The Palestinians are right: negotiations with Israel are futile. Like any people, Jews give in only to force. Thus even Fayyad wound up praising intifada.

The Palestinians cannot accept any territorial exchange which would leave Israel with settlement blocs, even though they comprise only about 7% of the land. The Jews who built those blocs were not stupid: their strategic location is more important than their meager size. The blocs would make Palestine’s borders long and winding, complicating travel and increasing their humiliation. By now, the only negotiable point is whether the West Bank will be connected to Gaza with a bridge or by a land route.

Leaders are not conspiratorial, but are plainly stupid. If they are to rise to power, they must be acceptable to all groups. They must be perfectly mediocre, unprincipled, and corrupt. The commando mentality of Israeli leaders, which leaves no room for strategic planning, goes well with naive leftist at the helm of America, a country which conducts silly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with no exit strategy and costs running at 100 times the amount of US aid to Israel.

Leaders are removed from public interest, and only care for one another’s approval. Thus Israeli government conducts defeatist policies to curry favor with its American colleagues.

Iranians are suspicious of the West. They are ready to export uranium if only the West does its part first. They want respect and cannot submit to threats.

Leaders have surprisingly silly ideas: Wilson on peace (though he lied, probably, to counter the communist peace propaganda), Obama on the Mideast, Bush on Iraq.

Germans and Russians view the same events, the same war, very differently. So did Russians and Americans in the Cold war. That didn’t happen because they are vile or have opposite values. Rather, they interpreted events differently. Blair has an exclusive education, views Arabs as traditional allies and is contemptuous of Jews. Obama’s radical left idealist background and automatic tendency to favor colonized people and Muslims guarantees troubled relations with Israel. Western leaders just don’t view events the way Jews view them. Terms like Juden, Jerusalem, pogroms, terrorism, and war of survival mean nothing to them.

Or take foreign Jews. When White House Jews such as Dennis Ross are entrusted with American relations with Iran and Syria, do their bosses harbor the slightest suspicion that these Jews might be pro-Israeli, which might jeopardize their mission? And these Jews, entrusted with an essentially anti-Semitic task, bend over backwards to prove themselves. In doing so, they are joined by Israeli defense establishment, which rallies behind America’s attempts to engage Syria―even at risk of massive American aid to Israel’s existential enemy.

Israeli leaders have wounded psyches. Barak was broken and moved to defeatism by the Argentinean bombing, which resulted in hundreds of Jewish casualties after he ordered a hit on Hezbollah’s leader Moussawi. A brilliant tactician, he lacks strategic vision and hops from one ad hoc solution to the next. Lieberman, whose Napoleonic ego is forever wounded by his humble origins in a small town in Moldova, an endless source of jokes among Russian Jews, will do anything for a bit of grandeur. Olmert and Livni are haunted by their right-wing past. Both tried to dissociate themselves from that stigma, while at the same time instinctively shrinking from leftist objectives. They haunted right-wingers in order to vindicate their own defections to the Left.

Netanyahu is torn between his Jewish soul and his American upbringing, between his allegiance to the country his brother died for and his obligations to the US establishment that propelled him to power, between his sympathy for right-wingers’ goals and his personal dislike for them. The path of concessions to world opinion made him a hated figure in the right camp, but he is still an alien to foreign leaders and diplomats. His complete lack of political achievements hurts his messianic nature.

All world leaders are worse for their countries than a random set of thugs appointed to the helm.

Settlers will get nowhere unless they learn to clearly divide society into relatively good Jews, and the rodef-malshin bunch and its agents. Both rodef and malshin are of Jewish origin, and both can be killed; no Sanhedrin is necessary. The Military Administration acts as rodef – murderous stalker when it takes guns away from outpost pioneers and leaves them to face the Palestinians unarmed. The army’s crackdowns on settlers send a signal to Palestinians that attacking them is permissible, indeed sanctioned by the government. Rodef is not necessarily a 100 percent evil person—he can be a caring family member, a donor, or have any number of other merits—but he must be killed for a single offense of murderous stalking. Similarly, a case can be made that the police’s murderous actions toward settlers position each of its participating members as rodef. According to halacha, even when a rodef acts on sovereign’s order, he’s still guilty of murder. There is no difference between Jewish sovereign and elected government; in Jewish society, a sovereign enjoys even higher popular consent than any elected government.

By publicly denouncing, repressing and occasionally prosecuting settlers, the Military Administration acts as malshin, Jewish informers. They need not lie: even when they publicize the true facts of Jewish crime, which endanger Jewish community, they are guilty and liable to execution. This is not another theoretical halacha, but the one on which rabbis—when they were real rabbis—sentenced numerous informers to death.

On other hand, army and police also feel affinity for settlers as fellow Jews. Even in hot-spots such as Hebron, Military Administration keeps working relationships with settlers; when they bought the Peace House, the Administration officials were genuinely happy that the Jews got to hold on to the strategic location. The army, accordingly, enforces leftist orders only minimally. When the pressure is huge or a commander is especially nutty, the military administration can make the settlers’ lives miserable; thus, the army choked off the supply of building materials to Judea and Samaria to prevent the increasing Jewish population from building new houses.
The case is still clear for Jewish ultra-left groups. Take B’Tselem which equips Palestinians with video cameras and encourages them to provoke clashes with Jews. This is a clear-cut case of informing on Jews, the capital crime of malshin, which is punished with death on rabbinical orders, without Sanhedrin. Jewish security cannot wait until Sanhedrin convenes. History proves that execution of criminals is effective in stemming crime. Ultra-leftists might be less inclined to incite the Arabs against Jewish pioneers if they knew that the reprisal is death. It was silly and immoral for Hebron settlers to take out their anger on the neighboring Arabs after Peace House eviction; morally and practically, the ultra-leftists who pushed for the eviction are liable.

