The biggest problem isn't that many important issues will perforce go unaddressed, though that's inevitable given the compromises required when neither bloc can govern on its own. Nor is it the risk that the government will be dysfunctional even on "consensual" issues like rescuing the economy from the coronavirus crisis, though this risk is real, since both sides' leaders will have veto power over every government decision.

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Rather, it's the cavalier way that Israel's Basic Laws are being amended to serve the particular needs of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his new partner, Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz.

Though Israel's Supreme Court wrongly claims the Basic Laws are a constitution, they were never intended as such by the parliaments that passed them. Indeed, some were approved by a mere quarter of the Knesset or less.

But they were intended as the building blocks of a future constitution should Israel ever adopt one. That's why this handful of laws, alone of all the laws on Israel's books, are deemed "Basic Laws," and why each addresses a fundamental constitutional issue (the executive branch, the legislature, the judiciary, human rights, Israel's Jewish character, etc.).

In other words, though they aren't a constitution, they do serve as the foundation of Israel's system of government. And tinkering with the architecture of any democratic system of government can have unintended consequences, as Israel has discovered before to its detriment.

The best-known example is the ill-fated experiment with directly electing the prime minister in the 1990s, which was repealed a decade later. The initial proposal, which also called for directly electing some Knesset members, might have worked. But the hybrid ultimately adopted, under which Israelis voted for an individual as prime minister but a party for Knesset, encouraged many people to split their votes, leaving the prime ministerial candidates' parties decimated. Prime ministers, therefore, had to create fragmented coalitions in which their own parties were often a minority, making it harder to govern.

A less known but particularly salient example is a seemingly innocuous reform enacted in 2016. The rule until then was that after an election, the longest-serving Knesset member would temporarily become Knesset speaker until a new government was formed, after which the government would choose a permanent speaker. Under the amendment, the old speaker simply stayed on until a new government was formed and chose a new speaker.

The change seems both trivial and sensible. Why bother with a temporary speaker for a mere few weeks – someone who doesn't yet know the ropes and will be gone before he learns them – when an experienced speaker could just serve a few weeks longer?

Yet this picayune change ended up producing the worst constitutional crisis in Israel's history. This past March, a new Knesset majority wanted to elect a new speaker to further passage of its own hasty amendments to the Basic Laws. The existing speaker wanted to postpone the election until the new government's composition became clear because once elected, a new speaker is virtually impossible to replace, and an opposition speaker could stymie all the government's work. This dispute led to the High Court of Justice riding roughshod over the separation of powers by not only creating a new constitutional arrangement in which two speakers would serve simultaneously (though one would be limited to running the vote for a new permanent speaker), but even dictating the second speaker's identity.

All of this would have been avoided had that seemingly trivial amendment not been passed: The opposition wouldn't have needed to elect a new speaker since the old speaker would immediately have been replaced with a temporary one. And there would have been no risk of a speaker in permanent opposition to the government because a new government would have been able to replace the temporary speaker.

In other words, this seemingly pointless provision embodied a careful balancing act between a new majority's desire to govern and a government's need to function, and its elimination sparked a constitutional impasse.

The amendments the new unity government is making to the Basic Laws – meant to create complete parity between Netanyahu and Gantz, as well as ensure that the prime ministry rotates between them in another 18 months – are much more far-reaching. For instance, both the prime minister (initially Netanyahu) and the vice-premier (Gantz) will appoint the same number of ministers, and neither can fire the other's appointees. If either one dissolves the agreement, the other automatically becomes premier. But if one is barred from serving for reasons beyond his control (excluding specified reasons such as serious illness), the second may not become premier, effectively forcing new elections. And so on.

To be fair, some of these grotesqueries stem from Israel's rampant judicial activism. Specifically, that last-named provision is motivated by the High Court's explicit threat to disqualify Netanyahu due to his indictments. Under current law, the vice-premier automatically replaces an incapacitated prime minister, meaning Gantz would have become prime minister for the entire term, leaving Netanyahu's bloc – more than two-thirds of the unity government's members – out in the cold.

Yet many provisions simply reflect the deep distrust between Netanyahu and Gantz. And while some will expire automatically when this Knesset's term ends, others won't, planting potential constitutional time bombs for future governments.

Even when alterations to a system of government are carefully thought out, exhaustively debated and not tailored to specific personal needs, history proves that they sometimes fail spectacularly. The risks are all the greater when changes are rammed through hastily, with no time for thought or debate, merely to serve specific political circumstances.

Thus even if these changes are necessary in today's unusual political circumstances, they must all be carefully reconsidered immediately after the next election and probably repealed. Because any country tinkers with longstanding constitutional arrangements at its own peril.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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So what horrendous activities do these 112 companies engage in? Well, there are several supermarket chains, which sell groceries to both Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, Golan Heights and east Jerusalem. There are several fuel companies, which operate gas stations where both Israelis and Palestinians fill up their cars.

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There are several bus and rail companies, which provide public transportation used by Israelis and Palestinians alike. There are phone companies (cell and landline) that provide general communications services. There are banks, which provide basic banking services. There's a water company, which provides potable drinking water and sewage solutions.

There are also several foods and clothing manufacturers, like General Mills, Angel Bakeries and Delta Galil, whose crime seems to consist of nothing but the fact that their cereals, bread, and underwear can be found on supermarket shelves in the West Bank, Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem.

In short, almost all the companies on the blacklist simply provide the most fundamental human necessities – food, water, transportation, communication. Some of these are defined by the United Nations itself as inalienable rights: Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "everyone" has a right to "food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services"; there's no asterisk saying "except for settlers." Others, like transportation and communication, aren't considered rights, but they are considered positive goods in any other context.

