The following op-ed at American Thinker (by this blogger) was not only well received, but linked to other sites, including The Jewish Press – The Paradox of Israeli Politics: Vote Right, Get Left by Adina Kutnicki. In addition, an interview was conducted by Inquisitr.com regarding this very same subject matter: The Reality of Life For An Israeli Patriot. All of it, headache inducing… head spinning…mind boggling.
Both were written for American (western) and Israeli audiences (translated into Hebrew too) due to the fact that so many have expressed profound bewilderment/befuddlement at Israel’s incomprehensible – dare one say, schizophrenic – decision making process.
In this regard, there is a “coalition of the willing” who refuse to be cowed by the “powers that be” – including this American-Israeli – taking them to task in very public forums, come what may.
Israel’s pre-eminent strategic policy analyst, Dr. Martin Sherman, spelled out the resultant strategic disasters from said dysfunction, in too many prominent venues to count. But a recent analysis is a stand alone, Confronting Israel’s Precarious Future: An Interview With Dr. Martin Sherman.
The failure of Israel to defend its image—never mind, advance—its image abroad has given its detractors virtually free hand in attacking it and in undermining its international legitimacy. This has the inevitable result of allowing the animosity towards Israel to grow unchecked, leaving its supporters abandoned without adequate arguments to defend it – or themselves – against the unfounded defamation and slander.
This diplomatic debacle is in fact a grave dereliction of duty by the Jewish state and its official organs. For it has not only made it far more difficult to publicly support, defend and identify with Israel and Zionism. It has made it considerably more dangerous.
Indeed, Israel’s anemic efforts to explain its policies and the constraints and imperatives that mold it –reflected, among other things, by the miserly budgets it allots its public diplomacy–are putting Jewish communities across the world increasingly at risk. For through their association with Israel, they have become surrogate targets for the anger the distorted portrayal of the country has aroused among numerous sectors across the globe.
This situation was rather caustically, but aptly, diagnosed by the very eloquent British columnist Melanie Philips, a staunch supporter of Israel, who in a brilliant but scathing interview on Israeli TV, scolded: “Israel has made itself defenseless…Israel has vacated the battlefield of ideas…”
In tandem, do pay keen attention to Dr. Martin Sherman’s latest tv interview at i24news, regarding the counter intuitive, obsessive compulsive “peace process”. A “road map” to Israel’s dismemberment…“peace by peace”…“piece by piece”. What kind of dysfunctional leaders continue down such a path? Israel’s.
Moreover, without a doubt, Professor Steven Plaut holds the leadership’s feet to the fire too. Evidence abounds to his broadsides. I’m An Israeli Soldier coupled with Schadenfreude & Israel’s Left are simply two illustrations of his clear thinking.
Whenever the Likud has been in power, the first priority on its agenda has been to implement the policies of the Labor Party and those to the left of it. This is why Bibi “two states solution” Netanyahu appointed more leftist judicial activist judges than his Labor party predecessors did. This is why Netanyahu refuses to end agricultural bolshevism or break up the cartels and monopolies that operate in Israel, ironically including those for milk and for honey. This is why freedom of speech for non-leftists has been curtailed under Likud administrations. This is why Netanyahu scuttled laws that required disclosure of funding for leftist anti-Israel NGOs operating in Israel, along with other laws to defend Israeli democracy. This is why Netanyahu did nothing to end the governmental funding for tenured treason. Under Netanyahu governments, Israeli state prizes general go to anti-Israel leftists. Leftist institutions are coddled and often funded with state money. Netanyahu thinks that such decisions make him popular among the Left and its captive media venues, and make him appear a supra-partisan statesman.
One of the most aggressive enemies of freedom of speech and democracy under the Netanyahu governments has been Shai Nitzan. He served as the special button man for the Attorney General’s office in Israel to harass and persecute the “Right.” While Nitzan repeatedly attempted to prosecute “Rightists” for daring to exercise freedom of speech, including Rabbis who expressed opinions not to the liking of the Left, I personally think his very worst assault on democracy took place in the “Bukay Affair,” which is described here: http://frontpagemag.com/2009/steven-plaut/the-bukay-affair-by-steven-plaut/ . I issued my own calls for the dismissal of Nitzan as early as 2009 (seehttp://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Israeli%20extremism%20-%20thought%20control%20in%20israel.htm ). While interrogating Soviet-style a nationalist professor (not me) for things he said in the classroom and prosecuting teenage children for attending rightist demonstrations, Nitzan refused to prosecute leftists and Arabs calling for murder and violence (see http://zioncon.blogspot.co.il/2011/07/open-calls-for-bloodshed-and-violence.html ).
