If Russia were to initiate a war in the near future, the US and European states would not be able to deny they were responsible for it breaking out in the first place. The US, which has made three serious political mistakes since successfully defeating communism without having to fight a war, deserves the most blame.

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The first mistake was avoiding adopting a Marshall Plan for Russia, even though that country needed one more than Germany. Unlike Germany, Russia has no democratic-capitalist traditions. The International Monetary Fund's demand Russia operate according to the usual standards once communism fell played a central role in the oligarch takeover of national assets and its transformation into a faltering capitalist democracy.

The second mistake was kicking Russia out of the Group of Eight nations in 2018. Regardless of whether or not Russia a faltering, and perhaps even failed, democracy, it is nevertheless a world power: Its territory is twice the size of the United States; it has unparalleled mineral reserves; and unlike Western democracies, which in the spirit of "cancel culture" erase their past and national identity, Russians are proud of their identity and their national enlistment to destroy the Nazis and would be willing to enlist toward such an effort now.

The third and most significant mistake was when the US refrained from dismantling the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was established to contend with the ideology threatening the West that held that communism's success was contingent on the worldwide adoption of communism. Following the collapse of communism, and given the current threats, it would have been fitting to replace NATO – which was aimed at protecting Europe from a threat that has since passed – with a new defensive framework to protect the West in its entirety, including Russia, which is its flesh and blood.

Following communism's collapse, the conflict of interests between Russia and the West are largely economical and not ideological as in the past. Unlike ideological conflicts of interest, economic conflicts of interest can and must be settled through diplomatic negotiations.

Russia is the only Western state to border two new threats: Iran and Chinese nationalism.  That is why it serves as the first line of defense against them. For this reason, a Russia that is strong militarily, economically, socially, and politically is capable of fulfilling its role of defending the West, which is the West's primary interest. The Nazis and communism were defeated by US-led efforts. As a result, Washington should have ensured it could successfully fulfill this role. By pushing Russia away, the West is forcing Moscow into the arms of its enemies, who are more than happy to oblige as doing so means moving the front lines from the heart of Asia to the heart of Europe.

In statesmanship, there are diplomatic breakthroughs and there is doubling down. NATO's perpetuation is an example of doubling down on a path that is no longer necessary. Like the late US President Harry Truman, Joe Biden seems to be the bureaucratic, doubling down type. He could nevertheless go down in history as a great US president if he prevents the unnecessary war that is about to break out by immediately announcing his intention of replacing NATO with a new organization whose goals and structures would be developed with Russia's cooperation once tensions have calmed.

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The COVID-19 pandemic, which is forcing humanity to confront difficult moral issues, highlights this weak point of the democratic method. For example, Britain, the mother of the Western democracies and a paradigm of well-established democracy, enabled its hospitals to admit prospective large numbers of coronavirus cases by closing them to elderly people and transferring already hospitalized elderly people to old age homes – all without ascertaining ahead of time whether they had been infected with the virus.

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And so, in the old age homes, thousands of members of the generation that had provided Britain with the power and capability to contend with such a crisis died – not necessarily from the virus, but from other ailments and conditions that required hospitalization. This is particularly ironic as it transpired that occupancy in British hospitals, even at the height of the pandemic, was lower than normal, not higher.

"I am in favor of a Jewish democracy. 'Western' is not enough. … We are not required to identify with the West. … We have a special Jewish character – which should be the legacy of the world. … The value of human life and human freedom runs deeper among us, in accordance with the teachings of the prophets, than in Western democracy. … I want our future to be built on prophetic ethics."

Seeking to ensure that Israel would not fall prey to the weaknesses of Western democracy, Ben-Gurion made sure to include in Israel's Declaration of Independence the fundamental values of the state, and to assert that "the State of Israel … will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel."

The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty states: "Fundamental human rights in Israel are founded upon recognition of the value of the human being, the sanctity of human life, and the principle that all persons are free; these rights shall be upheld in the spirit of the principles set forth in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel" [emphasis added]. Thus the morality of the prophets, which is an integral part of the law of the state, was made binding like the law itself, and Israel was created as a Jewish democracy by law.