In contrast, the United Nations couldn't find a single company engaged in "captivity of the Palestinian financial and economic markets" or "practices that disadvantage Palestinian enterprises, including through restrictions on movement, administrative and legal constraints" – something that might actually raise human-rights concerns. And only three were involved in providing "surveillance and identification equipment for settlements, the wall and checkpoints directly linked with settlements," which at least sounds sinister if you don't realize that such equipment is merely intended to prevent terrorists from slaughtering children in their beds (see the Fogel family, Hallel Ariel and many others).

To realize how absurd this list is, try a simple thought experiment. Syrian and Russian soldiers have been slaughtering civilians in Syria on an almost daily basis for nine years now; the death toll is more than half a million and counting. But does anyone think the supermarkets that sell these soldiers food or the water company that supplies their bases with running water are engaged in "activities that raised particular human rights concerns"? Of course not; we believe that even the worst murderers are entitled to food, water, and clothing. That's precisely why all countries provide such basics to criminals in jail.

Human-rights violations used to refer to grave crimes like murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing. But now, along comes the UN Human Rights Council and says that actually, even the most essential human activities – food, water, transportation, communication – raise "particular human rights concerns." This turns the very idea of "human rights concerns" into a bad joke: If every human activity is a "human rights concern," then nothing is.

But the absurdity doesn't end there. In a press statement accompanying the blacklist, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote, "While the settlements as such are regarded as illegal under international law, this report does not provide a legal characterization of the activities in question, or of business enterprises' involvement in them." Or in plain English, the activities in question aren't illegal, nor are businesses violating international law by engaging them (since I'm analyzing the document strictly on its own terms, I'll ignore its mischaracterization of the settlements themselves as illegal).

Hitherto, human-rights violations have been illegal under both international law and the legal codes of all Western countries (think murder, torture or rape). But it's impossible to criminalize every ordinary human activity. That's precisely why, as legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich has noted, international law doesn't actually prohibit doing business in occupied territory – a position repeatedly upheld by European courts.

But now along comes the United Nations and says that actually, many things can be perfectly legal despite raising "particular human rights concerns." So go ahead and violate human rights to your heart's content.

There has been a lot of concern among Israel and its supporters that the blacklist will lead to boycotts and sanctions on the included companies. That's one reason for the wall-to-wall condemnation it has elicited in Israel (the other being its patently discriminatory targeting of Israel; somehow, the United Nations hasn't bothered publishing blacklists of companies operating in occupied northern Cyprus, occupied Western Sahara or any other occupied territory). Even the most left-wing of Israel's Jewish parties, the Labor-Gesher-Meretz joint ticket, assailed the list's publication unequivocally (to the dismay of Israel's radical leftists).

Yet precisely because most of the targeted companies are basic service providers, the economic impact will likely be small. Most of these companies neither export and nor attract much foreign investment. And since their businesses depend almost exclusively on selling or providing services to Israelis (and Palestinians), the only way to boycott them would be for the boycotters to actually move to Israel.

Rather, the real danger comes from the way this blacklist cheapens the very idea of human rights. According to the UN Human Rights Council, there is effectively no difference between mass murder and selling groceries; both raise "particular human rights concerns." That's a standard that no minimally moral human being could take seriously. It turns "human rights concerns" into a laughingstock, and thereby undermines respect for all human rights, even the genuine ones.

And, as always, the biggest losers will be all the people worldwide suffering murder, torture, rape and other genuine abuses. For their cries will be drowned out by the din of the UN's lofty crusade against supermarkets and gas stations.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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The resolution was adopted in November 1967, five months after Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, eastern Jerusalem and Sinai Peninsula in the Six-Day War. But contrary to popular belief, it was carefully crafted to let Israel keep some of this territory by demanding a withdrawal only from "territories occupied in the recent conflict," rather than "the territories" or "all the territories."

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As America's then UN ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, later said, the omitted words "were not accidental … the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal." Lord Caradon, the British ambassador to the United Nations who drafted the resolution, explained, "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial."

The reason was that, in the resolution's own words, a "just and lasting peace" would require "secure and recognized boundaries" for all states in the region. But the 1967 lines (aka the 1949 armistice lines) did not and could not provide secure boundaries for Israel. As Goldberg explained, the resolution called for "less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces" precisely because "Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure." And since Israel had captured these territories in a defensive rather than offensive war, the drafters considered such territorial changes fully compatible with the resolution's preamble "emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war."

But then, having successfully defeated the Arab/Soviet demand that Israel be required to cede "all the territories," America abandoned its hard-won achievement just two years later when it proposed the Rogers Plan. That plan called for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines with only minor adjustments (since nobody back then envisioned a Palestinian state, the West Bank would have returned to Jordan, even though Jordan had illegally occupied it in 1948).

This formula made a mockery of Resolution 242 because it failed to provide Israel with "secure boundaries." Yet almost every subsequent proposal retained the idea of the 1967 lines with minor adjustments, even as all of them continued paying lip service to 242.

Now, for the first time, a plan has attempted to take that resolution seriously and provide Israel with defensible borders. That's why it assigns the Jordan Valley to Israel, reflecting the long-standing Israeli consensus that this territory is crucial to defend the country against threats from the east (in this regard, the name "Jordan Valley" is misleading because what makes the area critical for defense is its high ground – the eastern slopes of the Judean Mountains and Samarian Hills).

Even Israel's mainstream left has long deemed the valley essential, aside from a brief flirtation with Oslo-era delusions of a New Middle East. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords in 1993, said in his final speech to the Knesset in 1995 that Israel's "security border … will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term." And today, both the center-right government and the main center-left opposition party agree that Israel must retain the valley. Parties seeking to cede it constitute a mere 20 percent of the Knesset (and just 10% of Jewish MKs).

There is a similar consensus around the need for the belt of territory near the Green Line where most settlements lie since this provides a territorial buffer for Israel's major population centers. And a united Jerusalem under Israeli rule is essential because dividing it would leave Israel's capital vulnerable to nonstop shelling from the city's eastern half: For evidence, see Jerusalem's experience when the city was divided from 1948 to 1967, or the experience of communities along the Gaza border today. Again, even Rabin's final speech envisioned a "united Jerusalem … under Israeli sovereignty."

