Palestinianism is a closed system of memes that includes a historical narrative, a cause to which its believers aspire and an idiosyncratic language in which familiar words have special meanings. In this, it is similar to Marxism, which is not surprising, given its origins. Believers in this system include those who self-identify as Palestinians and many in the Western left who support the Palestinian cause.

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Palestinianism originated in the 1960s and was created by the cognitive warriors of the Soviet KGB. At the time, the Soviets were supporting pan-Arab nationalists like Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser in order to counter American and British influence in the Middle East. With the decline of pan-Arabism, Palestinianism became a useful way to incite the Arab world against the West. It also provided an excuse for opposing Israel, which the USSR now considered an enemy. Ironically, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had initially hoped that Israel would join the socialist camp, but it had become clear by the mid-1950s that Israel was drawing closer to the West.

This was a time of worldwide decolonization, and the KGB pushed the idea that the conflict between Jews and Arabs for sovereignty over the Land of Israel was actually a movement of national liberation by an indigenous "Palestinian" people against European colonialists. The Soviets repeated this endlessly despite the fact that approximately half of all Israelis are descendants of the Middle Eastern and African diasporas.

The Soviets had always used race as a weapon in their psychological warfare against the U.S., correctly seeing the exacerbation of race-based resentments as a highly effective way of sowing division among Americans. During the 1970s, they introduced the racial element into the Arab-Israeli conflict, as exemplified by the passage of the United Nation's "Zionism Is Racism" resolution in 1973.

The Soviet's Palestinianism was based on a clear and consistent, if false, narrative. The pivotal event in the narrative is the loss of land the Palestinian Arabs suffered in 1948, which they call the Nakba (catastrophe). However, what happened to the Arabs of Palestine was common for a losing side in war. After World War II, for example, at least 12 million ethnic Germans fled or were expelled from Eastern Europe. Jordan completely cleansed Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem of Jews after the 1948 war. Some 800-900,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab countries starting in the late 1940s and into the 1960s. Had the Arabs won the war, the Jews of Israel would certainly have faced a similar fate.

But unlike the ethnic Germans or the Jews of the Middle East, the Palestinian Arabs did not accept resettlement or any amelioration of their condition. So, the reversal of the Nakba, the "return to their homes" of the more than five million descendants of the original 600,000 refugees, became a fundamental part of the Palestinian cause.

The narrative also extends into the past. It falsely claims that a "Palestinian" people inhabited the Land of Israel for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. Some Palestinians, like the late diplomat Saeb Erekat, went so far as to claim that the Palestinians had lived in the Land of Israel from the time of the Canaanites and Philistines.

Along with granting aboriginal status to Arabs, the narrative denies it to Jews. It erases the long history of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, sometimes falsely claiming that there was no Temple in Jerusalem, or that today's Jews are descendants of the medieval Khazar people, with no connection to the Middle East.

To Palestinians, the Nakba is the most important event in their history, as important as the exodus from Egypt is to the Jews. Palestinians often compare it to the Holocaust. The Nakba is a wrong that cannot be righted in any other way than its reversal – the return of the refugees. And because the narrative says that the refugees were expelled violently, then violence is justified to reverse it.

Thus, Palestinian honor cannot be regained by compromise. Palestinianism only accepts the idea of a two-state solution as a temporary expedient towards its objective of reversing the Nakba. Palestinianism also completely rejects the idea of "two states for two peoples," insisting that the return of the descendants of the 1948 refugees to Israel must accompany the re-partitioning of the land. Thus, the "two states" would be dominated by one people – Palestinian Arabs.

It's important to understand the essential role of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the development of a specifically Palestinian identity. Before the advent of Israel, the clan was the source of Palestinian Arab identity. Now, it is the fight to destroy Israel. To be Palestinian is to oppose Israel and "resist" the occupation of "Palestinian land," from the river to the sea.

Palestinianism as an ideology is much like Marxism or Scientology. When Palestinianists are confronted with clear-cut facts, like the historical and archaeological evidence of a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel for thousands of years, they simply deny or ignore them.

Their special language is much the same. In ordinary English, one can occupy a house or a country. But in the language of Palestinianism, Israel "occupies the Palestinian people." Not only a site, but a people can be "occupied." The implication is that, for example, Gaza can be occupied without a single Israeli soldier present.

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There is also the word "resistance," which has connotations of French partisans blowing up Nazi ammunition trains, but for the Palestinianists means bombing a pizza restaurant in Jerusalem. In the same way, "nonviolent popular resistance" means murdering random Jews with knives or automobiles rather than guns or bombs.

Even though it is based on a false narrative, historical lies and perverted language, Palestinianism has the advantage of being an internally consistent system. Its only drawback is its total disconnection from reality. Yet Palestinianism has proved remarkably adaptive. It has transformed itself in accordance with the times, like the antisemitism to which it is closely related.

All the same, the ultimate objective of Palestinianism, the Palestinian cause, remains the same: The transformation of Israel into an Arab state, along with the violent expulsion of the Jews and their replacement by the descendants of the Arab refugees of 1948.

The adoption of Palestinianism as an essential part of the identity of the Arabs of the Land of Israel has terrible implications, because it means that there can be no compromise solution to the conflict. Palestinianism holds that the Palestinian people is the eternal enemy of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel, making the conflict a zero-sum game. Ultimately, this means that the conflict will continue until one of the two groups remains in the land and the other disappears.

