During that first trip to Israel, I understood that the future of the Jewish people was being forged in Israel, not in the Diaspora, not even in my warm community on the south side of Chicago.
When I was 12 years old, my family took our first trip outside the United States.
We came to Israel on a two-week family tour. It was July 1982. The Lebanon War had just begun. In retrospect, it was the first step on what has become my lifelong Zionist journey.
I was moved by everything I saw. The IDF soldiers hitchhiking home for leave from the battlefields in Lebanon looked like movie stars. Ma’aleh Adumim, now a major city, was a clutch of mobile homes in the desert but the gleam in the eyes of the settlers showed the promise of what was to come.
The markets of Jerusalem, the beaches in Tel Aviv, the shells of Syrian tanks on the Golan Heights and the fish in the Sea of Galilee captivated my imagination.
The Western Wall awoke me to the immutable fact that the Nation of Israel, the Land of Israel and the Law of Israel are indivisible.
Hearing Hebrew, the language of prayer shouted out from every corner filled me with awe. And seeing the multi-ethnic society of Jews from every corner of the world shook me to my core. After two thousand years, in an act of will with no parallel in human history, Jews of all races, backgrounds, and cultures; Jews with unique, fervently kept traditions came home and began patching together a people forcibly separated for 50 generations.
During that first trip to Israel, I understood that the future of the Jewish people was being forged in Israel, not in the Diaspora, not even in my warm community on the south side of Chicago.
I loved America. But I wanted to move to Israel.
Nine years later, in 1991, two weeks after I finished college, I fulfilled my wish. I boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv with a one-way ticket in my hand. A week later, I took my first step towards the second stop on my Zionist journey: the Israel Defense Force. Two months after dropping down, I started basic training.
I served in the IDF for five and a half years, leaving as a captain. Most of my service was spent in negotiations sessions with the PLO. As the coordinator of negotiations on civil affairs with the Palestinians in the Defense Ministry, I was a core – if junior – member of the Israeli negotiating team during the Oslo peace process years.
In the IDF, as in all the stations I passed in my professional life, I viewed my work as a calling. I always believed that I had the ability to impact the country and the people for the better, and that it was my duty to try to do so.
For the past 18 years, as a writer in Israeli and international media, it has been my conviction that my job is to use my pen, my keyboard and my voice to shape and expand Israel’s maneuver room whether in relation to the international arena, to military questions, to legal affairs or to political issues.
The job of a commentator is to interpret reality. The media’s habit of simplifying issues by treating everything as an either-or proposition is disastrous for formulating policy. Israel’s options are rarely binary. On almost all issues, Israel has a full spectrum of options. Yet, due to media pressure, our leaders often miss them.
To advance its interests in the international arena, for instance, Israel doesn’t need to bow before foreign powers. It needs to show foreign powers that they want what Israel has to offer and that it is in their interest to work with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the only prime minister Israel has had that fully understands and implements this basic truth.
The same is the case with the Palestinians. Israel has nothing to fear in its dealing with the Palestinians. The choice we were presented with for more than a generation – either peace with a Palestinian state or war without one – was a false and destructive conceit. It was based on a wide array of lies and delusions. I devoted hundreds of columns and my book, The Israeli Solution, to expose them.
So too, if we want to understand historic processes unfolding, we need to understand history. I saw it as my job as a columnist to explain the relevance of history to our current challenges and to expose the ignorance of much of what passes for historical wisdom in the popular discourse, whether in relation to German history, to Jewish history, to American history, or to Islamic history.
Over the past several years, I found myself returning over and over again to the study of basic issues of governance. This was no esoteric exploit.
Over the past several years, the term “rule of law” in Israel has been turned on its head. Rather than denote the dispassionate enforcement of duly promulgated laws, it has come to mean what President Reuven Rivlin once referred to as the tyranny of the “rule of law mafia,” that is, the rule of unchecked lawyers.
Israel’s Basic Law: Knesset defines the Knesset as the sovereign. That is because the public elects its members in national elections. Members of Knesset in turn, elect the government as the executive arm of the people’s will. That is how it works in democracies. The parliament legislates laws. The executive implements policies in accordance with the law and the mandate it receives from the public at the ballot box. The job of the judicial branch is to interpret laws.
Over the past several years, and with growing intensity in the past four years, the authority of the Knesset to promulgate laws has diminished. The combined forces of the attorney-general and the justices of the Supreme Court have seized not only the power to abrogate laws and interfere with the legislative process, but to dictate laws through legal opinions and judgments. The same goes for executive power. Not only have the justices and attorneys arrogated to themselves the power to cancel government decisions and policies, they have also asserted the power to dictate policies to the government.