The pandemic gave Israeli democracy an opportunity to highlight the advantages of being a democracy with a special morality whose values are grounded in its constitution.

Maintaining social distance, which is a critical aspect of checking the spread of the pandemic, clashes head-on with fundamental democratic values including the right to demonstrate, freedom of movement, and freedom of worship. As a Jewish democracy, it could be expected that Israel would contend with the pandemic as mandated by the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, and that, in light of the values of its Jewish morality in an emergency situation that endangers life, it would subordinate democratic values to morality and prohibit large gatherings that enable the virus to spread.

In fact, Israel left the right to hold large-scale demonstrations in place, thereby showing a blatant preference for the values of democracy – which, from a moral standpoint, is a blank slate – over the fundamental human right to life, which, according to Israeli law, takes precedence over the right to dignity, freedom or any other right.

Because an emergency situation requires social mobilization and a deepening of the commitment to protect others from harm, it entails prioritizing duties over rights. The great democratic celebration of the right to demonstrate in Israel falsely signaled that the emergency had come to an end, paving the way to a mistaken state of calm and the rights attendant on it. In recent weeks, these rights have been drained to the lees in all sectors, leading to a loss of control over the spread of the pandemic and to the possibility that Israel will undergo a calamity similar to what Western democracy, which lacks an established morality, underwent during the first wave.

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Thus, in a difficult hour of emergency, both secular Jews, whose grandparents laid down the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, and Haredi Jews, who are commanded to "keep thy soul diligently" and "live by them," are flouting the laws of the state and of Jewish morality, as well as the precepts of the Jewish religion in the vein of "What's mine is mine and what's yours is yours."

This constitutes a serious national failure. The need of the hour is to investigate the reasons for this and overcome it as quickly as possible.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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But it was the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty (1992) that dealt the most severe blow to Israeli democracy. The law was enacted under the influence of the European perception of the "other," which was spearheaded by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in an attempt to prevent attacks on "others" who are not "like us," which is what paved the way for the Holocaust. Levinas never envisioned the danger from the other end. Like with autoimmune diseases, giving priority to the "other" over oneself merely because they are different, persecuted, poor, or weak – even if they are criminals or even despicable terrorists – turned into a badge of morality for Europe.

Judaism expresses how others should be treated in the prescript to "love your neighbor as yourself" and "you shall love [the stranger] as yourself (Leviticus 19:18,34)." Like other moral values in Judaism, the obligation to love the other stems from altruism that also exists in nature, which is designed to protect not only the person who is helped but the person who helps them. The European version of how the "other" should be treated turned the teleological, beneficial assistance into a form of altruism that threatens the existence of the giver – making it suicidal and immoral. Zionist thinker and author Ahad Ha'am (Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg) opposed that version of altruism, claiming that he had "no right" to destroy his life for the sake of another's life.

From the earliest days of the Zionist enterprise, Jewish morality has flowed through the veins of Israeli democracy. David Ben-Gurion argued that western democracy was not enough for Israel, that the state had special Jewish content that should be shared with the world, and that the values of life and human liberty ran deeper "with us" than in western democracy.

The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty instilled the European perception of morality into Israeli democracy. Like any living thing that is distressed when it receives an infusion of the wrong type of blood, this "transfusion" caused a deep crisis in our democracy.

That moral crisis lies at the heart of the rift between the Supreme Court and the elite that supports it and the rest of the citizens of Israel. The "man on the street" senses that the morality which stems from the perception of "human dignity" goes against the perception that "truth springs up from the earth," and "righteousness smiles down from heaven (Psalm 85:11)." For that reason, amendments to the law alone will not suffice to resolve the crisis.

The damage caused must be addressed in terms of morality, by a renewal of a democratic, ideological debate that will make the "outlook" that guides the justice of the Supreme Court transparent. Their current "worldview" must be replaced by what the founders of Israeli democracy intended – Jewish morality, according to which lawmakers and judges alike will operate.