There is no Jewish-Arab conflict. If not for the ultra-left, normal Jews could do away with Arab enemies in a matter of days. The problem is between Jews and Jews, and until each side positions itself firmly, announces its goals and enemies, the country will stumble around. The indecisiveness benefits the left. They enjoy the state’s infrastructure of force and don’t need preparation. In any conflict over the settlements, leftists will use the power of state, and they will use the army illegally against “fellow” Jews. Conservative Jews won’t have time to prepare their resistance, as resistance requires vast organizational efforts, logistics, training, and above all the readiness to act forcibly against other Jews. Such readiness is a function of protracted propaganda efforts and cannot appear from nowhere in the few months between the announced withdrawal and actual evacuation.

A civil war between Jews is not unthinkable; we celebrate it every year. Hanukkah. Twenty-three centuries ago, liberal Jews colluded with a liberal gentile power to reform the “outdated” Jewish practices. Antiochus didn’t seek to conquer Judea: it was already conquered. The war had no political consequences whatsoever. Nor is it imaginable that Antiochus suddenly felt an urge to liberalize an obscure religion at the fringe of his empire. The culprits were liberal Jews who sided with Antiochus—and invited him to invade. They wanted to do away with kosher laws, embrace the civilized world’s way of worship, and adopt the progressive Hellenistic culture of stadiums and gymnasiums. The Maccabean revolt’s first victim was not a Greco-Syrian warrior, but a Jew who violated a technical commandment; he was publicly executed; no Sanhedrin, no court proceedings.

Hanukkah is not about lights, love, or Santa Claus. Every year, we celebrate the victory in a brutal civil war where Jewish fundamentalists killed out the liberal “elite.” They saved Judaism so that today other liberals could urge us to reform, abandon the outdated laws, and give our land to Arabs. Unless, of course, we kill the enemy within.

Jews rejected Palestinian Arabs until the 1960s as no-enemy and no-nation. Israel continued to reject the Palestinian state long after signing the Camp David accords. Oslo was promoted as a way to isolate the Palestinians like tarantulas in a can, where they would starve and eat each other. Then we gave the Arabs autonomy, Hebron, an offshore gas field, tax revenues, and finally weapons to kill us.
Something big must go wrong in Israel to break the Jewish lethargy. Even if Arab riots erupted, that might not be enough: many Jews would claim we provoked the poor beings. Israel needs a full-scale civil war, a healing bloodletting.

Oslo was supposed to bring a respite from violence, and promised the formation of a Palestinian state only in the future. The danger was not immediate. Gaza, after all, is a very small place, and not even central to the Jewish religious conscience. Fore posts in Judea and Samaria are illegal (Jewish houses on Jewish land!), and the government has an interest in tearing them down. Then will come the settlements, then Jerusalem, then Arabs as the largest faction in the Knesset. To die defending the fore posts now is far better than to live to see the death agonies of the Jewish state.

Far removed from its glorious days of fighting Arab armies, IDF has deteriorated into anti-guerrilla police, and has now become a crack force to be used against Israel’s own citizens. The army conducts more operations daily against Jews than against Palestinian Arabs. Often the army is petty enough to demolish Jewish prefab houses on private Jewish land just because they are technically unauthorized—even though Arabs have built tens of thousands of unauthorized houses in the vicinity. Just as often, the army engages in very controversial demolitions of unauthorized houses designated as synagogues or kindergartens, or even grave-sites, such as Dr. Goldstein’s. Sometimes evictions take place in a manner aptly described by a leading rabbi as Nazi-like: at night, the army threw Jewish children from the windows and bulldozed the families’ shacks along with their meager possessions. The army’s third-largest operation in terms of budget and the largest in terms of the number of personnel involved in the last five years was not a war, but the eviction of 8,000 Jews from Gaza. The evictions left a deep scar on the Jewish national conscience. If soldiers are expected to act humanely toward their enemies, it is all the more important that they act humanely toward their own people. It is surprising that the same people who would rip soldiers apart for evicting an Arab family or destroying their illegal house demand that soldiers unflinchingly evict their fellow Jews.

Other civilized countries use their the armies against fellow citizens only in times of martial law, and even then only against rioting crowds that create an immediate danger to other citizens. A typical scenario in which an army is used against private communities is when a religious sect threatens mass suicide—which, importantly, involves non-consenting children.

Israeli soldiers are not the praetorian guard of the Judenrat. They cannot be expected to fall on their compatriots when ordered to do so. Those who suggest that military disobedience demoralizes an army must consider that acting against its own people demoralizes an army even more. Murder and oppression are highly immoral. They are only made tolerable by the higher aim of defending one’s people. When your family is in danger it is better to kill than be killed; the logic is simple. Evictions destroy this moral basis of a healthy army. Acting in a clearly immoral fashion against its own people alienates the army from society, and lays the ground for a putsch, or at least for gross immorality toward enemies. If it is permissible—indeed obligatory—to throw fellow Jews out of their homes, then much uglier things become permissible toward our Arab enemies. On other hand, dissident settlers are often kind to Jews and Arabs alike; recall Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who risked his life to evacuate wounded Palestinian terrorists for medical treatment.

