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Evelyn Gordon

They may actually make war with Iran less likely because they send the vital message that if Tehran attacks Israel, Jerusalem will hit back—and hard.
The center-right’s support plunged between April and September partly because Benjamin Netanyahu, for the first time, adopted undemocratic tactics. Treating all Israeli Arabs as enemies also didn’t help.
Without it, many rightists would have felt that April’s election was stolen from them. That would have undermined their faith in the democratic process.
It’s time for the world to choose: Either admit that the Palestinians aren’t actually refugees or finally start treating them as real refugees by granting them the basic right of resettlement.
Letting U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar enter would have sent the opposite message—that their desire to erase Israel isn’t beyond the pale, but merely a legitimate political disagreement. That’s why Israel had to bar them.
Most Israeli Arabs shun violence. Indeed, just last month, defense officials reported that terrorist activity among Israeli Arabs—never high to begin with—has dropped sharply.
On the fundamental issue that has preserved the Jewish people for millennia—the binding nature of “halachah”—the Conservatives are formally on the Orthodox side of the divide. In a world where personal autonomy increasingly reigns supreme, that’s no small thing.
The true measure of whether a democracy is functioning properly isn’t whether problems exist; they always will. Rather, it’s whether democracy’s self-correcting mechanisms are working effectively to mitigate those problems.
Palestinians’ rights matter when targeted by Israel, but not when targeted by the Palestinian Authority. And Israeli rights never matter, except when violated by Israel.
Even if Palestinian statehood isn’t imminent, economic development now would increase the feasibility of any future state. So why is the Palestinian Authority refusing to go to Bahrain to discuss such development?
Too many legislators and voters have seen policies they cared about nixed merely because unelected justices or an unelected attorney general decided to substitute their own policy judgments for those of the elected government.
Expecting other countries to go from having never even considered moving their embassies to actually doing so in just 12 months was fatuous. But they have gone from a situation in which recognizing Jerusalem was unthinkable to one in which it’s being actively debated.