Through these acts of the legal fraternity, the powers of Israel’s elected officials have been whittled down. This week we learned that Supreme Court president Esther Hayut has quietly empaneled a forum of 11 justices to determine the legality of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People.
In Israel, Basic Laws are essentially the constitutional foundations of the state.
If Hayut goes through with adjudicating petitions against the law, even if the justices rule that the Basic Law is legal, by claiming the power to adjudicate a Basic Law, the justices will seize the power to undermine the foundations of the state.
The Law of Return, which is the anchor of Jewish peoplehood and the ingathering of exiles, has long been a red flag for post-Zionist radicals who reject Israel’s right to exist as a specifically Jewish state. There is every reason to believe that if the justices seize the power to undermine Basic Laws, they will not hesitate to go after the Law of Return.
Watching this dangerous trend of events, I have used my position as a columnist to warn the public about what is happening and to empower Israel’s politicians to fight for their powers. If Israel is to maintain its democracy, our elected officials must be empowered to challenge the legal fraternity and restore to the Knesset the sole power to legislate laws.
Given the gravity of the situation, the disputes over Israel’s borders, its energy policies, its immigration policies, its economic policies and its military policies become secondary concerns. The key question that hangs in the balance today is whether the Knesset will restore its power as the repository of the people’s will in accordance with law or will it become a mere debating society with the actual power to determine Israel’s future devolved entirely to bureaucrats ruled by a handful of unelected lawyers and judges? Because if the latter happens, the people will lose all ability to determine the outcome of every other aspect of national life.
Every once in a while, over the past year or two, I found myself wondering whether I should throw my hat into the ring and enter politics. Could I be effective in advancing the goal of restoring the powers of the Knesset from inside the Knesset or am I better off staying where I am? Since this was a purely hypothetical question, I left it open.
This brings me to my decision this week to move to a new stop on my Zionist journey.
This week I decided to respond positively to an offer from Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Education Minister Naftali Bennett to join their new party, the New Right (Hayamin Hehadash), and run on their Knesset slate.
True, there is more than one party that reflects my views in the Knesset, at least officially. But in recent years, the political leaders who have done the most to translate my positions into action have been Shaked and Bennett.
They share my concern for Israel’s future as a democracy. They dare to insist that to restore and strengthen Israeli democracy, the current power balance between bureaucrats on the one hand and elected officials on the other must be turned on its head. Whether they are discussing the vast expansion of the power of military lawyers over field commanders in the IDF, the necessity of enforcing the laws of Israel over its Arab citizens with the same alacrity as it is enforced over its Jewish citizens, or rejecting the notion that the Supreme Court has the power to overturn Basic Laws, Bennett and Shaked have consistently communicated and advanced positions I view as critical for the future of the country.
No less importantly for me as a proud Jew who never understood what I see as a largely artificial distinction between religious and secular Jews, their new party doesn’t seek to serve just one type of Israeli. It seeks to represent the full spectrum of the Israeli society that I saw and fell in love with, in all its rich diversity, in that pivotal first visit in the summer of 1982.
I am convinced that restoring Israel’s democratic institutions is the most urgent task we face today. And while I would have been happy to continue advocating for legal reform from my position in the media, when Bennett and Shaked asked me to join them in their efforts to advance this goal from the Knesset, I said yes with little hesitation.
The Zionist journey I began in 1982 has taken me places I could never have dreamed of. It is my deepest hope and my intention that on my next stop, I will have the privilege of advancing the Zionist enterprise I fell in love with so many years ago.
www.CarolineGlick.com
@ yamit82:
Yamit, you said,
“While I never question G-d’s judgment, I do question that he is merciful.”
God has certainly been merciful to me, for over 70 years. I’ll leave it to others to plead their own cases before Him. A friend of mine, who may be in prison for the rest of his life, tells me he is experiencing “the severe mercies of God”.
@ yamit82:
I read those books too. I am speaking from family experience
@ yamit82:
Dog ts G-d spelled backwards.
@ honeybee:
My dog LOL
@ honeybee:
True dat… Interesting that the same German Jews in Americ were looked down upon by the Sephardim who were considered to be the elite and had preceded entry into America bu at least 200 years.
adamdalgliesh Said:
God has deigned, through the Hebrew Bible (the first five books of which are collectively denominated as the Torah), to reveal to us His Eternal Attributes, His Message and that which He expects of us as His Chosen People. Consequently, it stands to reason that the Teaching that God gave to His Chosen People is both complete and final. As a result, our Sages’ understanding of God is based exclusively upon His Words and Actions, as related in its pages alone.