We need brave public leaders and intellectuals to lead a democratic discussion about the values of this kind of morality and how they can be adjusted to modern-day law – people like the ones who put together the Kinneret Convention. It would be better if this came before any constitutional reform, which the moral reform might render superfluous.

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The first is the inhuman monster that has been built in the Gaza Strip, which – like its twin in Lebanon – combines rocket fire against the Israeli homefront; endless obstacles designed to ensure that Israeli ground maneuvers rack up heavy casualties; and "human shields." All these are meant to keep the IDF from employing massive pre-emptive counterfire to "soften" enemy targets and minimize casualties among its forces, as well as keep the fighting short.

These monsters should have been wiped out in their inception through pre-emptive strikes, like Israel's strikes to take out the nuclear reactors in Iraq and Syria before they became operational. But the IDF preferred to let the rockets "rust in warehouses" because at the same time the enemy's capabilities were changes, so was the IDF itself.

Starting at the end of the 1990s, the IDF cast aside its doctrine of swift victories, which was based on a philosophy taken from nature, and donned a new set of emperor's clothes in the form of a doctrine sewn from existentialism, in which there is no one objective truth that must meet the burden of scientific proof. In this thinking, people "make the truth" and can base that truth on stories and legends, and change is as they see fit.

Since, according to this philosophy, there is no one truth, there can be no distinction between good and bad, between just and evil people, or between friends and enemies. There is also no justification to go to war since in the absence of truth and justice, killing the enemy and even casualties on our side – without which we cannot win – are immoral. The IDF espoused a new doctrine that was supposed to deter the enemy and cause it to give up, even without its physical abilities to wage war being eradicated. The enemy was supposed to give up simply because of shock and awe caused by fireworks displays of advanced technology and intelligence, amazing in their precision and power. The result: an exhausting war of attrition that has gone on since 2002, which Israel can't stop like it stopped wars of attrition in the past.

Given the failure of this doctrine in the 2006 Second Lebanon War, one might have expected the IDF to take off its new clothes and readopt its traditional approach of quick victories. Operation Protective Edge in 2014 exposed the fact that the IDF had not followed the government's instructions, which were, in a nutshell: Get back to basics.

Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi is the kid who after two decades of unwillingness to say that the emperor is naked, has stepped in to save Israel from its current impasse. At his swearing-in ceremony, he announced his intention to restore the IDF to an "effective, lethal, and innovative army." Later, he issued instructions to put together a strategy for an unequivocal win. However, this obviously can't happen as long as the IDF is clinging to a philosophy that rejects anything unequivocal.

Kochavi's mission is as hard as that of the first IDF chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Yaakov Dori, who in the midst of the War of Independence was forced to turn an army that had been prepared to battle gangs of marauders into an army that could fight other armies. As a lesson from the high price paid in 1948, we must give the IDF the time it needs to implement the "Kochavi revolution." Otherwise, Israel could find itself drawn into a long period of killing and destruction. That is the second reason why Israel should hold off, for now.

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Communism purported to end this suffering by eradicating the bourgeoisie and nationalism, and to this end, it stole private property and stripped people of their national heritage. Anti-Semitism was used to erase Jewish culture, which was perceived as a foundation of the world's old moral structure. The communist threat toward the bourgeoisie and nationalism was the main culprit behind the flood of populism in the previous century, which instead of sparking a defense of nationalism gave birth to the rise of fascism, which culminated in Nazism. In order to impose their "morality," the Nazis sought to eradicate Judaism by perpetrating genocide against the Jewish people.

According to the essentialism of today, mankind's distress is caused by borders separating states and nations, but also cultures, ethnicities and genders. Because these borders are man-made and do not reflect essential differences, essentialism strives to tear them down. To realize the vision of kneading society into a mush of borderless humanity, essentialism has also conjured a new morality: love of the "other" precedes love of oneself.

