The US gives Israel no aid. The money euphemistically called aid is anything but that. There are three types of aid: hesed (given of pure goodwill, not owed), tzedakah (owed for moral reasons), and mishpat (owed for legal reasons). None of those categories apply to Israeli-American relations. America possesses neither selfless goodwill, nor moral or legal obligations toward Israel. The annual subsidies are bribes at worst, payments at best.

America pays Israel for the influence in the Middle East. Controlling the Middle Eastern bully is America’s greatest regional asset. America receives immense leverage in its dealings with Muslims by the fact of controlling their major enemy. That achievement did not come easy: America failed at replicating it with Pakistan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Germany, Japan, and several other countries. America has two contradictory policies: isolation and the world outreach. Aligning itself with regional hegemons is the only way to resolve that political dichotomy. Tried in many countries, the US policy of regional alignment succeeded only with Israel. Only the Jews were ready to sell sovereignty.

The aid to Israel is an extremely efficient investment. America spent more than $300 billion for the second Iraqi invasion, but the debacle discredited it: Iran ignores the American threats and Muslim countries continue jacking up the oil price. Israel is given 1% of that amount in annual installments, and in return greatly reinforces the US stance in the Middle East: Arabs can always appeal to America against Israel, and America generally listens to them.

The American aid is insulting. In Jewish law, it is an obligation of every individual to avoid being a burden to society at any cost; charity is the last measure for those who cannot support themselves. It is outrageous for the Jewish nation to plead for aid with Gentiles. Israelis are not that poor, and the aid is not that huge. Ending the huge subsidies to Israeli Arabs and non-working Jews, reducing socialist pensions and job benefits in the Histadrut trade union, and firing a large number of useless bureaucrats would more than offset the lost aid. Sensible free market economic policy rather than the post-socialist regulatory abomination would propel the Israeli economy. The IDF can be reduced, long-term conscription abandoned, and a lot of money saved if Israel officially relies on nuclear deterrent in any large-scale war.

The amount of US aid, about $3 billion, remains steady in nominal dollars since 1979 while the CPI increased more by than three times during that period. The cost of weapons increases much faster than the CPI, and the amount which was substantial in 1979 is now negligible. The aid comprises 0.02% of the US GDP and 0.5% of its military budget. For Israel, the figures are, respectively, 1.5% and 17%. Though even the 17% can be realistically offset by streamlining the Israeli army, the situation is actually much simpler: Israel spends 77% of the American aid for American weapons. R&D is a major part of advance weapons costing, and Israeli purchases help amortizing it. In effect, Israel receives the US subsidies in order to pass them to the US military contractors. The comparable Russian weapons – not exactly of the same edge but still very good and sufficient for fighting the Arabs – cost 4-7 times less. In terms of purchasing power parity with Russia, US military aid to Israel amounts to about half a billion dollars annually and close to 3% of Israel’s military budget. Some of the weapons Israel procures in America are virtually useless, untested, hyper-expensive military toys superfluous in the real combat. Addicted to US weapons, Israeli army came to resemble its American counterpart in terms of inefficiency, skyrocketing costs, and the lack of training and daring spirit.

Large-scale procurement of American weapons made Israel dependent on America for any military operations and highly susceptible to the threats of American embargo on arms deliveries. Israel currently places tens of thousands of small, less than $100,000 orders with the US defense contractors, which suggests across-the-border dependence on American suppliers for spare parts and minor items. That creates immense political dependence on the US.

The general purpose American aid to Israel is now being phased out, and for good, as it was spent in the most corrupt manner and hardly benefited common Israelis. The extraordinary aid packages were always detrimental to Israel as they were tied to sweeping political concessions such as evacuating Gaza, a move which created power vacuum where Hamas quickly established itself.

The amount of US aid to Israel is comparable to private Jewish contributions, about $1 billion through charities and $500 million in Israeli bonds. Israel could reasonably double those contributions by a stronger Diaspora outreach program.
The balance of aid benefits the enemies of Israel. Egypt gets $1.3 billion in military aid annually, even though its only target and potential enemy is Israel. America knowingly and willingly funds an anti-Israeli army. Egypt also receives $500 million of general purpose aid, which frees the equal amount of its own resources for military programs. American aid is much more critical to impoverished Egypt than to Israel, and so the cessation of foreign aid to all parties benefits Israel.

America also aids Palestine – though the money nominally bypassed the PLO, it paid the salaries of PLO functionaries and employees. Now America directly funds Fatah, which even pays Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Hamas employees in Gaza with that money. In Palestine, America directly finances anti-Israeli terrorist infrastructure.

Not only the US aid, but also arms sales are doubtfully helpful to Israel. America traditionally offsets arms sales to Israel with deliveries to Arab states. Arab procurement of US weapons greatly exceeds Israel’s. Joint US-Russian arms embargo on the Middle East would benefit Israel: she is able to manufacture most weapons while Arabs cannot, and Israel has an edge over Arabs in arms smuggling and grey market procurement.

Arabs recognize the dubious value of US support. For example, Jordan, the Arab country closest to the US, supported Saddam in the Iraq-Kuwait war. Jordan was afraid of Saddam and did not count on the US help.

The campaign to end US foreign aid should also include ending the goodwill military campaigns, such as liberating the petty emirate of Kuwait. Israel would benefit from a still wider policy, namely America’s return to its traditional isolation. Taking the US bases out of the Gulf countries would leave Israel as America’s only juggernaut in the Middle East, and actually increase the US establishment’s dependence on Israel.

The one thing I detest more than liberal “rabbis” is racist Jews who speak of vile, underhuman Arabs. On the contrary, Arabs are normal, and in many political and moral respects remind us of how the Jews should behave.

Take Arab rocket attacks on Israel. Few Jews are so contemptuous of Arabs to imagine them stupid to the extent of not recognizing economic benefits of stopping the attacks. Israel would open some crossings, allow some migrant laborers from Gaza, and international aid will increase. The Arabs can get still more aid by ousting Hamas, whose forces constitute, at most, 2% of Gaza’s population. In the place where firearms are abundant, Arabs would have no trouble dethroning Hamas. Gazans are not afraid of Hamas: the people who live for generations in squalid refugee camps under Egyptian, then Israeli oppression, who are used to artillery fire at night, are not afraid of anything. Individual Arabs, yes, they crack easily under interrogation, but Arab masses are fearless.

The only reason that Gazans support the militant factions and withstand Israeli retaliation is the noble feeling of immense hatred to the enemy. They can live peacefully in refugee camps on the UN handouts, but they are willing to suffer in order to return what they consider their homeland, and what is now called, Israel. Gazans did not come from the West Bank; they came from the “core” Jewish cities from Haifa to Jaffa. This is the land which they fight to get back. They don’t fight for Schem or Hebron: those cities are already in Arab hands. They want what the Israelis think is core Israel. And if they cannot get the land now, at least they will continue pounding the Zionist enemy until he gives up.

It might be that the Arabs’ calculations are right. By any measure, Haifa and Jaffa are not Jewish cities; Jews controlled those territories in antiquity only for a very short time. By any measure, Schem and Hebron are Jewish towns: we bought them, conquered them, settled them, had them as our major cities, and have the full-fledged religious right to them. If, therefore, Jews abandoned Schem and Hebron, the Arabs find it completely plausible that Zionists will eventually abandon Haifa and Jaffa. And they are right, Jews keep abandoning those places: Akko is now an Arab town, and Jaffa becomes the one.

So when Gazans shell Israel, they act neither cowardly, nor stupidly, but bravely, shrewdly, and – from their point of view – righteously.

Likewise, Israeli Arabs refuse to integrate, assimilate into the Israeli identity which is so much economically beneficial for them. First, Jews must be eternally grateful to them for doing so. Imagine if Israeli Muslims started acting as good Israelis: learned Hebrew, served in the army, and became nice to Jews. The next thing we would see will be a wave of Jewish assimilation, Jewish women converting to Islam to marry those nice, unobjectionable Arabs. The Arab hostility reminds Jews that something has to be done about the swelling numbers of Israeli Arabs; nice Arabs would be accepted as legitimate voters, breed up to majority, and vote the Jewish state out of existence.