And just so that doubt should not creep into our souls about God’s Faithfulness to His own Word, the Prophet Samuel reminds us that:
“‘Moreover, the Eternal One of Israel does not lie and does not relent, for He is not a human that He should relent.’“ (I Samuel 15:29), echoing the earlier words of the Gentile prophet Balaam that: “‘God is not a man that He should be deceitful, nor a son of man that He should relent. Would He say and not do, or speak and not confirm?’” (Numbers 23:19).
Since Hebrew Scripture warns us that the nations’ Scriptures, even if otherwise attractive and compelling, are nevertheless False, we are certainly required to treat the deities described in their Scriptures as False, and we are most certainly prohibited from intellectually merging or otherwise identifying their deities with the God of Israel.
Furthermore, Hebrew Scripture not only warns the Jewish people against merging or otherwise identifying the false gods of others with the God of Israel, but it also sends the very same warning to the Gentile nations; for, the Prophet Isaiah says to them:
“‘For thus said HaShem, Creator of the Heavens; He is the God, the One Who fashioned the Earth and its Maker; He established it; He did not create it for emptiness; He fashioned it to be inhabited [and then declared]: ‘I am HaShem and there is no other. I did not speak in secrecy, some place in a land of darkness; I did not tell the descendants of Jacob to seek Me for nothing; I am HaShem Who speaks Righteousness, Who declares Upright Things. Gather yourselves, come and approach together, O survivors of the nations, who do not know, who carry about the wood of their graven image, and pray to a god who cannot save. Proclaim and approach; even [let your leaders] take counsel together: Who let this be heard from aforetimes, or related it from [times] of Old? Is it not I, HaShem? There is no other God besides Me; there is no righteous God besides Me, and no Savior other than Me. Turn to Me and be saved, all ends of the Earth; for, I am God and there is no other. I swear by Myself, Righteousness has gone forth from My Mouth, a Word that will not be rescinded: that to Me shall every knee bend and every tongue swear.’” (Isaiah 45:18-23).
We Jews cannot possibly accept the postulate that the deity depicted in the “New Testament” and the God of Israel are one and the same — or that, after so thorough a baptism in the falsehoods of the “New Testament”, Christians (even those who do not worship Jesus as a god) nevertheless pray to the God of Israel.
It is no different with Islam.
@ yamit82:
German Jews could never forge that they were/are Germans first
yamit82 Said:
What do you regard as merciful?
@ yamit82:
2 major newspaper empires in Israel founded and owned by German Jews: Shocken and Moses families.
@ adamdalgliesh:
Doesn’t matter today as besides the court like in America they dominate academia and law faculties are by definition leftist and even post Zionist in their world view…. In Israel, judges are appointed by committees made up of both politicians and sitting judges so we have a system till now of judges selecting one of their own and it is no different in the IDF in selecting senior officers. Hebrew U was founded by German Jews as was the Technion in Haifa but the most left leaning universities in Israel are probably Haifa and Ben Gurion Universities.
@ Michael S: Yes, God never fails to accomplish his purposes, because he is omnipotent. But we humans cannot always discern what his purpose is. Humility is required of us in this regard.
@ yamit82: “Do not presume the ways of God to scan,/the true measure of mankind is man.”–English poet Alexander Pope, in his “Essay on Man.” God’s ways are not our ways, and his purposes are inscrutable to us because our intellects are so much smaller than his. Can an ant judge a human’s conduct? Much the less can we judge the conduct of God. I believe that his purposes are benevolent and kind, even though it often seems that the reverse is the case. Pope makes a strong case for the benevolence of God despite the seeming cruelty of the natural order in his Essay on Man. But we must make the leap of faith by having faith that He will ultimately see to it that justice will be done and all the wrongs righted in God’s good time–perhaps in the Life to Come.
@ yamit82: That scoundrel ‘historian” Ilan Pappe, late of Haifa University and now of Exeter University in England, is also a yoke, and his parents were among those saved by the Jewish Agency.
@ yamit82:
A very informative and insightful post. Yam. I have long noticed that most of the outspoken “peaceniks,” such as Aharon Barak, Tom Negev, and Uri Avnery, were “yokes,” or Jews of German origin. Are most of the Supreme Court yokes, too? Is that odious Mandelblitt? The outgoing police commissioner? I am asking these questions in good faith to you, Yamit. You seem to know more about these things than most American Jews.
honeybee Said:
Yep
@ honeybee:
True dat
Michael S Said:
yamit82 Said:
While I never question G-d’s judgment, I do question that he is merciful.
