Those who attack Israel always claim that they are not attacking Judaism. Therefore, they assert, they are only anti-Israel and anti-Zionist, not antisemitic.

This shows, among other things, how little the attackers know or care about the tenets of Judaism. But even putting the depth of this ignorance aside, their claim is belied by its source, which is not some abstract history treatise but the Hamas charter.

The 2017 version of that charter proclaims: "Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea."

"From the river to the sea" sounds familiar, no? Hamas is the source of this ringing phrase, now on posters across campuses and even high schools and middle schools throughout the United States. All those signs are quoting the Oct. 7 murderers.

What is an Israeli or Jewish student at an American school supposed to think when he or she sees Hamas quoted on school walls? What is such a student, or any Jew, supposed to think of the people shouting this phrase, coined by the people who raped women to death on Oct. 7?

In a country where we have removed the names of racists from schools and buildings – even the likes of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson – what are Jews supposed to make of the endorsement of Hamas's aspiration to destroy the Jewish state and turn the entire Land of Israel into what Hamas calls an "Islamic Waqf"? That is, per Hamas's 1988 charter, holy territory "consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day."

Americans are also quoting Hamas when they excuse attacks on Israel and call for the Jewish state to be destroyed. Here are Hamas's own words from its 2017 charter: "Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project." Sounds familiar again, no?

This is the argument advanced by anti-Israel activists everywhere when accused of antisemitism. They are directly quoting Hamas.

No one who knows anything about Jewish prayers, Jewish customs or the Hebrew Bible could possibly believe such nonsense. Yet those who spout it include Jews whose only Judaism consists in invoking their Jewish identity to attack Jewish beliefs, like the genius a few weeks ago at the Oscars who "refuted" his Jewishness being "hijacked" by Israel's insistence on preventing another Oct. 7. What did his Jewishness consist of that day? How had he expressed his commitment to the Jewish people, Jewish belief or leading a Jewish life beforehand? It appears that it was only by claiming to be a virtuous person who denied the Jews' right to defeat their would-be destroyers.

Hamas, like all enemies of the Jews, cannot be allowed to define Judaism or Jew-hatred. No white person would dare tell a black man or woman what it means to be black. No straight person would presume to teach a gay or lesbian person what it means or how it should feel to have a family, be married or be in love.

The same goes for the Jews. We get to decide these things.

Ironically, Hamas itself proclaims that it is antisemitic. Its 1988 charter explicitly states: "Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. … Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Muslim people."

Everyone who recognizes that flying a Confederate flag is racist must acknowledge that quoting Hamas is antisemitic. No one who opposes antisemitism should be quoting Jew-haters. And no schools, colleges, workplaces, restaurants or other place of public accommodation should allow Hamas's racist words to shriek from posters and flags.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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When Israeli judicial reform was proposed in January, the left protested, demanding that the legislative process stop so negotiations could take place. It was illegitimate, said the protesters, for the parties who won a majority of the Knesset to use their control to pass a law that didn't have broad support.

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Now the legislative process has been stopped at the direction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Just as the protesters demanded, teams have been appointed and talks scheduled at the president's residence over the coming weeks.

But the protests have not stopped. What they have done, however, is reveal what they're really about: Not judicial reform, but undoing the last election.

In Israel, there have been no claims that the last election was tainted by fraud or manipulated by the Russians. The left's claim is that the people who won the election are bad and should not have won.

Why? Listen to their own words. In Ashdod, one of the protest leaders – Eliad Shraga, chairman of the innocently named Movement for Quality Government in Israel – explained: "We are the light, and Netanyahu and his partners are the darkness. We are democracy and they are dictatorship. We are love and they are hate!"

"Netanyahu, like a man who runs from the truth, knows deep inside that he is not fit to be the prime minister. He knows he doesn't reach the minimum ethical bar to be prime minister. He knows he's corrupt, he knows he's ethically rotten and he knows he doesn't lead by example," Shraga proclaimed.

