Almost Marx offers a reductive selection, of a kind…

Headline: Netanyahu Is Shattering Israeli Society

Israel today is a boiler with way, way too much steam building up inside, and the bolts are about to fly off in all directions. 

Israel has never experienced a Palestinian intifada, a Jewish settler intifada and an Israeli citizen judicial intifada all at once. But that’s begun to unfold since Netanyahu’s far-right government took office. 

Violence between settlers and Palestinians is not new. But when it coincides with the most ultranationalist, ultra-Orthodox govern.

The new factor, though, that could really tear apart Israel’s democracy is Netanyahu’s scheme to essentially end the independence of the Israeli Supreme Court in the name of “judicial reform.”

Really? Ask yourself this question: What Israeli leader would risk a civil war at home, a breach with Jewish democrats across the world, a break with America, significant damage to Israel’s high-tech miracle — and now open talk by Israeli soldiers that they will not die to protect a dictatorship.

Netanyahu would risk all that only for something very big, very important and very personal.

In other words, none of this judicial “reform” is on the level.

That is why the protest movement against this judicial coup continues to gain strength.

In the next few weeks, if Netanyahu’s coalition passes these “new laws of dictatorship,” Barak said, they will be “canceled by the Supreme Court” as illegal.

“If the threshold is crossed,” he added, “and the laws of the dictatorship are set in motion, the responsibility will pass to us, the citizens of the country.

Finally, something else I have never seen before: A scary reality check from one of Israel’s hottest start-ups. 

“We share in the grief of the families who lost their loved ones in the last day and are concerned about the rapid security deterioration on both sides.

“Wiz has been successful thanks to the exceptional ecosystem that exists in Israel, but we are now facing an existential threat.

It’s not an accident. I believe that if Ukraine were to fall to Vladimir Putin and Israel were to become a phony democracy like Hungary, the whole world would tip the wrong way. 

Israel is the only real democracy with an independent judiciary in the Middle East. Ukraine is defending the European Union, a giant engine of the rule of law, free markets, human rights and democratic norms, even if not every E.U. country has fully embraced all of them. If democracy is undermined in the E.U. and Israel, democracy everywhere will be more endangered. Ukraine is defending the European Union, a giant engine of the rule of law, free markets, human rights and democratic norms, even if not every E.U. country has fully embraced all of them. If democracy is undermined in the E.U. and Israel, democracy everywhere will be more endangered. 

I have been ruthless in pruning this ‘essay’. Not one political/economic/moralizing cliché left behind with the added rhetorical ballast of:

Israel is the only real democracy with an independent judiciary in the Middle East.

Ukraine is defending the European Union, a giant engine of the rule of law, free markets, human rights and democratic norms,…

The New York Times and Tom Friedman are propagandists for The American National Security State, and its fascists, ungovernable suzerain Israel.

Almost Marx