Sunday, August 19, 2018

Troubles In Israel?

My go to guy on Israel is Yaacov Lozowick, currently the State Archivist for Israel, and the former archivist at Yad Vashem.  He's also written of his political change from a Peace Now activist in the 1990s to supporting (reluctantly) Ariel Sharon in 2005, a change prompted by the Second Intifada, launched by Yassir Arafat, after he rejected creation of a Palestinian State in 2000.

Lozowick used to be a frequent and fascinating blogger, but since taking on the state archivist role he posts very infrequently.  However, he also has an active Tweeter account, though he usually stays away from commenting on current internal Israeli politics, so when I saw this a couple of day ago I paid attention:




The link is to an article by David Horovitz in the Times of Israel the theme of which is:

"Israeli democracy isn’t broken . . . But Israeli democracy is being battered. There are attempts to intimidate the judiciary. The media is both demonized and compromised. Financial corruption goes untreated and seeps into politics."

I don't know enough about Israeli politics to comment but when Lozowick takes this seriously, I do the same.  Some further excerpts:

There’s a purportedly reasonable explanation for everything.  [Horovitz then goes on to list several incidents, including:]

The arithmetic was different for the nation-state law. If a phrase noting Israel’s commitment to full equality for all its citizens had not been excised from the text, support in the Knesset for the legislation, with its overdue definition of Israel as the “national home of the Jewish people,” would have been overwhelming. But the argument was made that provisions for equality are already enshrined in existing legislation, albeit without the actual word “equality,” and notwithstanding the fact that this is the law that defines the very nature of Israel.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Taken one at a time, ostensibly acceptable rationalizations can be found for all the crises and controversies I’ve listed. Taken together, the picture is bleak.
Troubling.



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