The conflict is not really over the refusal. The refusals have gone on for years, handled quietly between soldiers and their commanders. As leftists dodge conscription or join home-front units, combat forces are composed largely of settlers. Naturally, they are not going to evict their neighbors or relatives. This is well understood in the army, and these soldiers are exempted from eviction operations. The problem arises when they disobey publicly, for political rather than personal reasons—especially for conservative political reasons; the leftists who disobey by dodging the draft are chastised in the most lenient manner.

Disobedience would be even more widespread in the kind of army we advocate, an army into which middle-aged men, rather than children, are conscripted. In the modern army, strength of character is more important than physical strength. Sending children to fight before sending their parents is shockingly immoral, especially since the children have not yet had the chance to vote for a change. A middle-aged army would have stronger opinions, which is exactly the reason why all governments conscript gullible youngsters.

Obedience is not always good; sometimes, it equals dangerous complacency. When the government and the commanders act against their country, it is a soldier’s duty to protect basic values rather than discipline. This debate raged quietly in the German army from 1933 to 1938; commanders, a traditionally aristocratic and independent bunch, wondered whether their loyalty to their country or to their führer came first. The doubters soon went down in a purge. Obedience creates a great danger in militarized countries, such as Israel. The Nazi leadership only needed to replace a few dozen top commanders in the army and several hundred in the police to gain unquestioned control over all security forces. In 1938, within a matter of days, the army was transformed, just as the police had been in 1932. Where once they had been society’s conservative pillars, highly skeptical of the Nazis, they now had become the regime’s enforcers. A similar process took place in Austria: months before annexation, just a few dozen top-level police commanders appointed by Austria’s Nazi Minister of the Interior ensured complete freedom for the Nazi riots. The police, who had once broken up Nazi riots with ease, now stood by. It is a blessing that Israeli soldiers are not automatons in their commanders’ hands, but thinking, responsible Jews.

The disobedience is not really an issue of military discipline. It is preposterous to assert that soldiers who refuse to evict Jews might also refuse battlefield orders. The soldiers who come from among the settlers, the ones who generally try to avoid eviction roles, are the best, most highly motivated combat personnel. If anything, their refusal to evict Jews shows devotion to the Zionist cause. Soldiers who endure jail and dishonor for their love of Jews will certainly endure battlefield dangers as well.

It might be actually good for the army for soldiers to think about their orders rather than executing them blindly. This is especially true on today’s fogless digital battlefield, where a regiment’s commander sees exactly the same picture as the Chief of Staff. Israeli history knows many instances when commanders essentially murdered their obedient soldiers: Rabin’s Jerusalem operations, Sharon’s break through Mitla, and Olmert’s surge in Lebanon, to name a few. Looking at the fact that none of Israel’s generals has a proper military education, and quite a few of them are glaringly unprofessional, soldiersmay indeed need the right to veto decisions which might prove suicidal for them. There is no reason to believe that honest, brave, highly motivated Jewish soldiers would use their veto power to excuse themselves from fighting. If the state is democratic, it would be reasonable for soldiers to be allowed to elect their commanders and control them. If the general staff believes that the appointed commanders are professional and authoritative, then they should have no trouble winning the troops’ support—and indeed, IDF commanders up to the mid-level are generally highly professional and popular among their troops.

Military jurists, including the Israeli Supreme Court, have upheld the right to disobedience. Specifically, after the Kfar Qassem massacre, the court ruled that soldiers have a duty to disobey orders that fly in the face of their consciences. It is a great fault of Zionist education that for some soldiers evicting other Jews does not raise the red banner, “Prohibited!” The army whose stated aim is defending Jews cannot repress them; Zionism means settling Zion rather than uprooting our settlements. Besides the nationalistic reasons, there are strong religious prohibitions against evicting other Jews, destroying our settlements, and abandoning our land. A society which expects its soldiers not to rebel against morality must not be surprised by their refusal to rebel against that morality’s source, God.

Rabin fled a battlefield near Jerusalem during the War of Independence, abandoning his soldiers to death, and he gunned down defenseless Jews on the Altalena.

Rabin committed high treason to win the 1992 elections. Yosi Beilin conspired in Cairo with Abu Mazen to convince Israeli Arabs to vote for Labor in exchange for sweeping concessions to the PLO; thus started the Oslo accords. Rabin campaigned on the platform of tough response to Palestinian terrorists, but embraced them soon after the elections. Rabin formed coalition government with the support of Arab parties in the Knesset; the PLO friends have told them that Rabin’s tough stance is a fiction intended for Jews.

Rabin’s actions were detrimental to the Jewish state. A ruler who endangers the people can legitimately be killed. It’s better to kill one ruler than have many citizens die; the Oslo process claimed more Jewish casualties than Yom Kippur war. Crowds are not wise, especially when brainwashed, and it could take years to dethrone Rabin. Killing him was a feasible solution.

Assassination of evil rulers is widely acceptable. The US prompted South Vietnamese generals to kill the unruly Diem, and tried to kill Castro. Germans attempted to kill Hitler. The US could have spared itself a couple of wars by killing Milosevic or Saddam.