The reason for the protests, Shraga honestly stated, is that the officeholders chosen by "the people" are, in the opinion of the protesters, bad. The protests are being held to throw those elected officials out of office by making it impossible for them to govern the country.

The protesters have never been opposed to any specific legislative proposal. Yair Lapid and Gideon Sa'ar, like many other members of the current opposition, are on record supporting judicial reform. What they are opposed to is the results of the last election. They are convinced that the people who won should not have won, and that the voters who chose these people have no right to do so. Because democracy.

In this, they have an unqualified ally in the Supreme Court, which disqualified Aryeh Deri from serving as a government minister. Deri had been put in power because his party won 400,000 votes. The court disqualified him on the simple and honestly stated grounds that those votes had been cast unreasonably. It was unreasonable, said the court, for Deri to be a government minister. So, they ordered his removal from the cabinet.

The protests have tainted even the IDF, encouraging refusals to serve that are explicitly based on the refusers' belief that the people elected simply should not have won. The soldiers are being encouraged to think they can refuse to serve until that bad choice has been undone. Ehud Barak said exactly this at a Chatham House talk last week. It doesn't take a Henry Kissinger to figure out that this is a recipe for self-destruction in very short order.

Over the last 2,000 years, the Jewish people have not much experience in governing themselves, and it shows. The people driving events are unembarrassed about saying out loud what they really think. Though they cry "democracy," their protests are intended to disenfranchise those pesky ignoramuses who vote unreasonably. People who genuinely believe, and are arrogant enough to say, "we are the light" are simply refusing to allow a government to operate if it's chosen by anybody else.

This is what's happening in Israel and why it's happening. Zman lakum, Jewish people. Time to wake up.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Israel's Supreme Court has long been criticized because it imposes rules on the country that most of the country thinks are wrong. It's an odd predicament for a democratic country, in which one would expect the law to reflect the will of the people. It's particularly odd that this predicament is defended in the streets of Tel Aviv as "democracy."

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One of the key defenses of this odd system is the claim that it's necessary to protect Israelis from legal attack in other countries. Other countries would like to challenge Israel's acts of self-defense as "war crimes," but international law provides that if a country has functioning courts that apply the rule of law, then their judgments will be respected. The courts of other nations or international tribunals will not interfere.

So, a sarcastic sign outside Ben Gurion Airport reads:

Dear Traveler: Before leaving Israel, you must check to ensure that no indictment has been brought against you before the International Court at the Hague.

If the fascist overhaul passes.

But you can help prevent this: Join the protest.

What does this really mean?

What it means is this: We, the Jewish people, dragged ourselves home to Israel from the four corners of the earth when we gave up on being treated fairly in the lands of exile. We despaired of getting due process in the czar's courts, German courts, French or Spanish courts. We've even begun to worry about getting a fair hearing in Brooklyn, where the people who assault us on the streets, if they're arrested at all, are released immediately and never punished.

But the opponents of judicial reform claim that we must still believe that the world's courts will respect the Israeli Supreme Court because it judges our people and our army. Because it demands of that army that it behave in compliance with its obligations under international law.

Thus, we can safely travel abroad without fear of being arrested and charged with a war crime. The army will defend the country and our Supreme Court, applying international law, will defend the army.

How's that working out in reality?

We'll start the UN, which, despite Israel's Supreme Court, denounces Israel's actions every hour on the hour. In fact, the UN set up a new office a few months ago with a budget of millions of dollars that has only one function: Finding ways to attack Israel's actions as violations of international law.

Next, there's the International Court of Justice at the Hague. Last December, the UN General Assembly asked the ICJ for its opinion on the legality of the "ongoing Israeli occupation." There's little doubt that, if the ICJ answers this question, it won't bless Israel's "occupation"– not the "occupation" of the disputed territories, the "occupation" of Jerusalem, or even the "occupation" of Tel Aviv.

But for the clearest proof that Israel cannot defend itself by submitting to the world's demands, there is Jenin. In 2002, Israel sent its soldiers into the casbah of that city to put an end to months of terror attacks that had killed dozens of Israeli civilians.