Featured on JNS.org, this article was first published by White Rose Magazine.

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In all the world there are fewer than 15 million Jews, in Israel fewer than 7 million. But there are forces arrayed against us that are unique in their scope and viciousness. Throughout the world, even in countries where there are few Jews or none at all, people have opinions about us. According to a worldwide survey done by the ADL, some 26 percent of the world's 7.5 billion people "harbor antisemitic attitudes." That is incredible, when you think about it.

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There are 35 million Kurds in the world, another people seeking (but so far not getting) self-determination. Certainly, they have issues with their Turkish and other neighbors, but I venture to guess that it is highly unlikely that anywhere near as many people have even heard of the Kurds, much less "harbor anti-Kurdish attitudes."

What's true for Jews goes triple for their state. I won't repeat the depressing statistics about the number of United Nations resolutions condemning Israel that pass every year, and the fact that it is consistently attacked there for crimes that it did not commit while countries that do engage in murder, aggression and oppression are never mentioned. I won't go into detail about the extreme and irrational anti-Israel expression (misoziony*) found in almost 100 percent of the world's academic and artistic realms.

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Really, Israel and Jews are unique in the "objects of hatred" department (and if you think it's our fault, then you are part of the problem).

This hatred is not just theoretical. From time to time, our immediate neighbors start wars whose intent is to kill or disperse the Jews inhabiting the Land of Israel. As a result, Israel has been forced to spend a large portion of its GDP on defense, which has led to its possession of very advanced military technology, which, along with its slightly better degree of organization, led to the defeat of its enemies in conventional war. That in turn led them to adopt strategies of asymmetric warfare and terrorism, which we have managed to counter, although less successfully.

These aren't our only enemies. In the middle of the twentieth century, one of the most highly developed scientific, literary and musical cultures in the Western world descended into genocidal madness and ignited a war which resulted in 60 million dead and much of Europe laid waste, primarily – there were other reasons, but I'll stick with "primarily" – to annihilate us. Largish groups in almost every country of Eastern and Western Europe worked together with the Nazis to help collect, ship and exterminate those of us who fell into their hands.

After the war there was a general revulsion in what was left of the countries that had participated in the biggest pogrom in history, as well as an understanding on the part of the Jewish remnant that our state had to be established regardless of the cost, which prevailed against the resistance – imagine, after all that! – the resistance from Britain and the Arabs.

But the anti-Semitism of Europe didn't go away, although it was pushed under cover by the embarrassment of its involvement in the pogrom of pogroms. There was no embarrassment about expressing it in the form of misoziony, the wild hatred of the state that we managed to establish despite Britain's best efforts to prevent it. And while there is still enough revulsion left to prevent them from repeating their attempt to liquidate our people, it hasn't stopped them from paying to create the conditions for others to do it for them.

So we have European powers, particularly Germany (of all nations) and the hyper-civilized Scandinavian countries – the ones who abhor physical violence and have made the expression of racist sentiment illegal, spending millions of their citizens' taxes on enterprises designed to weaken the Jewish state and set the stage for its destruction by Arabs or Iranians who aren't squeamish about direct action with guns and bombs to accomplish the goal desired, but never said out loud in public, in Brussels, Berlin, and Stockholm.

European money keeps numerous international and Israeli organizations afloat, usually ostensibly in defense of human rights, but practically focusing on the rights and national aspirations of one particular group, the Palestinian Arabs. If you ask an honest Palestinian, he will tell you that he aspires, above all else, to violently kick the Jews out of all of the Land of Israel, in which he believes they have no right to live (except as a dhimmi minority), and certainly no right to have a sovereign state.

The Europeans, realizing that this aspiration smells uncomfortably like the 1940s, insist that what they want is only to divide Israel along the 1949 armistice line and set up a Palestinian Arab state in the eastern part. Then this state will live happily alongside Israel, with its nine-mile-wide waist, and the "Middle Eastern conflict" will be over. This is called the "two-state solution," but of course won't solve anything, except the difficulties the Arabs have today in hitting Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport from their territory with the cheapest and simplest of mortars.

Israelis learned by experience that Arab control of areas near Jewish populations makes them a target of terrorism and rocket attacks, and refuse to vote for the stupid or psychologically disturbed politicians who advocate this. Thus, since the second intifada (2000-3) and the Hamas takeover of Gaza (2007), Israeli voters have rejected the parties of the left, whose support has fallen to the point that they flirt with the cutoff percentage in elections.

Europe wants to change that. For example – and this is just one of countless similar examples – the European Union has granted more than half a million dollars (500,000 euros) to an Israeli NGO whose objective is to change the attitude of Russian-speaking Israelis, who have always leaned politically right for obvious reasons and who have opposed the creation of a Palestinian state.

The European Union says that the grant is intended to "promote conditions for a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and potential shifts in public opinion among the Russian-speaking community by building confidence and trust in the two-state solution among a population that has traditionally rejected and been omitted from the process, as well as to deconstruct a negative view of the Palestinian narrative."

It should be obvious that the political attitudes of Russian-speaking Israelis are nobody's business but Israel's. But this item provides a window into the overall program of the European Union and individual European countries, which work on numerous levels to bring about the partition of the Land of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state.

This and other manipulative programs, including financial support for international and Israeli NGOs that propagandize, support BDS, and engage in "lawfare" against Israel, complement the EU's investment in building infrastructure for Palestinians in Area C, the part of Judea and Samaria that according to the Oslo accords is under Israeli civil control.

