JEWISH KING JESUS IS COMING AT THE RAPTURE FOR US IN THE CLOUDS-DON'T MISS IT FOR THE WORLD.THE BIBLE TAKEN LITERALLY- WHEN THE PLAIN SENSE MAKES GOOD SENSE-SEEK NO OTHER SENSE-LEST YOU END UP IN NONSENSE.GET SAVED NOW- CALL ON JESUS TODAY.THE ONLY SAVIOR OF THE WHOLE EARTH - NO OTHER.
1 COR 15:23-JESUS THE FIRST FRUITS-CHRISTIANS RAPTURED TO JESUS-FIRST FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT-23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming.ROMANS 8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.(THE PRE-TRIB RAPTURE)
LAND FOR PEACE (THE FUTURE 7 YEARS OF HELL ON EARTH)
JOEL 3:2
2 I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people(ISRAEL) and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.(UPROOTED ISRAELIS AND DIVIDED JERUSALEM)(THIS BRINGS ON WW3 BECAUSE JERUSALEM IS DIVIDED,WARNING TO ARABS-MUSLIMS AND THE WORLD).
THE WEEK OF DANIEL 9:27 WE KNOW ITS 7 YRS
Heres the scripture 1 week = 7 yrs Genesis 29:27-29
27 Fulfil her week, and we will give thee this also for the service which thou shalt serve with me yet seven other years.
28 And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week:(7 YEARS) and he gave him Rachel his daughter to wife also.
29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid.
DANIEL 11:21-23
21 And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honour of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries.
23 And after the league made with him he shall work deceitfully: for he shall come up, and shall become strong with a small people.
24 He shall enter peaceably even upon the fattest places of the province; and he shall do that which his fathers have not done, nor his fathers' fathers; he shall scatter among them the prey, and spoil, and riches: yea, and he shall forecast his devices against the strong holds, even for a time.
DANIEL 9:26-27
26 And after threescore and two weeks(62X7=434 YEARS+7X7=49 YEARS=TOTAL OF 69 WEEKS OR 483 YRS) shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary;(ROMAN LEADERS DESTROYED THE 2ND TEMPLE) and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.(THERE HAS TO BE 70 WEEKS OR 490 YRS TO FUFILL THE VISION AND PROPHECY OF DAN 9:24).(THE NEXT VERSE IS THAT 7 YR WEEK OR (70TH FINAL WEEK).
27 And he ( THE ROMAN,EU PRESIDENT) shall confirm the covenant (PEACE TREATY) with many for one week:(1X7=7 YEARS) and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease,(3 1/2 yrs in TEMPLE ANIMAL SACRIFICES STOPPED) and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.
JEREMIAH 6:14
14 They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
JEREMIAH 8:11
11 For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.
1 THESSALONIANS 5:3
3 For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.
ISAIAH 33:8
8 The highways lie waste, the wayfaring man ceaseth: he hath broken the covenant,(7 YR TREATY) he hath despised the cities, he regardeth no man.(THE WORLD LEADER-WAR MONGER CALLS HIMSELF GOD)
JERUSALEM DIVIDED
GENESIS 25:20-26
20 And Isaac was forty years old (A BIBLE GENERATION NUMBER=1967 + 40=2007+) when he took Rebekah to wife, the daughter of Bethuel the Syrian of Padanaram, the sister to Laban the Syrian.
21 And Isaac intreated the LORD for his wife, because she was barren: and the LORD was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.
22 And the children (2 NATIONS IN HER-ISRAEL-ARABS) struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to enquire of the LORD.
23 And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels;(ISRAEL AND THE ARABS) and the one people shall be stronger than the other people;(ISRAEL STRONGER THAN ARABS) and the elder shall serve the younger.(LITERALLY ISRAEL THE YOUNGER RULES (ISSAC)(JACOB-LATER NAME CHANGED TO ISRAEL) OVER THE OLDER ARABS (ISHMAEL)(ESAU)
24 And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb.
25 And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.(THE OLDER AN ARAB)
26 And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau's heel; and his name was called Jacob:(THE YOUNGER-ISRAELI) and Isaac was threescore (60) years old when she bare them.(1967 + 60=2027)(COULD BE THE LAST GENERATION WHEN JERUSALEM IS DIVIDED AMOUNG THE 2 TWINS)(THE 2 TWINS WANT JERUSALEM-THE DIVISION OF JERUSALEM TODAY)(AND WHOS IN CONTROL OF JERUSALEM TODAY-THE YOUNGER ISSAC-JACOB-ISRAEL)(AND WHO WANTS JERUSALEM DIVIDED-THE OLDER,ESAU-ISHMAEL (THE ARABS)
ISAIAH 28:14-19 (THIS IS THE 7 YR TREATY COVENANT OF DANIEL 9:27)
14 Wherefore hear the word of the LORD, ye scornful men, that rule this people which is in Jerusalem.
15 Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves:
16 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.
17 Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding place.
18 And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.
19 From the time that it goeth forth it shall take you: for morning by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night: and it shall be a vexation only to understand the report.
DANIEL 8:23-25
23 And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king (EU DICTATOR) of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences,(FROM THE OCCULT) shall stand up.
24 And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power:(SATANS POWER) and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people.
25 And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes;(JESUS) but he shall be broken without hand.
DANIEL 11:36-40
36 And the king shall do according to his will;(EU PRESIDENT) and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvellous things against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the indignation be accomplished: for that that is determined shall be done.
37 Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers,(THIS EU DICTATOR IS A EUROPEAN JEW) nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all.
38 But in his estate shall he honour the God of forces:(HES A MILITARY GINIUS) and a god whom his fathers knew not shall he honour with gold, and silver, and with precious stones, and pleasant things.
39 Thus shall he do in the most strong holds (CONTROL HEZBOLLAH,AL-QUAIDA MURDERERS ETC) with a strange god, whom he shall acknowledge and increase with glory: and he shall cause them to rule over many,(HIS ARMY LEADERS) and shall divide the land for gain.
40 And at the time of the end shall the king of the south(EGYPT) push at him:(EU DICTATOR PROTECTING ISRAELS SECURITY) and the king of the north(RUSSIA) shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.
Netanyahu responds to Abbas invite: ‘I’ll be here, any day’-PM reiterates willingness to meet PA leader, but says they must discuss Palestinian incitement before any peace talks-By Raoul Wootliff and Raphael Ahren April 4, 2016, 6:28 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday he was willing to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “any day,” after the PA leader called for a meeting during an interview last week on Israeli television.Netanyahu also stressed that he had made the offer before, and was standing by his invitation.“I’m inviting him again. I’ve cleared my schedule this week. Any day he can come, I’ll be here,” Netanyahu told journalists in Jerusalem ahead of a meeting with visiting Czech Foreign Minister LubomÃr Zaorálek.Abbas told Channel 2’s “Uvda” program last week that he was willing to meet the prime minister to reach a peace agreement.I heard President Abbas say that if I invite him to meet, he'll come. So I'm inviting him. I've cleared my schedule.https://t.co/jXEdWR8n3n— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) April 4, 2016-“I still extend a hand to Mr. Netanyahu because I believe in peace. I believe that the people of Israel want peace and that the Palestinian people want peace,” Abbas said.Abbas called Netanyahu “the partner” for peace, and called on the Israeli premier to meet with him “at any time.”But Netanyahu said Monday that before peace talks, the first thing the two needed to discuss was ending Palestinian incitement against Israelis.“My door is always open for those who want to pursue peace with Israel,” the prime minister said.Israel has accused Abbas of failing to condemn the wave of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians and security forces that erupted in mid-September, and says his PA hierarchy presides over incitement to violence against Israel.The attacks, mostly stabbings but also shootings and car-ramming assaults, have killed 29 Israelis and four non-Israelis. Over the same time, at least 188 Palestinians have died by Israeli fire. Israel says most were attackers, and the rest died in clashes with security forces.Abbas told Channel 2 news that if it were not for his forces, the violence would be much bloodier now. He denied that he is encouraging Palestinian youth to stab Israelis and said that Israelis are unaware of his security forces’ efforts to prevent stabbings.Netanyhau’s comments came hours after President Reuven Rivlin made similar statements saying he was willing to meet Abbas.“We need to find a way to build trust between us,” he says. “I am ready to meet with [Abbas] with whatever coordination with the Israeli government of course.”Rivlin, also speaking alongside Zaorálek, said he was somewhat heartened by Abbas’s interview but that the PA leader needed to back up his words by distancing himself from fundamentalists like the Hamas group who would prefer to see a temporary agreement that allows for the future destruction of Israel.