The principle of altruism, as stated in the old commandment to "love thy neighbor as thyself," is altruism created by nature for all its creatures, which protects not only the needy but the generous and helpful as well. But there is a point in which giving ceases to be a moral act. Essentialism turns this useful and rewarding generosity into an act of suicidal altruism.

The politics of multinationalism, multiculturalism and free immigration obligate the giver to surrender his identity in terms of gender, nationality, culture and history. In response, waves of popular resistance have swelled to create the Brexit crisis in the United Kingdom, the wall controversy in the United States, and yellow-vest protests in France, and have strengthened right-wing nationalist parties across Europe. For now, the nature of this populistic wave is oriented toward the defense of the nation-state and therefore is also friendly to Israel. But with the continuing ascent of essentialism, it is also possible that it, too, will become offensive in nature and attack, with its leaders propagating utopian illusions akin to Nazism.

Similar to communism, essentialism cannot come to terms with the existence of the old moral order. However, since classic anti-Semitism is currently out of fashion, it is channeling its hatred of Jews to the State of Israel, whose insistence on constitutionally defending itself as a nation-state is a veritable call to arms.

Just as anti-Semitism functioned as a bridge between the contrasting utopias of communism and Nazism – today, too, it bridges between enlightened essentialist liberals and boorish Muslim extremists in their joint struggle to delegitimize Israel. Jews weren't able to defend themselves against these previous utopias and the waves of anti-Semitism they produced. The fight against the current wave of anti-Semitism needs to be spearheaded by Israel. It must focus this fight on essentialism, which is breeding populistic and anti-Semitic backlashes. Formulating a strategic plan to wage a cultural battle of this sort is an unprecedented intellectual challenge shared by Israel and Jews in the Diaspora.

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The IDF's traditional war doctrine is predicated on forcing the enemy to surrender after defeating it on its own territory with nimble land forces capable of encircling and threatening to destroy it. What the new IDF chief, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, has described is a new type of doctrine that sees the military defeat the enemy primarily through destroying its military resources and personnel on the ground (and under it), from afar, by means of lethal precision weaponry born of Israel's technological advantages.

The focus on efficiency and lethality expresses the aspiration to emerge victorious as quickly as possible, without having to pay too high of a price and with higher levels of precision. Precision is necessary, among other reasons, to neutralize the main threat posed by the terrorist armies' only game-changing weapon, that is to say the civilian population. Due to the desire to avoid civilian casualties, the IDF thus far has not used its full might to end campaigns quickly and shorten the period of suffering for Israeli and enemy civilians alike.

Building this new army, it would appear, presents Kochavi with several challenges. The first among them is the urgent need for a budget that can limit the vulnerable transition period between the IDF's new procurements, during which the army must incorporate the resources derived from the previous doctrine with the resources required to implement the new doctrine.

Unlike in the past, increasing the budget is necessary for the IDF to manage a simultaneous war footing: a defensive posture alongside the ability to immediately launch offensive campaigns on multiple sub-fronts to annihilate the enemy's ability to fight. Linear victory, as was the case in the past when the IDF concentrated its resources on one front and then moved them to another after securing the former is an economic use of those resources, but tends to expand the length of the war and, consequently, the scope of devastation and civilian casualties as well.

The second challenge facing the new chief of staff is to eliminate the air force's monopoly on precision, long-range "lethality" and to disperse this capability among all the branches.

His third challenge is to breathe new life into the eroded ethos of "duty." He has to motivate and incentivize talented officers to stay in the army and forego enticing and often better paying civilian avenues.

The fourth challenge is defining the role of the reserve army in the new war. Galvanizing and updating the reserve force is imperative if he wants to fix the terrible impression left by the outgoing IDF ombudsman in his reports on the state of the army's emergency weapons warehouses and military training according to the old war doctrine.

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From its inception, American democracy has been entrenched in the stabilizing force of liberalism, even in the face of immense crises. European liberalism permeated American liberalism and rattled this stability, and now Trump is trying to curb this trend.