Israeli Arabs refuse assimilating in return for economic benefits. Wait, that’s what the Jews praise themselves with. The good Jews abandon the safety and economic advantages of America and move to Israel. Arabs are smart and rational, or call them cynical: they accept economic benefits from Jews, but refuse to integrate into the Jewish society. Some youngsters are even willing to fight the Jews instead of accepting economic benefits from them, such as higher education; others accept the almost-free education, and then work to subvert the Jewish state by building a parallel Arab society, donating to Islamic charities, and showing solidarity with their Palestinian brethren in the “occupied” territories. In the meantime, Israeli Arabs work to take over Israel by rationally exploiting her democracy, by the mere act of breeding. Sex for them is a political affair. Arabs accept temporary dhimmitude, but lose no chance to further their comeback as the sovereign nation in Palestine.

Arabs don’t want the coexistence with Jews, and wait patiently for the moment when they can drown some Jews and drive away the rest. That is how normal people behave when someone takes over the land they consider theirs. That is why the Torah commands the Jews to fight the natives of Canaan and drive them away, for they would always remember that the land was theirs, and their hostility to Jews will be implacable. Arabs want to drive the Jews away: Arabs resisted the Jews fleeing to Palestine from burning Europe; America and Britain resisted Jewish flight, too. That’s exactly what Jews are commanded to do with respect to Arabs: “For I will give the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you will expel them” (Exodus 23:31).

Jews love to assert that Arabs claim more land that they actually need or have ever settled, that Jews worked the plains which were no-man’s land. But Jews were commanded to conquer the land from the Red Sea to Mediterranean, and from Nile to Euphrates; that’s also a land that Jews have never settled, and cannot settle with meaningful density. National sovereignty over the land has nothing to do with actually settling it: look at Chinese Himalayas or Russian sub-Arctic.

Arabs are religiously intolerant, they protest when Jews worship at the Temple Mount. If only the Arab example rang a bell in Jews’ minds: “You shall destroy, destroy their deities and break, break their monuments” (Exodus 23:24). Every rabbi with the least trace of honesty would concur that cleansing the Temple Mount from Islamic structures is an immensely important commandment, and every minute of procrastinating in doing so is a grave sin. God granted us a miraculous victory in 1967 for a reason, and what reason can we imagine behind giving Jews sovereignty over the Temple Mount? That’s, of course, if you believe that there is God; for those who evolved from monkeys the implications might be different.

Muslims exert horrendous religious punishments. Saudis sentence rape victims to capital punishment and ban every other religion from their country; Iranians stone adulterers. Liberal Jews have long forgotten their own punishments – which are exactly the same for the very same crimes. But Jews prefer tourism’ income to religious purity, and porn industry tax revenues to morality.
Arabs teach their children violence; at the age of eight, they slaughter sheep. At the age of three, good religious Jewish children start learning the Torah from Leviticus, the section that details sacrifices. Liberal Jews assert that Judaism is non-violent; reading the Torah might change their opinion. The God who told us to slaughter Amalek babies and priests of Baal during their worship, who killed the Egyptian firstborn and ordered us to bring numerous gruesome animal sacrifices, God of the Deluge, pogroms, and Holocaust – he is not a merciful liberal “spirit which is in man.”

Arabs are terrorists. But when Arabs kill Jewish civilians, they act normally – as any normal person does to his hated enemy. Jewish civilians serve in the army, pay taxes which support the army, vote for the governments which keep the territories under “occupation,” and send their sons and daughters to fight the Arabs. Palestinian terrorists don’t seek annihilating the Jews; that’s a task for Arab mobs and armies. The terrorists seek rational political ends, and employ violence only to achieve those ends; such violence is very economical by the standards of warfare. Such violence is extremely efficient in political terms: polls show Israeli support for Palestinian statehood growing after major terrorist acts.

Jewish partisans in Europe during WWII also employed terrorist tactics, and so did ETZEL and LEHI. Forget the fringes; it was the Haganah that carried out Dir Yassin and Kfar Kassem. Israeli army routinely shot POWs in 1967 and more rarely in 1973, and crushed them flat with tank tracks. When given a minimally free hand, IAF bombed Lebanese and Gazan towns with no compunction. Indeed, what compunction could be there to an enemy? The British - the world’s utmost liberals - exhibited a very limited compassion to Dresdners whose women, children, and the old they burned in incendiary raids, hurrah. Jews have a divine guideline in dealing with our sworn enemies, “Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Samuel 15:3). God severely punished Saul for merely killing women and children, but not animals. David, likewise but for a different reason, killed all the inhabitants but not animals. You may not like it, but that is Judaism. If you want to be nice, join Tibetan monks; they are not nice, either.

Arabs are suicidal, they send their children to suicide bombings. And Jews were sending their children to senseless risk in Beirut for eighteen years. Arabs, at least, sacrifice their children for political ends; not so the Jews who during the Second Intifada feared for their children day and night but did nothing to stop the Arabs from killing them. No grieving Jewish parent went to Ramallah and blew himself in an Arab bus; a shame. Arabs sacrifice their children for what to them is a noble aim of fighting the Zionist enemy; Jews sacrificed their children to Shimon Peres, the idol of Rabin and his peace process. In the Book of Maccabees, Hannah urges her seven sons to suffer horrible death at the hands of liberal Jews and their Greek masters rather than “merely” eat non-kosher meat. That’s a Jewish mother, that’s Judaism. Compare to Tel Aviv restaurants serving pork.

Of course, Islam is a perversion. Of course, Arabs are wild, primitive, and make worse neighbors than Anthrax bacteria. Of course, the country is ours and we must cleanse it from Arabs by whatever means necessary. But the Arab example offers Jews a valuable insight into what the “normalcy” really is.

After the millennia of the Exile, Jews are not used to sovereignty. Jews developed a habit of appealing to policeman: to protect their ghetto before, to protect their state now. And so the Israeli lobby bends over backwards to garner international support for sanctions against Iran. Just in case someone has missed it: Iran lives under sanctions for the last 29 years, since its Islamic revolution. The touted third round of sanctions is as senseless as the other two: it would freeze some empty bank accounts and impose travel ban on those who can travel under any name they choose. The sanctions are illegal, too: why should Iran, a member of Non-Proliferation Treaty, be punished for acquiring civic nuclear technologies if the US officially acknowledged that Iran has no military nuclear program? In the interconnected world, sanctions are never efficient, especially the import sanctions: Iran can transship its imports through UAE, Syria, or any other country, and use UAE banks and even havala money changer networks for financial transactions. The only efficient sanctions against Iran would be export sanctions, banning oil purchases from that country, but no one cares so much about the Jews as to pay extra at gasoline stations.

Indeed, why should anyone care about Jews? Does any Jew who read about Holocaust honestly cares about Gypsies killed in the death camps? Why should a French company refrain from making a quick buck in transactions with Iran? We the Jews had no problem cooperating with South Africa in developing nuclear bomb, or helping Latin American dictatorships to keep their population in check. When Russia sells missiles to Syria, and America – advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia, why should not Siemens build a telecom network in Iran? Besides, if Siemens won’t do that, Samsung will, or one of the telecom start-ups in Eastern Europe.

Jews can claim Holocaust, compassion, basic human decency – and even make the Western governments pay lip service to those notions, but in the end the governments know they have no fiduciary obligation to the Jews. In fact, most of their constituents would even enjoy if the Jews are fried in the nuclear blast.

Other countries need not fear nuclear Iran. There is no way that Iran would nuke America, Russia, France, or Egypt – both for the fear of overwhelming retaliation and simply because it has no reason to attack. The horror tales of Iran selling nukes to international terrorists are nonsense: Iran did not even allow Hezbollah to use Zelzal-2 rockets in the 2006 Lebanon war. The only countries which have a good reason to fear nuclear Iran are Israel and Iraq.

Sanctions against Iran are a classic example of “quiet diplomacy,” the quintessential Judenrat policy which invariably failed: it did not stop pogroms in tsarist Russia, caused Allies to save the European Jews, or freed the Soviet Jews. Quiet diplomacy requires Bismarck’s brains and Germany’s stature. Jews should loudly pound at the doors, preferably with bombs.

Israel can bomb Iran, suffer the consequences, and reestablish her international stand and deterrence for another twenty to thirty years. Or she can rely on the foreign powers to do the job they don’t have to do, and appear in disregard, surrounded by nuclear Arab states and eventually fried by one of them.

The biggest problem, however, is not Iran, but the nuclear weapons of Islamist Pakistan and rogue North Korea.