Holy Moses!-Satellite image of red River Nile evokes biblical legend-Photo uses infrared technology to map heat created by vegetation surrounding the Egyptian river-By Times of Israel staff April 2, 2016, 5:25 pm
A newly released satellite image of Egypt’s Nile river shows the river colored deep red, bringing to mind the biblical first plague in which the waters of the great river turned to blood.But, this time at least, it is not the wrath of god that is responsible for the river’s crimson hue: The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3A satellite, which took the picture, uses a radiometer to measure infrared energy.The heat radiated by vegetation around the river is therefore responsible for the red color.The satellite, launched in February, is designed to monitor environmental changes. It is the third of more than a dozen “eyes in the sky” that make up the Copernicus program, which the ESA describes as the most sophisticated Earth observation system ever launched.Two satellites already in orbit are equipped with radar and high-resolution cameras, to which Sentinel-3A adds instruments for measuring sea and surface temperatures, among other things.The satellite will be able to spot upcoming droughts by detecting subtle changes in surface color that suggests crops are failing.One of Sentinel-3A’s greatest advantages is its ability to scan the entire planet in just over a day and send back data within hours, giving scientists and policy-makers detailed information on environmental changes in close to real time. By measuring sea temperatures it will boost short-term weather forecasts and help track the impact of climate change.AP contributed to this report.
Israel cuts power at second Palestinian city over unpaid debt-PA, Israeli officials say they weren’t informed in advance of Bethlehem outage, which comes days after similar move in Jericho-By Raoul Wootliff and AP April 4, 2016, 8:22 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
Israel’s state-owned electric company on Monday continued to scale back its electricity supply to Palestinian cities due to almost two billion shekels in unpaid debt, limiting its supply to the city of Bethlehem and vowing to do so in other places across the West Bank over the next two weeks.The Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) said Monday it was halving its supply to Bethlehem, after taking a similar, short-lived step in the city of Jericho last week.It was not stated when the power supply to Bethlehem will be restored.The company says the Palestinian authorities have racked up a debt of 1.74 billion shekels ($460 million). Israel has thus far continued to provide electricity out of concern for the Palestinian population, but the IEC said it could no longer absorb the debt and was taking measures to stop it from growing further.Palestinian officials claim that Israelis gave them no prior warning of a power cut to Bethlehem, saying they were only told about pending power cuts to Ramallah and el-Bireh, according to the Ma’an news agency.Bethlehem Mayor Issam Juha told Ma’an that the municipality was not warned that the cuts would take place.Israeli government officials also said they were not informed by the IEC of the planned cuts, according to Army Radio. The IEC also cuts power to Israeli homes over unpaid debts.The cuts in Jericho, which began last Thursday, led to blackouts, but full supply was restored later the same day, according to Mansour Nassar of the Jerusalem District Electricity Company (JDECO). The cut affected up to 30,000 people in a total population of around 50,000 in the city and surrounding area, according to Jericho Governor Majed al-Fityani.The Palestinian Authority is struggling financially and depends largely on foreign aid. It relies heavily on Israel for electricity supplies, which also provides electricity to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.Ongoing talks with the IEC and PA have so far not resolved the debt problem. In January 2015, the IEC cut power to Palestinian cities for a number of hours every day over a similar debt, only to renew it a few weeks later.A year earlier, the company and the Palestinian Authority struck a deal to resolve an outstanding debt after the IEC had cut electricity to the West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin over unpaid bills of NIS 1.9 billion ($482 million).Under an economic agreement signed with the PA in 1994, Israel collects around 600-700 million shekels each month in customs duties levied on goods destined for Palestinian markets that transit through Israeli ports.It transfers the money after deducting approximately 100 million shekels for expenses such as Palestinian hospitalizations in Israel, sewage treatment and covering part of the electricity debt, which has remained largely stable in recent months.Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
Air France’s female staff can opt out of Iran flights over headscarf-Resumption of route, announced in December, leads to row over Iranian law obligating women to cover hair in public-By AFP April 4, 2016, 7:20 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
Women employees of Air France will be allowed to opt out of working on its upcoming resumed flights to Iran to avoid having to wear a headscarf, a company official said Monday.The airline will appoint a “special unit” to replace those who do not want to fly to Tehran, he said.“Any woman assigned to the Paris-Tehran flight who for reasons of personal choice would refuse to wear the headscarf upon leaving the plane will be reassigned to another destination, and thus will not be obliged to do this flight,” human resources official Gilles Gateau told Europe 1 radio.On April 17, Air France will resume its Paris-to-Tehran service, which were suspended in 2008 because of international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear ambitions.Unions say company executives sent staff an internal memo regarding flights to Tehran, saying that female cabin crew would be required to wear trousers with a loose fitting jacket while on board, and must cover their hair with a scarf when they leave the plane.The headscarf rule is already in place when flying to certain destinations such as Saudi Arabia.French labor unions, who held talks with the human resources chief on Monday, argued that an escape clause was already in place for flights to Conakry in Guinea during the Ebola crisis last year and for services to Tokyo following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Police nab would-be attacker in West Bank arrest-Caught up in ‘stop and search,’ Palestinian from Ramallah admits he planned to plow stolen Israeli car into IDF soldiers-By Stuart Winer and Judah Ari Gross April 4, 2016, 6:47 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
The Israel Police said Monday that officers arrested a Palestinian in the West Bank who was planning to carry out a car-ramming attack against soldiers.The 23-year-old Ramallah man was detained Sunday morning at a West Bank checkpoint, where police from the Binyamin district were conducting a “stop and search” operation.A quick inspection revealed the man did not have a driver license and was driving a car stolen from central Israel a month earlier. The suspect was taken for questioning at Binyamin station, where he confessed that he was planning to carry out a car-ramming attack against IDF soldiers “because of the occupation of Palestinian lands.” He also told investigators that he hoped to become a “martyr” by dying in the attack.The unexpected checkpoint surprised him, he said, and disrupted his plans.Police did not say exactly where the incident happened or on which road the checkpoint was deployed.According to police, the man also declared he was a supporter of Fatah, the Palestinian political party headed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.After being questioned, the suspect was transferred to Ofer Prison near Ramallah.On Sunday, a 30-year-old Israeli woman in the central Israeli city of Rosh Ha’ayin was lightly injured in a stabbing attack. The attacker, a young Arab Israeli woman from the nearby village of Kfar Kassem, was subdued by a security guard and taken into custody without shots being fired.That stabbing ended a nine-day stretch without attacks in Israel and the West Bank.In the past six months since the ongoing wave of terror began in October 2015, 29 Israelis and four foreign nationals have been killed. Nearly 200 Palestinians have also been killed, some two-thirds of them while attacking Israelis, and the rest during clashes with troops, according to the Israeli army.Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
Israel halts cement to Gaza, to keep it out of Hamas’s hands-Freeze only temporary, COGAT says; UN stresses need for reconstruction, condemns ‘deviation of materials’ by terror group-By Judah Ari Gross April 4, 2016, 8:37 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
Israel halted the import of cement and other building materials into the Gazi Strip on Sunday after realizing they had been partially diverted to the Hamas terrorist organization that rules the territory, the Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said.An undisclosed amount of cement, intended for the rebuilding effort of the beleaguered Strip, had been “taken by Amad al-Baz, deputy director of Hamas’s Economic Ministry,” COGAT announced on its al-Munasek — Arabic for “the coordinator” — Facebook page on Friday.This was in direct contradiction to reconstruction agreements between Israel and the Palestinians and, as a result, COGAT chief Maj.-Gen. Yoav Mordechai “froze the import of the inventory intended for the private sector,” according to the body’s statement.The information about al-Baz’s actions came to light through the international reconstruction effort in Gaza, COGAT said.“We are disappointed that Hamas continues to harm and take advantage of the Palestinian population, only to advance the personal interests of the organization,” COGAT wrote on its Arabic-language Facebook page.The United Nations also condemned the “deviation of materials” in a statement released on Monday, but refrained from naming Hamas as responsible.“Those who seek to gain through the deviation of materials are stealing from their own people and adding to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza,” said Nickolay Mladenov, the UN’s special coordinator for the Middle East peace process.“The people of Gaza depend on the entry of construction material to repair and reconstruct their damaged and destroyed houses following the 2014 conflict and to enable much-needed infrastructure and development projects,” Mladenov said, referring to the devastating 50-day war fought between Israel and Hamas in summer 2014.This freeze is not intended to be enduring, and will only remain in place until the issue can be more thoroughly explored, a COGAT spokesperson told The Times of Israel.“We are investigating, and will decide how to proceed,” she said.In the meantime, other goods and materials are being brought into the Gaza Strip as usual, the spokesperson said.One of Israel’s main concerns in the reconstruction effort of the Gaza Strip has long been that materials being brought into the coastal enclave will be employed to create tunnels and other infrastructure that can be used against the Israel Defense Forces in a future conflict with Hamas.