Palestinians have killed high-ranking Israeli officials, and Israel similarly eliminated the Palestinian bosses. Israeli security services organized the murders of Meir Kahane, his son Binyamin, and probably of Rehavam Zeevi. During the Mandate period, Jews killed British officials. Those Jews are now Israeli heroes. Political assassinations are socially acceptable. Are they just? Yes, sometimes. Some targeted assassinations benefit societies. Some are a just retribution for the victim’s crimes; Rabin did not accord due process to the Jews he machine-gunned on Altalena and when they tried to swim ashore; he did not deserve a due process himself. Rabin skipped on due process when he ordered teenage Jewish soldiers to break hands and legs of Arab participants in the Intifada. Israel refuses due process to Islamist guerrillas her forces assassinate now and then; why accord a due process to a Jew who abets the guerrillas, such as in the Oslo accords?

Common Israelis kill common Palestinians all the time because the common Palestinians remotely affect Israeli security; kill them without trial during urban fights and police operations. Rabin endangered the Jewish state much more than any individual common Palestinian did, and deserved much harsher treatment. Israel is at war, and Rabin was a traitor; no due process was necessary.
Is the assassination democratic? No. But Rabin operated non-democratically and unjustly, and was answered in kind. Democracy is a sham; it is the government’s right to manipulate public opinion, and the Rabin-Peres-Beilin clique exercised that “right” to the utmost. Democracy could decide on whether to build a bridge or a dam. Core values are not up to a democratic decision-making. Jewish character of Israel, possession of the Jewish land in its entirety, and security of the Jews are non-negotiable. Rabin openly betrayed those values, and no court sentence has been required to execute him.

What are the democratic rules of the game? Submit to the government which manipulates the public through media and bribes it through welfare? Let the faithless Jews destroy the Jewish state by electing Rabins before they emigrate? Did not the American Blacks resort to violence to claim their rights? Did not the Basques? The Irish? The Chechens? The Americans – against the British? Courts award justice to criminals, but not to the people who oppose the government. Assassinations are often the only recourse.

Torah says, “Do not follow a majority to evil.” Democratically elected rulers can be evil and deserve death. Hitler was democratically elected and Stalin enjoyed near total support of the population. Soviet dissidents rejected the democracy (Soviet people enthusiastically elected their rulers) in favor of the more important values. In critical moments, societies are not ruled by majority, but by the most determined groups. If the minority’s goals are wrong (such as Khomeini’s), they are reversed fairly soon by the majority which grows more determined. If they are right (such as Lincoln), the majority eventually accepts their views.

Core values of a society are those that pass the test of time. Societies continuously experiment with values, and various groups attempt to enforce (Maccabees) or promulgate (modern Reformists) their values. Sometimes, several groups clash when enforcing their values upon a society. Values eventually pass a triple test: of violent strife (enough determined people should support them to pass), of short-term acceptability (the enforced values need to gain democratic approval soon), and of long-term sustainability. Judaism passed that test; Rabin had not.

Is civil strife inherently bad? Not if it is necessary. The American Civil War arguably bettered the society. Maccabean civil war re-imposed Judaism on the assimilating Jews. The US supported anti-communist civil wars in scores of countries. In regard to the Israeli civil war, “a Jew against a Jew” would be an improper generalization. It is rather, “Jews against Jewish traitors,” a feasible dichotomy.

Toward the end, the weak-willed Rabin suddenly revolted against Peres and Beilin, declaring in his last appearance in the Knesset, “We will not return to the lines of June 4, 1967 – the security border for defending the State of Israel will be in the Jordan Valley, in the widest sense of that concept.” That was a dangerous return to Rabin’s 1980 position, “Our evacuation of the West Bank would create the greatest threat we can possibly face.” When Rabin became obstinate about further concessions to Arab enemies who did not stop murdering Jews, Peres & Co. eliminated him. The security services framed Yigal Amir – a Kahanist – to ban Meir Kahane’s party. A hollow live Rabin was exchanged for dead Rabin a vibrant symbol of the peace process. Peres had only miscalculated about the stupidity of Israelis: for all the brainwashing, they voted Likud rather than Labor. Sacrificing Rabin backfired for the leftists.

Assassination of Rabin, as of Moyne half a century earlier, was superficially a setback for conservative Jews. Israeli security services hunted down right-wing protesters, Rabin was virtually divinized, and brainwashing engraved the peace process onto the collective unconscious. Nevertheless, Likud won the subsequent elections. Likewise, Moyne’s assassination alienated Churchill from Zionists, but Britain did not want to relinquish the mandate, anyway. The British have carved two-thirds of the land promised to Jews for Jordan long before the Moyne’s affair. The UN partition of the Land of Israel between Jews and Palestinian Arabs loosely follows the Peel Commission guidelines, drafted seven years before Lehi killed Moyne. Academic historians and media love to paint violence counterproductive, but terrorism usually bears huge political fruits: witness IRA or Hamas.

No Jew comes out to execute heinous traitors like Barak, Peres, Beilin. Is everyone afraid? Aren’t there any terminally ill people who want to serve their country even at no cost to themselves? Yigal Amir, at least, proved himself a hero.