These building projects, carried out without permits or permission, are intended to create facts on the ground that will make it more difficult for Israel to retain control of these areas in any future deal. At the same time, international pressure on Israel to not build in the territories, even inside existing settlements that will certainly end up as part of Israel, has been effective. Despite news reports that "1,000 new homes have been approved" and so forth, very few buildings have actually been constructed. And illegal Palestinian settlements have not been removed.

Make no mistake – the Palestinian leadership has no interest in a state in the territories except as a stepping stone to the replacement of Israel by an Arab state, and the death or dispersal of about half of the Jewish people. They say it themselves, over and over.

Are officials in the European Union and individual countries that support this project so stupid or blind and deaf as to fail to understand that? Do they not know that the funds that they provide to the Palestinian Authority are used to pay terrorists? Do they not see that UNRWA, of which they are now the prime funder, educates Palestinian children to hate?

I don't believe it.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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"Dear #Iran, The USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people. 52% of us humbly apologize. We want peace with your nation. We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime. We do not know how to escape. Please do not kill us. #Soleimani"

Dear #Iran, The USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people. 52% of us humbly apologize. We want peace with your nation. We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime. We do not know how to escape. Please do not kill us. #Soleimani pic.twitter.com/YE54CqGCdr

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) January 3, 2020

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Somewhat less embarrassing but entirely formulaic were the responses of the various Democratic presidential candidates, almost all of whom said President Donald Trump's action was "reckless" and likely to lead to further escalation, or even war. J Street, the anti-Israel lobby masquerading as pro-Israel, said: "This highly dangerous step, taken without congressional authorization [actually not required—V.R.], could trigger a disastrous escalation costing the lives of thousands and lead our country into a devastating new war of choice in the Middle East."

A great many reactions took the form of "don't tug on Superman's cape because you don't know how it will end." Even though Iran is anything but Superman—the United States is roughly a zillion times more powerful militarily—these commentators argue that Iran has numerous avenues to damage the United States and Trump isn't competent to deal with the consequences.

There's no doubt that Soleimani's replacement will mount some kind of revenge attack, and it will at least be intended to kill people. But the American home front is unlikely to bear the brunt of it (McGowan needn't worry); it is likely to be aimed at U.S. troops in the Middle East, Israelis, or both. Indeed, the Israel Defense Forces was immediately placed on alert, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew home from Greece early to meet with his Cabinet.

Despite this, practically everyone in Israel applauded Trump's action. Even the editor-in-chief of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, Aluf Benn, saw it as a good move for Trump, both politically and strategically.

This is likely because Israelis have seen the steady advance of Iranian influence in the region from up close, and are concerned that the regime is not far from reaching its goal of creating a "Shi'ite crescent" through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. At the same time, Iran has destabilized Yemen, which just happens to control a strategic choke point at the outlet of the Red Sea, and from which it can harass its Arab enemies, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

The strategy—Soleimani's strategy—has been to create and support Shi'ite militias in Iraq and Syria which, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, will ultimately take control of those countries and do Iran's bidding. Soleimani brilliantly took advantage of the rise of Islamic State and the chaos in Syria to increase Iran's power, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced people.

His goal was to eliminate American influence from the Middle East, acquire the oil resources now in the hands of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, destroy Israel and establish a Shi'ite caliphate across the region. Ultimately, the acquisition of nuclear weapons would make any challenge to Iranian hegemony impossible. And who knows what longer-term objectives, in Europe or even North America, he might have had?

The destruction of Israel is essential to the Iranian plan. Israel is seen both as an outpost of the United States and the West and as an illegitimate Jewish sovereign state in a region that according to Islamic ideology must be 100% Muslim. The ayatollahs want to lead the world's 1.5 billion Muslims. Hence there are both strategic and religious reasons for Iran's enmity to Israel.

The Obama administration believed that by appeasing and paying off the Iranian regime it could prevent direct attacks on Americans and establish a working relationship with Tehran. But the Iranians ran circles around the U.S. negotiation team (led by the less-than-bright John Kerry), achieving a deal which not only did not prevent them from getting nuclear weapons, but guaranteed that within a few years they could proceed with their program.

It reduced the strength of U.N. resolutions limiting their development of ballistic missiles, removed sanctions—most of the text of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is a list of sanctions to be nullified—and provided an influx of cash that could be and was used to finance the terrorist militias. It also provided a weak, easily bypassed inspection routine that could not be depended upon to prevent cheating.

Another part of the Obama strategy was to try to buy cooperation from Iran by weakening Israel, to the point that it would be indefensible (this policy was first enunciated in the 2006 "Iraq Study Report" to which Obama confidant Ben Rhodes contributed).

The administration thought it could "bring Iran into the family of nations" this way, but the Iranian regime's goals were to dominate, not to cooperate. The misunderstanding was massive and fatal. (And what is unclear about "Death to America"?)

The recent series of attacks against American forces and interests in the area, that culminated in the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, was intended to break America's will and precipitate a withdrawal from Iraq and Syria. And this time it was the Iranians who miscalculated; Trump was not prepared to tolerate the deaths of any more Americans, and he understood well the political consequences of "another Benghazi" or "another Iranian hostage crisis."

Israel has been fighting a quiet war against Iran for several years, trying to prevent its buildup in Syria, its introduction of precision-guided missiles into Lebanon, and other strategic activities. Israel has been almost entirely alone in this fight.

