Newsletter
Newsletter Support JNS

Evelyn Gordon

The deal involved changes to Basic Laws that may have been necessary in these political circumstances. But any country tinkers with longstanding constitutional arrangements at its own peril.
Locke and other political theorists of his era understood something many people today have forgotten—that the Hebrew Bible offers a wealth of insights into politics.
Not content with merely refusing to solve the crisis, Hamas is actively making it worse. A major factor in the crisis has been the overload of patients caused by Hamas’s insistence on holding violent mass protests near the Israeli border every week for almost a year now.
Horrible as Riyadh’s behavior is, the Houthis are worse. Thus by ending support for the Saudi coalition, American would empower an even greater evil.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as two Israeli leftists recently admitted, is far more moderate than his hardline image. But by portraying him as an extremist, the left has tarnished Israel among both American Jews and the Democratic Party.
Asking America to keep soldiers anywhere for Israel’s sake violates a sine qua non of both the Israeli ethos and the bilateral alliance—that Israel defends itself by itself.
Since most American Jews lean left, it’s understandable that they would rather focus on right-wing anti-Semitism, which comes from the enemy’s camp, than left-wing and Muslim anti-Semitism, which come from their political allies.
Newly appointed justices are starting to rebel against the status quo; the winner is Israeli democracy.
There isn’t enough public support for an operation that could end Hamas terror completely. Thus the choice is between two short-term fixes, both of them bad.