Israel was never a liberal state. It was developed by die-hard communists—so die-hard that they emigrated from the socialist Soviet Union to found even-more-socialist kibbutzim. The kibbutzim embodied communism even more than the Soviet state farms: property was communalized, the income of individuals was lumped together and then distributed arbitrarily, children were often raised by the commune more than by their parents, and some kibbutzim even tried the arch-communist idea of communal sexual relations. Until the late 1970s, Israeli secret services and the IDF’s higher echelons were stuffed exclusively by leftist members of MAPAI (the Worker’s Party). Israel was so clearly going in a socialist direction that Stalin supported it both politically in the UN and militarily by arms sales through Czechoslovakia. The Israeli economy is typically communist: heavily state-owned, heavily trade-unionized, susceptible to periodic bursts of inflation, highly protective in terms of customs tariffs, tightly regulated to the point where common citizens find it nearly impossible to establish productive businesses, and with huge redistribution of wealth via heavy taxes. Israeli public expenditures as a ratio of GDP are by far the highest in the Western world. Israel today is a typical post-communist country.

Zionism was never associated with Jewish ideas. All the founding fathers of Zionism were secular, assimilated Jews. Their ideology was exactly the same as that of “civilized” nineteenth-century German anti-Semites: Jews are bizarre and should be made like other peoples. Thus the Jewishness was explicitly rejected. Zionists were building a new state, rather than returning to the ancient Jewish state. Following Hertzl, many Zionists accepted Uganda, rather than the Land of Israel, as the site of the Jewish state, and only incidentally settled in Palestine—mostly to garner support for a Jewish state among the Christian powers. Zionists tried to make German the official language of Israel. Failing to do that, they transposed Russian-based slang onto ancient Hebrew letters, which now passes for beautiful biblical Hebrew in Israel. Zionists advocated parting with Jewish history and abandoning traditional Jewish intellectualism and entrepreneurship; their ideal Jew was a rootless proletarian. Zionism expunged Judaism to the point of attacks on religious Jews by young socialists. Zionist anti-religious propaganda copied the efforts of Soviet atheists. To this day Israeli schools subject Jewish children to anti-religious brainwashing. Peculiarly, Israeli schools teach young Jews Islam, ostensibly for the sake of coexistence with Muslims, but in fact to undermine the standing of Jewish religion. To the same end, the schools teach children a history of religion rather than the religion itself. This is done in order to breed cynicism through the primitive, spiritless, seemingly scientific dissection of Judaism. The much-touted government subsidies to religious Jews are minuscule compared to government subsidies to Arabs. Moshe Katsav was forced out of the office with incredible, demonstrably untrue criminal allegations after he, a Sephardi Jew, refused to honor the leader of the UK Reformists as a rabbi. Katsav honestly acted on what every Jew knows: Reformism is not a version of Judaism, but a Jewish social venue dressed in religious garb. Though superficially paying respect to Judaism, Israel actually undermines it.

In conjunction with the Diaspora organizations, Israel undermines Jewish values. In order to set a moral example to the world, the Jews have to be different; if we’re not different, then what is the example? But the assimilated leadership wants the Jews to likewise assimilate. If Jews assimilate, then their unelected leaders would be left without a flock. So the Jewish establishment attempts to strike a non-existent balance between cultural assimilation and national perseveration. That is impossible. If Jews are people like everyone else, why resist inter-marriage? If Judaism is ethics, are Gentiles less ethical? Surely Gentiles are perfectly ethical, and their ethics are indistinguishable from Jewish ethics. The atheist leaders who abandoned Judaism and the struggle for moral purity cannot offer the Jews a reason to be different, to avoid intermarriage—a reason to be Jewish. The leaders replace Judaism with Hanukah parties at Reformist temples. Their rabbis don’t tell the flock the real story of Hanukkah, which was not an independence war (Judea simply changed imperial masters, from the Greeks to the Romans), but a brutal civil war between Orthodox Jews and liberals who sought to Hellenize the country. Tolerant modern Jews emphasize the freedom of worship that Israel offers to all religions in Jerusalem. That’s exactly the ultimate religious offense that the prophets lambasted and the kings of Judea were punished for. It is so politically incorrect to be Jewish.

Israel lacks freedom of speech. There is military censorship, but more important impediments to the freedom of expression are Israeli laws against defamation. Whereas civilized countries allow defamation of public figures, which serves the public interest by uncovering their wrongdoings, in Israel (as in Russia) public figures enjoy better legal protection against defamation than commoners. Journalists writing about Israeli public figures must be ready to prove their every word in court. Civilized countries adopt the opposite doctrine: the defamed public figures have to prove malicious intent on the offender’s part. Israeli public figures have sued numerous journalists for unproved accusations, conjectures, and even mere insults, often obtaining bankrupting judgments. Israel licenses the media, and no conservative media receives broadcasting licenses. There are no right-wing journalists in Israel because no news outlet would publish them. The Jerusalem Post is the single centrist newspaper. The Israeli media are owned entirely by oligarchs who depend on the government for profits and take no interest in criticizing it. There is no independent media in Israel.

Freedom of expression is legally curtailed in Israel. Sharon’s government criminalized mere opposition to the disengagement from Gaza—and many people were sentenced to jail for expressing their opposition. In a recent case, conservative activist Ben Gvir was convicted of abetting a terrorist organization for simply holding a poster that read, “Kahane was right.” The Israeli High Court recently overruled as too lenient a lower court’s sentence of two teenagers who burned tires in 2005 during protests against the disengagement from Gaza. The court ruled—literally—that the teenagers’ actions constituted political protest, and as such should be severely punished. The very reason for absolving from prosecution—freedom of political expression—is turned into the pretext for punishment and aggravating circumstance.