@ adamdalgliesh: Properly spelled, “Hear, hear!”
@ msHear, Hear!
Michael S Said:
I don’t question the correctness of liquidating the Jews of Europe. They turned their collective back on the Land of Israel and God’s purpose for the Jewish people….
“Israel’s degradation is the desecration of the Name of the L-rd.” (The Biblical commentator Rashi, Ezekiel 39:7)
Michael S Said:
In ancient times, there was a bandit named Yiphtah. A son of a Jewish father by concubine, he fled the family house and started a highly successful gang. At one point, Amonites issued an ultimatum to his paternal tribe of Gilead: give us back our land which Jews have occupied and let’s live in peace – otherwise, war. Exactly the Israel’s choice now. Yiphtah offered several political justifications for holding onto the land, notably the expired statute of limitations, but recognizing the weakness of his arguments, finally resorted to a foolproof argument: whatever land God gave us will remain ours. Not because we have conquered this land, but because God gave it to us. In the logic terms, Yiphtah argued from the authority, the ultimate authority in this case. He went to war and won it. So it is today: whether the West Bank is liberated or occupied, Jewish rights there are open to legal debate. If God gave Judea to Jews in 1967, the argument is closed.
@ Bear Klein: Bear, perhaps you are right and perhaps I was unfair to Shaked and Bennett in my last post. Certainly Shaked has done her best to limit the power of the Supreme Court and to have better justices appointed. I would like to see more vigorous and comprehensive measures, but perhaps what she has accomplished so far is the very most that can be done at the present time. I hope that their party will be returned with more seats in parliament so she can do more.
@ yamit82:
Even sadder is one respects what one hates
@ yamit82:
How sad when one become what one hates.
@ yamit82:
Yamit, the article you posted is very informative. Before reading this article, I had no idea who the Jekkes even were
Of course, I take issue with one thing you said:
“If God had a purpose in the Holocaust, it could only have been stopping the assimilation, preventing that plague from coming to the Land of Israel, just as a generation of the Exile had to die in the desert. That purpose had failed…”
God doesn’t fail, and cannot fail. He simply doesn’t do things the way we would do them. If humans designed life (as they are indeed trying to do), it wouldn’t resemble the perplexing but beautiful array of creatures we are and live among. Instead, it would resemble an industrial robot, endlessly replicated.
Every people group in the world has a unique heritage. For the Jews, it includes a history of the exile, the Holocaust, the formation of the State of Israel… and its peculiar form of High Court. The purpose in all this, even though we don’t understand the details of it, is that God be glorified and His name exalted, and that those who love and serve Him will receive an eternal reward.
THE NAZI ROOTS OF THE ISRAELI SUPREME COURT
For mainstream Zionists, the year 1933 started a windfall of haavara, an exchange in which Germany allowed its Jews to leave for Palestine with large amounts of money and possessions. Short of foreign exchange, the Germans devised a solution acceptable to the Zionists: the departing German Jews would pay for local goods with deutschmarks; the goods would be then exported to Palestine, where Zionist enterprises would sell them and pay the arriving immigrants. The solution was a win-win one: Germany rid itself of some Jews, and the Jewish Agency received about a 35 percent profit on the transactions. Unbeknownst to German Jews at that time, they also profited handsomely—by having their lives saved. Still, only about a tenth of German Jews moved to Palestine.
They were unlike those who had come before. The religious Jewish immigrants were not hugely productive but highly charged ideologically. Zionist immigrants were not religious but hugely productive. German Jews (yekkes) were neither. Like most of the 1990s Russian aliyah, the yekkes were fleeing domestic troubles rather than ascending to the Land of Israel. The assimilated mob hardly even associated itself with Jews, and not at all with Zionists. Many expected to return to Germany after the Nazis’ rule was over. In the haavara scheme, Zionists played with the devil and lost: German Jewish immigrants amalgamated into a powerful anti-Zionist force. They spoke German, scorned the redneck Palestinian Jewish culture, ignored religion, and snobbishly viewed themselves as Europeans in an Asiatic land. Common Jews answered them in kind, and the alienation grew. Detested and scornful, German Jews were the Peace Now of that time.
