Hezbollah controls the lion’s share of Israel’s marijuana, hashish, and heroin supplies. The terrorist group benefits from the drug trade on all fronts: it benefits militarily by enlisting Israeli drug dealers as spies, ideologically by destroying Israeli society, and financially from sales. Some marijuana passes through Sinai, enriching the Hamas-affiliated Bedouin clans in Egypt.

Israeli police fight the drug trade zealously, but their battle is lost. This is like the American occupation of Iraq: you can win every battle but lose the war, because some wars are decided in low-level encounters rather than battles. The United States spends $60 billion annually fighting its 7 million drug addicts and tens of millions of harmless marijuana consumers. Though Israeli financial statistics are kept secret through military allocations, we can expect a similarly staggering amount.

Hezbollah earns, Israel spends. Terrorists and their fellow Israeli criminals grow richer and therefore stronger, while the Israeli state expends precious resources. And worst of all, the fight is hopeless—as soon as police bust one drug ring or delivery channel, another opens. Instead of combating the drug trade, police only clear the spot for other clans. In effect, the police act as the mob’s hit men.

Israeli law enforcement services are especially wrong to crack down on the groups which import cocaine and methamphetamines from Latin America and Europe, as this is the most efficient way of pushing Hezbollah’s drugs from the Israeli market. But there is a better option: legalize the drugs and allow their use under medical supervision.

Frankly, I don’t care about those nuts who choose to destroy themselves with drug abuse. As long as alcoholics are permitted to kill themselves slowly, and the Peace Now is allowed to continue its murderous propaganda, there is no reason to single out drug addicts for special care or persecution. My concern is about the 99 percent of law-abiding Jews who are endangered by the government restriction on drug sales. Drug addicts steal from us, they are a disproportionate burden on our healthcare, and they enrich and strengthen our enemies. Let them kill themselves if they want so, but not to kill us.

Let’s go after the real problem, the one of enemies. Strip them of drug-trade profits by legalizing drugs. Make them cheaply available with medical prescriptions. Arguably, that may have the side effect of reducing drug addiction by taking the chic out of it. Drugs will no longer be forbidden fruit, a revolt against society, the lot of the elite. Rather, drugs will only be associated with a despicable medical condition.

True, drug consumption is implicitly prohibited in the Torah: since alcoholic intoxication is frowned upon, that is all the more reason that drugs are not suitable for humans. But the Israeli state, which disregards every commandment, is the last entity that should appeal to the Torah. Besides, here we have a case of conflicting commandments, and the one which affects the entire society takes precedence: abetting the enemy is a more important prohibition than drug consumption. While it sets myriad hair-raising punishments for various other crimes, the Torah is tellingly silent on alcoholism. Though drug addiction runs against the human purpose, it is not society’s business to prosecute it. Indeed, the drug trade was legal in Britain just eighty years ago.

Unrelated to terrorism but otherwise similar is prostitution. The Torah does not ban foreign prostitution; since patriarch Judah habitually engaged a roadside prostitute, we need not pretend to be more moral than him. By legalizing prostitution, we can take money from the coffers of criminals and put them as taxes into the state’s budget. The prohibition makes prostitutes’ lives miserable; they live under constant threat from criminals and police. In a society which teaches school pupils such abominations as coexistence with Muslims, prostitution is a morally harmless behavior. Just like the drug trade, profits from prostitution have made Israeli crime syndicates into venerable enterprises and allowed them to heavily corrupt the police.

Scores of countries allow prostitution, including the Netherlands, Germany, and some areas of the United States. Are we to consider them immoral (well, except for Germany)? Legalization of prostitution benefits those involved in it by improving their working conditions and increasing their wages. Customers enjoy lower prices by taking out criminal middlemen, and engage in harmless consensual activity without criminal overtones. The government receives taxes and cuts down on police spending. Criminal syndicates lose a huge chunk of their profits. So why not?

The alternative to the role models of suicidally moralistic or detestably corrupt Jew is the Jew who conquered Canaan. And he is not the thing of the past.

The outgoing police chief Moshe Karadi told an open secret: Israeli politicians routinely use police investigations to blackmail their opponents. By the time the investigation is quietly abandoned, the victim is smeared irreparably.

The charges are often unsustainable. In Moshe Katsav’s case, it’s his word against the lady’s – no hard evidence whatsoever. Similarly in Ramon’s case. Other instances don’t constitute corruption in any meaningful sense. The touted Greek islands affair where Ariel Sharon helped an oligarch to purchase a Greek island – what harm has it done to Israel? Where’s the criminal damage? Olmert’s apartment, purchased below the market price – so what? Olmert helped a contractor to receive a building permit that the contractor was entitled to, anyway. Olmert benefited from his official position – so what? Where’s the damage to public interest? Olmert’s role in Bank Leumi privatization is deeply entrenched in Israeli public opinion as criminal. Olmert, however, followed the normal practice of structuring tenders for major assets so that a reputable investor rather than the highest bidder wins. Did the changes proposed by Olmert benefit an Australian Jewish billionaire Lowy? Probably. Were they detrimental to Israel? No one has attempted to answer that question. Mazuz also bugs Olmert about political appointments in government agencies. That’s correct: Mazuz, a political appointee, argues against political appointments. The practice of political appointments is standard in Israel; the Likud and Avodah have their almost-formal quotas in the Jewish Agency and other government organizations. Convict every party boss or don’t hunt Olmert on that nonsense.

Politicians aren’t beacons of morality, nor should they be. They are not paid or elected to provide a moral example. People paid to do so, rabbis, also show indecency time and again. Foreign politicians survive charges much worse than those brought against Israeli politicians. Common people try to benefit from their job positions: from labor demands to using office phones for private calls. Such actions are criminal only if they illegally harm employers or trustees, including voters.