After that operation, we were told about a "massacre" of innocent Arabs, complete with the stench of the rotting bodies of the victims of Israeli aggression. It was all a lie. It was a lie told around the world, by the International Red Cross and dozens of respected media outlets. It was later debunked but, as usual, no one was paying attention.

More important was the strategy Israel adopted in that operation and the reasoning behind it. Israel refused to use air power to kill its enemies in Jenin, not even its most accurate weapons. Instead, to minimize civilian casualties and avoid claims that it was violating international law, Israel sent in ground forces.

The result was predictable. Captured Jenin-based terrorist Thabet Mardawi told CNN that he "and other Palestinian fighters had expected Israel to attack with planes and tanks."

"I couldn't believe it when I saw the soldiers," Mardawi said. "The Israelis knew that any soldier who went into the camp like that was going to get killed."

Shooting at these men as they walked cautiously down the street "was like hunting … like being given a prize. … I've been waiting for a moment like that for years."

Thirteen Israeli soldiers–husbands, fathers, and sons – died in that operation. That's what comes of worrying too much about what the world thinks.

The way for Israel to be respected by the world is to respect itself. That means respecting the value of the lives of its soldiers, as was not done in Jenin.

It also means respecting the judgment of its citizens and their right to govern themselves. The insistence on broad powers for Israel's Supreme Court is based on the conviction that Israeli voters don't have the right to govern themselves, because if they did, they would make the wrong decisions.

They would decide to be too harsh to Arabs who hurt or threaten Jews. They would make the country too religious. They would be inadequately respectful of Reform and Conservative Judaism. They would give too much money to the Haredim.

Because these things are bad, Israel's voters cannot be allowed to choose them. If 15 justices on the Supreme Court can stop these things, they must be empowered to do so.

No other country in the world is governed like this. No other country in the world treats itself or its own citizens like this. Israeli citizens have the right to govern themselves. When they do that, standing up straight, the world will respect them.

If the world doesn't respect them, then what? The Jewish people will still govern themselves. That is an end in itself and one worth defending.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Writing in the Tablet on Feb. 22, an Israeli scholar of the American political system claims that the proposed judicial reforms in Israel should disturb American conservatives. Why? Because, says Professor Yoav Fromer, they're really just a replay of FDR's court-packing plan.

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Clearly learned in American political thought and history, Fromer, who chairs Tel Aviv University's Center for the Study of the United States, invokes Alexis de Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers on the virtues of judicial review and judicial independence. The claim is that the reforms will make the Israeli Supreme Court march to the dictates of a tyrannical majority.

The argument is wrong but revealing. It's wrong because it ignores a great deal about both the proposal on the table, as well as the crucial differences between Israel's system and the United States. But Fromer's article accidentally reveals a great deal about whose interests are really at stake.

Let's start with the facts – the ones ignored in Fromer's article, which render useless his comparisons between Israel and America. For one thing, FDR's court-packing proposal was to add seats to the Supreme Court that Roosevelt would immediately fill, thereby transforming the court's political makeup in one fell swoop.

The current judicial reform does nothing of the kind. It proposes adding no seats to the court. So it would not enable Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to add even a single justice to the court right now.

Instead, in another fact Fromer overlooks, the proposal takes control over appointments away from private lawyers and sitting judges, and gives more of it – not all, but more – to democratically elected officials. Can you imagine what the United States would look like if the leaders of the American bar, such as the heads of Wall Street law firms, held two of nine votes on appointments to the Supreme Court? Or if three more of those votes came from the court itself? Ending such a non-democratic regime is hardly the first step on the road to serfdom.

But the most important fact Fromer ignores in his song of praise to US judicial review is that in America, we have a written Constitution. That document constrains judges and allows them to strike down the will of Congress and the president only when the laws stating that will are themselves illegal because they contravene another, higher, written, democratically adopted law – the United States Constitution itself.