Now, in one blow, Trump removed a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans, numerous Israelis and other Jews, and hundreds of thousands of Arabs and non-Arabs in several nations of the Middle East. Trump interrupted the Iranian plan to dominate the region, perhaps permanently. The Iranian-controlled militias in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria will be orphaned. Who knows, maybe the next step will be to put an end to the Iranian nuclear weapons project.

It is even imaginable that the removal of Soleimani will be the trigger for the replacement of the medieval regime of the ayatollahs by the Iranian people, and the return of Iran to the civilized world after more than 40 years of darkness. May it come to pass!

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The film made me enormously proud of the accomplishments of the Jewish people, state and army. And while I don't believe in direct divine intervention in human affairs, this victory – along with the survival of the Jewish people since biblical times – makes me wonder if I could be wrong about that.

So what's the problem?

It seems we have taken the gift given to us by God and the IDF and, little by little, through ignorance and weakness, squandered it.

The Sinai peninsula, conquered in 1967, is back in Egyptian hands. Yes, I know we gained "peace" in return, but actually the United States bribed the Egyptians to leave us alone with billions in aid, including military aid that translated into weapons that can only be useful against us.

Today Egypt has a government that sees an advantage in maintaining the cold peace – but if the Muslim Brotherhood government that came to power for a short time (2012-13) with the help of former U.S. President Barack Obama had been more competent, we would be facing hostility today no less bitter than we faced in the days of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In exchange for this peace, we gave up natural resources including oil, but more importantly, the one thing that Israel lacks above all else, and the one lack that is most difficult to compensate for with high-tech cleverness: strategic depth.

The Gaza Strip, too, has reverted to Arab control. It is now for all intents and purposes a sovereign state under control of Hamas, which bitterly oppresses the Arab population and uses it as a human shield in a permanent war of attrition against Israel. This came about as a result of Israel's voluntary, unilateral abandonment of its settlements and military installations there.

Gaza now serves as a base for Hamas military activities and an excuse for international condemnation of Israel, which from time to time must defend itself against rocket attacks, incendiary and explosive devices carried by kites and balloons, and attempted incursions by terrorists, either over the border fence or under it by way of tunnels.

And the holiest spot in the world for the Jewish people? The very day after the conquest of the Old City, Moshe Dayan ordered the Israeli flag removed from the Dome of the Rock and gave administrative control of the Temple Mount to the Arab Wakf. A "status quo" was created, in which Muslims and Jews would both be able to visit their sacred sites.

However, in practice, Jewish rights were eroded little by little. Today, Jews can visit only at restricted times, can enter through just one gate, are forbidden to pray, carry objects (even water bottles), or even use water faucets dedicated to Muslim hand-washing. They are often exposed to harassment from hostile Muslims.

There are few limitations on Muslims, and Arab children sometimes play football on the Mount, despite a court order forbidding it. The Wakf has built several mosques on and under the Mount, and in the process destroyed or lost irreplaceable, archaeologically valuable artifacts. Agreements call for archaeological supervision of construction work, but this requirement is ignored by the Wakf.

As far as the rest of Judea and Samaria is concerned, the "international community," in mortal fear of PLO terrorism and the Arab oil weapon, has been pushing and shoving at Israel ever since the 1967 war to abandon the territories that it liberated from Jordanian occupation.

But it took Israel's own Shimon Peres, in pursuit of a chimerical "New Middle East," to stupidly bring our worst enemy, Yasser Arafat, back from exile where his organization was growing old and feeble, and allow him to establish his terrorist base in the biblical heartland of the Jewish state. We even gave him money and guns!

We paid a steep price for this mistake during the Second Intifada, and we continue to pay today when Jews are murdered at random by the generation of young people raised under the educational system of Arafat and his successor, the porcine Mahmoud Abbas.

Although we can't blame anyone but ourselves for the Oslo Accords – even former U.S. President Bill Clinton was taken by surprise – the hostile European Union has made use of Oslo to advance its objective of forcing Israel out of the territories. In the guise of "humanitarian" aid to the Palestinian Authority, the E.U. today ignores Israeli zoning and building regulations and constructs public buildings to create facts on the ground in areas that, according to Oslo, are under Israeli control.

Why did we allow all this to happen?

There are multiple reasons. One is that we don't know how to negotiate. We like to think, "We are strong, we can afford to give up (whatever) in the interest of peace. The other side will appreciate our generosity." Wrong. Whatever we give up, the Arabs take, and then ask for more. They don't understand "generosity" – they see weakness. The negotiating process is like a ratchet: it can go in one direction – toward the Arabs – but not the other.

Another reason, often noted, is that we assume that everyone else is like us. We want peace, so Palestinian Arabs must want peace. We care about security, economic development, a good life for our children. So must Palestinian Arabs.

They, on the other hand, simply want to get rid of us; it doesn't matter to them if they would have a better life if they cooperate with us.

We want an independent nation-state, but they are strongly loyal to their clans. We look for win-win solutions, but it is always more important to them to hurt Jews than to help Arabs.

Finally, the Arabs are always ready to use the "heckler's veto," or more correctly in this case, the "terrorist's veto": give us what we want or there will be no peace. What Israeli politician wants to be accused of being responsible for the unrest that follows standing up for ourselves?

What can we do differently? Unfortunately, we need to become less generous. We need to become tougher. We need to set limits and stick to them.