What role for Trump in his grandson’s Jewish circumcision? Is it going to be Donald the ‘Sandek’ at Sunday’s ‘bris’ for Theodore James? Probably not-By Andrew Tobin April 1, 2016, 6:45 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
JTA — It’s going to be a busy weekend for Donald Trump.Just ahead of what’s expected to be a close Republican primary in Wisconsin, Trump’s newborn Jewish grandson is to be circumcised.The GOP frontrunner anticipated Theodore James Kushner’s arrival in his speech to AIPAC last week, announcing: “My daughter, Ivanka, is about to have a beautiful Jewish baby. In fact, it could be happening right now, which would be very nice as far as I’m concerned.”It took a few more days, but Ivanka Trump gave birth Sunday. According to Jewish law, the bris will take place eight days later, this coming Sunday.Trump’s eldest daughter has said Judaism in important to her family’s life in New York, calling her family “pretty observant.” The celebrity businesswoman underwent an Orthodox conversion before marrying Jewish real estate investor and newspaper publisher Jared Kushner in 2009. She and Jushner belong to an Orthodox synagogue, observe Shabbat and in 2013 had a bris for their firstborn son, Joseph, now 3. They also have a 4-year-old girl, Arabella.Donald Trump has touted his daughter’s Jewish family to appeal to Jews in his campaign for president. But he’ll have to hustle to make it to Theodore’s first Jewish lifecycle event. The bris falls a day after Trump is to hold a town hall in Wausau, Wisconsin, and two days before the state’s primary.Assuming Trump manages to jet to New York for the occasion, what will his role be? USA Today tried and failed to get an answer from the Trumps.Here are some possibilities (and impossibilities):The mohel: Removing the foreskin is a job for a professional — and a Jew. Trump may have a degree from the Wharton business school — and know a thing or two about getting “schlonged” — but he’s never mentioned any mohel training. And giving his fondness for self-promotion, it’s fair to assume it would’ve come up by now.Plus, Trump’s allegedly small fingers could make scalpel work difficult.More to the point, Trump is not Jewish, though he was introduced to the Republican Jewish Coalition in December as a “mensch” with “chutzpah.”If Ivanka Trump and family don’t yet have a trained Jewish mohel picked out, JTA’s America’s Top Mohels special report in 2014 can recommend several options in the New York area: There’s Philip Sherman (wears a bowtie and sings). Emily Blake (a rare female mohel, she reads Native American poems and uses Manischewitz in her anesthesia). For more traditional options, there’s Mordechai Mozes or Paysach Krohn — or any of the combined seven sons in their families that also do circumcisions.The sandek: Usually it’s a grandfather who holds the baby during the bris, which would make Trump one of the two top options on Theodore’s big day. But the sandek traditionally is a Jew. That leaves Kushner’s dad, Orthodox Jewish real estate developer Charles Kushner, as the person most likely to have his lap used as an operating table.The kvater: The rules about who gets to bring the baby from the mother to the mohel are loose enough for Trump to qualify. However, it’s considered good luck for recently married couples who want to conceive children to perform the ritual schelp. So it might make more sense for the honor to go to Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump’s younger brother. The businessman, who runs Trump Winery, married Lara Yunaska under a chuppah at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in November 2014. The couple doesn’t yet have children.That leaves the Donald without a ritual role. But that doesn’t mean he has to twiddle his thumbs.Donald Trump might be of most service as a spokesman for the bris. Just image his post-op press conference at the bagel-and-lox spread: “It was yuge! I guarantee you there’s no problem, I guarantee.”
Bill Clinton brings Hillary’s message to leading rabbis-Participants won’t discuss contents of off-record NY meet-up, will only say it was ‘constructive’-By JTA March 31, 2016, 3:45 am-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton met with over 20 leading rabbis in the New York area to discuss his wife Hillary’s presidential campaign.The meeting Tuesday in Midtown Manhattan was off the record and lasted for two hours, twice the amount of scheduled time. Participants would not discuss the content.Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, the executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis, called it “constructive” in a brief interview with JTA.“It’s important to have exchanges with candidates,” he said.Potasnik, like others attending, was there in a personal capacity and not on behalf of their affiliated groups. Many of the rabbis took selfies with Clinton.Among others attending were Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the former president of the Union for Reform Judaism; Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, the executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly; and Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division.Hillary Clinton, seeking to secure her delegate lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., her challenger in the run for the Democratic presidential nod, is stepping up her campaign in New York state ahead of its April 19 primary.