Israel has no written constitution. Instead, its Supreme Court is a law unto itself. It strikes down whatever it wants, whenever it wants when it thinks that the government chosen by the voters has done something that a majority of justices feel is "unreasonable." While Fromer worries about Israel's "fragile" basic laws, which come as close as Israel has to a Constitution, he ignores the fact that one of the things making those laws so fragile is that the Supreme Court has granted itself the power to strike down such laws. In Israel, you see, the constitution can be unconstitutional if the justices say so because they think it's unreasonable. And the justices who do that, recall, are the ones chosen by the private bar's leaders and the sitting justices, who, of course, choose as successors the people they agree with.

None of this makes any sense, and once one understands that this is the system being reformed, no serious person can deny that reform is needed. That's why Israel's President Isaac Herzog., the former leader of the Labor Party, and Natan Sharansky, who knows a thing or two about real fascism, both support reform. Both want Israel's fractious political parties to negotiate on a compromise bill that fixes these problems and can be supported by a wide majority. The Likud Party leaders pressing for reform, such as Simcha Rothman, have been trying for weeks to conduct such negotiations. But Yair Lapid is in the streets of Tel Aviv, handing out Israeli flags paid for by American liberals through the New Israel Fund, opposing negotiation unless the government first agrees to stop governing, and calling for violent revolution.

Despite the crucial facts it ignores, Fromer's Tablet article is revealing for its description of the interests he perceives to be threatened by the reform he opposes. Minority rights are at stake, he claims. Who are minorities? Helpfully, he names the ones he cares about: "Palestinians, Arab Israelis, women, LGBTQ people, and even secular Israelis."

These are, one might notice, the people who vote left – except, of course, for Palestinians. They are not citizens of Israel or inhabitants of Israeli territory. But they are a group favored by the left. (That, by the way, is why the left is out of power – because a clear majority of Israeli voters realized long ago that their government cannot be committed to advancing the interests of people whose leadership is universally pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state.)

Yet these are the constituencies – and the only constituencies – whose interests have been advanced by the secular elite that seized control of Israel's government through the self-proclaimed "revolution" of Chief Justice Aharon Barak decades ago. It was Barak who invented the idea that a court can strike down laws that are "unreasonable," and who anointed himself and his judicial colleagues as the final arbiter of what "reasonable" means.

And yet. In Israel, the Haredim are a minority. Religious Zionists are a minority. The Israelis who live near Arab Palestinian communities that shelter terrorists – such as the group of murderers who call themselves "the Lion's Den," which has been killing Jews all over the country for the last several months – they're a minority too. Professor Fromer isn't worried about them, and neither was Aharon Barak nor his colleagues or the people they chose to succeed themselves in the wielding of the great powers that Barak seized.

For that matter, combat soldiers are a minority in Israel. Yet the Supreme Court long ago conferred upon itself the right to overrule the soldiers' commanding officers on when and how those soldiers could use force to defend themselves and their fellow citizens, thereby grasping a degree of unchecked power held by no other court in the civilized world. That minority is also not of much interest to Fromer.

For an unelected body to wield power over all of these people, dictating to them solely on the basis of what these self-selected Solons think is "reasonable," is simply and utterly intolerable. Indeed, it's totally indefensible. Which may be why even an article that attacks judicial reform doesn't actually defend the system that will be left in place if reform fails.

Is the Likud proposal perfect? Perhaps not. But it behooves serious people, learned scholars who know about law and history, to engage seriously with the real issues and thereby to help bring Israel's voters to real solutions. Making things up about court-packing and singing about judicial review when there's no written constitution are no substitute for careful thought or serious argument.

 Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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An important step forward in the battle against antisemitism was taken recently by the US Department of Education, which has the potential to improve the antisemitic atmosphere now tainting many US college and university campuses. The DoE's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has officially recognized that differential treatment of people because they adhere to the Jewish commitment to Zionism violates the Jews' civil rights and constitutes illegal antisemitism.