"An eye for an eye" is arguably the most misunderstood Jewish commandment. Most condemn it as too harsh, some praise it as just, but few cared to actually read it. This commandment applies to the narrow class of situations only rather than to all crimes.
It is indeed odd to imagine that ancient Hebrews diligently pulled out a tooth of someone who kicked out a tooth. Realizing the impracticality of such strictly defined reciprocity, sages reinterpreted it as monetary compensation: a tooth' value for a tooth kicked out. That, too, ran into practical difficulties: what is a tooth's value? Obviously, the value of the last tooth is greater than of the 32nd tooth. A lost tooth doesn't diminish one's "reference value" at slave market. A bruise, which is temporary, doesn't affect one's permanent value at all, and so the sages declared a bruise value to be a price someone would ask to willingly suffer such bruise. That definition, too, is unworkable, as a rich man and a poor one would value the bruise widely differently, thus defying the common legal guidelines. Besides all of that, there is no hint in the Torah that "an eye for an eye" should be understood figuratively, as some sort of compensation.

The difficulty evaporates when we realize that "an eye for an eye" principle only applies to exemplary punishment in the very specific situation. In such rare cases, reciprocal corporal punishment could be feasibly carried out.

The lawgiver makes his intention known by starting the Laws section (Exodus 21) with rules about Hebrew slaves. Now, that's exceedingly strange. Judaism is about laws and justice, and the Laws section is a centerpiece of the Book of Exodus, literally the central (middle) chapter of the scroll. We would expect the laws to start with major themes, such as life and murder. But eleven opening verses of the Laws detail the rights of Hebrew slaves.

Those rights were exceedingly generous even by the nineteenth century C.E. norms, let alone the ancient world's habits. Slavery of Hebrews was limited to six years. Slave girls were to be treated on par with wives.

What's the point? In the opening lines, the Laws immediately shock the reader into the entirely different moral reality. The Hebrews must isolate themselves from the old habits: from barbarity of neighboring tribes, brutality of Egypt, even from the inbuilt human egoism. At this point, Hebrews are commanded to abandon the natural human behavior of exploiting their compatriots to the utmost extent feasible. They are told to care about the most vulnerable members of their society, Hebrew slaves.

It is not that caring of Hebrew slaves is the major civil law, but it relates the major legal principle, "Love your [Hebrew] neighbor as thyself." That principle is not merely a moral piece, but a fully actionable law.

The Laws section then proceeds with common legal issues.

Murder of a man is generally punishable with execution (Exodus 21:12). In case of premeditated murder, there can be no excuses whatsoever (21:14); the intent to murder a fellow Jew undermines the society's very basis.

There is a legal innovation: manslaughter, voluntary or otherwise, is not punishable; the offender can find refuge among Levites and later in specially designated towns. The only criterion is whether the offender waited for his victim to kill. In Jewish law, generally only actions matter rather than intentions. Why this case is different, why one murder is different from another? Even the nicer modern legal system punishes for manslaughter. The reason is to be seen in the opening verses on the treatment of Hebrew slaves. In such a compassionate society, unpremeditated murder must be presumed unintentional, purely an accident which does not call for punishment.

The murderer fled to a place of refuge, but what about his clan or immediate family? In barbarian societies, they would be targeted for vendetta. Jewish law, however, contains no hint of preventing vendetta, suggesting that it was non-existent in the society. Absence of collective (clan-level) or extrajudicial retribution testifies to the Hebrews' high morality and law obedience. The law was not idealistic, but successfully converted the throng into the perfect society.

Contrary to the common misunderstanding of "an eye for an eye," bruises incurred in fights among men are not subject to retribution, but merely compensated. Exodus 21:18-19, "And when [the] men would squabble, and the man will hit his neighbor with stone or fist, and he will not die but lie in bed: If he rise up and walk outside [his house] on a support, then cleansed [from the guilt of murder] will be the one who hit, only gives [for] his idleness and shall treat, treat."

The period of acceptable illness is any. The lawgiver didn't forget specifying the period, as it is explicitly mentioned in the following verse on beating slaves.

A good reason for not treating a fighting injury as a criminal offense is that both sides are guilty: they equally participated in fight. So there is no punishment per se, but merely compensation of lost earnings and medical expenses.

The law is careful to clarify that any squabble suffices to exonerate the offender. There need not be a fight, but merely a squabble.

Now we know the punishment for murder (execution) and any injuries incurred in a squabble (compensation). What about the injuries inflicted without a fight: by surprising one's opponent or where one man is clearly stronger than another? In such situations, murder is a more likely outcome. Or, we may apply a fortiori argument: if the injuries incurred in a squabble (where both men are equally involved) are compensated, then all the more the injuries incurred in a surprise attack should be compensated. Fully conforming to the liberal ideal, Hebrew law discusses only generic situations; in contrast, modern law is concerned with specifics, thus creates a heap of highly specific legislation and, consequently, loopholes.

Next, the law deals with the most tender and valuable members of Hebrew society: pregnant Jewish women. Exodus 21:22, "If [the] men would fight, and hit a pregnant woman, and the fetuses come out, and there will be no harm [to the woman], then he will be fined, fined as the woman's husband imposes on him, and gives as they lay [on him]." Contrary to anti-abortionists' views Hebrew law does not treat fetus as a human being: killing a fetus is punishable with fine only, it is not a criminal offense such as killing a human being.

The fine is not specified here, and whether it is large or small, is a matter of conjecture. On one hand, the law carefully specifies the double and quadruple fines, and therefore leaving this fine unspecified hints at it being insubstantial. On other hand, the law uses strong language: "fined, fined" and "lay on him." My feeling is that the first option is true, and the fine is small, thus not subject to specification; strong language refers to sureness of the fine rather than its amount.

And here the Hebrew criminal law culminates. Exodus 21:23-25: "And if there would be harm [to the woman], then give a soul for a soul, an eye for an eye, etc." The tit-for-tat retaliation is prescribed only for harming pregnant women.

The legal status of women in Hebrew society vastly exceeded the men's. Maiming a man is subject to fine only, but similar harm to woman involves harsh retaliation. The legislator recognized that women are inherently more vulnerable than men and need stronger protection.

The law teaches us that men cannot claim weakness: it is their responsibility to be on par with any attacker, as they will not be awarded any compensation beyond the costs of treatment and idleness. Women are not expected to counter the attackers except by screaming (and surely must not serve in the army). The society, therefore, punishes even the innocent harm to women severely. The law enjoins the women from participating in men's fights: a woman who indecently touches a man involved in brawl with her husband, is punished.

What about the non-pregnant women? Young females are not expected to come close to men; only married women might defend their husbands. Old females were uncommon in antiquity. So the generic case was a pregnant woman.

The legislator makes sure that his intention of protecting the weak is clear by the following verses, "And if a man would strike his slave or concubine in an eye and destroys it, he will set him free for his eye. And if he would kick out a tooth of his slave or concubine, he will set him free for a tooth." How unusual is that, freeing a slave for merely a tooth! In that era and for three millennia afterwards, masters could kill their slaves with impunity.

This rule is a Jewish version of the affirmative action. According to the tradition, the rule does not apply to Hebrew slaves. Thus, Hebrew concubines are treated on par with wives (Exodus 21:7-11). Such a concubine should be set free even if her master/husband diminished her allowance of clothes. As she has her own clothes, she is a subject of property rights, and not a rightless slave. Similarly, Hebrew male slave owns his wife and children (Exodus 21:3), and so is not a slave in the regular sense. Hebrew slaves are set free at the end of six-year periods, so in effect they are temporary laborers rather than slaves.

In the case of foreign slaves, their masters own their bodies, but Hebrew slaves possess property rights: if they own their wives, then all the more they own their own bodies. Any injury done to a Hebrew slave's body should be compensated like to free men.
The legislator here solved a curious puzzle: since foreign slaves are their masters' property, a master cannot compensate his slave for injury like he would compensate a free person. Sort of fining oneself for breaking one's own instrument. That paradox surfaced in Exodus 21:20-21: murder of a slave is a punishable offense, but any other harm is not punishable as slave's body is "his master's silver." Freeing injured slaves is both ethical, instructive (to slave-owners), and the only logical way to enforce justice while respecting the property rights.

Here is the affirmative action: a Hebrew slave is only compensated for his eye or tooth, but foreign slave is released for the similar injury. The master is, in effect, fined by the tooth' cost and the entire slave' cost, respectively. Therefore the fine for harming the rightless, defenseless foreign slave is much larger than for similarly injuring a Hebrew slave.