Exclusive / 'I would not as an Israeli be worried about the future of our relationship. I think it's going to strengthen'-Israel ‘our indispensable ally’ in war on Islamic terror, says Paul Ryan on visit to Jerusalem-House Speaker calls for ‘generational strategy’ to win over hearts and minds in the Muslim world; warns Iran will make supporters ‘rue the day’ they backed the nuclear deal; says nobody should try to force Israel ‘into an insecure position’By David Horovitz April 4, 2016, 1:28 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
Paul Ryan — Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate, and the Republican Who Didn’t Run for the Presidency this time — broadly holds to the principle of not being too critical of the US government when traveling abroad. But his very decision to come to Israel on Sunday and Monday — on the first days, that is, of his first foreign trip since taking the Speaker’s job last October — is an implied rebuke to President Barack Obama, and an overt reassertion of American solidarity with Israel.Talking to The Times of Israel from the balcony of his Jerusalem hotel room, Ryan’s first order of business is to make clear that he very deliberately chose to visit Israel now so as “to reinforce our alliance” and to underline his conviction that the US-Israel partnership should and will grow stronger in the future.The 46-year-old father of three from Wisconsin, who was last in Israel late in Ariel Sharon’s prime ministership in 2005, emphatically endorses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view that Palestinian terrorism directed against Israel is ultimately no different from the Islamic terror afflicting Europe and threatening the United States, and that the civilized world must unite to fight it. “They’re coming at Israel but they’re ultimately coming for us,” he says. “So we are partners in this war on terror, radical Islamic terrorism. Israel is an indispensable ally in that. Israel is on the front line in so many ways with respect to it.”Rather than wishing the Islamist extremism away, or seeking desperately to avoid calling it by its name, Ryan sets out an agenda for confronting it — not only militarily, when it rears its violent head, but at the grassroots level, where the brainwashing and indoctrination are taking place. “We need a generational strategy about winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world,” he argues, and specifies the imperative to form “a coalition of governments in moderate nations” to prevent the creation of the next generations of killers. “We don’t have a current strategy to deal with ISIS right now,” he laments, “let alone how do we prevent the five-year-old in Pakistan from becoming a radical.”Almost everything that Ryan says in our interview — on Iran, on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on fighting terror, and on US-Israel ties — will be music to Netanyahu’s ears.He endorses the goal of a two-state solution but believes that Israel doesn’t have a Palestinian partner at present, so “I don’t know how much progress can be made.”He is adamant that it is not for the United States, or for any other outside player, however well-intentioned, to try to coerce Israel into taking steps along the path to an accommodation. “I’d leave it up to your government,” he says, when asked about the Obama Administration’s encouragement of Israeli territorial compromise. “We shouldn’t try to force Israel into an insecure position.”As a prominent opponent of the President Barack Obama-led nuclear deal with Iran, furthermore, he remains adamant that it was a dreadful agreement, intent on holding Iran to its (albeit inadequate) terms, determined to resist any further concessions, and convinced that the regime in Iran will expose the foolishness of those who supported it. “I think the ballistic tests (were an early indication). I think what Iran is going to end up doing is going to make people rue the day they voted for that deal,” he says bitterly. “As we move forward in the future, I think people who supported the deal are going to regret that support.”And encouragingly for Netanyahu, he also takes the view that the prime minister’s lobbying against the deal, and essentially against Obama, in Congress in March 2015, has not alienated parts of the American political spectrum in the long-term, or turned Israel into more of a partisan issue in the United States. “I’m not a Democrat,” he confirms helpfully, but he says he believes the intensity of that battle was a passing “moment.” Overall, he advises, “I would not as an Israeli be worried about the future of our relationship. I think it’s going to strengthen.” The alliance with Congress is extremely warm and firm, he elaborates, and ordinary Americans understand “that our ties with Israel are deep and strong, and that they’re mutual… We need Israel for our own national security. We need Israel to keep ourselves safe as well.”Acknowledging the challenge of BDS, and anti-Israel activism on campus, Ryan is adamant, nonetheless: “There is a nasty strain of anti-Semitism. You read more about it in Europe. But (in the US) this is infinitesimal. The support for Israel is deep in America.”All in all, there’s no mistaking that a president Paul Ryan would be unstintingly supportive of Israel, and a far more comfortable White House partner for Netanyahu than the incumbent. Except, of course, that Ryan isn’t running. He says he has no regrets about that, even as the Republican race has turned so acrimonious and divisive. The GOP had a more than ample 17 contenders when the race began, he was enjoying his career on the Hill, and wanted to have enough time to be a good husband and father for his young family.Even now, Ryan says, should the Republican campaign deteriorate into still more vicious in-fighting at a contested convention, he’s not prepared to sally forth as the unifying savior. “I’ve already said that that’s not me,” he insists. “I decided not to run for president. I think you should run, if you’re going to be president. I think you should start in Iowa and run to the tape.”Ryan on Monday visited his Knesset counterpart Yuli Edelstein, and met with minimal fanfare with Netanyahu — the prime minister presumably anxious not to be vulnerable to allegations of partisan interference in the US presidential campaign. (Netanyahu hosted Romney in 2012, to no shortage of subsequent criticism from Democratic circles.) The Prime Minister’s Office on Monday afternoon sent out two photographs and issued a two-sentence statement on the visit, which was closed to the media: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this morning met with a bi-partisan Congressional delegation led by US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan. The delegation expressed its firm support for Israel.”From here, Ryan is heading on to other parts of the region — visiting several nations that are partners with the United States in the fight against Islamic State.Our interview was conducted on Sunday evening. What follows is the lightly edited transcript:The Times of Israel: This is your first time here since 2005.Paul Ryan: Let me tell you why I’m here. It’s important for me to say this. It’s my first trip as Speaker. The first place I wanted to come, on the first day (of the first trip): I wanted to come to Israel. For very important symbolic reasons — to buttress and reinforce our alliance and my belief in a stronger alliance between our two countries.Because that needed doing? It’s something that needs to be done. It needs to be buttressed. I think there’s room for improvement.I was at AIPAC. I heard you speak. I heard some of your thoughts on the Iran deal. (Ryan’s full speech is here.) You think it’s “terrible.” That it legitimizes them as a threshold nuclear power.-Correct.-But how does it play out now? There are elections in the United States. There will be a new leadership in the United States. Can it be reversed? Will it be rolled back? What’s your best-case scenario? My thoughts are well known on the Iran deal. I fought it in the House. We did not prevail because of the way the vote was structured. The question now is one of enforcement — keeping Iran to its word. And making sure that we don’t backslide on any other sanctions. So, enforcing, monitoring and watching all the other sanctions — making sure there are no other sanctions that are being loosened. And that’s what brings me to concern about the clearing houses and the dollarization — giving (Iran) access to cash, to dollars, and to the US financial system. That’s not part of this deal, and it shouldn’t be. That falls into the category of concerns about backsliding or even giving more concessions and sanctions relief.The ballistic missile tests — ultimately, they’ve got away with it.Yes, so that was anther UN resolution (defied).My thoughts have not changed on the Iran regime. We need to have a stronger posture with our Iran policy. It’s a difference of opinion we have with the administration.Where we go from here is to make sure that we don’t backslide on sanctions. That we’re tougher on sanctions. We’re looking at other things in the House. The last thing we want to do is see backsliding.The speech Donald Trump gave at AIPAC (last month) included an internal contradiction. He said at one point that he’d dismantle the deal, and then he spoke about needing to enforce it very strongly. Those who think that it can be dismantled are (deluding themselves)? It’s going to be determined by circumstances in the future as to the conduct of Iran. Do they cheat? Do we catch them at cheating? Other things like that.I didn’t hear his speech. I spoke before him. I thought about saying in the middle of the speech, Is it me or is the room spinning? (Speakers at AIPAC’s main sessions addressed 18,000 in a basketball stadium from a central stage that rotated slowly — DH) I’ve given a lot of speeches, but I’ve never done anything like this before. (Laughs.)