European liberalism is different from the American version. In the spirit of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, it is predicated on "the right ideals" – basic Utopian assumptions concocted through human imagination. The first ideal is that human beings are born equal. This narrative has no basis in nature, which produces humans different in kind and character. In Europe, the effort to force equality and uniformity on naturally different people gave rise to social experiments, from the French Revolution to socialism, communism and Nazism, which arose as an antithesis to the aspiration for equality. In this century, Europe's short-term historical memory has led it to adopt multinationalism and multiculturalism, Utopian ideologies that have revived memories of the Weimar Republic period.

Unlike European liberalism striving to create a "new" man, American liberalism, similar to biblical morality, accepts man's limitations and the fact that human beings are born different. Seeking to emulate society's "natural state," the morality behind this liberalism is derived from the axiomatic, eternal and harmonious laws of nature. The purpose of adhering to these principles (unlike Utopian principles) is to foster stability and harmony, similar to that found in nature, between people as well. This harmony is justice – the alternative to equality that cannot be created between people because they are different. (We must not conflate equality of opportunity, which is desirable, with equality of outcome.)

More than its devotion to liberty (to which the Europeans are also devoted in their own misguided way), American democracy owes its stability to the education from birth of the average American (Republican and Democrat alike) to also uphold the principles of truth (there's only one), justice (or "fairness" in the American sense), and peoplehood (patriotism) which the Europeans hold in contempt. This practice has helped the Americans avoid the terrible consequences of Europe's social experiments.

Trump's fight against fake news and political correctness (the legalization of lies), his push to ensconce his country's internal and external economy on fairness and reciprocity, and his prioritization of patriotism over cosmopolitanism, are expressions of his desire to refashion American democracy on the traditional principles of American liberalism.

The tense atmosphere Trump has created to save America from a fate similar to that of Europe is currently far more dangerous than the tensions that bred the Civil War. At that time, the discord stemmed from the argument over the limits of human liberty; today's tensions stem from a type of Huntingtonian clash of liberal civilizations that differ across their entire spectrum of principles and beliefs about their origins.

The Americans must decide between traditional liberalism which has safeguarded long-term stability, and a Utopian liberalism, which shuns the laws of nature and thus always ends in disaster.

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However, in its earliest years, the IDF was also forced to wage lengthy wars of attrition. It eventually put an end to these, beating the enemy and destroying its fighting capability to secure quiet that would last as long as possible.

Such periods of quiet were reached after Operation Kadesh in 1956, which ended the war of attrition waged by the fedayeen; after the War for Peace in the Galilee or First Lebanon War of 1982, which put an end to the Katyusha missile threat from Lebanon; and after Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, which seriously checked the momentum of the Second Intifada.

Today, too, Israel is waging a war of attrition, this time against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

But this particular war of attrition has turned into the longest in Israel's history because of Israel's reluctance to finish it with a decisive operation.

The reason for the dawdling has to do with the tactics of Hamas' military wing, which present a threat to Israel. Its armaments include a series of fortified intelligent systems located deep inside tunnels and in the heart of a dense civilian population. Moreover, Hamas has a variety of weapons it could use against the Israeli homefront while simultaneously exacting a heavy toll on any IDF ground forces sent into the Gaza Strip.

Hamas' approach has "skewered" Israel, as military theorist B.H. Liddell Hart put it, on the horns of a triple dilemma: long-term attrition against civilians if Israel maintains its current reality of keeping its soldiers back from occupying Gaza; heavy casualties among IDF soldiers over a long period if they are sent in to put an end to the attacks on Israeli civilians; or preventing heavy military and civilian losses through a massive remote destruction of the enemies' systems, equipment and operatives, which would entail extensive casualties among the Gaza civilian population used by Hamas as human shields, and could hurt Israel's international standing as a result.

Hamas has turned the residents of Gaza into pawns in a powerful game and is exploiting them to create a balance of power. This has neutralized the ability of the IDF – one of the most advanced armies in the world – to act and has forced Israel into this brutal war of attrition, which cannot be stopped at a "reasonable" price, as previous wars of attrition could.