No system of justice accounts for all the possible circumstances. Murdering a slave is a criminal offense (Exodus 21:20), injuring him permanently is a civil offense (21:26-27), but what about the situation when the slave died a considerable time after the beatings? Being dead, he cannot be released on the account of injuries, as Exodus 21:26-27 prescribes. At the same time, he was not exactly murdered, as he did live for considerable time afterwards; perhaps the blows were not lethal but his treatment was wrong? Even in the modern courts, which have the benefit of autopsy and other types of expert analysis, there is often no clear-cut answer. And so the legislator sighs, "And if he lives for a day or two, he should not be avenged, as he is [his master's] silver."

Note that the great kindness was prescribed not to the weak in general, but only to loyal (wives) or submissive (slaves). Nothing in the Hebrew law implies kindness or even restraint to enemies, but only to subjugated enemies.

The law equates hitting (21:15) and abasing (17) one's parents; both actions are punishable with death. There is no issue about murdering them: such crime is covered by generic rule of executing murderers. The law is a direct consequence of, "You shall respect your father and your mother" in the Ten Commandments. Rabbis effectively abrogated a similar law about unruly child by demanding unrealistically that both father and mother accuse him in the same voice tone. In the law, however, abasing any parent is a capital offense, no other evidence is required. The law does not sentence merely for a heated argument: only the one [continuously] abasing his parents is liable to death. How do we know it is a crime to abase any parent rather than both of them, for it is said, "his father and his mother"? By comparing this law with, "And he who is hitting his father and his mother, shall die by execution" (21:15): obviously, it is a crime to hit any parent rather than both of them.

Why so harsh a punishment? It's not because of primitive paternalistic concerns; such concerns would justify execution for insulting one's father (head of the clan) but not mother. The law is meant to strengthen the society by strengthening family. The law emphasizes family in the modern sense rather than clan. By making it unthinkable to abase mothers, the law forced Hebrews to leap into the mutually respectful society.

Now we see that Jewish law prescribes different levels of retaliation: mild for the offenses between men, harsh tit-for-tat for attacks on women, hyper-compassionate for wounding slaves, and exceedingly cruel for offending parents. What about the other nations? The Torah deals with two classes of the offending nations. One is Amalek: those who harassed the Jews; such nations must be exterminated even in the remotest generations for their past crimes, probably on the presumption that national character doesn't change and children would readily repeat their parents' sins if given an occasion.

The second class is the nations which settled the Promised Land before Jews; such nations would always remember that the land was theirs, will consider the Jews occupiers, and hate us. Unlike Amalek, they should not be wiped out as they committed no crime against Jews, but rightfully defended themselves against aggression. Jews must evict the core inhabitants (Exodus 23:31), destroy their places of worship (23:24), and God will efface them (23:23).

The raw justice mercilessly extirpates the offenders so that law-abiding Jews can live comfortable lives. Jewish criminal law is unforgiving: neither a victim, nor the society can forgive, but the offender must be punished severely. Forgiveness paves the way to repeated crimes.

Leviticus 24:19-20 suggests that Jews originally adhered to across-the-border "an eye for an eye" and that rule was later softened to apply to pregnant women only. Jews, themselves recently slaves in Egypt, hardly acquired Jewish slaves already in the Sinai. The subsequent verses deal with a settled society with houses, pastures, holes on the roads, and so on. Whatever the legislative sequence, at some point Jews were given a law that presumed goodwill among neighbors, protected the weak, and severely punished the wicked.

It is easy to be pessimistic about American economy. The hard part is timing the downturn. The problem is well known from shorting on stock market: many companies are obviously overvalued, but can still rise up enough to wipe out the bear.

American economy was always, in a sense, a vampire. It attracted huge foreign investments and then defaulted cyclically. Americans have Las Vegas casinos, while the world has its own casino - America. The foreigners played on American stock market, railroads, junk bonds, currency, dotcoms - you name it. To call it "investment," even "speculative investment," is a misnomer: we're talking about high-stakes gambling. The money doesn't even fund the companies in IPOs, but mostly applies to the secondary - purely speculative - market. In the end, foreigners always lost their investments. The boom cycle seems to be about 30-40 years, and the last major crisis took place in the early 1970s, reverberating into the S&L crisis and the 1987 stock market crash.

Obviously, the three times increase in stock market indices since 1994 and up to five times increase in real estate valuations reflect a market boom. Such increases are unsustainable. The looming social security crisis when the baby boomers retire also assures an economic downturn.

The government attempts to cut down on taxes and welfare proved unsuccessful. America, as any democracy, continuously increases the allowances for its voters until the economic dead end. The government expenses rise continuously, almost always faster than GDP, and are resilient: the expenditures keep rising when GDP slows down.

The US dollar is overvalued as any brand-name item. For decades, it was the currency of choice for foreign governments, companies, and commoners. The US, accordingly, was able to issue staggering amounts of currency without the fear of being inundated by it: foreigners kept dollars as reserves and savings, and did not threaten the run on the American market. That situation is changing rapidly since late 1980s as US brokers appeal to previously passive investors. Foreign pension funds and governments seek higher profits by investing in America rather than simply maintaining cash reserves in US dollars. Japanese and the oil Arabs, untouched as yet by American economic crises (their riches accumulated after the 1970s US default), are especially active investors. Chinese government can always unload its massive dollar reserves onto the US market. The euro undermined the dollar as the major reserve currency. American financial sanctions against Iran also suggested the Muslims to switch to euro and Swiss francs. The dollar inflation is huge, about 390% from 1972.

Though the American dominance in the high-tech is unrivaled, it is actually not American. Only a relatively small educated class prospers from the high-tech. Another small number of denizens profits hugely from the Casino America, offering financial services to foreigners and hapless locals, both of whom lose consistently. The majority of Americans are employed in the industries which cannot compete with the foreign ones. That's why the American economy is disproportionally service-oriented: its industries went bankrupt. Scores of Mexican immigrants with no competitive skills weigh the American economy down. The similarity with Ancient Rome is striking. There, too, a small part of the economy was highly competitive while most citizens lived on the government handouts.

Though the US economy is relatively free from regulation, its most important aspect - wage - is heavily regulated. The minimum wage in America drives industrialists out of business. If the least skilled worker receives $8 per hour, then a much more skilled industrial worker expects three times as much, and entrepreneurs have to move their factories to China.

Outsourcing the high-tech jobs to places such as Israel and India presents little problem to America so far. No other country managed to develop the high-tech clusters: many companies working in the same area, venture capital, excellent universities, and attractiveness to highly qualified foreign workers. The problem comes from counterfeiting and reverse engineering the US products. Another critical factor is the demand for high-tech gadgets: recently, Microsoft encountered relatively sluggish sales of its Vista platform to existing Windows customers, as they are satisfied with their current OS and don't want to invest in switching. Manufacturers of hard goods are already familiar with this problem: Volvo is so reliable that many owners of old cars refuse to upgrade, and mobile phone users don't rush to replace their handsets with the newest devices. The market for high-tech improvements can be saturated.

The US "financial" (gambling) industry can be struck hard by the foreigners and small domestic investors becoming temporarily wary of speculative investment.

American economy is overleveraged: from sub-prime mortgages to resurging junk bonds. Many stock corporations have liquidity far below the market price of even the IPO valuations, and their investors are latent losers. The US economy is highly vulnerable to even small downturns. The government has long recognized that problem, and fights it with interventions, essentially absorbing the losers' debts and embezzlers' profits with taxpayers' money. From the New Deal semi-socialist programs which converted a short-term recovery into prolonged recession, to the giant S&L bailout, to the government-propped buyouts, such as the recent Bear Stern's, the government hides the losses from the public view to retain credibility and avoid its nightmare, the run on the US dollar. That's sort of what Enron officials were charged with.

The American economic ripples are a part of the worldwide crisis which has recently broke out in Japan, Malaysia, Great Britain, and other countries. The governments grew bigger, tax more, spend more, and regulate more. For decades, booming economy and the technological revolution provided a sufficient pace for worldwide GDP growth despite the opposing trend of growing governments. Still, the US disposable income grew by merely 1% a year for the last 35 years.

The current international income disparity is abnormal. In the late eighteenth century, English farmers lived not much better than freehold Chinese farmers. So the situation will slowly return to the historical norm. Abnormal profits are only made in monopolies: either regulatory or based on some other advantage. Now the US economy enjoys monopolistic advantage in the high-tech. The income trickles from the top earners down through the American society, but also the know-how and jobs trickle to other countries. America will prosper in absolute terms, but decline compared to other nations which develop faster. They are still unlikely to reach the American income, GDP, and budget figures for considerable time, but the gap is closing. Some countries can form the blocs which collectively exceed the US GDP.

