a question like this when he said, “No one has the privilege to act or talk as if the country is doomed”.  Yet that is exactly how even some rabbis and communal leaders daily and hourly act and talk: Israel as they knew it is dead. They can no longer, they bemoan, support their one and own Jewish state.

That is a paradoxical posture if ever there were one. How can this be? The explanation goes right back to birth. The imperative to justify one’s existence might as well be in the human DNA. Without meaning, the spirit slumbers. A vacant soul must be filled with something. As to what that might be, GK Chesterton, author of the brilliant Father Brown stories, beheld a petrifying truth. If you don’t believe in God, he said, you don’t believe in nothing, you believe in anything.

Steeping your life and soul in grubby politics – salvation for the radical left – is no way to build character. Putting Chesterton’s clarity to work, we commoners bear the brunt of their belief in anything except God. We pay for climate mania enforced by alerts to act to avert the world burning to cinders; we suffer a gender mania convinced that people are born without a gender and can pick their own, or none at all; inclusivity mania that male and female belong to the identity, ‘birthing people’ is really no joke; we’re obliged to pretend that believers in the 2-State solution are not pretending.     

What signal do they emit as they flounder in dark recesses of the psyche to hit on a meaning to life? What they subject us to: one crisis after another to give crazy nihilists the challenge of combating threats plaguing the planet. If not Covid, it’s climate, if not Trumpism it’s the imperative to save Israel from itself.

The last two are paired. “A growing number of American Jews regard the Jewish state as the moral equivalent of a (Republican) red state,” says Jonathan Tobin. That being so, partisan hate skipped continents to Israel where Trumpist white nationalists purportedly have gained power.