Nitzan is so openly leftist that he ruled that leftist portraits showing Netanyahu in SS uniform are protected speech while anything that implies disagreement with the theology of Yitzhak Rabin or anything that “insults” any leftist public official (like a Supreme Court judge or Shimon Peres) is “incitement” and a crime that must be prosecuted.
This morning the Netanyahu government announced that Nitzan is to be the next State’s Attorney, in essence the Israeli Chief Prosecutor.
The only conceivable reason for this seems to be that Uri Avnery or Tamar Goszansky (from the Israeli communist party) were not available to serve.
As to the abundance of evidence proving the bonafides of the latest COMMISSAR, Shai Nitzan, Israel’s State’s Attorney, its Chief Prosecutor, “Nitzan is widely perceived as an avowed ideological enemy of the Jewish settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria, a perception that engendered much criticism of the possible appointment in the months leading up to the announcement.”
As to how “voting right ALWAYS gets left”, thus, rendering pernicious leftist outcomes, bear this uppermost in mind: ALL occurred under a supposed “right wing” leadership! Below are three indictments – out of enumerable – which serve as devastating exhibits:
ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION ORDERS AGAINST JEWISH NATIONALISTS – ADINA KUTNICKI – Freeman Center For Strategic Studies is a case study whereby right wing leaders pursue Jewish nationalists with equal impunity, as do their leftist counterparts. Same modus operandi.
Once they set their sights on a Jewish nationalist target, the Israel Security Agency utilizes a variety of methods. It may move the process forward quickly by citing ‘information’ which requires immediate detention or expulsion. Gleaned mostly through unsubstantiated intel in the first place, (which is often fabricated) the cases rarely lead to formal indictments, with many charges quietly dropped. Sometimes, they dangle incentives before those identified as more likely to succumb to pressure. For instance, they may offer to pay for everyday necessities to ease a family’s financial burdens. Lately the security services have employed a new tool of harassment–arresting those who come home after midnight!….
Justice in the Holy Land?
Adina Kutnicki – demonstrates that there are two parallel legal criteria set up in Israel; one used to judge Jewish nationalists, the other used to adjudicate against leftists and their Arab counterparts.
Could it be true, are there really two parallel sets of justice/rules of law, one applied to leftists and their Arab counterparts, the other to right wing nationalists and their ‘settler’ brethren? These questions require urgent answers, particularly in light of several recent high profile, disturbing events taking place in Eretz Yisrael…..
The outrageous, humiliating spectacles of Rabbi Dov Lior and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef hauled into police stations, for the ‘crime’ of endorsing (issuing a haskama) a leading Jewish legal treatise, Torat HaMelech, The King’s Torah, raises the specter of the arrival of a new level of selective prosecution against the nationalist sector. The threatened charge: Incitement. A troubling thought indeed……
On the other hand, unlike Rabbis and Jewish nationalists, leftists do not suffer the same personal and public humiliations nor are they arrested for their comments which actually incite to Jewish murder!….
Consider the following, albeit a tiny sampling of their high profile utterances: Professor Yehudah “Judd” Ne’eman, Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University Faculty of the Arts, an Israel Prize Winner (usually reserved for those on the far left), publicly called for a civil war. Unlike the above Rabbis who simply interpreted Jewish law, Professor Ne’eman urged his fellow leftists to execute a “war between the political left and the Jews of Judea and Samaria”, AKA the “settlers”. Even though recordings of Ne’eman’s statements were obtained and publicized by Israel’s TV Channel 1, incredulously, he was never called in for investigation by the State Prosecutor’s office.