The E.U. is funding illegal construction in Judea and Samaria? Demolish it. Start with Khan al-Ahmar, which even Israel's left-leaning Supreme Court agrees must go, and which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to remove months ago.

We need to take back what we have given up, little by little, and strike hard against the "terrorist's veto." We are not going to get the Sinai back – and at this stage, I doubt that we want it. But the situation in and around Gaza can and must change radically. There must be a price paid for incendiary balloons, a price so high that they won't want to pay it more than once.

The same goes for the Temple Mount. A bit at a time, the way we lost it, we must get it back. Of course, there will be a reaction (i.e., riots). But the reactions happen because the Arabs know they can get away with them. They know we will always back down, as we did with the metal detectors at the gates. They know we are afraid of confrontation, so they just push harder.

It's a long process, and it will be painful. The Arabs are in the habit of winning; it will be hard to get them used to losing. But there are no win-win solutions for the Middle East. In this neighborhood, all games are zero-sum.

This article first appeared on AbuYehuda.com and is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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As you probably know, Israelis vote for parties, not for individual candidates. The parties pick ordered lists of candidates (how they do this is up to the parties), and each party gets a number of seats in the Knesset proportional to the number of votes it receives. The seats are ordered, so if a party gets a third of the total vote, the first 40 candidates on its list get seats.

Then the president will consult with the various parties and pick the Knesset member he believes most likely to successfully form a government. Usually – but not necessarily – this is the No. 1 member of the party with the most seats. Of course, no party ever gets a true majority, so after the election come the coalition negotiations.

In April's election, the constellation of right-wing parties, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, came out far ahead of the Center-Left, led by Benny Gantz and his Blue and White party (actually, it's hard to call it a party – it's more like a conglomeration of personalities with differing political viewpoints who agree on one major principle: opposing Netanyahu).

Although the Likud by itself achieved only a small margin over Blue and White, Netanyahu's big advantage was that he had – or at least thought he had – enough coalition partners to put together a majority in the 120-member Knesset. Gantz was far behind, being unable to get 61 members in a coalition even if he were to ask the non-Zionist Arab parties to join him, something which hasn't happened in Israel's history.

Israeli coalition negotiations are notoriously ugly, with small parties trying to extort the maximum number of important Cabinet positions, promises to support or kill particular legislation, or money for pet projects or specific segments of the population, before they agree to sign on. But usually everyone wants to get on with it, and compromises are made before time runs out.

This time, one of Netanyahu's partners, Avigdor Lieberman, whose Yisrael Beytenu party is made up mostly of secular Russian immigrants, and which won five Knesset seats in April, refused to join the coalition unless the government passed a law Lieberman had initiated back when he was defense minister. The law calls for an increasing number of yeshiva students to be drafted and applies financial penalties to yeshivas that don't meet conscription targets.

The haredi parties would not agree, although they were willing to discuss a compromise. But Lieberman insisted: The law must be passed "without changing [so much as] a comma." Lieberman's five seats made the difference between a 65-seat majority and the inability to form a government.

Everyone believed that a last-minute compromise would be made, or that Netanyahu would persuade an opposition member to jump ship or pull some other rabbit out of his hat. But it didn't happen. Netanyahu's only options were to inform President Reuven Rivlin that he could not form a coalition, in which case Rivlin could ask Gantz or any other member of the Knesset to try, or to get the Knesset to pass a bill to dissolve itself and call for a new election. Whether anyone else could have succeeded was uncertain, but rather than take the chance, Netanyahu chose other election. They will be held in September.

Until then, Netanyahu will remain prime minister. The Knesset will not introduce any new bills. Soon the campaigns will start all over again. It's been estimated that the election will cost the Treasury 475 million shekels ($131 million), and the obligatory day off for all workers will cost the country as much as a billion shekels.

The lack of a government capable of making serious commitments will also mean that U.S. President Donald Trump's "deal of the century" – at least, the political part of it – will be put off until after the election, and after the coalition negotiations that must follow. That won't be until the end of the year, which will be just about when the pre-election frenzy in the United States starts. Various domestic issues of importance will languish, such as the reform of Israel's Supreme Court, which I believe is essential and should be decoupled from any attempt to grant Netanyahu immunity from prosecution on the several corruption charges pending against him.

And it's possible that the whole thing could happen again this September.

It's totally unacceptable that the creation of a new government can be stymied by one stubborn individual, whose party received about 4.2% of the vote.

The general problem is the way a small party can exploit its position to gain massive leverage and benefits. The haredi parties, who are prepared to go with either the Right or Left depending on who offers them the best deal in cabinet positions, money for yeshivas, freedom from military service, and Torah-based legislation, are famous for this, but they are not the only ones that do it. Of course, this applies once there is a government as well as at coalition-making time; if they are unhappy, they can vote with the opposition to bring down a government.

The bribes paid to the various prospective coalition partners – and bribes are exactly what they are – are expensive. New ministries and their staffs are created to give jobs to important partners. Institutions are subsidized, welfare benefits for particular segments of society are expanded, and so forth. The negotiators are generous. Why shouldn't they be? It's absolutely vital (they think) that their party get to lead the nation, and it's taxpayer money anyway.