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As explained in the complaint to which OCR has now responded, opposition to Zionism, means "the denial of Jews their inalienable and collective right to self-determination, as expressed in the connection to their ancestral homeland, the Land of Israel." Self-determination by any people can only be exercised in a physical place – a place where that people has the right to determine its own fate. Anti-Zionism is thus at its heart an insistence on perpetual Jewish weakness, on Jews' eternal dependence on the kindness and indulgence of non-Jewish majorities among whom all Jews would be forced to live if the planet were found too small to accommodate one Jewish homeland.

The use of anti-Zionism as a mask for antisemitism has spread rapidly across American colleges and universities. It's now dripping down even to elementary and high schools, where anti-Israel activists are attempting to make public school curricula conform to their belief that Jews have no right to a homeland and that the Jewish commitment to Zion is racist. One might have thought that the 1991 repeal of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism would have reveal this canard for what it is, but if one thought that one would be wrong.

DoE's action comes in the wake of an announcement in August by 14 student organizations at the law school of University of California, Berkeley that they would refuse to have as speakers any person who supports "Zionism, the State of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine." Note, for those who may be confused by other versions of anti-Zionist boycotts, that the mask is off on the announcement by these student groups: These boycotters don't pretend they are merely interested in criticizing the State of Israel or some action it has taken with respect to Arabs within or near its borders. This boycott declaration is clear: The fact of Israel, and the fact of Zionism, are what need to be opposed and put a stop to. To achieve that goal, these students propose to do what so many American students now do at what used to be our finest universities: refuse to listen to anyone they disagree with.

A complaint filed with OCR argued that "Zionism is an integral component of Jewish identity" and "a key pillar of Jewish faith," and therefore that exclusion of Zionists necessarily means closing the door to Jews – it "exclude[es], marginaliz[es] and silenc[es] Jews." It would be no different if the student groups announced: "We've nothing against Islam, but we refuse to admit people who believe Mecca is a holy city that only Muslims may enter."

In its Dec. 13 letter, OCR announced that it was opening an investigation into whether "a hostile environment [was created] at the law school" for students and teachers "based on their shared Jewish ancestry" when university-recognized student organizations passed a bylaw against inviting speakers who support "Zionism, the state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine."

We now need a full-throated commitment to the principle announced, and now acted upon, by the Education Department's OCR, espoused, and acted upon, by civil rights offices of all states and cities.

But more is required, and not just from government entities but from the many people at US colleges and universities who are charged with ensuring that these educational institutions do not discriminate against minority populations in their midst. That means the offices for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) at all colleges and universities must internalize and act upon the central insight now adopted by the federal government: that "a hostile environment" is created for students and teachers "based on their shared Jewish ancestry" when university-recognized student organizations discriminate against people who support "Zionism, the state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine."

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The typical response of anti-Israel activists to demands that they not be allowed to discriminate against Jews – including those espousing the Jewish commitment to Zion – is that their free speech rights are being denied. But that's no more true here than it is for the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws to protect every other group. Nobody would buy the idea that a university must tolerate any student group's exclusion of, or hostility to Muslims who believe in the sanctity of Mecca, or the exclusion of gays who believe in their right to marry one another.

The Jewish commitment to Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel is a sincerely held religious belief. Therefore, barring the door to Zionists means barring the door to Jews. That's against the law, as DoE's OCR has now made clear.

Everyone who cares about this issue needs to know that.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Indeed, Israel first agreed to allow Omar and Tlaib entry. As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained in his statement announcing the revocation of this permission, Israel changed its mind only when their planned itinerary made clear "that their intent is to hurt Israel" and promote "unrest against it."

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No country has any obligation to let admit people who come only to attack. Yet Israel has been denounced for this decision.

The answer is that the attacks come from different flanks. The actual Israel-haters are delighted to attack Israel for not letting the women in, just as they would have been delighted to attack Israel for letting them in and then bemoaning the oppression of the Palestinians that the women came to promote.