The plan's limited version of Palestinian sovereignty derives from the need for defensible borders as well, since as the past quarter-century has shown, Palestinian military control over territory means kissing Israeli security goodbye. The Palestinian Authority was able to wage the Second Intifada – which killed more than 1,100 Israelis, 78 percent of them civilians, including through suicide bombings in major Israeli cities – because the Oslo Accords barred the Israel Defense Forces from entering P.A. territory. Only after the IDF reasserted control over those areas did the terror wane. Similarly, the IDF's absence from Gaza is what has allowed Palestinians to fire more than 20,000 rockets at Israel from that territory, even as not one rocket has ever been launched from the West Bank.

Having learned this lesson, Trump's plan assigns security control of the West Bank solely to Israel. And again, this used to be an Israeli consensus before Oslo fever took hold; even Rabin, in his final speech, envisioned a Palestinian "entity which is less than a state."

One could obviously quibble with certain details of the plan; for instance, the idea of leaving some settlements as enclaves in Palestinian territory sounds like a security nightmare. One could even legitimately wonder, given the experience of the last 25 years, whether any kind of Palestinian state is compatible with Israel's security.

Nevertheless, Trump's plan is the first serious attempt to give Israel what Resolution 242 promised more than 50 years ago – borders that are not only recognized, but secure. As such, far from "violating UN resolutions," it's actually the first plan that doesn't violate them.

This provides Israel and its allies with a golden opportunity to remind the world that contrary to what is widely believed today, UN resolutions and "internationally agreed parameters" originally promised Israel defensible borders. Thus all the plans that broke this promise are the ones that ought to be deemed illegitimate – not the one plan that finally seeks to keep it.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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This has been evident, first of all, in the alliances that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has formed with several countries in eastern and southern Europe, resulting in these countries repeatedly blocking anti-Israel decisions at the European Union level. Previously, Israeli diplomacy had focused overwhelmingly on Western Europe. Netanyahu's key insight was that conservative, nationalist governments seeking to preserve their own nation-states would have more instinctive sympathy for a Jewish state than the liberal universalists who dominate in Western Europe, and whose goal is to replace nation-states with an ever-closer EU.

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But as several recent events show, even Western Europe isn't a lost cause. The difference is that there, conventional high-level diplomacy won't work. Rather, the key to change is the fact that most Europeans, like most people everywhere, don't really care that much about Israel, the Palestinians or their unending conflict. Consequently, small groups of committed activists can exert a disproportionate influence on policy.

For years, this has worked against Israel because the anti-Israel crowd woke up to this fact very early and took full advantage of it. Take, for instance, the 2015 decision to boycott Israel adopted by Britain's national student union. The union represents some 7 million students, but its executive council passed the decision by a vote of 19-12. Or consider the academic boycott of Israel approved in 2006 by Britain's National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (which no longer exists, having merged into a larger union). The association had some 67,000 members at the time, but only 198 bothered to vote, of whom 109 voted in favor.

Yet it turns out pro-Israel activists can use the same tactics, as in last week's approval of a resolution saying anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism by the lower house of France's parliament. The resolution passed 154-72, meaning that fewer than 40% of the National Assembly's 577 deputies bothered to vote, even though 550 deputies were present earlier in the day to vote on the social security budget. In other words, most deputies simply didn't care about this issue, which meant that passing the resolution required convincing only about a quarter of the house.

Similarly, a relatively small group of committed pro-Israel Christians in the Dutch parliament managed to mobilize support last month for a resolution rejecting labeling requirements for products made in the disputed Israeli territories (Judea and Samaria, the Golan Heights and parts of Jerusalem). The motion, which passed 82-68, correctly deemed these rules discriminatory as long as they don't apply equally to all disputed territory worldwide.

Also last week, a majority of the Norwegian parliament's Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense demanded that the government cut funding to the Palestinian Authority over incitement in school textbooks. And last month, the Dutch government actually cut aid to the PA over its practice of paying salaries to terrorists. In both cases, credit belongs to small Israeli organizations that have tirelessly lobbied European parliaments on these issues (Palestinian Media Watch on pay-to-slay and IMPACT-se on student textbooks).

This same principle, incidentally, applies in parts of America where Israel is losing ground, like the Democratic Party. Last month, for instance, anti-Israel activists managed to get several anti-Israel motions onto the agenda of the California Democratic Party Convention. But several organizations, including a new group called Democratic Majority for Israel, fought back. Starting with a committed base of around one-third of the delegates, it ultimately managed to persuade almost two-thirds to vote against the resolutions, even though California – one of the most left-wing states in the union – would seemingly be friendly ground for the anti-Israel Left.

The problem with traditional diplomacy is that it generally focuses on high-level officials, both elected politicians and civil servants. These are people with zero incentive to rock the boat on Israel's behalf because they would rather spend their political capital on issues that most of their countrymen (and they themselves) actually care about, which rarely include Israel and the Palestinians. And in Europe, not rocking the boat means adhering to the anti-Israel consensus that has long dominated the EU. Thus, while this kind of diplomacy remains essential for numerous issues, it often isn't effective at generating change.

Yet precisely because senior officialdom often doesn't care much about Israel, committed activists can move the needle by lobbying members of parliament, joining the boards of organizations and so forth, thereby generating noise that makes it seem like people care about this issue. That won't immediately produce change at the governmental level; in Holland, for instance, the government said it would ignore parliament's position on product labeling. But it's a necessary first step.

Pro-Palestinian activists have long understood this, but pro-Israel activists are only now belatedly playing catch-up. And while much of the work obviously has to be done by local activists, Israel could facilitate the effort by identifying and actively engaging with groups that are potentially persuadable to pro-Israel activism.