There were too many small parties, so the percentage of the vote needed to get into the Knesset was raised. It presently stands at 3.25%, which means that if a party doesn't get that many votes (equivalent to four seats), they get no seats and their votes are lost. This is what happened to my vote this April when the New Right party of Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked missed the cut-off by a mere thousand votes. Now there aren't numerous one- and two-seat factions in the Knesset, but the extortion problem still exists. And the high cut-off harms the medium-size parties because it impels voters to choose the biggest parties out of fear of having their votes neutralized.

There are some very good things about Israel's system. A citizen makes a clear ideological choice in voting for a party, and Israelis care about ideology. Even if you vote for a party that just makes it over the threshold with four or five seats, your people will have influence in the Knesset, and perhaps in the cabinet, if they join the coalition. Unlike the American or British systems in which parliamentary candidates stand for election from geographical districts, there is no problem of gerrymandering (drawing district boundaries to disenfranchise voters of a particular party or particular ethnic groups). The gridlock caused by a conflict between the executive and legislative branches, so characteristic of the American government, is far less likely.

I don't have an easy solution. Politics is politics, and it will always involve deals in smoke-filled rooms. But is there anything we can do to clean up the coalition system without losing the worthwhile parts?

This column first appeared on AbuYehuda.com and is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The court says Netanyahu wants to render it powerless, destroying the independent judiciary that is a requirement for democratic governance. Netanyahu says the court has arrogated too much power to itself, so much so that the Knesset and the government, which in fact are the democratically elected voice of the citizens, are the ones that have been neutered.

Both sides appeal to the concept of democracy, but both sides understand that the conflict is about power.

What brought this issue, which has been simmering for years, to a boil now is that the prime minister would like to pass a law granting him immunity from prosecution on corruption charges as long as he is in office. And he also wants the Knesset to be able to override a Supreme Court decision to overturn a law it has passed.

It is very unfortunate that the issue of checks and balances among the branches of government has to be tied up with the question of immunity for the prime minister, since naturally anything anyone says about it will be attributed to the most obvious political motives. But the balance of powers question does need to be addressed.

Let me just insert a bit about immunity here: I'm for it. The past few years have seen Netanyahu's time increasingly taken up by several police investigations, countless sessions of questioning, and daily media frenzies based on leaks from the police and prosecutor's office. There is absolutely no doubt that his ability to do the job he was elected to do has been severely impacted. Not only that, but his political position has been undermined by the flood of unproven allegations leaked to the hostile media. No matter how you feel about Netanyahu, this is both dangerous for the nation and personally unfair to Netanyahu.

There are good solutions to this in other democracies. In France the president has immunity from questioning by the prosecution for the period of his term; statutes of limitations are suspended during it. He can be prosecuted immediately upon leaving office, and he can be removed from office by impeachment by a special court that is convened by both houses of the French parliament. In America, although there isn't a constitutional provision for it, the majority legal opinion is that a president must be impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate before he can be prosecuted.

Israel does not have a constitution as such. The very first Knesset was supposed to adopt one six months after the establishment of the state. It did not, because various factions were unable to agree on many issues, and because David Ben-Gurion felt the enterprise would be too divisive. Instead, Israel has 14 Basic Laws, which deal with important subjects and which will supposedly (don't hold your breath) one day be expanded and put together into a constitution.

Most (but not all) of these Basic Laws can be changed by a vote of the majority of the Knesset members present (assuming a quorum). Some are detailed and some vague, some subjects are not covered at all, and the empty spaces have to be filled by legislation or by legal interpretation. This provides fertile ground for a very activist court. Israel's Supreme Court has defined its own role over the years, especially since the 1980s, and an exceedingly broad role it is.

In most legal systems, access to the courts is reserved for those with "standing" – a stake, financial or otherwise, in the outcome. But in Israel, anyone can petition the highest court in the land, at any time, for any reason. So you have European-funded NGOs petitioning the court on behalf of Palestinian residents of the territories!

In most systems, there are limitations on what is "justiciable" – that is, appropriate for the courts to decide. Some matters are considered essentially political, and some, like issues related to security, require special expertise. But in Israel, the definition of "justiciable" has expanded to include almost anything the government does.

There's more. As Evelyn Gordon writes, "Whereas once the court would consider only whether a government action accorded with the letter of the law, the court began routinely overturning decisions which it considered 'extremely unreasonable,' on the grounds that extreme unreasonability is ipso facto illegal. In the words of [former Court President Meir] Shamgar, 'unreasonability that extends to the heart of the issue makes the decision of a government authority illegal.'"

This combination gives the court virtually dictatorial powers in every realm of government action. The court can review any law passed by the Knesset and any administrative decision of any government official, including decisions made by military or security personnel. It is the first and last court to consider such laws and decisions; there is no higher court to appeal to. And it can throw out a law or decision not only because it's unconstitutional, but because they find it "unreasonable."

Israel's Supreme Court is probably the most powerful such organ in any democratic country. The U.S. Supreme Court has never been this "activist" in anyone's wildest dreams. The Israeli Supreme Court sees itself as sort of a Platonic philosopher king, completely objective and not dirtied by the muddy waters of politics.

All judges in Israel, including Supreme Court justices, are chosen by a nine-member judicial selection committee, which meets in secret. Three of its members are Supreme Court justices and two are representatives of the Israel Bar Association. These five often vote as a bloc, which means that the left-leaning legal establishment controls the selection of judges. These philosopher princes were recently embarrassed when an influential member of the committee and head of the IBA was caught trading judicial appointments and promotions for sex.