Israel cannot live with the strategic helplessness that has been forced upon it by this two-bit terrorist organization and simply wait for a terrorist attack large enough to justify a major operation in Gaza with consequently heavy casualties among civilians in Gaza. Hamas is apparently calculating enough to avoid supplying Israel with such a justification.

We also cannot hide from the fact that rather than beating and deterring Hamas, Hamas is beating and deterring us.

Israel's strength has not been eliminated through military, political or economic means, but through Hamas' cynical manipulation of the moral rules that prohibit harming civilians.

However, Israel can rope in the moral system that is being used against it and work its way out of the trap. The key lies in addressing the moral question of whose lives take precedence: theirs or ours? And by answering it decisively: "Ours!"

Once free from the trap it has fallen into, and with universal morality on its side, Israel needs to declare loudly and clearly that the lives of Israelis are more important to it than the lives of its enemies, and needs to launch two operations. The first would be a military one, involving a rapid, temporary ground invasion into the Gaza Strip along routes previously cleared of enemy fire, thus avoiding heavy IDF casualties and preventing unnecessary losses of civilian lives or property. The goal would be to destroy Hamas' ability to fire rockets at Israel and wipe out the core of Hamas' wild leadership.

The second operation should be a cultural and moral one, with the goal of bringing the conscience of Israel's democratic allies in line with universal morality, according to which the entire world should take action against immoral and unconscionable terrorism.

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With that, it's also worthy to note that the IDF's past achievements weren't predicated merely on the supreme readiness of its troops, for whom military service is mandatory and reserve duty is brief and temporary, nor on fully stacked, perfectly organized warehouses even. The army's successes were influenced, first and foremost, by its combat doctrine and its strategic, operative approach, from which operational plans are formed.

The author of the report, outgoing IDF Ombudsman Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brik, hails from the 1973 Yom Kippur War generation, which is still convinced that the IDF's numerous losses in that war stemmed from an intelligence failure and because the emergency warehouses weren't prepared for war. This conclusion clearly influences Brik's report.

Although a professional analysis of 1973 war shows the IDF's losses stemmed mainly from a poor operative approach – which would have been very up-to-date had it still been 1967, when Israel didn't have any strategic depth and thus had to "quickly take the fight to the other side." This approach became invalid after the Six-Day War, when Israel gained a modicum of strategic depth.

After 1967 the army should have adopted a defensive operative approach, based on containing the attacker in our territory with a standing force in the first phase and defeating him with reserve forces in the second phase. This approach would have mitigated the considerable dependency on an intelligence warning and would have allowed the reserves to organize properly and less haphazardly in the emergency warehouses. More importantly, this approach would have spared the lives of countless soldiers who fell defending territory that we should have let the enemy conquer temporarily in order to absorb the initial blow and only then force the fight back to his soil.

Similar to the aftermath of the Six-Day War, today, too, the IDF is facing a new operational reality – one which neuters its traditional combat doctrine. For this reason, the army must alter its operative and strategic approach, along with its action plans and force building aims.

The IDF's traditional combat doctrine was geared toward quickly and "cheaply" defeating mobile state army's like itself, due to its superior ability to maneuver quickly on land.  Stationary terrorist armies, which have replaced mobile state armies, and the array of ground obstacles they have built – fortified, booby-trapped, underground and armed with missiles pointed at the Israeli home front – have almost completely eradicated the open spaces of maneuverability in the arena.

This operational reality is intended to drag the IDF into a series of drawn-out battles to fatigue both our ground forces and home front immensely. In the past, the IDF acted in a linear fashion: defense followed by a transition to offense; first securing victory in the primary arena and then moving on to the remaining arenas. However, the current enemy's counterstrike capability, which allows him to attack Israel from all arenas simultaneously, obligates the IDF to replace its linear fighting model with simultaneous dual combat: offense that is waged parallel to defense, with decisive blows delivered quickly and simultaneously across all arenas.