Sometimes these will be groups more identified with the Right, like religious Christians and European nationalists. Other times they will be groups identified with the Left: In both Germany and Austria, the Green party's youth wings have played active roles in fighting BDS. But either way, the goal should be to find potentially sympathetic organizations that could be spurred to pro-Israel activism through engagement.

When a government open to pro-Israel positions gets elected, Israel should obviously try to leverage the opportunity through traditional diplomacy. But by engaging with parliamentarians and grassroots groups in an effort to foster pro-Israel activism, it can increase the likelihood of naturally sympathetic governments adopting pro-Israel policies and reduce the likelihood of naturally unsympathetic governments adopting anti-Israel ones.

For too long, Israel's attitude toward European diplomacy has been top-down. It's long past time for it to start investing more in bottom-up efforts.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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One was the response to the US State Department's announcement that Israeli settlements don't violate international law. What was striking was that many opponents didn't actually challenge the department's (correct) legal conclusions. Instead, they objected on policy grounds.

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Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden, for instance, complained, "This decision harms the cause of diplomacy, takes us further away from the hope of a two-state solution, and will only further inflame tensions in the region." Another leading Democratic candidate, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, termed the announcement "a significant step backward in our efforts to achieve a two-state solution."

Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, was particularly blatant. While acknowledging that the decision focused solely on international law, he worried that it "will be widely read as a broader change to the US position on Israeli settlements," which "would place serious and critical obstacles to a viable two-state solution." Consequently, he urged the administration "to reverse its position."

Essentially, all three want the settlements declared illegal simply because they think settlements are bad policy, regardless of what international law actually says. In other words, they're incapable of distinguishing policy from law.

People who understand this difference have no problem with settlements being recognized as legal because they understand that something can be bad policy even if it's legal. Indeed, that's precisely what all administrations, both Republican and Democratic, did for roughly three decades between Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama: They vehemently opposed settlements on policy grounds while simultaneously acknowledging that they weren't illegal.

Yet the concept of "it's legal, but it stinks" has evidently gone out of style, especially on the Left. When leftists think something stinks, they want it declared illegal, even if it's not.

The advantages of this tactic are obvious. Policy questions, by definition, are disputable; indeed, many people disagree that settlements are bad policy. But law ostensibly eliminates controversy because once the courts rule something illegal, then everyone is supposed to accept that it must stop. Thus branding any policy one opposes as illegal is meant to make it politically illegitimate. If settlements are illegal, they mustn't be built, even if they're actually good policy.

Granted, this ploy has an inherent problem when it comes to international law since there are no recognized courts whose authority to make such judgments is universally accepted. Neither America nor Israel, for instance, ever agreed to accept the legal interpretations of the International Criminal Court, UN agencies or any other such body. And without an accepted arbiter, whether or not something violates international law is endlessly debatable.

But the bigger problem is this tactic's enormous cost, which far outweighs any possible benefit: When people start branding anything they object to as "illegal," they turn the law into just another player on the political battlefield. And once that happens, legal decisions will be treated with no more respect than any other political pronouncement.

Thus Americans who object to recognizing the settlements' legality on policy grounds are destroying any pretensions that international law might have to objectivity and impartiality, just as the European Union did by insisting that international law requires labeling products from Israeli settlements, but not from Turkish settlements in northern Cyprus or Moroccan settlements in Western Sahara. In both cases, international law is being treated not as an objective, universally applied standard, but as a selective political tool to punish disfavored countries or policies. And as such, it deserves no more deference than any other political decision.

Given how amorphous international law actually is, that may be no great loss. But when the same tactics are applied to domestic legal systems, the consequences become devastating. Once a significant portion of the citizenry starts to view legal decisions as politics in another guise, the consensus on which democracy's survival depends – that legal decisions must be honored – will rapidly erode.

As I've noted before, this is already happening in Israel. But last week's indictment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provides a particularly worrying example of the costs.

I'm the rare Netanyahu supporter who thinks that one of the three cases against him is actually serious. But for two understandable reasons, many supporters believe that he's simply being persecuted by a leftist legal establishment frustrated by repeated failures to oust him through democratic elections.

The first is that the Attorney General's Office and the courts have intervened in literally thousands of policy decisions over the past three decades, frequently in defiance of actual written law and almost always in the Left's favor. In short, both bodies have routinely behaved like political activists rather than impartial jurists. So rightists have no reason to trust their impartiality now.

Second, Netanyahu has been targeted by frivolous investigations – including, in my view, two of the three now going to trial – ever since he first became prime minister in 1996. All involved genuinely repulsive conduct on Netanyahu's part. But rather than treating such conduct as a problem on which the public, rather than the courts, must render judgment, the legal establishment repeatedly opened cases against him, to which they devoted countless man-hours before finally closing them.

Now, the legal establishment says it has finally found a real crime. But like the boy who cried wolf, Netanyahu's supporters no longer believe it.

The combination of these two factors means that many Israelis genuinely feel that their prime minister has been ousted by a corrupt legal establishment solely because it opposes his policies. And that will inevitably foster even greater distrust of the legal system.

Leftists spend a lot of time these days fretting about democracy's possible collapse. But if they really want to avert such a collapse, the first step is to stop politicizing the law, so that legal institutions can regain public trust. For without a legal system whose decisions are widely respected, democracies will be left with no way of resolving disputes but the one shared by dictatorships and anarchies – plain old-fashioned brute force.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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This position is spreading rapidly among liberal American Jews. In an essay in Haaretz in August, for instance, Abe Silberstein argued that Israel must be coerced into creating a Palestinian state because otherwise, the only alternatives are perpetuating the status quo or a one-state solution – and any moral Jew would have to deem the latter "infinitely preferable," even though it would probably end Jewish statehood. In other words, the Jewish state's right to exist depends on satisfying Palestinian (and American Jewish) demands.