The US Army is heading into a major trouble. It staked everything on the cutting-edge weapons but their costs increase faster than GDP, squeezing the budget. All other high-tech goodies become cheaper, but it's different with weapons where good is never enough, and the army always looks for the best. The law of marginal utility kicks in, and the costs of slightly better weapons skyrocket. The US Army, therefore, might not be so terrifying soon. Or, a major war might shake the excessive gadgets off, and the army would settle on good rather than hyper-advanced weapons.

For all its booms and busts, America will remain a wealthy and important country at least for decades, but its relative importance in international affairs will decline from the unsustainably high post-WWII level.

[Mearat a-Mahpela (The Cave of the Patriarchs) is the burial place of Abraham, Yitzhak, and Jacob. The place was purchased by Abraham and conquered by Jacob. The cave is the second-holiest Jewish site. The insane rulers of Israel gave Arabs most of Mearat a-Mahpela even though Arabs massacred Jewish community in the very same city of Hebron.]

Yigal Amir, although he did not actually kill Rabin, is a hero because he raised his gun against a high-ranking traitor, the murderer of Altalena. I would love to know that Dr. Baruch Goldstein walked into the holy Jewish site desecrated by Arabs and exacted revenge on them and preempted the planned pogrom. Unfortunately, I am not sure about that. Dr. Goldstein was a good Jew and a wonderful person, but he was not perhaps a national hero. He was a victim.

The official story is simple: On Purim 1994, the mad Kahanist took his rifle, went into the mosque, and shot the worshipers. Never mind that the place should not be a mosque in the first place. Never mind the Arabs were shot from the different rifle than Dr. Goldstein’s. And certainly never mind that he allegedly shot 154 Arabs with 140 bullets.

The absurdity of the government’s scenario was immediately apparent: a tender person, caring doctor shot Muslims in cold blood. The government ventured a libel that Dr. Goldstein, an army doctor, was so mad that he even refused to obey orders of his commanders and declared his only authorities to be RAMBAM and Kahane, and also refused to treat Gentiles. Those lies were perpetuated though Dr. Goldstein’s commanders disproved them immediately, and he in fact was distinguished for excellence in medical service and have treated many non-Jews.

The Arab crowd lynched Dr. Goldstein after disarming him. Israeli attorney general refused to prosecute the murderers most of whom were well known and boasting of the murder. In another case, when a Jew shot an Arab terrorist after disarming him, the Jew was sentenced to long prison term even though he acted in temporary insanity. As everyone says, Arabs are not treated on par with Jews in the state of Israel. They are treated preferentially.

Immediately after murdering Dr. Goldstein, the Arab mob attempted a large-scale pogrom in Hebron, with nine Jews and a number of Arabs killed in the subsequent clashes. The Hamas-led pogrom was premeditated, prepared long before the incident, as the official warnings indicate. A day before, Palestinian mob ("worshipers") rioted in the Cave, and shortly before the incident they chanted "Slaughter the Jews," as Shamgar report concedes. Acting on Major Stellman's order, the IDF surprisingly released the arrested Palestinian inciter. Despite the exceedingly high tensions and clear pogrom mood, the IDF and Border Police didn't bring reinforcements but left only a handful of guards at the Cave. Massacre of Jews was in the air, and the Israeli government welcomed it, as the massacre would have ended the troublesome Jewish presence in Hebron, as the 1929 massacre did.

The official story accuses Dr. Baruch Goldstein of opening fire at Arabs. Any sensible person - and that doesn't include leftists of Shamgar Commission - would ask how could the doctor achieve at least 154 Arab casualties, including 29 dead, with 140 bullets? He is claimed to walk in the Cave with 4 cartridges, 35 rounds each for Galil rifle. Shooting in the dense crowd of Palestinians, it was just impossible to reach 154 of them. It was impossible to spend one round only for each casualty. It is very hard to kill with a single shot in such hurried circumstances. Even allowing for all those incongruence, there is physically no way to score 154 Arab casualties with 140 bullets.

Arabs murdered Dr. Baruch Goldstein when he tried to reload his rifle, so at least one of the four cartridges was still unused, bringing the number of bullets down to 105. It is completely implausible that almost each bullet wounded several Arabs, passing through their bodies.

Shooting 4 cartridges in rapid-fire mode would not have produced that many casualties, and might jam the rifle. Shooting 105 or 140 bullets in semi-automatic mode would have taken a considerable time, giving the guard just meters away enough time to react and the Arabs – to flee.

Even the best shooter cannot realistically score 154 casualties acting alone, with a single rifle, hurrying, in dense crowd. And Dr. Goldstein was not a great shooter. Neither before, nor after him, in thousands of terrorist acts throughout the world, was such a score achieved. No shooter came even close. Only in the totalitarian Israeli state which controls the media, brainwashed people can believe such nonsense. To compare, the Arab who inflicted 19 casualties in Merkaz HaRav yeshiva in March 2008 spent about 600 bullets.

Another scenario is more likely, and supported by the large body of evidence: Dr. Goldstein appeared on the scene when Palestinians had already started the riot they had prepared for months. The doctor was the first Jewish victim of the Arab mob. Israeli soldiers on duty shot at the Arab crowd, achieving the impressive 154 casualties. But at that time of rampaging peace process, the Peres-Beilin-Rabin clique could ill afford a picture of Arabs massacring Jews in Hebron, so they invented the story of Dr. Goldstein's "massacre." So the subsequent Arab riot became "justified" instead of being a normal Arab pogrom. As an added benefit, Peres-Beilin-Rabin framed the Kach Party, the only force which could stop the suicidal peace process. Israeli establishment used the fact that Dr. Goldstein was a member of Kach to ban the party (it's good that they did not ban the medical profession, since he was also a doctor).

At the Shamgar Commission hearings, two Israeli soldiers on duty that morning (Kobi and Niv) testified that Dr. Goldstein entered the Cave wearing his standard M-16 rifle, not the Galil used in the shootings. Independently of each other, they also said they saw another man entering the Cave with the Galil rifle. Shamgar rejected their testimonies.

A search for the mystery man with Galil rifle walking in the Cave beyond the army posts in the dawn could lead to one place only: Shabak, Israeli security service. Just like they framed Yigal Amir and murdered Rabin, they also sent their man to shoot in the Arab crowd. The objective was tremendous: to end both the Jewish presence in Hebron (a major issue for Jewish zealots) and the only real political opposition, Kach (Netanyahu, that farce of an opposition, transferred Hebron to Arab jurisdiction).

It remains obscure how Dr. Goldstein entered the Isaac Hall, full of Muslims, without anyone noticing him in such a highly unusual movement. No less likely, he was murdered elsewhere in the Cave and his body later dragged into the Isaac Hall. Several Palestinians testified they saw Dr. Goldstein shooting, but even Shamgar report notes numerous severe contradictions in Arab testimonies. Shamgar conjectured that Dr. Goldstein entered through Yosefia route, but his fingerprints are absent on the door.

Conveniently for Shamgar, the CCTV on the site was declared not operating at the time.

Israeli rulers had a tremendous interest in murdering Dr. Goldstein. After the assassination of R. Meir Kahane, Dr. Goldstein became the link between several feuding Kahanist factions. After Dr. Goldstein's murder, R. Binyamin Kahane became the leader of Kach, and was also assassinated. R. Binyamin Kahane was also ostensibly killed by Arabs, but the fact that the assassins "accidentally" pumped 62 bullets in the front seats of his car while not touching the kids on the rear seat reveals Israeli snipers. Years later, the IDF arrested the alleged assassin, but since he had several murders on his hands, it was no problem convincing him to also accept responsibility for R. Binyamin's.

Years later, the leader and an activist of Jewish Defense League in America, Irv Rubin and Earl Kruger were murdered ("committed suicide") in two separate incidents in high-security US prisons. JDL was the last remnant of Kahane's movement. Israeli establishment did away with Kach.

On a separate note, killing of Arabs in the Cave of the Patriarchs is no different from the ancient events we celebrate on the Purim.

Israel goes from one restructuring crisis into another. Socialism, successive waves of aliyah, near-bankruptcy in the arms race, ideological changes from mini-state in 1948 to mini-empire in 1967 to defeatism since the 1990s strain government’s credibility and make Jews doubt if the nation has any ideology to sustain statehood. Democracy is a comfortable order for established societies, but in times of crises, Romans appointed dictators. Voting for personalities invokes more responsibility than for parties; Israelis who vote for Kadima might not vote for Olmert. Strong presidential republic where the president is elected directly by public weathers crises better.