-Israelis are incredibly invested in the relationship with the United States. Israelis are really worried about Iran, and consensually think this is a bad deal, but many wonder if maybe Israel could have fought it without being quite so in your face — because of the danger of Israel becoming more of a partisan issue (in US politics).I don’t see it that way. I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.First of all, if you come to Congress, the bi-partisan support for Israel is very strong. Before I did this job, I chaired the Ways and Means Committee. I put in the Trade Promotion Authority Legislation, which is what you need to make trade agreements, (including) the anti-BDS language. No problems. Easy bipartisan win. I had support from both sides.So I do believe that our relationship is strong, will get stronger. Republicans disagree with the administration’s policy in this area. A lot of Democrats do.In this area: You mean the Iran deal? Yes.I would not as an Israeli be worried about the future of our relationship. I think it’s going to strengthen. Because I can speak for Congress, knowing that we have a very strong alliance. Again, that’s why I’m here (in Israel).And what about Americans generally? You mention BDS. We’re aware in Israel that there’s a battle on campus. And it’s nastier than it has been.It’s true. There is a nasty strain of anti-Semitism. You read more about it in Europe. But (in the US) this is infinitesimal. The support for Israel is deep in America. I don’t have a big Jewish diaspora in my district. But I have huge pro-Israel supporters in my district. The evangelical churches. The common American citizen understands that our ties with Israel are deep and strong, and that they’re mutual. We need Israel for our own national security. We need Israel to keep ourselves safe as well. That’s important.We have international terrorism that is threatening the civilized world. It’s threatening us. They’re coming at Israel but they’re ultimately coming for us. So we are partners in this war on terror, radical Islamic terrorism. Israel is an indispensable ally in that. Israel is on the front line in so many ways with respects to it. So (the alliance is crucial) just for security cooperation. (Additionally,) we share the same values. You are an oasis of democracy in a tough neighborhood. And it’s very important to us to keep these alliances.And you don’t think the battle over the Iran deal… You lost that battle in the House; Netanyahu failed to sway enough people (with his speech to Congress). There is a concern here that maybe Israel alienated some parts of the Democratic Party spectrum.I’m not a Democrat. I can’t necessarily speak to that. I don’t see that. I think that was a (passing) moment.I think the ballistic tests (were an early indication). I think what Iran is going to end up doing is going to make people rue the day they voted for that deal. As we move forward in the future, I think people who supported the deal are going to regret that support.You think reality is going to force…Yes. I won’t go any further than that. But I think people will regret it.So now let’s talk about this presidential race that you have.I’m neutral. (Laughs)-Of course you are. I’m used to coming to the US, with Israel in the midst of political battles and all kinds of chaos at home, and now I came to the United States…Yeah, I know.How do you think it’s going to play out? Actually in my state (of Wisconsin) on Tuesday, (there’s a crucial primary).Do you have some Wisconsin insight? Well, Cruz is doing pretty well. He’s pulling ahead in polls. Bernie might win it. The enthusiastic Democrat in Wisconsin is a pro-Bernie Democrat.Wisconsin is a fairly important signal as to whether we’re going to have an open convention or not. If Trump wins it, then he’s putting himself on a pretty good path to clinching (the nomination) — the 1,237 (delegates) before the convention. If he loses Wisconsin, there’s a two-three week gap. It makes it more likely — though I don’t know (for sure) — but it makes it more likely that it’s an open convention. Then we’ll see what happens. I’m the co-chair of the convention, so I’m perfectly neutral on this.That takes me out of the next two questions you were going to ask me. (Laughs.)-But it’s possible, isn’t it, that people might prevail upon you to…? No, I’ve already said that that’s not me.You’re not interested in being…? I decided not to run for president. I think you should run, if you’re going to be president. I think you should start in Iowa and run to the tape.So why didn’t you? Oh, lots of reasons. Phase of life: I have a young family. I thought I could make a meaningful difference where I was in Congress: At the time I was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. I focused on economic issues quite a bit. So I thought I could make a huge difference where I was, and still be the kind of dad and husband I want to be.And we had a deep bench., We had 17 people running. We had a deep bench of qualified people. So I thought we had that fairly well taken care of.What does it say about America that the Trump campaign has done as well as it has? And that the Sanders campaign has? The anti-establishment or non-establishment candidates.Deep anxiety. Our economy has been flat since the recession. We have been under 2% growth. We have 45 million people stuck in poverty. Wages are flat. And ISIS is on the rise.When we saw Paris and then San Bernardino, it really brought a wake-up call. People are really anxious on both national security and economic insecurity. They believe that the government is failing them. Because it has.I find myself giving a lot of civics lessons as I travel the country to my constituents. They think, why didn’t you stop this? Or why didn’t you do this? Which is the constitution: You know, you have to have enough votes to override a veto, to be able to pass things, to get to a filibuster. (People are unhappy) that we didn’t change or stop what had happened in the last four years.What would they have wanted done? Repeal Obamacare and fix national security.Tell us more about national security. That’s so resonant for us.I’ll give you an example. We passed a Defense Authorization Act. The guy who wrote it is here with me. Mac Thornberry, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. We passed it requiring a comprehensive plan to defeat ISIS. We still have yet to see one. That got people really anxious. Including ourselves. The Executive Branch executes foreign policy. We fund it. But we don’t think we have a comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS and to keep us safe.That, plus our border is porous. And we have those concerns. That compounds people’s concern that the government is not keeping them safe and doing what it needs to do.Did America seek to pull away from the Middle East in the hope that it wouldn’t follow you home? Fortress America? Not intervening in Syria, for example. I don’t know how to fix Syria. But don’t be surprised a few years later when people try to flee because they’re being massacred in the hundreds of thousands.Of course, looking at the refugee problem. I’ve been fairly clear in my criticism of the administration’s policy on all of these issues. Syria, of course — the red line (which President Assad crossed by gassing his people in 2013, but which President Obama allowed to pass without a promised punitive response).What we’re witnessing in some respects — not all, but many respects — is the (consequences of the) administration’s foreign policy, which I’m a strong opponent of. They’ve got their foreign policy wrong. Normally, Congress doesn’t run on foreign policy. But we think it’s risen to the level of needing attention, that it’s one of the five points that we’re going to be running on this year: economic growth; health care entitlement reform; welfare reform; foreign policy; and restoring the constitution. On foreign policy, we want to have a foreign policy doctrine and a military equipped to carry out that doctrine, to keep us safe. We don’t think we have suitable foreign policy to advance America’s interests — which, chief among them, is protecting our national security.Do you have specific suggestions on tackling Islamist terrorism — things that need to be done; that are overdue to be done? I don’t think we have a comprehensive strategy. We need a generational strategy about winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world. How do we figure that out? Tony Blair has done some great work in this area: How do we embrace moderates. How do we lead a coalition of governments in moderate nations and win hearts and minds. And to confront the madrasas, to confront the extremism, while we have a much more effective national security policy, and a military that is not being drained. I can go on about the budget with the military. We need to improve our military strength; we need more ships, we need more brigades, we need more combat-ready brigades.(We need) a foreign policy doctrine — an actual strategy to defeat ISIS which is the current problem, and a long-term strategy to confront extremism, and an engagement plan with Muslims themselves and moderate Muslim nations. And our allies in Israel are our partners in that.Anti-Semitism is on the rise. Anti-Americanism is on the rise. Terrorism is on the rise. They’re kicking out generations of young kids — look at the knife intifada you have here.Our prime minister would say it’s all part of the same thing — we’re dealing with extremists; we’re dealing with people who are being brainwashed. This is all one and the same.Yes, I see it that way. I see that we have to have a long-term strategy. My kids will be working on this — their generation. (We need) a long-term strategy to deal with this. And we don’t do that. We don’t have a current strategy to deal with ISIS right now, let alone how do we prevent the five-year old in Pakistan from becoming a radical.What do you have to say on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — an area where the Obama administration made a lot of effort and ultimately failed to achieve any kind of substantive progress — not for a lack of good intentions, I’m sure? Every administration puts a very substantial effort. We agree with the two-state solution — we agree with the goal. But you have to have the kind of security situation that you need to put this together, and you don’t have that. It’s not my place to say, but you have to have the kind of partnership in order to have a lasting peace, and you don’t have that. So, until you do, I don’t know how much progress can be made.Whereas the current administration has sought to say to Israel, we think you can afford to take more risks.I’d leave it up to your government. What we should not do are premature resolutions at the UN, if that were to come. We shouldn’t try to force Israel into an insecure position.Do you see any realistic likelihood that in the last months of this administration there might be something nasty going through the UN that America wouldn’t veto? No… I pray that there isn’t. I don’t have any reason to believe that there is. And I do know that Congress the next day would be doing something about it. We would do whatever we could from our capacity to prevent such a thing from happening. I can’t imagine the administration would do that. Then again…You’ve been wrong in the past? … There is a concern here. There is so much mutual mistrust there, that nobody is completely sure.It’s justifiable. I get it.