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This position is also common among non-Jews. For instance, in a September essay for Mosaic on whether a Catholic equivalent to Protestant Zionism was possible, Gavin D'Costa concluded, "If the Israel-Palestinian dispute were to be resolved tomorrow, with the full agreement of both parties and with international support, I believe official Catholic Zionism would emerge quite quickly." In other words, the Church might someday accept a Jewish state, but only if Israel satisfies Palestinian (and Western) demands.

Ostensibly, such positions could be dismissed as simple anti-Semitism based on Natan Sharansky's famous 3D test (demonization, delegitimization and double standards). The relevant criterion here is double standards since no other country's existence is deemed conditional on its behavior, even when said behavior is far worse than Israel's.

Nevertheless, dismissing conditional Zionism as anti-Semitic poses one obvious problem: Any rationale for a Jewish state, whether religious or secular, rests on the Jews' claim to be a distinct people with a distinct religion, language and culture. And that very heritage deems the Jewish people's right to remain in its land conditional on its moral behavior. This isn't a minor detail; it's a core element of Jewish theology.

It is stated repeatedly in the Bible. It's included in the Shema prayer, Judaism's closest approximation to a credo, which observant Jews recite twice daily. It's the reason given by the rabbis of the Talmud for both the first and second exiles (they attributed the first to murder, idolatry and forbidden sexual relations, and the second to baseless hatred). Indeed, it's precisely because this is so fundamental that it still seems self-evident even to secular Jews who have abandoned almost every other vestige of Judaism, or a Catholic Church that has downgraded the Hebrew Bible in favor of the New Testament (the main reason Christian Zionism is a Protestant phenomenon is because Protestants give greater weight to the Hebrew Bible than Catholics do).

So does that mean conditional Zionists are right, and Israel's right to exist depends on satisfying Palestinian demands? Not at all, because there's a crucial distinction between modern conditional Zionism and the biblical version: Neither the Bible nor the talmudic Judaism it engendered ever insisted that Jewish morality requires the Jewish polity to commit suicide.

Indeed, another fundamental principle of Judaism is that following God's laws leads to life, not death (see Deuteronomy 30:19 or Leviticus 18:5). Consequently, the Talmud allows almost any religious commandment (except murder, idolatry and forbidden sexual relations) to be violated to save a life. It also declares that if someone comes to kill you, "rise up and kill him first."

For the same reason, national self-defense is considered one of the principal responsibilities of a Jewish leader, and possibly even a religious obligation. The Bible itself merely states that some wars are obligatory without defining which wars fall into this category. But one interpretation adopted inter alia by the great medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides, says it includes wars of self-defense.

Obviously, this doesn't mean anything goes. Even in wartime, the Bible sets limits on an army's behavior – the original laws of war. But Jewish tradition utterly rejects the idea that morality requires national suicide. On the contrary, it views defending the Jewish commonwealth as a positive moral good.

So what does all this have to do with the Palestinians? It's very simple: Even if you accept the (false) premise that ceding the West Bank would actually satisfy Palestinian demands, the fact remains that Israel isn't there solely or even primarily because of the settlers, who have repeatedly proven incapable of preventing territorial concessions (see the Oslo Accords, the disengagement from Gaza, the far-reaching offers made by prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert). It's there because, based on bitter experience, most Israelis see no way to leave without committing national suicide.

Withdrawing from parts of the West Bank under the Oslo Accords led to the lethal terror of the Second Intifada, which ended only when the Israeli army retook control of these areas. Withdrawing from Gaza resulted in 14 years (and counting) of almost nonstop rocket and mortar fire on southern Israel; a similar outcome would be far deadlier in the West Bank, which, unlike Gaza, is in easy range of Israel's main population centers, economic hubs and international airport. Withdrawing from southern Lebanon in 2000 enabled Hezbollah, a terrorist organization, to acquire a missile arsenal greater than that of many national armies, aimed straight at Israel.

All this has convinced most Israelis that barring a radical and unforeseen change in Palestinian behavior, ceding the West Bank would be militarily suicidal. And since a one-state solution still looks demographically suicidal, that leaves some version of the status quo as the least bad option – not only for Israel but even for the Palestinians, as I'll explain in a subsequent column.

So is conditional Zionism anti-Semitic? That depends on the conditions. But nowadays, the key condition usually involves suicidal Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. Thus today's conditional Zionists require one nation, of all the nations in the world, to destroy itself for another's sake. And yes, that's anti-Semitic.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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The conventional wisdom has been that even if these airstrikes were necessary for Israel's defense, they posed a real risk of escalation. And obviously, that remains a possibility.

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But given Trump's latest moves, they may actually be making war less likely by letting Tehran know that Jerusalem – unlike, say, Saudi Arabia – won't sit with folded hands if it suffers a significant Iranian attack like last month's strike on Saudi oil facilities. The realization that Israel has both the ability and the will to hit back hard might well deter Iran from launching such a strike, even though it now knows that it wouldn't be risking an American response.

For this reason, much of the rhetoric about how Trump's recent decisions will affect Israel is overblown, even though the decisions themselves are unequivocally horrible. Strategically, the US withdrawal from northern Syria abandons that area to very bad actors (Turkey and/or Iran). It's also a moral atrocity, as it abandons the Kurds to Turkey's tender mercies despite their having been America's most loyal and effective partner against the Islamic State. And it signals the world that Washington won't protect its allies, thereby reducing the incentive to be an American ally. Trump's inaction after Iran destroyed half of Saudi Arabia's oil processing capacity sent a similar message.

But even though Israel is always worse off when America looks weak or unreliable in the Middle East, it's in a very different position from either Saudi Arabia or the Kurds because it has always insisted on defending itself by itself rather than expecting American soldiers to fight on its behalf.

Saudi Arabia has long depended on US troops to defend it. Despite having bought billions of dollars of topline American military equipment, its army is neither big enough nor skilled enough to use it effectively. So when Trump makes it clear that he won't commit US forces to defend Saudi Arabia, Riyadh has a problem.