Another front, though, has been Israel's "reasonable" friends, who worry that by barring its door to these enemies Israel allowed itself to be made to look bad. Let's hold that accusation up to the light.

Several years ago, a "flotilla" set sail to Gaza from Turkey, including several boats filled with celebrity Israel-haters and one filled with actual terrorists. They claimed they were coming to deliver humanitarian supplies to the oppressed Arabs in Gaza, which is under a blockade that even the United Nations says is legal because the Hamas government in Gaza has declared war on Israel (and, just for good measure, on all Jews throughout the world). In fact, though, as was obvious to anyone who was paying attention, these people wanted to do nothing other than stage a publicity stunt, manufacture victims of Israeli self-defense, declare victory and go home.

Israel stopped most of the boats without incident, but the one with the trained terrorists on it put up a fight. Israel landed some of its most highly trained special ops soldiers on the deck of this ship, armed with sidearms and paint guns – yes, you heard that right, paint guns. So enormously brave and skilled were these Jewish heroes that they ultimately subdued the terrorists on deck, who came at them with metal rods, tried to kidnap one and bloodied several before they were defeated.

The world's response? The same foolish nonsense we hear now about Omar and Tlaib. Israel's avowed enemies claimed to be shocked at Israel's bad behavior, saying they used violence to stop a humanitarian campaign! And all its tepid friends could do in response was to wring their hands and moan that the incident made Israel look bad.

This response came then, as it often does now, from people who clearly care about Israel, accurately evaluate Israel's enemies most of the time and who should know better than to be cowed by publicity stunts. The only point of the exercise – of the Mavi Marmara "humanitarian" flotilla, like the "learning exercise" of Tlaib and Omar, was to make Israel look bad. For a reporter or analyst to say that Israel failed because it looked bad by barring its door to these enemies is an entirely self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, it isn't even a prophecy; it's just a self-referential announcement about the views of the announcer. Israel, these people are saying, looks bad because I have announced in print that Israel looks bad.

This is nonsense. What Israel did was simply to deny entry to enemies – something that every reasonable country does every day. The United States denies visas all the time to people it deems a threat. In fact, according to a General Accounting Office report from 2018, in the United States, under President Barack Obama, the non-immigrant visa refusal rate rose from about "14% in fiscal year 2012 to about 22% in fiscal year 2016, and remained about the same in fiscal year 2017; averaging about 18% over the time period," according to the report. "The total number of NIVs issued peaked in fiscal year 2015 at about 10.89 million, before falling in fiscal years 2016 and 2017 to 10.38 million and 9.68 million, respectively."

Looking bad is in the eye of the beholder. Lookers who are analysts (and even those who are just thoughtful) should feel no obligation to bemoan Israel's "looking bad" for anything unless it really is bad. If it's not, then the objective analyst should always say exactly that.

On Friday morning, it was announced that Israel had granted Tlaib's request to enter the country so that she could visit her 90-year-old grandmother, who lives in the disputed territories. "It may be my last chance to see her," Tlaib tearily told the media before Israel acquiesced. Israel insisted only that Tlaib agree that while she was on this humanitarian visit, she not promote a boycott of the Jewish state. Tlaib's response? After saying "yes," she ultimately said "no." She thus proclaims her real truth: Visiting her aged grandmother was less important than promoting hatred of the Jewish state.

If anyone had any doubt about the intended purpose of this "visit" by Omar and Tlaib, this capitulation by Tlaib removes it. They weren't coming to learn and see, and they weren't coming to promote peace. They weren't even coming to visit family. Instead, as Tlaib makes absolutely clear, they were coming only for one reason: to hurt Israel. If they couldn't do that, they weren't coming at all, even to visit aged family members whom they will probably never see again.

Israel absolutely should not fall victim to such stunts. And neither should its friends.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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In fact, as is clear from a bipartisan record in the United States that rests on legal authority stretching back centuries, the exact opposite is the case. As just explained by Robert Mueller, the special counsel who has spent the last two years investigating U.S. President Donald Trump, "criminal accusation against a sitting president would place burdens on the president's capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct."