The end of Israeli democracy? In the cacophony of grandstanding over Israelis’ endangered liberties, one of the most profound debates in the country’s history is being missed-By Haviv Rettig Gur April 4, 2016, 8:48 pm-THE TIMES OF ISRAEL
In a recent op-ed in the Forward, Daniel Sokatch, CEO of the left-leaning US-based New Israel Fund, laid out his widely shared aspiration to rehabilitate the Israeli left from afar by flooding it with cash.“The attacks on civil society and other democratic institutions continue from year to year,” he wrote, “with some right-wing victories such as passage of the boycott law [which allows civil suits to be brought against West Bank settlement boycotts], and some defeats at the hands of Israel’s underestimated and underfunded left.”Sokatch retells the narrative now commonly accepted overseas that sees Israeli democracy in decline, if not in full-blown collapse, as once-victorious Israeli progressives are pushed back in the face of a surging chauvinist right.The evidence most often cited for this decline in Israeli liberty is the raft of right-wing bills proposed in the Knesset in recent years, including the boycott law mentioned by Sokatch.Do the bills in question – the NGO bill, the MK suspension bill, etc. – prove that there is an assault on Israeli democracy? And is this assault, as Sokatch claims, held back by the heroic efforts of an “underestimated and underfunded left?”The debate over the wisdom or perfidy of the bills themselves is a hopelessly partisan one. But this last part of the left’s narrative — the claim that the bills are being stopped by the left — is eminently testable, and sheds a great deal of light on the meaning and purpose of the bills.Much ink has been spilled on Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s NGO bill, which dramatically (and critics say unfairly) ups the public disclosure requirements for nongovernmental organizations that receive a majority of their funding from foreign governments. Just about all the groups that fit that description belong to the political left.Whether the controversial bill is good or bad, democratic or anti-, it is undeniably a far milder attempt to deal with the issue than previous proposals. In the 18th Knesset (2009-2013), Likud MK Ofir Akunis (now the minister of science) proposed a bill that would have outlawed such funding altogether, all but shuttering many far-left groups.What happened to Akunis’s proposal? Was it defeated, as Sokatch suggests, by the left? A similar question arises regarding the rightist versions of the “nation-state bill” that drew so much opprobrium in 2013 and 2014, the ones that contained much-criticized stipulations demoting the de facto status of Arabic as an official language and granting West Bank settlements constitutional protections.Where did they go? The answer would surprise many who have opined on these bills in recent years. For it wasn’t the left that stopped Akunis’s bill. It didn’t have the chance — the bill never made it to a preliminary vote in the Knesset. It was killed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, together with other coalition leaders, and not in any dramatic parliamentary showdown, or even a debate. The bill was simply excluded from the agenda because it lacked the minimum support it would have needed to even hazard a vote.The story is much the same with the nation-state bills, but this time the left’s haplessness is proven by the fact that the bills did make it to a plenum vote – where they passed.They did not become law, to be sure. They only passed a preliminary vote, and only after Netanyahu struck a compromise with their authors, including three currently serving cabinet ministers (Shaked, Ze’ev Elkin and Yariv Levin), that saw the bills killed after the vote. Under this compromise, the authors were handed the symbolic victory of a successful vote on condition that they agree to cancel their bills in favor of a more liberal Netanyahu-proposed version, one which uses equal terms to describe Israel as “Jewish” and “democratic,” leaves out any demotion of Arabic’s status and avoids the settlement question altogether.The left had a rare opportunity to embarrass not only the bills’ far-right proponents, but the prime minister himself. It tried to muster the votes — and failed. The bills were formally canceled in a vote inside the Netanyahu cabinet, on Netanyahu’s express instructions.The point of this into-the-weeds examination of the fates of those bills is clear: it is the right, not the left, that is holding back the proverbial tide.And these are not cherry-picked examples. The list of right-wing bills defeated by the right is a long one. A bill proposed by the Yisrael Beytenu party that would have instituted a death penalty for terrorists – surely an easy win in terror-afflicted Israel – was defeated 94-6 (yes, 94 to 6) in a July 2015 Knesset vote. The left, however “underestimated,” could not summon 94 votes in the 120-seat Knesset even in its most indelicate fantasies.Sokatch’s own example of the controversial 2011 “boycott law,” which made the singling out of West Bank settlements a legally actionable act of discrimination under Israel’s anti-discrimination laws, ironically disproves Sokatch’s own narrative. Foreign pundits often point to it to sustain the democracy-in-decline narrative, if only because there are so few other examples of the successful passage of a distinctly right-wing law in seven years of emphatically right-wing rule. Yet the boycott law was so defanged by the time it actually passed, with criminal sanctions excised from the final version and a high bar set for proving even civil damages, that it has yet to be enforced.It is worth dwelling on that point: five years after its passage, the boycott law has not even been tested in court – and not for lack of Israelis who say they won’t conduct commerce with settlements.And it should not go unnoticed that even after the teeth were pulled from this controversial bill, Netanyahu himself still refused to support it in the final July 2011 Knesset vote that made it law, pointedly absenting himself from the plenum (together with then-defense minister Ehud Barak).The list grows tedious – and that’s the point. Ayelet Shaked’s longstanding proposal to add a “supersession clause” in the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which would have enabled the Knesset to overrule High Court of Justice decisions, was dropped last summer, in her very first days on the job as justice minister. Her explanation: she lacked the votes to pass the measure, or even to make it worth fighting for.Just last month, Jewish Home MK Moti Yogev’s bill outlawing the broadcasting of the Muslim call to prayer on loudspeakers was withdrawn by its own author – because he could not obtain the support of the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, a cabinet committee overseen by avowed rightists (and West Bank annexationists) Shaked and Levin. A similar bill suffered a similar fate in 2014.Sokatch’s “underfunded and underestimated left” is a mirage. The left is just as ineffectual as its critics contend. And if it is the right, not the left, that holds the line against the anti-democratic surge, does that mean Israeli democracy is not, in fact, under threat? -Gimmicks-The right’s persistent habit of systematically toppling its own bills reveals the underlying gimmick that drives so much discussion about Israel on both left and right. For it is usually the rightist lawmakers, not their critics, who declare that their bills are meant to solve the supposed problem of “too much democracy,” or who say they prefer Israel’s “Jewish character” to its “democratic” one. To the left’s growing use of “democracy” as a catchword for its liberal politics, many on the right have responded by calling for “rebalancing” – i.e., weakening – that democracy.It is hard to criticize the left for its rhetoric when it is at least partly drawn from the right’s own descriptions of its intentions.In the end, the debate about Israel, both at home and among those overseas who take their cues from Israel’s domestic politics, is driven by the faux stridency of powerless demagogues, by rightists who propose unpassable bills to draw out the wrath of the left and so distinguish themselves in a crowded field — and leftists who simply have too much to gain from their hand-wringing, from foreign funders to a mobilizing ethos of victimhood, to subject it to any measure of self-criticism.Or, put another way, the frenetic rhetorical contest between left and right is essentially a media event, not a policy debate. The bills would not be proposed if the lawmaker could not be assured they would not be held responsible for their passage.On Wednesday night, September 2, 2015, in a plenum nearly empty of lawmakers, MKs Akunis of Likud and Israel Eichler of United Torah Judaism managed to inject an amendment into the new Broadcasting Authority bill that came up for a vote that evening that made it illegal for journalists in public broadcasters to express personal views on political matters. The law passed, and the unnoticed amendment became the of the law.When they noticed it the following morning, horrified political reporters took to calling it “the silencing law.”The amendment caused a triumphant uproar of victimization on the left and profound embarrassment on the right. It passed by accident, coalition leaders explained. By Sunday, when lawmakers returned from the weekend, it was Netanyahu himself who brought forward the amendment to reverse the measure. It was overturned within the week.Akunis and Eichler made weak attempts to defend the measure, but seemed more horrified that it passed than that it was overturned.These bills are intended as press releases, and it is no accident that their numbers usually swell in the run-up to right-wing primaries. They are not meant to pass. Lawmakers who propose them do not expect to find themselves responsible for the results of their passage.