The Kurds, in contrast, have demonstrated an impressive willingness to defend themselves. But their lack of statehood means they lack critical military equipment, such as an air force, which they would need to defend themselves unaided; that leaves them dependent on US forces to do things they can't do for themselves. So when Trump announces that American troops will no longer protect them, they have a problem.

But Israel has a large army equipped with the best military gear American and Israeli ingenuity can devise, combined with a willingness to use it and experience in doing so. So when Trump's decisions indicate that Israel can't rely on US troops to defend it, either, that's not a problem; it never relied on US troops to begin with.

Granted, there were Israelis who fantasized that America would deal with Iran and thereby spare Israel the need to do so – including, shockingly, some in the defense establishment (who have now belatedly woken up). But realists like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu always understood that this was ridiculous. That's precisely why he insisted on spending 11 billion shekels ($3.1 billion) to prepare for a strike on Iran if necessary, despite fierce criticism from political opponents.

Iran isn't a superpower like the Soviet Union, which Israel had to rely on America to contain. It's a mere regional power, just like Israel.

Moreover, though it has been decades since Israel last faced an enemy as formidable as Iran, the fact that the countries share no land border deprives Iran of its greatest advantage: its vastly bigger population, which enables it to field many more troops than Israel can. If Iran could send tanks across Israel's border, it might be able to overwhelm Israel by sheer numbers. But it can't because it would have to cross all of Iraq and Jordan to do so. Thus any fighting between Israel and Iran itself (as opposed to Iran's many proxies) would be limited to air and missile battles, in which the superior equipment and skills of Israel's air force provide a counterweight to Iran's advantage in missiles.

Nor is there reason to fear, as one prominent Israeli pundit implied, that Trump's reluctance to deploy American troops in the Middle East means that he would also refuse to replenish critical military materiel should Israel run short during a war. Putting soldiers in harm's way is very different from providing an ally with the arms it needs to do its own fighting. Moreover, Israel still enjoys considerable support in Congress, which has proven critical to getting Israel needed arms in the past.

Nevertheless, since an Israel-Iran war could wreak devastation on both countries, it's much better to prevent it from occurring. And that's where all those Israeli airstrikes come in.

Despite Iran's willingness to engage in military provocations, it has shown no desire to risk serious military consequences on Iranian soil. Indeed, it has escalated very carefully, moving up to each new level only after concluding – based on the non-response to previous attacks – that it could do so safely. And so far, it's been right: Even the attack on the Saudi refineries, its worst to date, drew no military response from Riyadh or Washington.

But years of Israeli airstrikes against Iranian and Iranian-affiliated targets have proven that the Jewish state won't let Iranian aggression go unanswered, and any Iranian escalation will be met commensurately. For instance, after Iran expanded the battlefield from Syria to Iraq, Israel apparently began striking Iranian targets in Iraq as well. All this sends Tehran the clear message that any major attack on Israel itself would likely result in direct Israeli retaliation against Iran.

That knowledge may well deter Iran from launching such an attack. And that is doubly important now that Trump has taken America out of the Middle East picture.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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In April, rightist parties that explicitly promised to support Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister won 65 of the Knesset's 120 seats. In other words, a clear majority of voters seemingly cast their ballots for a rightist, Netanyahu-led government. But after the election, Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Lieberman refused to join such a government.

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Thus even if an alternative government could have been formed – whether a unity government or one led by Netanyahu's rival, Benny Gantz – it would have undermined rightists' faith in the democratic process. Any such government would have looked like a product not of the majority's will, but of the whims of a single individual who "stole" right-wing votes and gave them to the left.

The do-over election showed this wasn't the case. Lieberman's party not only maintained its strength but increased it, thereby proving him right that his voters cared more about curbing ultra-Orthodox power than about keeping Netanyahu in office. Moreover, the pro-Netanyahu bloc shrank even further – from 60 seats (excluding Lieberman) in April to 55 in September – due entirely to Netanyahu's own appalling behavior in the intervening months, which prompted a nontrivial number of center-right voters to either switch sides or stay home and a massive increase in Arab turnout.

That doesn't mean Gantz won; the bloc he heads can't form a government on its own. But neither can Netanyahu's bloc. Any possible solution – a unity government, a Netanyahu government with leftist partners or a Gantz government with rightist partners – will require a compromise between the blocs. And nobody will be able to claim the election was stolen when that happens.

This matters greatly because the democratic process has been subverted far too often over the past 25 years, usually in the Left's favor, with enthusiastic applause from the left's self-proclaimed democrats.

It began with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who gained the center-right votes he needed to win in 1992 thanks to two promises – no negotiations with the PLO and no retreat from the Golan Heights. He promptly broke both, signing the Oslo Accord with the PLO in 1993 and offering Syria the Golan in exchange for peace (Syria refused). The effect on voter trust was devastating, as evidenced by one centrist colleague who told me that she agreed with demonstrators chanting "Rabin is a traitor": Having voted for him due to those promises, she felt betrayed.

Far worse, however, was the way Rabin ratified the Oslo II agreement in 1995. He achieved his 61-59 Knesset majority by openly buying two votes from the right-wing Tzomet party in exchange for government posts with all the attendant perks (free mail and telephone for life, a government pension, etc.). Since this was illegal at the time, as confirmed by a High Court of Justice ruling on the deal, he then amended the law to retroactively legalize it. Needless to say, both the blatant vote-buying and its retroactive legalization were heartily cheered by the left's self-proclaimed democrats.

Eight years later, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon further eviscerated the right's belief in democracy. The 2003 campaign revolved around the Labor party's plan to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza; Sharon won in a landslide by opposing this idea. But after being elected, he promptly adopted his rival's policy, prompting fury among his own voters and cheers from the self-proclaimed "pro-democracy" camp.