His call follows a recent statement by former Technion physics professor Oded Regev that he would be willing to volunteer in a civil war against the radical right. Oded lobbed this verbal grenade,”I believe that there is only one way to overcome the religious extremists and that is through organized violence, through launching warfare in the full meaning of the term. Anyone who does not surrender in that war will be incarcerated. Those Rabbis and their friends continue in the tradition of Goebbels”.
Not to be outdone in his leftist vitriol, Professor Eyal Nir, of Ben Gurion University’s Chemistry department, (following in the infamous footsteps of Neve Gordon, BGU’s poster boy for worldwide anti-Israel rhetoric) likewise incited against the nationalist sector, calling “on the world to come and help break these scoundrels’ necks.” His “ scoundrels” were young Jews who marched with Israeli flags on Jerusalem Day through areas lightly populated by Jews in our united capital…..
And, The Hunt Continues:The Hunt Against Jewish Nationalists Continues – Adina Kutnicki – exhibits the brazen, often illegal tactics used to pressure Jewish nationalists into giving up their quest to live within the Jewish heartland, Judea and Samaria aka the West Bank. Simple as that.
Under extreme pressure from the left wing media, Israeli police continue to arrest Jewish nationalists with little or no evidence. Even though most charges are eventually dropped, the detainees face difficult conditions in prison cells and interrogation rooms…
WITH the above firmly planted in mind, the seemingly inexplicable dichotomies and paradoxes have hopefully become clearer. YET, this recent explosive interview with Professor Paul Eidelberg, Organized Treachery vs. Organized Hypocrisy: A 35-Year Study of Israel’s Dysfunctional Government strips bare the treachery and the hypocrisy of Israel’s dysfunctional government!
Despite the fact that the Likud Party won more than 70 percent of the votes in February 2003, when it campaigned against the Labor Party’s policy of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Likud Prime Minister Ariel Sharon adopted Labor’s policy and thus effectively nullified that 2003 election! Moreover, in October of the following year, the Knesset “legitimated” Sharon’s coup by enacting the “Gaza Evacuation Law,” thanks to the votes of 23 Likud MKs who thus betrayed their February 2003 election pledges to the nation…
Sharon’s nullification of the 2003 election was actually political coup d’etat. Add the spiritual coup that Prime Minister Netanyahu pulled four months after the March 2009 election. In June of that year, Netanyahu, without Knesset or public debate (and contrary to his own Likud Party’s constitution), endorsed the creation of an Arab Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, the cradle of Jewish civilization! So much for Proportional Representation, exalted as one of the blessings of democracy…
The fact that almost every democracy on the planet manages to conduct its public business by means of multi-geographic- constituency elections should dispel the fiction that Israel cannot function well or justly without its existing system. The truth is that 65 years of this “system” has engendered the shoddiest politics. In the 1999 elections, 29 Knesset Members hopped over to rival parties in order to obtain safe seats! Israel’s political “system” is a disgrace as well as a disaster, and only the ignorant along with self-serving politicians want to preserve it!”…..
Israel has not only flawed politicians but also flawed political institutions—and this includes Israel’s Supreme Court which has usurped legislative and executive powers of government by its pernicious and unparalleled dictum that “everything is negotiable.” This dictum gives the Court the power to negate the cherished values of the Jewish people–and it has done so! The lack in Israel of a Constitution that defines the Legislative as well as the Executive powers of the Government renders the range of these powers extremely vague—so much so that the PEOPLE have no idea of what is permissible or impermissible. Even law professors find it difficult to distinguish a basic law from ordinary legislation. But here’s the coup de grace. In 1992, a coup d’état occurred in Israel without the public having the vaguest idea of what was in store for the Jewish state.In that year the Knesset enacted Basic Law: Human Freedom and Dignity. This so-called basic law was enacted by the absurd vote of 32-21, i.e., with less than half of the Knesset’s membership voting! This was an act of judicial despotism for which Israel may thank the Court’s President Aharon Barak— famous or infamous for his dictum “everything is justiciable.”…….
Does anyone still wonder how/why Shai Nitzan is merely the latest (in a VERY long line) socialist COMMISSAR to be elected by a pithy “right wing” leadership?
Adina Kutnicki 