Israeli political bosses hunt their colleagues with criminal allegations to win elections or blackmail them into pursuing leftist policies, notably disengagement.

Dealings with Angola, a long-time Russian military client, are FSB’s turf. FSB requested Angola’s embassy in Moscow to issue diplomatic license plates for Gaydamak’s Maybach. Putin tolerates selected Jewish oligarchs in return for them promoting Russian interests in Israel. Livaev plays his part. His media channels in Israel heavily promote Slavic culture and agenda, and praise Russian leaders. Russia demands land plots in Jerusalem. Stalin envisaged Israel as Soviet beachhead in the Middle East and supported Israel in 1948 war when the US embargoed weapons shipments to Palestine. Putin continues that policy.

Russian Jewish mafia is perfect conduit for Russian policy in Israel. They earn and steal in Russia, and return there for safe haven. Huge numbers of Russian Jews resist assimilation into Israeli milieu and call Hebrew “their [Israelis’] language.” Lieberman accentuates and exploits the division.

Gaydamak is not the worst person who aims at Israeli political Olympus; to find someone worse than Peres or Livni is quite impossible. Decent mafiosi could be preferable to sleazy politicos. Besides, Gaydamak stands no chance against the experienced political machinators. The throng of hired consultants and journalists sings Gaydamak victory, but he is no more a political prospect than Chicciollina. Curious voters eager for scandals and star publicity might give his list a few seats. That would only confirm Israeli political establishment as a brothel with everything for sale, but not give Gaydamak any serious power. Prime minister will offer him an invented portfolio, like Lieberman, to do nothing. Gaydamak’s mega-parties underscore cheapness of Israeli cultural and political “elite”, eager to attend them; the disgusting corruption wins Gaydamak no friends. Gaydamak’s social endeavors are a base attempt to buy electorate with welfare giveaways, minor compared to Olmert’s bribes to Haifa region and Sderot. Gaydamak lacks political agenda and substitutes it with generic distribution of money that he imagines will buy him votes; people take aid money but don’t vote for benefactor.

Money buys power only to an extent in politics. Candidates need either charisma or support from established party. Gaydamak lacks either. He plays a typical Russian scenario of an oligarch buying his way into parliament. In Russia, that often works because of the voting fraud; in most cases, the “new Russians” fail in elections, mislead by their campaign managers. Those who make it into parliament, do so at extraordinary cost. If Gaydamak seeks parliament protection from police repressions, he should consider that Israeli police go even after the officials much higher than a Knesset member. If Gaydamak seeks political ends, investing in small promising parties is a safer bet. If he seeks political glory, there is none in sight.

Russia floods Israel with non-Jews. Under Putin rule, Russian archives massively forge birth certificates with Jewish roots. Sohnut, an agency that dealt with Jewish immigration and became useless with the end of aliyah, embraces Putin’s forgeries and brings in Israel huge numbers of fake Jews without any attempt to check their obviously forged papers. For a few hundred dollars bribe, Slavs get Jewish birth certificates in faraway Russian cities and add to Putin’s agents of influence in Israel.

Israeli socialism was conducive to forming bureaucratic state. Bureaucracy is empowered with the socialist hands-on economic management, totalitarian regulation, monopolies, and trade unions. Economic win or loss became dependent on connections rather than skills or luck. Bureaucracy is pro-left because the left regulates a lot. Ministers from conservative parties are sabotaged and mostly fail. Bureaucracy cemented an alliance with leftist courts and the security services historically manned by leftist appointees.

Thus the backlash against Jewish settlers and especially Noar Gvaot, the people who moved into the hills of Judea and Samaria to live semi-nomadic lives outside of the Israeli jurisdiction. They set a dangerous precedent of escaping the bureaucratic embrace. Totalitarian states have to control every citizen; when the pressure of government oppression runs sufficiently high, even a small hole allows many to escape and still more to admire them.

Economic deregulation down to free market level will destroy bureaucratic state and its political cover, the leftism. Deregulation should not be confused with privatization which passes ownership to oligarchs but leaves the controls over monopolist enterprises in bureaucracy’s hands. Breaking up monopolists, deregulating industries, and rising commercial competition to government enterprises must precede privatization.

The Jewish barons are right: the unnatural help to Arabs is necessary to preserve Israel a democracy. They did not add, what kind of democracy. The exemplary Greek democracies did not imagine subsidizing resident aliens, much less – tolerating hostile aliens. Pork-eating, Sabbath-flaunting, shiksa-married Jewish “leaders” (who ever had voted for them?) want Israel made in their image. Not a Jewish state, of course. Calling them “leaders” is a defamation of Jews.

Talking of Sderot, the Knesset approved $200 million a year for those “victims of the peace process.” The amount, huge for the very poor town of hardly 20,000 people, is intended to shut up the residents, the living proof of the failure of Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza. Treacherous Israeli government could do nothing to save the inhabitants of Sderot, and bribes them to die unobtrusively.

We know that good people do not come to power. That the road to the Knesset is cobbled with compromises. That political donations have to be repaid many times over. That egomaniac party leaders push out possible competitors and stuff the parties with drones. That ambitious politicians have to form their own parties, fragment the spectrum, form odd coalitions, and wander out on an unpredictable course.

We know that radical, uncompromising politicians cannot attract donations. That donating to anti-establishment parties cuts entrepreneurs out of lucrative government contracts. That the media shy from uncomfortable truths and prefer to keep their idiot audience tranquil and happy.

We know the Jewish barons usurped the communities’ voices. That the people who often got their riches by every imaginable kind of crime, who are Jewish only in public pronouncements, lead the communities and decide on the matter of life, death, and existence.

We know the Jewish state we have longed for for two millennia is deterioratings into an abomination. And we keep silent. A nation of priests, unable to lead itself.