To quell the uproar, Sharon promised to put the plan to a referendum among his Likud party's registered membership. So the right-wing democrats who had gone door-to-door to secure his election victory launched another door-to-door campaign, with equal success: Sharon lost the referendum by a decisive 60-40 margin. But he simply ignored the results and implemented the pullout anyway. And once again, his undemocratic behavior won plaudits from the left's self-proclaimed "democrats."

This chain of events resulted in a non-negligible minority of rightists becoming completely disillusioned with democracy. They came to view it as a system whose rules were gamed in the left's favor, rather than applying equally to everyone, because they saw election results and even laws repeatedly being ignored with impunity when this served the left's purposes. The only rule seemed to be that anything furthering left-wing policies was "democratic," while anything furthering right-wing policies was "undemocratic." And this has been reinforced by 10 years of watching the left tar Netanyahu – who, until the past five months, never did anything remotely as undemocratic as Rabin and Sharon – as "anti-democratic."

The pernicious consequences are obvious. People who have lost faith in democracy are more likely to see violence as a legitimate means of achieving their goals or fantasize about some form of absolutism (theocracy, monarchy, etc.). Indeed, it's a tribute to the resilience of the right's democratic instincts that these are still marginal phenomena. But they have undeniably grown, and another "stolen" election would have reinforced this trend.

Democracy's sine qua non is that voting actually matters. When people stop believing this, democracy dies; that's precisely why the left's consistent support for undemocratic moves that serve its goals is so dangerous. And people who actually live in undemocratic countries understand this very well. As Dima Eygenson, who recently immigrated to Israel from Russia, told JTA, "It's pretty exciting and new to me that voting could actually make a difference, lead to a real change in the country's fate. You can vote in Russia, but it will make no difference."

Thanks to the Sept. 17 do-over election, which Netanyahu almost singlehandedly forced on an astonished nation, Israel was spared a situation in which half the electorate once again concluded that voting makes no difference. Given the outcome, it could be his final service to Israel, but it turned out to be an important one. And though I doubt he'd appreciate the irony, that wouldn't be a bad ending to a long career of public service.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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This isn't to deny the substantial damage it has caused. Pro-Israel Democrats felt betrayed and even some pro-Israel Republicans were outraged. Most of the organized Jewish community was horrified. And the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement received media exposure it could never have gained on its own.

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But nobody would have felt outraged or betrayed had Israel barred, say, white-supremacist politicians. Thus the underlying message of these reactions was that unlike white supremacism, advocating Israel's destruction is a legitimate opinion, and is entitled to the same respectful treatment as the view that Israel should continue to exist. Yet, no country can or should treat its own erasure as a legitimate option.

To understand why this was the issue at stake, a brief review of the facts is needed. When Israel originally agreed to allow a visit by Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), it knew that they enthusiastically supported BDS, a movement unambiguously committed to eliminating the Jewish state. It also knew they would use the visit to tar Israel in every possible way.

However, it assumed that they would at least pay lip service to Israel's existence by following the standard protocol for official visitors – meeting Israeli officials and visiting some Israeli sites. On that assumption, and since the law banning entry to prominent BDS supporters permits exceptions for the sake of Israel's foreign relations, Israel decided to admit them "out of respect for the US Congress," as Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer said at the time.

A few days before the visit, however, the proposed itinerary arrived and proved that assumption wrong. Far from paying lip service to Israel's existence, the trip literally erased the country from the map.

It was billed as a trip to "Palestine," not, say, "Israel and Palestine." It didn't include visits to a single spot in pre-1967 Israel, aside from the unavoidable landing (for those too lazy to take the longer route through Amman) at Ben-Gurion International Airport. And even that was billed simply as "arrive in Tel Aviv," with no hint that Tel Aviv belonged to a country other than "Palestine."

Nor did the trip include meetings with any Israeli officials; Omar's subsequent claim that she, unlike Tlaib, did plan to hold such meetings is patently false. According to her own story, she planned to spend Friday, Aug. 16 and Saturday, Aug. 17 in Israel before joining Tlaib's trip on Aug. 18. But official meetings are always arranged in advance. And as of Aug. 15, when Israel nixed the visit, she hadn't yet approached a single Israeli government or defense official (though she did contact one Arab Knesset member). Did she really think that she could just show up at the last minute, on the two days when Israelis aren't in their offices (Israel's workweek is Sunday through Thursday), and magically arrange meetings?

Finally, the trip was organized by MIFTAH, a Palestinian organization that supports terror and regularly spouts anti-Semitic blood libels, including accusing Jews of poisoning wells, drinking Christian blood and organ theft.

In short, this was a trip that literally negated Israel's existence. Yet all the outraged reactions either ignored this fact or, worse, treated it as unexceptionable. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee exemplified the former approach, tweeting, "Every member of Congress should be able to visit and experience our democratic ally Israel firsthand" – just as if Tlaib and Omar hadn't deliberately shunned experiencing Israel. Leading pro-Israel Democrats epitomized the latter approach.

"The decision of the Israeli government to deny entry to Israel by two members of Congress is outrageous, regardless of their itinerary or their views," declared House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who had just returned from leading 41 Democrats on his own congressional trip to Israel. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) opined,
"No democratic society should fear an open debate." Congressmen Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said the "close relationship enjoyed by the United States and Israel should extend to all its government representatives, regardless of their views on specific issues or policies." Former Vice President Joe Biden said, "No democracy should deny entry to visitors based on the content of their ideas – even ideas they strongly object to."

In other words, even some of the most pro-Israel voices in Congress insisted that wiping Israel off the map is a legitimate opinion, one that Israel must accept just as it accepts disagreements over government policy. It shouldn't "fear an open debate" on whether or not it should continue to exist. It shouldn't "deny entry to visitors based on the content of their ideas," even if the idea in question is its own destruction.

This is simply ludicrous. For Israel to deny entry to advocates of its own dissolution should be as uncontroversial as denying entry to neo-Nazis. And it's deeply worrying that even Israel's genuine friends in America evidently think otherwise.