For this purpose, the army must develop new, multiforce methods for routing the enemy, as an alternative to ground maneuverability. Formulating this innovative, necessary approach and building the ability to carry it out practically is a professional and intellectual challenge of paramount proportions, and we must hope the IDF has already begun tackling it.

Brik's recommendation to check the readiness of the troops and emergency warehouses should be respected. However, the need for a thorough, theoretical examination of the army's combat doctrine is no less urgent.

If it is found that the current doctrine and approach fulfill the IDF's duty to neutralize the threat of a prolonged war of attrition, we can be certain that the next war will be won quickly and "cheaply," similar to 1967, even if the troops and warehouses aren't at maximum readiness. On the other hand, mistaken perceptions, similar to those behind the IDF's preparations in 1973, will assuredly result in heavy losses and protracted war, even if the troops and warehouses are fully ready.

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They want to abolish the law, or at the very least add an equality clause to it. Now that Israel's identity as a Jewish state has been buttressed by the nation-state law, we can discuss this righteous, longed-for equality through the prism of Jewish liberal values.

Progressive liberalism and Jewish liberalism, which preceded the former by thousands of years, have a shared goal: to prevent subjugation and tyranny – often the byproduct of the inherent inequality between people. The respective methods of achieving this goal, however, are completely different.

Progressive liberalism strives to prevent tyranny by imposing equality onto people who are naturally different. This is a utopian ideology, and similar to other such utopian ideologies it is self-contradictory. The inability to reconcile the contradictions predisposes these utopias to tyranny, for instance in Bonapartism, Communism and Nazism. Perhaps society is now on the same slippery slope in the name of multiculturalism, the flagship of European progressive liberalism.

Jewish liberalism, on the other hand, is predicated on a morality based on righteousness (people get what they deserve). It seeks to prevent tyranny by creating social harmony, something akin to the harmony found in nature, despite its variant components. To create a similar harmony among principally different human beings, Jewish moralism drew its values (and later its laws) from the laws of nature, which are eternal and do not contradict one another. Not only is this designed to prevent tyranny, it is meant to ensure that the harmony forged between people by token of this moralism withstands the test of time.

Equality is not a foreign value to Judaism; it is a central tenant. We are all equally obliged to obey the law, which in turn must hold everyone, rich and poor alike, accountable. People must be given equality of opportunity, while their inborn differences must be allowed to dictate who wins the race for the accumulation of possessions. As the saying goes, "Truth springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven" [Psalms 85:11]. In this spirit, achieving righteousness means that as in nature, people must also adhere to a single truth and consistently aspire to reveal it, understand it and prevent its forgery.

Progressive liberalism absolved itself from making this effort by sufficing with a relative truth, a narrative and political correctness. It adheres to "truths" that preclude the possibility of a just life and prevent honest social discourse.

This fundamental difference between the two liberalisms explains the dialogue of the deaf taking place in Israeli society today. Some people have exchanged their morality of Jewish righteousness for the morality of progressive equality. This is also evident in Israel's dialogue with certain segments of Western democracies, whose promises to treat Israel righteously are conditioned on Israel's application of their progressive equality – even toward those who openly act to destroy it militarily, economically and legally.

Returning to the Druze protests: They should be assessed through the prism of Jewish liberalism, in which the foremost principle is adherence to truth. Indeed, the large role that the relatively small Druze minority has played in enhancing Israel's security and its economic achievements means their claims of discrimination are correct and justified.

However, rather than repair this injustice by abolishing the nation-state law, which is what they have asked for, this morally obligates the government to amend the discrimination. This it can do by recompensing the Druze with special legislation in their favor, similar to the "Law of Return" which for the purpose of justice "discriminates" in favor of the Jewish majority.

The nation-state law, whose ratification will hopefully lead to justice for the Druze minority, should also substantially change the manner in which social discourse is conducted in Israel. As in the past, this discourse should be guided by intellectuals and by the principles of pursuing justice and upholding obligations, instead of as at present, when the discourse is dominated by jurists and calls for equal rights.

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