Police violently disperse peaceful demonstrations, routinely break the bones of the demonstrators, beat them mercilessly, and even tear their nostrils. Police perpetrated Cossack-style pogroms in religious neighborhoods to discourage peaceful religious protests against deliberately provocative actions such as gay parades in Jerusalem. The police entered the Mea Shearim neighborhood at night, broke windows with water cannons, broke the doors down and beat religious Jews, from children to elderly rabbis. Police routinely detain conservative activists engaged in peaceful protests for months without charges, or they cynically invent absurd charges such as elderly women attacking the police. There are many cases of police arresting and beating Jewish women with babies at their breast. Police commonly detain and beat teenagers, both boys and girls, even twelve-year-olds, for simply participating in anti-government demonstrations. Such cases of extreme police brutality—including reported attempts at rape and sexual abuse, broken bones, and torn livers—always go unpunished. Police often act against Jews in conjunction with the army, though every civilized country forbids using the army against its own people. Almost every demonstration by any right-of-center group is accompanied by police violence. The police’s treatment of leftist groups is extremely lenient: Israeli and foreign anarchists routinely break the separation barrier before the eyes of policemen, and even attack the police. Such violent behavior is unimaginable at demonstrations by conservatives, who are thrown into jail in numbers for false misdemeanors. Israeli police act specifically against the conservative opponents of the regime. It is critical for the Israeli establishment to suppress any conservative expression because their defeatist anti-Jewish policies are so absurd that even the least dissent would crack the system.

Israeli security forces hunt political opponents of the regime. Conservative Jewish activists are routinely sentenced under the anti-guerrilla provisions of the British Mandate Administration, which is still operational in Israel. That means Jews are tried secretly before military courts. The defendants are not allowed to hear the evidence against them—which is allegedly secret. Afghan terrorists in Guantanamo Bay and Palestinian terrorists in the same Israeli courts enjoy much wider due process than Jews. Police search the houses of conservative activists at whim; there is no freedom from unreasonable search and seizure in Israel. The policemen who deliberately tore the nostrils of a peaceful protester against the withdrawal from Gaza (Vitkin) were sentenced to three-to-six months’ community work. Israel’s practice of judicial harassment evolved from frightening precedents: from the pre-state period when Haganah forces assassinated Ben Gurion’s political opponents such as Arlozoroff, to the “Season” operation against the independent Jewish fighters who targeted the occupying British forces, to the routine wiretaps of political opponents. Israeli police commonly pursue unfounded investigations of political figures to either blackmail or smear them. Sharon initially attempted a tough and largely effective policy in the Hamas-ridden Gaza, but the leftist Attorney General besieged his family with multiple investigations, forcing Sharon to follow the peace camp’s policy of evacuation from Gaza. Olmert and other politicians were similarly threatened with criminal prosecution unless they cooperated with the peace camp. No of these charges resulted in meaningful convictions, but they remain a powerful tool of political blackmail.

Western legal practitioners commonly regard the Israeli High Court as the most activist court in the world. The ultra-leftist court changes and amends laws, hands down judgments based exclusively on its own sense of fairness without even referencing a relevant precedent, and micro-manages everything from military efforts to construction. The High Court routinely commands the IDF to make particular moves, such as moving the separation barrier a few meters. The court hears an immense number of trivial cases, and effectively usurps executive power. The High Court appoints its own judges.

There was a judge in Israel named Yiftah. A Robin Hood in his youth, he was knowledgeable neither in Torah nor in the law. He just led Israel against her enemies. And in doing so, he was a thousand times more just than any law-enforcement official today.

Liberal governments believe it’s illegal to manipulate taxpayers’ opinion on the taxpayers’ account. Officially, Western governments refrain from domestic propaganda. Not so with Israel, which runs an immense propaganda machine called “hasbara.” The Israeli propaganda apparatus originally addressed foreign audiences, but unable to compete with CNN, BBC, et al., it switched to a domestic audience, assuring the people of the benefits of the fictional peace process and setting some Israelis against others. The state’s propaganda systematically disseminates falsehoods, such as that Jewish villagers in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza live off government subsidies—of which they in fact receive nearly none. Similar lies are spread about religious Jews, and then villagers and religious Jews are lumped together as the archetypal enemy of the people. Jewish villagers in Judea and Samaria are falsely presented as predominantly religious to frame the abandonment of Judea in the “peace process” as “us (secular) against them (religious).” The propaganda machine has been used extensively against political opponents, most notoriously in the silencing and smearing of Meir Kahane in the manner of a Stalinist show trial.

Israelis don’t support their government. Olmert’s government was voted into office by only 13 percent of eligible voters, and its support has eroded since. Israelis voted for the Rabin who promised a hard line against the Palestinians, “to block them in Gaza to eat each other like spiders in a can,” the Rabin who ordered the army to break the hands and legs of Palestinian teenagers in the Intifada—not Rabin the peacemaker. Little did they know that while Rabin promised Jews a hard line, Yossi Beilin promised concessions to Abu Mazen in Cairo in exchange for the PLO’s endorsement. Israelis voted for Netanyahu, who promised to repeal the Oslo agreements; he instead gave Hebron to the Arabs. Barak was voted into the office as “Mr. Security”  before abandoning Lebanon to Hezbollah and offering Arafat Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and even Jerusalem. Israelis of course didn’t vote for the Barak who would give Arafat the only viable gas field in Israel, near Ashkelon, ostensibly to make the Palestinians self-sufficient, but actually to crookedly pass the gas field to BG Corporation and skip Israeli tender. Israelis voted for Sharon, the ultra-tough military governor of Gaza, the person who ended terrorism there, not for the Sharon who would evict 8,000 Jewish villagers from their homes in Gush Katif. Israel reduces the right of petitioning the government to farce. Half a million Israelis participated in protests against Sharon’s disengagement, which abandoned Gaza to Hamas, but their opinion was ignored.