-Own goals-Israel’s far-left activists, who are often at the center of these left-right skirmishes, know all this – at least when they are speaking in Hebrew.In a statement emailed to reporters in January, B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, two groups funded primarily by foreign governments and thus subject to the stipulations of Shaked’s NGO bill if it passes, called the bill “an own goal for the government.”“The law won’t hurt our activities in practice,” Breaking the Silence’s CEO Yuli Novak — whose group seeks out testimony from Israeli army veterans and serving soldiers relating to human rights abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank — boasted in the Hebrew-language statement.Hagai El-Ad, Executive director of B’Tselem, another group that documents human rights abuses in the West Bank, added: “The campaign of incitement against us…has had some positive results: we are finally talking about the occupation. Thousands of Israelis have joined the organizations [that stand to be affected by the bill] recently in order to learn, listen, volunteer and contribute to the fight against the occupation.”The bill’s “practical content is sparse,” the statement went on – apparently without coordinating its message with overseas supporters like Sokatch, who are arguing otherwise – “but its symbolic significance is far-reaching. Mainly, it undermines the claims of the Israeli propaganda machine that Israel shares the values of the democratic world.”One wonders if this last part about Israel’s values shouldn’t also have been coordinated with the likes of Sokatch, whose rhetoric speaks of protecting Israel’s values, while these advocates are telling the world (and boasting to Israelis that they are doing so) that Israel lacks such values altogether.There is a message in these gaps between the Israeli activists and their overseas supporters, between the left’s vision of its role in upholding Israeli democracy and the less complimentary facts on the ground in the Knesset, between the right’s own feigned militancy and the reliability with which it then kills its own bills.In these gaps is revealed a strange truth about this debate on democracy: that it is not really a debate about democracy, but about solidarity, kinship and the social compromises on which Israeli society is constructed.-Statist, intrusive, free-Israel boasts many of the features of highly successful democracies: an open and contentious public square, free and egalitarian parliamentary elections, robust judicial recourse and oversight.But no one quite knows why.Built by East European and Muslim-world immigrants with no actual experience of democracy, the Israeli state is, on paper at least, worryingly monolithic and intrusive. The local traffic cop, the school textbook, the neighborhood rabbi, even the local ritual mikveh bath, are all appointed and administered by watchful bureaucrats in Jerusalem.For the first 29 years of the state’s existence, one party, the center-left mainstay today called the Labor Party, never lost an election. This de facto one-party regime controlled not only the security services, but the country’s largest industries, which were state-owned and -run during those early decades.There are almost no formal checks and balances between the institutions of government. The prime minister is not chosen directly by the people, but in a complicated process of parliamentary coalition-building. He or she cannot govern without a parliamentary majority. The prime minister is thus not meaningfully constrained by any American-style opposition legislature.Nor does Israel possess any clearly articulated ideology of political liberty. There was no Philadelphia Convention at Israel’s founding, no Federalist Papers, no explicit public debate about the nature and structure of the country’s political institutions. The Declaration of Independence, which refers in broad terms to notions of freedom and equality, lacks the force of law. Only in 1992 were some key rights delineated in two pseudo-constitutional “basic laws,” yet even these are in an important sense only halfheartedly constitutional. The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, which articulates fundamental rights such as bodily safety, privacy and freedom of movement, can be changed or overturned by a simple majority of MKs present in the Knesset plenum.Add to that Israel’s bitter history of near-constant warfare that gave the military a central role in the formation of national identity, and the heroicizing of military leaders that naturally flowed from this experience – indeed, add in the enormous number of generals who moved seamlessly out of uniform and into the highest elected offices in the land: Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak – and one begins to feel that it is not the purported collapse of Israeli democracy that should surprise us, but the fact that so robust a democracy ever took root here in the first place.-Why did it take root? -Runnymede-In “The Origins of Political Order,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama offers a counterintuitive retelling of the story of the birth of English democracy. The Magna Carta, signed by King John in 1215 after he lost a battle with rebellious nobles at Runnymede, is usually depicted as the beginning of the end for absolutist royal rule in England. By placing limits on the powers of the king, the “great charter” is said to mark a dramatic first step in Britain’s inexorable and inevitable democratization.For Fukuyama, this version of English political history, this vision of history as inevitably arcing toward present-day liberalism, misses the most salient factor in England’s democratic development. Britons are free today not only because the king was weakened at Runnymede, but because he was also simultaneously strengthened.The monarchy that emerged after 1215 was startlingly powerful, centralized and legitimated by its sharing of political power. By the 14th century, the English state was largely professionalized, controlled its territory to the point that it could tax it effectively, and had imposed royal courts across the land that could overturn the decisions of local lords.That it had to share its decisionmaking powers on matters of war, taxation and the like with an ever-expanding circle of English elites represented in Parliament actually empowered the monarchy as an institution.For English democracy, Fukuyama explains, did not begin in the weakening of government, but in a more complex standoff exemplified at Runnymede. The nobles could sometimes defeat the king, but not topple the monarchy. The result was a tense centuries-long equilibrium between more or less matched opponents — king vs. nobles, monarchy vs. Parliament, with no side able to comprehensively quash the other. The rights and obligations each eked out of the other were initially extracted by force, then by implicit agreement, and eventually, over the centuries, by the institutionalization of these arrangements in the peculiar unwritten traditions of Britain’s monarchic democracy.And it would not have happened without a strong king, one to whom commoners could turn for redress of grievances against the nobility, one who could unite the country in war and serve in peacetime as an embodiment of a shared national identity.The love of the British for their unelected royals — that odd phenomenon of a robustly liberal democracy pretending with all the pageantry it can muster to be a theocratic dictatorship — thus articulates something profound about the origins of English liberty. When they celebrate their monarchy, the British are not celebrating kings and queens as such, but the rule-bound, peculiarly English sort of royalty that formed one-half of that primordial political balance from which their present-day freedoms, and those of so many other nations who learned from the English example in later centuries, originally flowed.The accident-From its earliest moments, the Jewish polity in Israel was divided not merely into political camps but into distinct social, ideological and ethnic groups that usually lived apart from each other and carried on separate cultural lives.To this day, these divides play an outsized role in Israelis’ identities and voting habits. Israelis are more likely to vote according to their ethnic origins or religious observance than any clear economic or political interest. In political terms, Haredim live apart from secular Israelis — even when they live among them, such as the many Haredi families who reside in the heart of secular Tel Aviv. Villages founded by Labor socialists fifty and even a hundred years ago continue to vote Labor, even when the village in question is a West Bank settlement that present-day Labor seeks to displace. The Ashkenazi-Sephardi divide returns in force each time Israelis go to the ballot box, and continues to serve as a key predictor of voting patterns in communities throughout the country.Yet the centrifugal forces of these identity politics are kept in check by an overpowering belief among Israeli Jews, forged in the still-living memory of the brutalities of the 20th century, that they share a common fate. Most Israeli Jews are the grandchildren of refugees, and for most of them, the state serves even today as a vehicle for fulfilling the original Zionist promise of a self-reliant refuge in a cruel world.This ethos of refuge lies at the heart of Israeli solidarity. It is responsible for another trait of Israeli Jewish identity: the deep-seated taboo against intra-Jewish violence. Amid countless wars and