Israel is truly admirable. Not just for its military might, not just for the start-ups and their technological achievements that various late liberals lust after; anyway, most of the technologies in the agri-food sector, the ones that turned the desert into a garden of Eden, were discovered in the era of socialist kibbutzim (communal farms).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most impressive thing of all is that 75 years ago, that is, from the moment of its establishment, in 1948, there has been full democracy in Israel. To be sure, the establishment of Israel was not bloodless. There were many conflicts between the native Arabs and the Jewish settlers throughout the 20th century, a war that still continues in many guises: terrorism, Intifada, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As for the dangers, Israel had not only from the North, but from the East and from the South. Despite all this, and with governments of collaboration – the simple proportional is a fixed electoral system – he conducted three wars against a multitude of allied states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All these are achievements of the first waves of Jews from Western Europe. People hunted \u2013 even before the greatest crime of the Nazis \u2013 most progressive, many of them educated, who were at the vanguard of the great European movements in art, science, philosophy and letters. This is not due to some “demonic” characteristic of the Jews, nor is it part of their DNA. It’s just that when someone is persecuted for no reason they are forced to think more about human nature, the relations between citizens and authorities, civil rights, etc. So did many, from Baruch Spinoza to Albert Einstein, from Sigmund Freud to Karl Popper, and hundreds of others who flourished in letters, sciences, and arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What changed in Israel, from 1990 onwards, was the mass immigration of Jews from the former USSR. They did not carry the rich intellectual heritage of the Jews of the West, they had only one political model: the tsar and the Pateroulides. They too were victims of discrimination, they suffered persecution, but they did not experience the great evil to the extent and duration, like the Jews of the West. Nevertheless, they seem more afraid and are less tolerant than the latter. It is experiences and exposure to various spiritual influences that shape people’s character, not their origins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have often said that in politics one thing leads to another and after some disaster we ask ourselves “but, how could this have happened?”. Israel’s demographic change brought political change. The Far Right strengthened \u2013 understandable, because the newcomers had experienced the communist yoke, but not justified. Thus, the Netanyahu government decided to abolish the quasi (unwritten) constitution of the country, the one that – 75 years ago – made Israel great and powerful. And with that, of course, “the government will now be able to fire the politically troublesome Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, in charge of the judicial investigation into Prime Minister Netanyahu and his bribery by media moguls.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Israel is truly admirable. Not just for its military might, not just for the start-ups and their technological achievements that various late liberals lust…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[990,991],"tags":[1087,153,1040],"class_list":["post-14771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-feuilleton","tag-benjamin-netanyahou","tag-israel","tag-middle-east"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14771"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14773,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14771\/revisions\/14773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}