Jews overwhelmingly reject gay parades and the partition of Jerusalem, and don’t believe in peace with Muslims. Most Israelis observe high holidays, Shabbat, and kosher laws at least superficially. Peace Now, which is so popular in the US, is a marginal ultra-left group in Israel, spat upon even by the left. The defeatist left-wing marginals receive disproportionate media coverage and enjoy huge subsidies from EU organizations. The real enemies of the Jewish establishment are religious and nationalist Jews, not Arabs. Arabs are easy to deal with by military measures, but religious and nationalist Jews undermine the legitimacy of the assimilated, post-socialist government, which retains no trace of Jewishness.

Changes are coming, albeit slowly. The settlers first refused to negotiate the Peace House with the government, then softened their position and tried negotiation. Unlike them, the government doesn’t really negotiate: it asked Jews to leave the house to the army and wait an unspecified number of years until the court decided on the house’s ownership. The settler leaders cannot shake their penchant for showmanship: the Council of Settlements, a semi-official organization, negotiated on behalf of the supposedly unrelenting Hebron radicals and home owners.

For all the talk of violent defense, none was forthcoming. There was no attempt to prepare even basic defenses like barricades, window shutters, and barbed wire. There was no roadblock and heavy gate to be kept closed at all times. The organizers didn’t even bother to set up hidden video cameras to broadcast the army’s attack live on the Internet.

A bunch of unruly kids cannot stand up to regular army forces in a pitched battle. Despite the ample time, the kids were left to themselves rather than trained in basic counterattack techniques day and night. Idleness, fear, indecisiveness, and lack of food quickly demoralized the defenders. The opportunity was perfect for ideological training, as thousands of radicals went through the house; but no Kahane readings were organized and no inflammatory speeches were given by credible rabbis. The defenders, accordingly, split into many groups without much interaction. Hooligans pelted Palestinians with stones and derided Arab passersby. Yeshiva students continued their studies; Rabbi Akiva’s abandoned theirs. The house was ripe with provocateurs and certain Shabak agents—in fact, it was they, rather than the settler-leaders, who worked with the youth, and might be largely responsible for the stone-throwing contests.

The point cannot be reiterated enough: the Jewish hooligans, condemned by everyone, are some of the best people to prop up the Jewish ideal. They are not educated in the liberal ghetto nonsense of nice Jews. They simply hate those who hate them; they are normal—which is an incredibly unusual thing among Jews. That they wash rarely or lack table manners are all extraneous things. They hate Arabs and Jewish police, harbor no respect for the rodef state, and are prepared to go to great length for their nation. It is imperative to train and educate them.

The PR is not thought out. Again, as in Gush Katif, settlers engaged in a schizophrenic approach, presenting themselves both as attackers and victims of the attack. They cannot show strength and claim pity at the same time. The pity line might work: old Jews in prayer shawls near the house, a lot of small children playing inside without their mothers, girls bringing food to military police soldiers, soccer matches between Jewish and Arab kids, and small gifts distributed to nearby Arabs. This is not a permanent solution: soccer would not change Arab terrorism, and Palestinian moderates cannot stop the militants. But we’re not looking for permanent solutions; the PR effect would have been great, especially if the settler leaders would pay to bring TV crews.

With fifty MKs signing pro-Hebron petitions, and hundreds of other influential people supporting the settlers, how come only one MK lived in Peace House? The police would hesitate before throwing MKs out of the building.

Pity culminates in suicide. During the Gush Katif eviction, two people burned themselves in protest. Despite being smeared as psychos, they still earned considerable pity, and in the end the decision was made for the media to ignore them. In Yamit, Sinai, Rabbi Kahane’s people barricaded themselves in a bunker and threatened to blow it up with gas cylinders; even Sharon hesitated to remove them. There is no Kahane today, but neither is there Sharon. Threatened with mass suicide in Peace House, the government would have retreated. How un-Jewish is suicide? Ask Masada defenders or scores of Jews who committed suicide as an alternative to desecrating God’s name; if abandoning the Jewish city of Hebron doesn’t desecrate it, what does? Besides, there is not a chance that the police would push the defenders toward suicide.

On other hand, the alternative approach—extreme violence—could work as well. But that should be real violence. On the national level, passive defense cost Jews the country. As Jews clung to Tel Aviv and Arabs carped at them continuously with ever-increasing demands, the last thirty years saw unimaginable concessions: Sinai, Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria; Israel even conceded to Syrian occupation of the Kineret shore beyond the international border. That’s after the Arabs lost all the wars. On the national level, Jews should negotiate peace with Syria after bombing Damascus and offering to retain only the Golan Heights; settlers should act similarly.