terror attacks, bordered on all sides by an imploding, war-ravaged Arab world, Israelis usually say they find the rare instances of Jew-on-Jew violence more unsettling and traumatic than even the largest and most frightening of the wars they have fought with outsiders. The sinking of the Altalena in 1948, the 1983 killing of Peace Now activist Emil Grunzweig or the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 — all instances when Jews killed other Jews — are better known to most Israeli high schoolers than the full-blown wars that took place in those years. They are studied as watersheds of the Israeli experience because they are seen by so many Israelis as events that violated the premise of collective responsibility at the heart of the Israeli Jewish narrative.The impact of this ethos of solidarity cannot be exaggerated. If one cannot violently repress fellow Jews, one is left with an exceedingly limited number of options for political regimes. If Prime Minister David Ben Gurion could not order Israel’s security agencies to rid him of the troublesome opposition leader Menachem Begin – not only because he didn’t want to do so, but because he didn’t believe the security services would have obeyed such an order – that fact alone means Israel could not help but develop an open, self-critical political discourse, open competition between rival political camps, and the free elections that enable that competition to take place fairly and without bloodshed.The essential elements at the root of Anglo-Saxon liberties, then, were all present at the dawn of the Israeli Jewish polity: an unwinnable competition among mutually antagonistic groups shackled to each other in a unifying ethos of solidarity, a simultaneous push and pull that forces on Israel’s Jews the compromises that are the content of what Israelis call “democracy.”Israel’s democracy, like Britain’s, is thus in a deep sense accidental, organic, rooted as much in the collectivist instincts of this refugee nation as in any self-conscious notions of individualism or political liberty.These compromises are evident everywhere in Israeli society and politics.When it comes to religion and family law, for example, Israeli Jews are subject to an explicitly illiberal rabbinic court system that unapologetically denies the right to marry to hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Yet the vast majority of Israeli Jews live free and unfettered family lives, marry whom they wish and even enjoy judicially recognized cohabitation rights for gays. They are able to do those things through the straightforward expedient of simply ignoring the rabbinate. In fact, there is an unspoken contract between Israel’s competing Jewish tribes that permits the rabbinate to be as stifling as it wishes on paper as long as it does not make the mistake of attempting to impose itself on Israelis’ lives in reality. The most illiberal family law system in the free world thus rests tenuously atop an essentially liberal and accepting society.Similarly, when asked to produce a detailed analysis of the “nation-state” proposals of 2014, one of Israel’s most renowned public intellectuals, the law scholar Ruth Gavison, recommended shelving the various bills and warned Israeli leaders against engaging so explicitly with the question of Israel’s national identity. Her reason: Israelis inherited from their founders a powerful vision for their country, but its power “lies in its vagueness. A Jewish nation-state law may upset the balance between elements crucial for maintaining the vision as a whole.”Israel’s identity, Gavison argued, should not be articulated too specifically. Such decisiveness risks upsetting the underlying social tensions from which the nation’s liberties ultimately flow.This analysis of the roots of Israeli democracy also sheds new light on the nature of the country’s political system. It is true that there is no meaningful balance of power between the executive and legislative branches, but within the Knesset itself, nationally elected party lists, each representing a social subgroup of Israeli society, have proven incredibly effective at holding each other in check, a skill helped by the fact that no group is large enough to wield power alone.So while it is true, as noted above, that the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty can be overturned by a simple majority in the Knesset plenum, that formal fragility hides the deeper resilience of Israelis’ rights. At the end of the day, the basic law has not been overturned. Too many camps in this fraught tapestry of a society see in the law a defense of their own rights, and so will not join any coalition that seeks to overturn it.Israel’s is a pragmatic democratic tradition, where democracy is seen as a solution to a specific and longstanding problem of social division and mutual dependence. It is more often viewed by Israelis as a mechanism for ensuring Jewish solidarity and survival than as a moral imperative in its own right.-The missing left-Beneath the demagoguery of the right’s purposefully offensive bills and the left’s self-righteous howls of oppression there is a second conversation as profound as any in Israel’s history.Many of the activists in groups such as Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem are engaged in an explicit challenge to the standing Israeli notions of “democracy.” For them, and for many others on the editorial pages of Haaretz or the rallies of the Hadash or Meretz parties, “democracy” has come to mean almost exactly the opposite of what most Israelis understand by the term: it is the very act of defying the Israeli Jewish ethos of solidarity.This far-left blames that ethos for the paralysis of Israeli politics on an untold number of issues, from the continued occupation of the Palestinians to the continued denial of formal religious liberties. Faced with these injustices, some of them only on paper and some of them very real indeed, these activists have little patience for “accidental” Israeli freedoms that flow from inchoate social compromises.They want explicit legal protections, constitutionally articulated liberalism and a universalist civic politics to replace the nationalist sensibilities that today drive the Israeli body politic.It is not hard to understand why they cause such furor in Israel, or why they are so reviled. For their opponents, especially on the right, this effort to dismantle Jewish solidarity amounts to an attack against the heart of Jewish survival — and of Israeli democracy as well. Solidarity, not liberalism, saved the Jews of Israel from the vicissitudes of the 20th century. Solidarity, not liberalism, lies at the root of both Jewish national independence and Israeli domestic liberties. For many Israelis, those who would shift the foundations of Israeli politics away from that solidarity are in an important sense dislodged from the Israeli experience.That their NGOs are mostly funded by foreign governments and so much of their advocacy is focused abroad — indeed, that they are so influential overseas despite being so utterly marginal at home — only reinforces this view. And, of course, it is no accident that the right, via the NGO bill and other measures, focuses its campaign on this estrangement and away from the content of their criticism.This branch of the left cannot win this fight, not because it is wrong – there is no claim being made here about which side is morally superior – but because its defiance of the underlying ethos of Israeli Jewish solidarity drives it inevitably away from the very body politic it seeks to change.Nowhere is this made clearer than in recent attempts by left-wing former security chiefs to defend Breaking the Silence.In December, retired IDF major general Amiram Levin took out an ad in Haaretz in which he insisted that soldiers must be encouraged “to speak out without fear, in the IDF and in Israeli society,” about their experiences in the West Bank. Levin then added in parentheses – the very presence of parentheses in such an ad speaks volumes – “(and only in the IDF and Israeli society).”Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin expressed similar sentiments in a Facebook post that month, praising soldiers who come forward with their moral qualms, and praising Breaking the Silence, “even if they can make us angry, even if they are sometimes inaccurate or not doing their jobs correctly,” as providing an “important mirror to our actions.”He then took the trouble to note: “I don’t like their activity abroad.”Neither Levin nor Diskin was defending Breaking the Silence. They were defending the act of dissent. They share the right’s criticism of the group even in their defense of it, but spoke out because of a larger fear: that what Breaking the Silence is doing right — encouraging IDF combat veterans to tell their experiences — would become conflated with what Breaking the Silence is doing wrong in their view — its abandonment of Israeli solidarity for foreign shores.Here lies the danger for Sokatch, for opposition leader Isaac Herzog, and for anyone else who seeks to rehabilitate an Israeli left that has not won an election in 17 years. As a matter of political strategy, not merely of ethics, they cannot change Israel by scorning it. The left’s political prospects — and perhaps, ironically, Israeli democracy with it, for what is a democracy in which only one side can win elections? — are far more endangered by the prospect of being identified with the far left’s rejection of Israeli Jewish solidarity than by any rightist lawmaker’s propagandizing.Israeli democracy cannot be taken for granted. But those who would slander it as weak and tottering, or seek to reshape it in their own image, owe it – and us – the courtesy of first judging it on its own terms.