Mass democracy, however, is inherently evil. Politically active, engaged populations seek to determine policies and control politicians, but such control is short-lived. People hate doing useless job, and the control of elected government soon proves useless. People hate responsibility, and political demagogues urge them to trust the government. When someone promises to care about you, and everyone around seems to concur, you also tend to concur.

Small groups are still reasoning entities, but reason disappears from large populations. The major reason for that is the mob tendency of adapting to the lowest common denominator: people shrink from offending others, realizing subconsciously that that may be dangerous, and seek the common points with them. The common point is the lowest common denominator, and for the large country such denominator is really low.

If the problems are both hard and not imminent, people prefer avoiding them. So, the sweetly talking demagogues are voted into the offices even though their promises are evidently absurd. "The dream of reason produces monsters." Any candidate who tells the unpleasant truth to the mob has no chances of being elected.

In the era of mass media, election campaigns are expensive. Grassroots financing is a fairy tale: once a candidate becomes widely known and his chances appear somewhat realistic, large donors flock to him. That is venture financing in political sphere: risks are large, but potential profits are staggering, as the first large donors would likely remain the new ruler’s closest confidants throughout his career. And so we saw German industrialists financing Hitler, and Jewish American businessmen – Obama. An honest candidate stands no chance of securing sufficient financing, as he is not sufficiently corrupt to shower his benefactors with government contracts and subsidies upon reaching the office.

In large countries with the history of freedom, mass media somewhat check the corrupt and obviously wrong policies. The minuscule Israel with a history of socialist oppression is exactly the opposite. A few oligarchs who control Israeli media critically depend on the government for contracts, permits, and non-extradition. Israeli media are therefore completely subservient to the establishment.

Democracy is a very accidental political system. It was never practiced on large scale in antiquity, but only in small cities where participatory democracy remains viable. In all cases, democracy quickly eroded into demagoguery, tyranny, and then monarchy. Modern states erroneously identified as democracies are actually republics, the difference being that some basic values in republics are closed to democratic discourse; on the other hand, even theocracy allows democratic decision-making on mundane issues while the core values are kept non-negotiable. Democracy gained popularity during the Renaissance when westerners marveled at everything ancient. Unlike the classic art, democracy remained popular because it allowed the ruling classes to rule as if by popular consent (manufacturing and twisting that consent) and provided academics with the opportunity to legitimately influence societies with social theories.

There are three viable alternatives to democracy. Two of them are biblically sanctioned: anarchy and monarchy, while the third was employed by Jews throughout most of our history - theocracy. Anarchy operates as a network of townships bonded together by mutual defense agreements, common and criminal law. The legal system is kept to a minimum, and people are free to a high extent.

Jewish monarchy is a constitutional one, where king is bounded by myriad restrictions. Short of a very bad king, such system is finely suited for opinionated Jews, whose perpetual debates and vacillations it crushes. If the king proves very bad, he can be removed both on religious grounds (as a traitor) or simply by the masses exercising their right of insurrection.

Theocracy is also not bad. Someone like Ovadia Yosef, for all his shortcomings, won’t be a worse leader of Israel than Olmert or Netanyahu. At least, Rabbi Ovadia has Jewish ideas and convictions. Theocracy served Jews well for the nineteen centuries. It wasn’t perfect, but enough that it is workable.

No realistically electable politician in Israel is better than Olmert. But there are viable forms of Jewish government better than democracy where the likes of Olmert would never succeed.

Policies are predominantly wrong because any given position in the complex adaptive system has myriad options, and any one option is likely to not be the best option. Complex adaptive systems resist policies but develop through painfully long series of micro-moves. At every stage, situation changes and needs adaptive response. Policies, on the contrary, tend to be fixed and self-perpetuating; otherwise, they are derogatory called ad hoc solutions and don’t amount to policies.

It follows, that whatever a government does, it likely does wrong. Bismarck weaved the most excellent policies, but they laid a foundation for the two world wars. The League of Nations was a great idea, but it legalized the inaction which allowed Germany to re-arm. Partitioning states to satisfy both political camps seemed a viable strategy, but partitioned Vietnam fought a bloody war, and other cases proved equally unsustainable. Bleeding the communists in Afghanistan was a nice thing to do, but the aid to mujahedeen created the Islamic terrorist threat. It is not an overgeneralization to say that all policies are wrong. There are no examples of fruitful policies under the heaven.

Policies differ from methods. Working is good, though no work plausibly makes an average person billionaire; work is method, enrichment is a policy. Methods are useful in themselves while policies serve external goals. Methods can be described as derivative of policies, or as very short-term policies. Occupation of Iraq with the aim of making it democratic is a policy – wrong; punishing raid with the immediate aim of removing Saddam is a method – right. Method is a historically standard modus operandi: countries attack when threatened, punish offenders when they can, and secure their own habitat. Almost everyone agree on methods: both Jews and Arabs believe that offenders must be punished; punishment is a method. Methods have only immediate goals.

Methods rely on very short actions and are unlikely to create the Bradbury’s Butterfly effect of unforeseeable remote consequences. Most often, methods reinstate or secure status quo ante. Less frequently, methods prevent the unforeseeable developments: European settlers massacred Red Indians so that no significant minority is left to claim their ancestral lands.

How absurd it is to imagine a lion that enters a camp of gazelles to teach them manners, self-defense, or agriculture. No, lions are satisfied with the immediate goal of satiation – if at the gazelle’s expense. Peace process is of the same stock. Israel tried rejecting the Palestinian demands, succumbing to them, and every option in between. Nothing worked – because policies never work. The Middle East’s ecosystem is a textbook example of complex adaptive system. Any policy would be wrong here. Who could honestly predict that Arafat would refuse statehood which Barak gave him on the silver plate? Who knew Nasser’s mind in 1967, when he wanted to attack Israel? We don’t know whether Iran develops nuclear weapons or merely defends its right to conduct nuclear enrichment. There are myriad inherently unknown variables in the peace process equation. If Israeli Arabs are loyal, that calls for one solution; if they are not, the solution must be entirely different. If Palestinian Arabs want to live in peace with Israel, that’s one situation; if Gaza’s refugees would never accept a Jewish state, that’s a totally different situation. Would Egypt pursue a hostile peace with Israel, or would its Muslim radicals come to power and opt for a war?

Mid-term economic planning proved a communist failure, but democratic states plan something incredibly more complex than economy – human societies. The peace process will invariably fail. The only solution to Israeli-Arab conflict is to stop seeking a solution. Jews settled in the Middle East’s equivalent of inner town slums. Former residents can be sent to jails – or refugee camps – but they will keep coming back. If Jews lack a resolve for the biblically mandated solution, the only alternative is living through a smoldering conflict for centuries. That’s completely acceptable.

Many more Israelis are killed in car accidents than in terrorist acts.

I wonder what Jews can seriously defend democracy for Israel. There is a straightforward issue of Arabs constituting 34% among Israel's young, and so wielding decision-making power over all legislative acts which require supermajority voting. Along with ultra-left Jews and some anti-Semitic non-Jews in Israel, the Arabs are close to being the majority. Arabs vote coherently while many Jews skip elections altogether. So the leftist-Arab block is slated to form a majority of those who actually vote in just 10-15 years as young Arabs enter the voting age. Such a democracy dooms the Jewish state.

The submissive Exile mentality makes democracy very bad for Jews. Jewish masses are used to being oppressed, and don't rush to counter the government which bluntly reneges on its pre-election promises or even put hundreds of thousands of Jews in danger of Palestinian rocket attacks. Democracy is a system of governance for responsible people, and Jews just lost the sense of responsibility during the millennia without statehood.

Look at the Jewish leaders, who are better described as murderous traitors of Jews. Ben Gurion, did he not expect a war in the 1947-48 despite the spiraling violence and clear declarations of intent by Arabs? But he rushed to arm the Jewish militia only after the war was well underway. Had Ben Gurion instituted mass military training of Jews and at least procured, if not yet shipped the arms most of the 6,000 Jews who died in that war would be alive – and have happy children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Instead, Ben Gurion directed his militia to fight other Jewish groups, ETZEL and LEHI.