Israel's procedure for removing the nation's chief executive is different than America's. But the principle Mueller invokes applies with at least equal force – in fact, with even greater force – in Israel than it does in the United States.

This is so because it's far easier in Israel for a sitting prime minister than it is for a sitting U.S. president to be removed from office. And no one is suggesting that a former prime minister or president has any immunity from criminal charges. The issue is not whether Netanyahu can be criminally charged, but only when – and whether such charges can be used to remove him from office.

In the United States, a president becomes a former president only if his term ends, if he resigns voluntarily, or if he is first impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives (which requires that a majority of the House votes to accuse the president of "high crimes and misdemeanors"). Then the Senate holds a trial of the president and must find him guilty of at least one of those charges, in which case he is immediately removed from office.

In Israel, by contrast, a prime minister becomes a former prime minister whenever he loses the confidence of 61 members of the Knesset. No formal charge by the legislature, and no trial, is needed. That means that, if the law sought by Netanyahu's coalition is in fact put in the books, the political process, rather than a single prosecutor, decides whether a prime minister continues to serve. That is the very essence of democracy. It is the placement of that decision in the hands of an unelected bureaucrat – a prosecutor who has never run for office or been chosen by any voters – that is the real threat to the peoples' rule.

In the United States, this issue was first fully addressed by the Department of Justice in 1973, when the president was a Republican, and the analysis was performed by a Republican lawyer appointed by that Republican president. The conclusions reached then – that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime – were completely reaffirmed in 2000, when the president was a Democrat and the lawyer doing the assessment was also himself a Democrat.

Both U.S. Department of Justice statements explained that barring a prosecutor from criminally charging a president, and leaving that decision with the legislature, places responsibility in the hands of duly elected and politically accountable officials. The House and Senate are appropriate institutional actors to consider the competing interests favoring and opposing a decision to subject the President and the Nation to a Senate trial and perhaps removal. Congress is structurally designed to consider and reflect the interests of the entire nation, and individual Members of Congress must ultimately account for their decisions to their constituencies.

The Justice Department explained that, if instead of the House and Senate the decision were left in the hands of a prosecutor, the president's fate would not be decided through a democratic process:

By contrast, the most important decisions in the process of criminal prosecution would lie in the hands of unaccountable grand and petit jurors, deliberating in secret, perhaps influenced by regional or other concerns not shared by the general polity, guided by a prosecutor who is only indirectly accountable to the public. It would be inconsistent with that carefully considered judgment to permit an unelected grand jury and prosecutor effectively to "remove" a President by bringing criminal charges against him while he remains in office.

This analysis applies with full force in Israel; in fact, with even more force, because juries, grand and petit, are themselves ways for "the people" to make their voices heard in law enforcement. But Israel doesn't have juries of either kind. So the decision to criminally charge a head of state would be made in Israel entirely by what the U.S. Justice Department has called "an unelected prosecutor." That's hardly a way for the people's ruler to be chosen.

Israel's governments, remaining in office only as long as they can hold together a coalition of unruly parties, are notoriously fragile. A law that immunizes a sitting prime minister from criminal prosecution does one thing and one thing only: It gives the people's legislature in Israel the power to decide whether a head of state should be removed.

This is particularly sensible because the voters in Israel knew this issue was on the table when they went to the polls. In this respect, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit did both Israeli voters and Netanyahu a favor when he announced, only shortly before the elections, that he intends to indict Netanyahu. So voters knew this issue would come up—and they chose a coalition that, it was clear, would support Netanyahu on the proposed law. Allowing the Knesset to take this step is exactly what democracy calls for, and it's what the voters in fact did call for.

And what about the rule of law?

The American authorities answer this claim as well because they remind us that at the end of the day, law is made by the people. Equally important, the law is enforced by a government that is and must always be controlled by the people. That popular sovereignty is the deepest and most important source of the law's legitimacy. Take away the people's control and law enforcement becomes just another tool for some small group to impose its will on everyone else.