A right-wing government and a left-leaning court would be expected to be in conflict. But the balance of power has moved too far in the direction of the court in recent times, paralyzing the executive and legislative branches.

The court almost prevented the signing of an agreement to sell natural gas abroad, and has prevented the repatriation of illegal migrants that have made life hell for residents of southern Tel Aviv.  It has ordered the demolition of whole Jewish communities in the territories because of NGO petitions that (sometimes unknown) Palestinians have claims on some of their land. It is almost certain to move to overthrow the newly passed nation-state law.

The court is the main reason for complaints that Israelis vote for the right but get policies of the left. It is not accidental that the expansion of the court's powers came at about the same time that the historic monopoly of the Labor Party was smashed by Menachem Begin.

The political opposition and the court itself view – or pretend to view – the situation today as nothing less than an attempt to overthrow democracy and the rule of law, and install Netanyahu as a fascist dictator.

"Judges on the Supreme Court have warned they could take 'extreme steps' in order to block legislative proposals that could severely curtail the court's powers and shield Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from prosecution," Israeli television reported Friday.

"It seems as if the prime minister and the candidates for the role of justice minister want to shatter and destroy the legal system," Channel 13 news quoted unnamed Supreme Court justices saying during private talks. "The immunity bill alongside the override clause is unbelievable. We won't hesitate to take harsh and extreme steps because history will judge us," they were said to add.

What these steps might entail remains unspecified. But it's clear that we will be in uncharted territory with no clear directions to get back if an open conflict between the government and the court erupts.

An immunity bill, along with some sensible restrictions on the court's power – a return to requiring petitioners to have "standing" in a case, a retreat from the idea that everything is justiciable and that anything the justices find unreasonable is also illegal, would be a good start. A change in the way judges are selected to make it fairer and more transparent is probably necessary.

None of these things destroys democracy or introduces fascism. Indeed, by restoring eroded checks and balances, they would make the country more democratic. But the Supreme Court is the last bastion of real power for the left in Israeli society, and they are going to fight to keep it, regardless of collateral damage.

This article is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post Israel's coming constitutional crisis appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Nevertheless, Trump is right to pressure Iran to end its nuclear program. If you are the U.S. president, and a country that chants "Death to America" every day several times before breakfast is clearly developing nuclear weapons (despite a worthless "nuclear deal"), the rational thing to do is make them stop, right? How hard is this?

OK, Obama didn't agree, but then … never mind. I'm talking about today.

Trump is being accused of dragging America into war, and Israel – and by extension, the Jews – are being accused of dragging Trump. That is precisely the point of the hateful anti-Semitic cartoon that created such a furor when it appeared in The New York Times International Edition recently.

I am sure that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a majority of Israelis, myself included, would be happy to see the United States destroy Iranian nuclear facilities. The United States has the power to do it, and Israel would doubtless offer to help.

But this doesn't imply that the United States would be doing it on behalf of Israel, let alone on behalf of the Jews. As a general rule, the United States, like other nations, does what it does to advance its interests. In this case, American self-interest includes protecting itself and its allies, as well as preventing the rise of a hostile caliphate in the Near East, and keeping Iran from taking control of a big chunk of the world's oil supply.

Saudi Arabia has as much or more influence in the United States than Israel and has had a "special relationship" with America since February 1945, when Franklin Roosevelt met King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud on board a Navy destroyer in the Suez Canal. Indeed, when the Saudis went head-to-head with the vaunted "Israel lobby" over the sale of AWACS airborne warning and control systems aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981, Israel lost.

The Saudis, who are presently fighting Iran in a proxy war in Yemen, are perhaps even more worried about Iran than Israel is. But that is less interesting to those who want to blame the Jews.

A conflict with Iran could result in attacks on American bases in the region (there are more of these than you may think) or terrorism against the homeland. If this were to happen, there's no doubt that it would be used as an excuse for anti-Jewish acts. It's ironic that even those Jews that supported the Iran deal, hate Trump, and have no connection whatever to Israel would find themselves targeted (ironic, yes, but it serves them right).

This is something that today's American Jews are not ready for. Having grown up during the Golden Age of American Jewry, they are not expecting irrational, unfair treatment. They are not expecting the kind of crazy conspiracy theories that blame the Jews for 9/11 to become mainstream. They are not expecting their ideas and opinions to be discounted because they come from Jews, their children to be rejected from elite schools – or admitted, and then tormented and threatened there. They are not expecting to be cursed or even knocked down in the street if they look Jewish, something that seems to happen on a daily basis now in New York City.

Most do not understand, yet, that every Jew is responsible for every other Jew, and that, as someone recently said, "when visibly Jewish people are victimized, then every Jewish person is victimized." And finally, they almost never realize that, whatever they think about it, the Jewish state – not Brooklyn and not Los Angeles – is the center of the Jewish world.

But they will learn. Either the United States will follow the courageous policy of the Trump administration and confront and defeat its enemies (who are also the enemies of Western civilization overall), or it will return to the cowardly strategy of appeasement and obsequiousness of the previous administration.

Either way, the Jews will be in the middle, and it will be hard for them. They will either learn to stick together and fight against the anti-Semites, or they will save themselves by giving up their Jewishness, insofar as this will protect them (it didn't during the Nazi period).

What's changed in the last two millennia or so?