Ben Gurion did not want to upset the British – even at the cost of thousands Jewish lives. The extent of his disregard to Jewish deaths was seen in the Holocaust: Zionist leadership refused to push the Western governments for visas for Jewish refugees, bombing the death camps, absolution of European dictators who contacted the Allies asking for personal guarantees in return for sabotaging the deportation of Jews. Most infamously, Ben Gurion and his ultra-rich Jewish friends rejected the German offer to spare the entire Hungarian Jewry for a very reasonable, military inessential number of trucks, cocoa beans, and other dual-use goods. And yet, Ben Gurion had the audacity to persistently deride Zeev Zhabotinsky, "Vladimir Hitler" even though Zhabotinsky was rushing about the burning pre-war Europe trying to convince Jews to flee. The very Ben Gurion, the conspirator of silence who bears the full responsibility for Holocaust and should have been hanged alongside Eichmann, was laughing out Zhabotinsky's efforts to save Jews before the war and Hillel Kook's during it.

Ben Gurion, an implicit Nazi collaborator, took care to absolve the explicit ones. One Rudolf Kasztner, a "leader" of Hungarian Jewry, assisted the Nazis with deporting us to Auschwitz, 12,000 Jews each day, every day. In recognition of his outstanding achievements of keeping the slaughtered flock quiet, Germans allowed a 1,700 of his rich protégés to escape. In 1955, Israeli court found him guilty of, literally, "selling his soul to the devil" for failing to alert the Hungarian Jews to their fate. In those years of the Soviet-type totalitarian control over judicial branch, it took great courage for the judge to issue such verdict, especially as Kasztner was represented by the government. Three years later, Israeli Supreme Court acquitted Kasztner, thankfully killed by then; no reasonable person in Israel has a slightest doubt that Ben Gurion heavily influenced the Supreme Court.

Israel's other prime ministers missed the Holocaust big thing, but otherwise had their hands in mass murder of Jews. Golda Meir, fearful of the American reaction and procrastinating in the face of Jewish holiday, did not preempt in 1973 when the Egyptian military buildup was unmistakable though one could have deluded herself about its purpose. Compounding a grave error with grave crime, Golda sent Jewish reservists to the slaughter which resulted in 10,000 casualties – instead of employing nuclear weapons. Golda's fear of the world opinion greatly exceeded her concern with Jewish lives. That ugly character famously announced that she can forgive the Arabs for killing Jews but not for making the Jews to kill Arabs. Likewise, her accomplice Moshe Dayan remarked during the early stages of the Yom Kippur war, "We're witnessing the Third Temple's destruction" – and reportedly was on the way to offer capitulation instead of nuking the Arabs.

The perversion gets worse. During the Lebanon war, the leftists demanded that Israel pulls out, thus wasting over 600 Jewish lives lost to combat the terror on our northern border. The right-wing Likud demanded that the IDF stays put in Beirut, opening itself to still more casualties. No mainstream politician had the guts to do what has to be done to secure the North Israel: depopulate South Lebanon.

The appeasement of gentiles, a policy brought to the fore by Golda Meir, produced bloody fruits: the IDF was instructed to save Arab lives. In practice, that meant not firing at the civilians used by the terrorists as shields, so that Jews often operated without air support and suffered heavy casualties. No doubt, the gentiles were concerned with civilian death toll, the very gentiles who designed blockbuster bombs to rip away the roofs so that subsequently dropped incendiary bombs could set the houses on fire more reliably; fried (and rightly so) Dresdners caused no public outcry in Albion.

The establishment's answer to massive Jewish deaths was, well and good. The Peres-Beilin-Rabin gang launched the worst war of them all, the peace process which has killed and maimed more Jews than the Yom Kippur war. To give the murder a purpose, they coined the unimaginably cynical term, "victims of peace process." When else in the history thousands of people have died to further peace negotiations? You die to win a war, not to procure media coverage for negotiators. It is critical to understand that the dead end of the peace process is not only the Left's business: Rabin was as right as it gets, the hysterical "Mr. Security" who ordered breaking hands and legs of Intifada participants. Netanyahu continued the peace process, and Lieberman never even tried repealing it while in the government.

Sharon, someone with the brain of a bulldozer, with proven history of disregard to Jewish lives, from the 1956 Mitla slaughter to the bloodthirsty destruction of Yamit. Who could think of electing him a prime minister? Sharon loved oppression. When oppressing the Arabs proved to be not a politically correct option, he turned to oppressing Jews, and turned thousands of Jewish refugees from Gush Katif into social corpses, broke and broken.

In horror thrillers, personages walk into the places full of danger unaware of it. What makes the situation horrible is that the viewer knows of the danger. Israeli reality is worse than a horror thriller: voters know about the danger and step in it. We have seen them all: Peres, Barak, Netanyahu. We know that they are traitors. We know they have previously reneged on every electoral promise. But they still manage to come back to power, millions of voters still support them. What would it take for the voters to turn their backs on a politician? A sexual assault? Haim Ramon did that, and now he is back in the government, a top Israeli negotiator on abandoning the Temple Mount to Arabs.

Democracy is extremely prone to subversion by demagogues and activists. It is not incidental that in every ancient state which has practiced it, democracy led either to final military defeat, or was superseded by tyranny and monarchy. Masses are being fooled easily at least for some time, and during that time the tyrant creates a sufficient power base to disregard subsequent popular opposition - which is mild, anyway, so long as his policies are not outright murderous. People love shedding responsibility, even to tyrants. During the time of their unimpeded rule, Israeli leftists established control over the military, security, and educational establishments which no conservative government can break, no more than any state's bureaucracy can be dismantled. Besides, there are just no conservative politicians of importance in Israel. Someone like Netanyahu is a political leftist, as that ex-business consultant believes in the cornerstone of leftism, the possibility of shaping the society rather than merely going along with the traditions and waiting for them to evolve very slowly.

The American example should have discouraged any supporter of democracy. Originally, theirs was only nominally a democracy, but actually an electoral aristocracy or meritocracy at most. Only the educated, and by the large margin, moral and principled people stood for the highest offices. The candidates were drawn from a narrow class, and could not imagine appealing to the lowest common denominator in order to win the most voters. Presidential candidates did not get many additional North's votes by standing against slavery, but lost huge numbers of the South' votes. Modern politicians would have no doubt quashed the issue of slavery in order to appeal to the largest possible number of voters.

The nineteenth century saw many duels between the US politicians on the slightest issues of honor. A century later, the candidates smear each other during primaries, and afterwards endorse each other or launch a joint bid. The extent of the American presidency's deterioration would be unbelievable if it had not follow the historical standard known from the Classical Greece, Ancient Rome, and medieval Italy's examples. At the every presidential turn, we imagine that that is the lowest one can get, but the next president comes out still worse. Carter, Bush-I, Clinton, Bush-II – they are really the human waste floated up to the crest of democracy. Unimaginably corrupt, unimaginably hypocritical, unimaginably immoral and cynical, and worst of all, unimaginably silly. It doesn't take much brain to refrain from having sex with a White House intern.

Now the whopping combination of Clinton-II and someone whose only political advantage is his skin color. Obama, sure, is not the first to exploit that dubious advantage: the incredibly stupid Rice did it already, even though her mimic on photos is grotesque compared to orangutan's. Rice, at least, sprouts some otherworldly academic nonsense, but Obama reminds me of an old Soviet cartoon where a Mickey Mouse-like figure was mumbling the same line, "Folks, let's live peacefully." Shouldn't a presidential candidate be a bit more substantial than that? Nowadays one does not expects at the helm a man who can author Federalist papers. After Bush-II who had trouble locating Afghanistan on the map before bombing it, what can we ask of Obama?

And I marvel at the insane Jews who support Obama with their votes and money. Is having the monsters such as Carter and Brzezinski on his team not enough to qualify Osama as pathological anti-Semite? Or do they need his friend Farrakhan' endorsement to scratch their collective head? Of course, Jews gave money to Hitler before he confiscated the rest of it, and a Jew managed the Nazi Air Force during Gering's extensive leaves. So the Jewish support for Obama is not out of the ordinary. Our people had always had their share of kapos.

Now, I don't care about Obama's intents of reforming American politics to the better. He is bad for Israel, bad for Jews. Incidentally, he is also bad for Americans. Does having the old guard Brzezinski on board sounds like an attempt to drastically reform the American politics? To me, it only sounds like a direct path for heads-on collision with Russia, since Brzezinski, like most Poles, is viciously anti-Russian. Anti-Semitic, too.

Look at the amount of donations Obama has collected. Did the political donors suddenly felt charitable, and support someone who promises to do away with corrupt politics and lobbying? Or did they give money to Obama because he promised to repay them manifold through government contracts, concessions, and subsidies? Obama is a newcomer, investing in him is particularly risky, and he could only attract large donors with promises of unusually high returns.