Passive defense never works. The army can wait out the settlers or strike unexpectedly. Offense is the only proper defense. When tens of thousands Jews gathered in Hebron for Chayei Sarah reading, why didn’t they march on the Palestinian houses and army outposts to occupy them? Violence must be decisive; stone-throwing contests with Palestinians are ugly and useless. Instead, hundreds of houses might be torched, causing a massive death toll. That would leave an impression on all the adversaries. If the point is to prevent further evacuations, including the subsequent Peace House evictions after the defenders sneak in, the best way is to strike the Israeli government in its most sensitive underbelly: the welfare of the Palestinians. Amona was about Jewish injuries, thus of no concern for the government or foreign media. The Israeli government won’t risk another eviction that is certain to bring massive injuries and death to the Palestinians—which is a far cry from the current hooliganism in Hebron. Again, the decision to engage in such an approach is a moral one, and not easy at that. Palestinians bear no responsibility for anti-Semitic actions of Israeli leftists and the government. Whether to use the Arab lives and limbs as pawns, purely as a matter of expediency, is a substantial question. But should it be answered in the affirmative, it might end the evictions.

There is no point in worrying about the settlers’ reputation: it cannot be worse.

When the terrorists hijacked an aircraft with Jewish passengers and landed it in Entebbe, they asked for a prisoner swap for only a few of their comrades, which seems laughable by current standards. Israel chose to attack the sovereign state of Uganda, losing a number of hostages and a commando, but refused to negotiate with the kidnappers. Both Rabin and opposition leader Menachem Begin agreed then: as long as even the slightest chance exists to release the hostages forcibly, they should not be exchanged.

Israel embarked on a policy course which is beyond even Kafkaesque, such as exchanging a thousand terrorists for a Jewish drug dealer or a top terrorist Kuntar for two decomposed corpses which used to be Jews. Now the government will trade any terrorists who did not pull the trigger, regardless of their role as accomplices to the mass murder of Jews. Israeli jails are filled with 11,000 “terrorists” of the stone-thrower variety, who should rather be flogged and dumped into Gaza.

In the 1970s, Israel successfully hunted down the terrorists who killed Jewish athletes during the German Olympics. Since the 1980s, Israel has only hunted down conservative Jews, murdering people like Kahane and the settler activists. Paying homage to the daring operations of the early state, Mossad and Shabak engage in targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders, but the effect is just the opposite. While the early assassinations of perpetrators made common terrorists nervous and caused them to make errors and be caught, leaders’ assassinations do not concern the common members, and are avenged terribly against soft Jewish targets abroad.

When PLFP-GC hijacked an El Al aircraft, the IDF blew up thirteen civilian airliners in Beirut airport. On the rare occasions when the PLO shelled Northern Israel from Lebanon, Israel responded with massive retaliatory raids, which drove masses of Shiites from South Lebanon, eventually leading to the civil war in Beirut. Who would have thought forty years ago that Israel would resort to theatrical raids on Gaza in retaliation for showers of rockets on her towns?

The problem is that the rulers of Israel believed their own rhetoric. Leftists such as Ben Gurion spoke about peace and tolerance but ruled the Arabs with an iron fist. The next generation took their pronouncements to heart. This generation of Israeli leaders who lack the firsthand experience of the pre-state war of survival with the Arabs, who expect the IDF to prevail and the US to intervene, who are concerned with foreign media more than with domestic opinion, will lead the country to death. Unless, of course, we deal with them reciprocally.

Feiglin wrongly decided to subvert Likud instead of forming his own party. Feiglin’s choice was dictated by circumstances: he needed to quickly join a party list in order to gain immunity from politically motivated prosecution. Likud offered only a dead end to Feiglin. Most of Likud’s voters are anti-Labor rather than right-wing, and few subscribe to Feiglin’s policy of holding on to Judea and Samaria. Likud also moderated Feiglin, particularly on the issue of transferring Israeli Arabs to Jordan; this moderation cost Feiglin a great number of right-wing votes. Feiglin has little chance to rise through Likud’s hierarchy; there are many ways to shut him up. For example, the proposed merger with Israel Beitenu would push Feiglin’s candidates to the bottom of Likud’s list. Even if Feiglin were to rise unexpectedly to Likud’s leadership and make the party right-wing, he would only cause Likud’s electorate to switch to other centrist parties. A party’s brand is a great asset in huge mature democracies like the US, where launching a new party is prohibitively expensive. Small, new democracies like Israel typically have a fluid party composition, with parties continuously entering and leaving the political scene. That trend is especially pronounced in a country of credulous, dreaming, messianic Jews who jump on every savior proclaimed to them by media ads. Hijacking Likud makes no sense for Feiglin.

Can the right wing form a winning coalition? Voter turnout is fairly high among Israel’s Arabs, who are 19 percent of the population; they vote Jewish left (which is Arab right). Slavs and Jews-by-grandfather form about 15 percent of the Israeli population. They often demand strong measures against Arabs, but rarely support truly conservative ideas like the annexation of Judea and Samaria, expulsion of the Arabs, or even a united Jerusalem; they are decent soldiers, but it’s just not their war. They fought with equal courage in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Close to 10 percent of Israeli Jewish citizens reside abroad and don’t vote. Not less than a third of Jews are hard-core leftists who embrace Arabs in the Jewish state and don’t consider Judea to be Jewish land. Israeli conservatives cannot hope for a majority. Even if they do form a majority in the Knesset, the leftist Supreme Court will quash their racist moves, and Israeli security establishment based on the MAPAI core will enforce the left’s law. The Murders of the Kahane family and Ze’evi showed that the Israeli establishment won’t risk ideological competitors. They will be bought like Lieberman, subverted into the political mainstream like Feiglin, or killed like Kahane. The Government propaganda machine hasn’t yet tried on Feiglin a fraction of the facilities it mobilized against Kahane or Sharon.

There is no alternative to revolution.