Yet Israel can't expect its overseas friends to treat this view as illegitimate if it doesn't do the same itself. And allowing entry to people like Tlaib and Omar would do the exact opposite: It would send the message that their desire to destroy the Jewish state isn't beyond the pale, but merely a legitimate political disagreement.

Perhaps US President Donald Trump's crude intervention made this the wrong moment to take a stand. Because Israel's decision came just hours after he tweeted that admitting Tlaib and Omar would show "great weakness," it was widely perceived as a capitulation to Trump rather than an independent decision on a crucial issue of principle.

But on the flip side, this was by far the most blatant, controversial and high-profile case that Israel is ever likely to encounter. Thus barring Tlaib and Omar sets a clear precedent, whereas failing to do so would have completely erased a crucial red line.

And because the world will never be more pro-Israel than Jerusalem is, holding that line is essential. If Israel wants the world to treat its eradication as an illegitimate aim, it must first do so itself.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The Jerusalem Waqf, which runs the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, isn't Israeli at all. It's jointly controlled by Jordan and the Palestinian Authority, and diligently disseminates both countries' anti-Israel incitement. Hence it is no surprise that anti-Israel riots periodically erupt there.

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On Sunday, it sought to exploit a calendrical anomaly: The Jewish fast of Tisha B'Av coincided with the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice). Since both holidays commemorate events that occurred on the Mount (the destruction of the First and Second Temples, in Jewish tradition; Abraham's sacrifice of Ishmael, in Muslim tradition), some members of both faiths like visiting the mount on that day. The Waqf, therefore, called a mass prayer rally at Al-Aqsa to prevent Jews from "defiling" it with their "filthy feet," as Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas once famously said.

To ensure mass attendance, it took two unusual steps. First, it ordered all other Jerusalem mosques closed on Sunday so that Jerusalem Muslims who wanted to attend services on one of the holiest days of the Muslim year would have nowhere else to go. Second, it asked imams throughout Israel to spread the message to their congregants.

Below are some of the responses from imams, who were asked what they thought of this (as published in Haaretz):

"Gathering in a religious space is not meant to cause escalation, much the opposite, we stress that we all must live in peace," said Sheikh Mohammad al-Quran, imam of Kseifa's mosque, adding that sermons and prayers at his mosque would focus on alms to the needy and the growing problem of violence within the Arab community.

Ahmad Abdullah, imam of Ein Naqquba's mosque, said that Friday's prayers were mainly a spiritual preparation for Saturday's fast, which precedes Sunday's holiday. "The topics brought up in the mosque are at the discretion of the imam," he added.

Sheikh Amar Walid, imam of Kafr Qassem's mosque, said that Eid al-Adha is meant to foster unity among peoples and deter violence and that violence within the Arab community would top his agenda that Friday, as it does every Friday. Then, referring to last week's murder of a 19-year-old Jewish yeshiva student by Palestinians, he added, "We are tired of the conflict, we need to end it already, the idea behind slaughtering an animal for the Feast of the Sacrifice is that it is upon us to avoid bloodshed among people."

In sharp contrast to how Israeli Arabs self-identified a decade ago, they now increasingly identify as Israeli

Nor are these imams unusual; 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, with the worrying exception of the Bedouin community, where it's on the rise.

In 2015, Israel arrested 120 Israeli Arabs suspected of terrorist activity. By 2018, that number had halved to just 60 arrests.

No less significant, Israeli Arabs increasingly identify as Israeli. In one survey conducted shortly before Israel's April election – nine months after the passage of the controversial nation-state law, which critics wrongly claimed made Arabs second-class citizens – 46% of respondents self-identified as "Israeli Arab," 22% as "Arab," 19% as "Israeli Palestinian" and 14% as "Palestinian." Thus 65% included "Israeli" in their self-definition, almost double the 33% who included "Palestinian." And the most integrationist option, "Israeli Arab," was chosen by more than twice as many people as the second-place contender. This is a sharp contrast to how Israeli Arabs self-identified a decade ago.

The same survey found that 76% of Israeli Arabs termed Jewish-Arab relations in daily life "mostly positive," while just 18% termed them negative. Moreover, fully 94% recognized the existence of a Jewish people, unlike the Palestinian Authority, which vehemently denies Jewish peoplehood. And in a separate poll, a majority of Arab respondents said they were "proud to be Israeli."

Equally notable is the recent change in Arab voting patterns. In April's election, 30% of Arab voters cast ballots for Jewish parties, almost double the 17% who did so in 2015. Granted, this was partly to protest the petty bickering that led Arab parties to dismantle their joint ticket; now that the Joint List has reconstituted itself, many Arab voters may return to it in September's do-over election. But some experts think the movement toward Jewish parties could actually intensify, and so do the parties themselves: Left-leaning parties are courting Arab voters in a manner that Thabet Abu Rass, co-director of the Abraham Initiatives coexistence organization, termed "unprecedented."

"The Center-Left Zionist parties are basically going over the heads of the Arab parties to appeal directly to Arab voters in a very genuine manner," he said, "and that is because they have identified the growing frustration of Arab voters with the parties that are meant to represent them."

Even more surprising, some center-rightists have urged their parties to do the same. Former Benjamin Netanyahu aide Nathan Eshel and Israel Hayom columnist Professor Eyal Zisser both recently published columns arguing that the time is ripe for this since repeated polls have shown that Arab voters overwhelmingly prioritize domestic issues – jobs, crime, education, and housing – over the Palestinian conflict. And successive Netanyahu governments have worked hard to address such issues in the Arab community.

None of this means there aren't real problems in Arab-Jewish relations, including unconscionable anti-Arab broadsides by too many rightist politicians and vicious anti-Israel incitement by Arab Knesset members and Islamist clerics. But overall, the story of the past decade – under Israel's "most right-wing government ever" – has been one of increasing Arab integration. Whatever government is formed after September's election must continue that trend.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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