This column first appeared on AbuYehuda.com and is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post What lies ahead for American Jews? appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

I know that Americans are obsessed with race. It's understandable, given the historical facts that half of the country had a slavery-based economy until 1865, that vicious, legally sanctioned discrimination against the descendants of those slaves persisted until the 1960s and that racial hatred – on the part of both whites and blacks – is still prevalent in American society.

This is an American problem. It is not Israel's problem, although Israel's problem is based in history, too. The history of violent Arab/Muslim rejection of Jewish sovereignty anywhere in the region, which is championed today by the Palestinian Arab leadership represented by the PLO and Hamas.

Israel's problem is not race-related; Jews and Arabs are closer genetically than Jews – even Ashkenazi Jews – and Europeans. It is not color-related; Jews and Arabs both come in all colors. It is not even an ethnic conflict, since Jews and Arabs can and do get along – despite many cultural differences – in Israel, in environments where the influence of the PLO and Hamas is weak.

No, ours is a violent political conflict. But unlike similar conflicts all over the world, ours is not allowed to end. The Jews have spiritual, historical, legal, aboriginal and moral rights to what we call the Land of Israel, and we've defended those rights through several wars. But for two main reasons, the conflict cannot be ended.

One reason is that the Western world is not happy with the idea of a sovereign Jewish state. It doesn't like the idea of an ethnic nation-state in general or the idea of a Jewish one in particular. It has internalized the KGB-developed narrative of a Palestinian people whose "human rights" are denied by the very existence of a Jewish state. So the West keeps pushing various "solutions," and the Arabs keep rejecting the ones that allow the Jewish state to continue to exist.

Wars cause population shifts. Three million Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II. They do not have a "right of return," and the world understands. Some 800,000 Jews were forced to leave Arab countries after 1948. Most went to Israel. Nobody dreamed that they might have a "right of return" to Baghdad or Algiers. Nobody established a special United Nations agency to take care of them and their descendants until this claimed "right" could be exercised. But the West coddled the Arab refugees from the 1948 war and the United Nations encouraged them in their fantasy of return.

The meddling of the West is problematic, but it is the second reason that is more serious: The Jews are stupid. Yes, you heard that right. The much-vaunted Jewish mind, which has produced so many Nobel prizes, has not been able to figure out that when someone is trying to kill you, the most moral thing to do is to fight back.

I know, it's in the Talmud: "When someone is coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first" (Sanhedrin 72a). But we don't do that. The Arabs ethnically cleansed every last Jew from the areas they occupied in 1948, but we didn't do the same (contrary to Arab propaganda, very few of the Arabs who fled Israel at that time were driven out by force). The Jordanians violated the cease-fire agreement and refused to allow Jews or Christians to visit their holy sites in Jerusalem and Hebron. They turned synagogues into stables and tore up Jewish gravestones to build urinals. The Jews, on the other hand, ultimately granted the Arabs in Israel full citizenship, so they could elect Knesset members who support terrorism against Jews.

In 1967 they came to kill us again, and this time we conquered Jerusalem, and all of Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip. But we still didn't kick them out, and we even gave them control of the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest place. And what a surprise – we are not allowed to pray there, and they have ripped out tons of earth from underneath the Mount, destroying Jewish history, maybe even artifacts of the First Temple! And we knew about it and didn't stop them.

The Jews are stupid because they think they should be "better" than their enemies, according to some Western/Christian standard that even the hypocritical West doesn't live up to. The authors of the Talmud were right after all.

There is no shortage of hatred here in our region, but it isn't racism. And it is mostly Jew-hatred on the Arab side. There are some Jews that hate Arabs, usually because of a bad experience, such as losing a mother or a child to terrorism, but the government, media and cultural establishment have sent a message of peace and tolerance since the beginning of the state and especially since the Oslo period of the 1990s. The PLO and Hamas have done precisely the opposite, from the time of the father of Palestinian nationalism, Haj Amin el-Husseini, who incited pogroms in the 1920s and then spent World War II in Berlin, where he encouraged Hitler to kill as many Jews as possible, raised an S.S. division from, Bosnian Muslims and broadcast anti-Jewish propaganda to the Middle East in Arabic.

Husseini's disciple Yasser Arafat initially set up the PA education system, geared to teach irredentism and Jew-hatred; he initiated the policy of venerating and paying terrorists who murder Jews. His successor Mahmoud Abbas continued and expanded it. Now there is a whole generation of potential murderers among the Palestinian Arabs, who see Jews not as people but only as objects of hate, the filthy offspring of apes and pigs. Today, a Palestinian teenager who is chastised by his parents might take a knife and slaughter a Jew in the street to redeem himself.

The Jew-hatred that burns so hot among the Palestinian Arabs, nurtured over the years by the Palestinian leadership and tolerated and even subsidized by the West, is the single most important factor that prevents a peaceful end to the conflict here.

But that doesn't fit the worldview of people like Rep. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) and former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke. They worry about the human rights of the Palestinian Arabs, but don't notice that the right to life of the Jews in Israel is threatened by an array of dozens of countries, including some that are armed to the teeth with rockets aimed at Israel. They think that Israel has not offered enough to the Palestinians, despite the fact that she offered far more than she could afford several times, and the offers were rejected – because no offer that allows the continued existence of a Jewish state will be acceptable to them.

The Jews have behaved stupidly, but the growth of the very right-wing politics in Israel that Beto and Bernie decry shows that they are finally smartening up.

American Democratic politicians should do the same.

This column first appeared on AbuYehuda.com and is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

The post No, it's not about race appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.