The Clinton-II is a disgrace to America. Is this country a monarchy now? Where are those dynasties coming from? Lady, you were a bad wife of the bad president. You couldn't keep your husband in check. And now you want to handle Iran's nuclear threat? Give me a break.

Like Rice, Hillary is the sort of the Portrait of Dorian Gray. All her moral ugliness translates into her mimic. If that is the face of America, pity the country.

What are the Clinton-II presidential qualifications? She is a political schemer. Bismarck created political schemes, that is very different from being a schemer. Clinton-II never tackled any serious political issue. Her stance on Iran amounts to hysteria: maybe bomb, maybe talk. Her talks with Assad undermined the US efforts against his terrorist regime, and gave him carte blanche for renewed involvement in Lebanon. Her position on Israel is well-known: her husband the sex maniac had already arranged with Barak to give up Jerusalem to Arabs. Clinton-II, who poses as sort of a Christian, prefers ripping the holy city away from Jews and giving it to Muslims.

Clinton's domestic prescriptions are simple: tax more, steal more. The vast pork-barrel programs are her trademark. Now she wants universal health coverage for illegal immigrants and the criminal mothers who neglect their children so as to refuse buying them a $50-a-month medical insurance.

Any random mobster would make a better US president than the Clinton-Obama duo.

Russian Jewish oligarchs seem to embrace Israel. The major reason behind their interest to the Promised Land is its non-extradition statute: Israeli law generally bans rendering a Jew to foreign prosecution. Israel is also notoriously lax on money laundering and foreign tax evasion: police investigate money laundering only when it coincides with a major tax evasion in Israel. Another reason why Russian oligarchs love Israel is because she is a backwater village to them susceptible to inexpensive takeover.

Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs invariably participate in those countries’ elections; large business there is inseparable from politics. The costs and difficulties involved in Russian and Ukrainian politics dwarf those of Israel. It is not unusual for a Ukrainian oligarch to spend $10-30 million for his own tiny party in parliamentary elections; contributions to large parties, especially in Russia run much higher. Parliamentary seats are sold at $4-10 million apiece. In comparison, the power in Israel comes on the cheap. Russian oligarchs see Israel as a political investment opportunity. For them, it is not only or even primarily a matter of profiting from politics, but mostly a way to realize their dreams of power. They come so close to power in Russia and Ukraine but are always vulnerable to anti-Semitic rulers. In Israel, the oligarchs can finally dominate.

Israeli politics is very provincial. Even a no-one called Netanyahu rose to power by hiring American campaign managers and investing relatively little in advertising. Peace Now became prominent by using forty-year-old tricks of political campaigning. Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs possess vastly more sophisticated experience of managing political campaigns and imagine they can influence Israeli politics efficiently.

The oligarchs are way smarter than average Israeli politicians; it’s hard to find a person sillier than an average MK. But it takes luck rather than genius to become an oligarch in Russia, and the magnates often overestimate their political power. The oligarchs are proverbially hapless in politics, consistently losing their political investment on the advice of cheating campaign managers.
Thus we see Michael Cherny and Vadim Rabinovich investment in Lieberman going sour: after short-term success, Lieberman the phony predictably loses his support base. Cherny and Rabinovich bet on a commonsense idea of militant Russian identity in Israel, but once that idea failed to bring Lieberman’s electorate substantial improvement, they weren’t able to redefine his platform. With Likud making inroads into Lieberman’s Russian audience, and ad hoc parties such as the Pensioners’ taking their share of Russian voters, Lieberman’s project is doomed. Lieberman will retain some supporters, bent on taking him for messiah, but their number would guarantee him only an insignificant position in the Knesset. It is possible that Lieberman can heat up his voters with demagoguery once again, but his trend is downward. Lieberman’s case is the first Israeli instance of a widespread Ukrainian phenomenon: parties which depend on lone oligarchs are doomed. The oligarchs cannot allow their parties to be strongly anti-government, and so the parties lose their opposition identity, become mild and unattractive for voters. Lieberman’s oligarchic sponsors do not rationally depend on Israeli government as they make money elsewhere, but so far they habitually avoid alienating the ruling establishment.

Or consider a Jew with an odious last name, Gaydamak (gaydamaks are the worst anti-Semitic strain of Cossacks). He partners with KGB/ FSB in many businesses, from Soviet foreign debts to weapons sales, but now miraculously converted into Israeli philanthropist. Gaydamak was always frank about his social and eventually political ambitions in Israel. After the years of being derogatory called “Arkasha” by his KGB overseers, Gaydamak wants to become a political boss. His entourage of Israeli advisors is laughable, though; they play the king rather than trying to make him. In Israeli political vacuum, Gaydamak’s bizarre political party can get even 14 seats, but will hardly enter the Knesset in subsequent elections. Messianically minded Jews have elected a number of such single-session parties, and almost none of them staged a comeback. Gaydamak’s sensible social slogans target voters across the political spectrum, thus making him dangerous to every politician. Upon entering the Knesset, Gaydamak would likely be ostracized by fellow politicians. He can make a decent political figure: not prone to petty corruption and not very left.
Like other very rich Jews, Gaydamak cannot be right or Jewish: such stance would offend his Gentile friends and business partners. Olmert likewise describes Bush whose peace process kills the Jewish state as very friendly; Jewish values and interests are an uncivil obstacle in the friendly chat of ex-Jews with fellow Gentiles. It is impolite to stubbornly insist on Abraham’s right to Hebron and Jacob’s right to Schem when a friendly powerful Gentile wants to help you out of that mess with Arabs that his predecessors set up. It is ludicrous to speak of Jewish choosiness, truth of Judaism, and religious right to the land at business meetings and debauch parties. Gaydamak, accordingly, spends money to alleviate the harm done by defeatism rather than helps to achieve the victory; he helps Sderot refugees rather than outpost settlers.

Lev Levaev comes very close to being the fifth column. His major income source, trade in Russian diamonds, wholly depends on Putin’s whim; Levaev, therefore, have to carefully dance to Putin’s tune. And so Levaev sponsors the alien Russian culture in Israel; instead of integrating the Russian Jews into Israeli milieu, they are kept distinct. Levaev also fosters political ties between Israel and anti-Semitic Russia; his role is especially dangerous because of his contacts in the highest political echelons of Israel. Levaev cooperates with Putin and, for example, on Angola diamonds – with Mossad’s ex-chief Mossad Danny Yatom. It is plausible that he acts as a link between them, essentially abetting a high treason. Levaev, like other oligarchs, is left: an aggressive, religiously charged Jewish state is not good for his business. Superficially, Levaev supports Chabad charities, but his own shopping malls work on Shabbat. The Jewish schools Levaev sponsors in Russia and Ukraine are thinly disguised assimilationist shops which teach formalized religion, hateful to the children, instead of the real Judaism and Jewish values. Levaev is a typical religious atheist who separates God from business. Like Vyacheslav Kantor and so many others, Levaev chose the respectful position of Putin’s court Jew instead of simply being a person true to Judaism.

The latest Russian Jewish oligarch who established connection with Israel is Roman Abramovich. He survived Putin’s purges of Jewish oligarchs, and exhibits absolute loyalty to the Russian regime; a shred of loyalty to anti-Semitic Russia amounts to treason against Israel. Abramovich is far richer than any other Israeli oligarch and, considering his extravagant spending habits, can reach almost any political goal, if only temporarily. There is no doubt that Abramovich would be as left and pro-Russian as the other oligarchs. He has a history of social mega-projects in Chukotka, a far Siberian region where he serves as absentee governor. Abramovich is therefore likely to follow in Gaydamak’s steps, starting with huge cocktail parties and ending with pompous welfare projects. Given Abramovich’s track record of keeping low political profile in Russia, he is unlikely to exhibit political ambitions in Israel.

Putin’s tremendous influence on Russian Jewish oligarchs presents a problem. Putin is very different from previous Russian leaders: he is not a nomenclature bureaucrat who carefully charts his course, but a petty KGB officer turned corrupt businessman turned politician turned tsar. Putin is, in a sense, rootless; he lacks political fundamentals. His thinking is that of the proverbial “new Russian” businessman, entirely lacking strategic dimension. The nearest Western analogy is of a spoiled and not particularly bright child who suddenly became a large company’s CEO. Putin is unpredictable; he makes moves based on curiosity and desire to show his power. Now the Putin-controlled Jewish magnates can establish control over Israel. They can spend much more on elections than any Israeli party, and invest more in the electoral-oriented welfare than any charity. In all likelihood, the MAPAI-built security apparatus of Israel would grind the oligarchs. And we shouldn’t pity them.