The protection Netanyahu seeks, which is the limitation on prosecution already conferred upon the American president, does not immunize either officer from criminal liability. Both president and prime minister can be criminally charged as soon as they leave office. The law sought in Israel, like the rule in place in the United States, protects only one thing: the people's right to choose their leader.

Anything else is tyranny.

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Telling ugly lies about the Jewish people is anti-Semitic and it's anti-Semitic, first and foremost, because they are lies.

This simple truth enables us to understand why Rep. Ilhan Omar and David Duke are now on exactly the same page, so much so that Duke has tweeted his applause for Omar and Omar has not declined the compliment.

Duke lies about the Jewish people, claiming that they control the world for their own ugly purposes. Omar does exactly the same; that's why Duke praised her. Omar lies about the Jewish state and about the Jewish people in that state and in America.

Does Israel ban or punish religions other than Judaism? Muslims control the mosques on the Temple Mount; the muezzin's call is broadcast freely on loudspeakers all over Israel five times a day, starting at 5 a.m. Christians go safely to church in Israel as they cannot do almost anywhere else in the Middle East. Omar's claim that the Jewish state discriminates against religions other than Judaism is a lie and it's anti-Semitic because it's a lie about the Jewish people and their state.

Is Israel – the nation-state of the Jewish people – an apartheid state? Nobody who's ever gone to the grocery store in Israel could ever truthfully say such a thing because they would have seen Jews and Arabs shopping together and working together. Nobody who's ever looked at the government of Israel could say such a thing because the government is populated by Jews, Druze, Christian and Muslim Arabs, Baha'i and every other religious group you can think of. Claiming that the Jewish state puts Arabs in Bantustans is a lie: Some 54% of the population of the Haifa District is Arab. Equating Israel with South Africa before Mandela is an anti-Semitic lie because it's an ugly untruth about the Jewish people and the Jewish state.

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Lying about the actions of the Jewish state to delegitimize the Zionist enterprise while affirming the right of every other people in the world to a place of their own (and not caring all that much how those other places treat their minorities) is anti-Semitic because it's a lie.

The overwhelming majority of U.S. senators and representatives support a close relationship with Israel because they believe that such a relationship is in America's interest. Lying about the Jews spreading money around to buy this support is anti-Semitic, and it's anti-Semitic because it's a lie. (It's a lie, in part, because the overwhelming majority of support for America's pro-Zionist position comes not from Jews but from Christians.)

Omar has claimed that she is merely "questioning" America's relationship with Israel. But she's lying because she's done no such thing. She's advanced no argument about why it isn't in America's strategic interest to maintain its current relationship with Israel. She's adduced no reasons why the United States would be better off supporting the terror-exporting, America-hating government of Iran.

What she has done (and all she has done) is lie about Israel and the Jews. Telling such lies is no less anti-Semitic than "explaining" hostility toward the Jewish state by claiming that on April 19, the Jews who live there, like the ones who live in the U.S., will be eating blood-drenched matzah.

Omar's actions, though, have afforded the world some badly needed clarity because they enable us to see who's lined up with whom. David Duke's website trumpets his agreement with Omar and Omar hasn't rejected his support.

This unity of purpose among Jew-haters shows clearly why it's delusional to claim, as Paul Krugman recently did, that only the haters on the Right are dangerous. There is no Left or Right on Jew-hatred; whether it comes from a Somali woman in a headscarf or a white man wearing a pointed hat, it's all the same. If you're lying about Israel, the Jewish state, or you're lying about the Jews, as a people, then you're an anti-Semite.

Does a congressional resolution condemning "hate" make all of this go away? Of course not, because the only "hate" that's been on display is Jew-hatred. Therefore, it was Jew-hatred that needed to be condemned. The Democrats' inability to do this speaks volumes about them, about their party's allegiances and about their capacity (or willingness) to understand the world. And themselves.

This article is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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