Lacking Zionist ideals, the cosmopolitan yekkes became the major voice behind the idea of a binational state, or even Jewish autonomy under British rule. They advocated peaceful solutions and accommodation of Arabs. The German Jews were remarkably pacifist as a matter of law-obedience. They had an aversion to mob violence, and they suffered from guilt. They lived under the tremendous guilt of “the drowned and the saved.” They could not forget that the immigration certificates handed to them were refused to others, who subsequently perished. By helping the Arabs, they mitigated their failure to help European Jews
The British occupiers turned the Jewish Agency (Sohnut) into a Judenrat. The British issued to the Sohnut a limited number of immigration permits, which it distributed at its own discretion. In effect, the British made Jews to perform selektzia, choosing between life and death for their compatriots. The Sohnut acted sometimes cynically, other times sensibly or desperately. It distributed visas to Palestine among its socialist supporters and to young people with agricultural training. But before Germany occupied Poland in 1939, Sohnut passed half its visas to German Jews who, at 500,000, were just 17 percent of the total number of Jews in Poland. Naturally, the Jewish Agency thought the German Jews were in more immediate danger than the Polish ones. The yekkes, accordingly, lived with the knowledge that they had received their visas as a matter of Sohnut’s misjudgment, even though they weren’t qualified by age and profession.
Many German Jews who came to Palestine did not have a trade or means to secure productive employment. Nor did they want one, as they viewed redneck Jews with disdain. Later, the Israeli “cultural elite” became infected with this attitude.
When the Jewish state had been formed, the yekkes were the only educated class. Automatically, they became academics, media professionals, and judges. They imprinted German values on their students. Those were the extremely nihilist values of the most assimilated Jewish community of the time. If God had a purpose in the Holocaust, it could only have been stopping the assimilation, preventing that plague from coming to the Land of Israel, just as a generation of the Exile had to die in the desert. That purpose had failed, as yekkes exerted disproportionate, overwhelming influence over the Israeli educated class.
Politically, the Germanized court system received a major boost when Herut-Likud first came to power thirty years ago. Socialists recognized that the changing Israeli demographics would spell an end to their dominance: Sephardic Jews had bitter personal experience with Arabs and would vote for right-wing parties. Here came the Supreme Court option: if the court elects its own members, it becomes completely insulated from the changes in public opinion—and incidentally, from Zionism too. Common Israelis may vote for whomever they like, but in the end the Supreme Court would control legislation—striking down some laws, ammending others still in the Knesset by informing MKs of the court’s opinion—and dictate new laws in the court’s decisions. The Supreme Court has even assumed executive power by ruling on the army’s actions, the route of the separation barrier, and myriad other issues, which amounted to its managing the country.
Bear Klein…so much for your evpolutionary ways, Caroline has explained things very well. This is a counter revolutionary force inside of Israel. Is it too far to go to say they are antisemites. They attack the wife of the PM Mrs Netanyahu because she employed a chef or chefs to help with menus in her home for visiting important people from abroad. They are very similar now to Pelossi agaisnt Trump.
@ ms:
I agree with your statement. The change to correct this first needs to be a new Basic Law defining the Separation of Powers!
The lack of a constitution allowed Jurists to take power that they were not granted by law because of the vacuum of such law.
So making the system balanced must addressed. Shaked has started making incremental not revolutionary changes in this direction.
@ Bear Klein:
JURISTOCRACY IN ISRAEL, WHEN LEGALITY LOSES LEGITIMACY
Both the rule of law and democratic governance in Israel are being jeopardized by the very body purported to be its most committed guardian: the judiciary.
@ adamdalgliesh:
Disagree with you Shaked has started to change the system from within in her initiatives as Justice Minister. She has changed the way judges are picked and getting conservative judges appointed. She has changed the way land disputes get adjudicated in Judea/Samaria. Bennett has strongly supported her in these endeavors.
In other words she has been effective from within the system in a small party who is part of the coalition.
Israel’s best chance for constructive change is to eventually have Shaked/Bennett leading the country.
Caroline Glick is the only person who has identified the true source of Israel’s woes–the shadowy clique of lawyers, judges, and “retired judges”, many of whom do not even hold any official government office, who have seized control of the Israeli government in a creeping, largely secret coup without firing a shot, in defiance of Israel’s law and Basic Laws (its de facto constitution) and who rule Israel without the consent of its citizens, or even the knowledge of most of them.
Unfortunately, Caroline exaggerates the commitment of her political allies, Bennet and Shaked, to fight this outrage. Shaked, it is true, has done a little to try to oppose this illegal seizure of power. But her actions have been far too tentative, and her rhetoric about the usurpers far too mild and conciliatory, to alert the public as to the gravity of the situation. Bennett, for his part, has neither said nor done much of anything about it.
This is HUGE.