by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator

This is the version that appeared in The American Spectator. A later version, with more Jewish and Israeli examples that may be of interest to many readers, appeared in the Israel National News.

Last November, the voters of Israel democratically elected — by a significant majority — a moderately conservative, center-right government that likewise is sympathetic to traditional family values. Just as the Left in America blazes forth with its worst venom against Blacks like Justice Clarence Thomas who are conservative, so it explodes with extra hate against Jews who refuse to toe its leftist line. The American Left believes it owns Blacks and Jews. Other people are “up for grabs,” but Blacks and Jews will not be permitted to leave the plantation. And G-d forbid that Israel be overtly conservative and pro-religion, educating American Jewry that “progressive” leftism is their foe.

In reality, authentic Judaism is not and never has been “progressive” or compatible with leftist ideology. Open a Bible for yourself and peruse the Torah volumes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Yes, the Torah and Judaism are compassionate to the poor, the widow, the orphan, the peaceful stranger, and the downtrodden. Such values are not the provenance of the Left. Rather, the Left distorts those values by teaching, contrary to the Bible, that responsibility for caring for the needy falls on the government, not the individual. In that way, the individual is excused from acting righteously and instead can advocate picking the pockets of others, taxing others to fund over-staffed, over-salaried, politically appointed mega bureaucracies that create programs marked primarily by failure to reach truly deserving recipients and achieve declared purposes. Instead, public money gets frittered. Departments expand and bloat. Professionals game the system. And nothing structurally changes half a century later to alleviate deserving need where it actually exists.

Judaism is conservative and family oriented. The biblical values of compassion and caring — not virtue signaling — completely define the conservative worldview. Conservatives are exceptionally charitable, aiming to provide a safety net for those truly needing it. The government’s proper role is in the situations of catastrophic need for which government truly exists: to provide security from invasion and attack from abroad; to ensure law enforcement, security, and domestic tranquility; and to ensure the health and safety of the public guided by scientifically validated medicine. Conservatives expect the government to assist at times of hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, and similar “Acts of God” (a legal term of art for such events). To oversee the development and production of safe medicines and diagnostic devices. But not to become our parents. For that last purpose, we have other people; they are called “our parents.”

Conservatives do not need to be lectured on compassion or democracy or freedom. We properly believe that people first should engage in self-reliance and utilize the gifts G-d has given them to achieve their most. Government should not finance those perfectly capable of helping themselves. History and one’s own eyes testify that true long-term success comes from one’s own endeavors. Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” the Democrats’ “affirmative action” programs, and similar government interventions and handouts have left America, half a century later, with the same groups bellowing the same complaints and even intensifying demands. After half a century of “affirmative action,” instead of enjoying a more equalized playing field, we now hear demands for billions in “reparations.” Well, what was the “Great Society” and welfare and food stamps? How is it that, after government pay-out programs and set-asides for two generations, only 7 of 762 new admissions to New York City’s Stuyvesant High School were achieved by Black applicants? So little improved because government is the problem, not the solution. Just get government and teachers’ unions out of the way, and empower deprived kids with access, through school vouchers, to the kinds of childhood education that others get. Only then will they attain academically what half a century of “affirmative action” has not won for them.

The same leftist strangulation here in America defines the Israeli Left. Throughout the country’s first 30 years, it was ruled by a socialist extreme-leftist order, left-wing media heroes like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin. Those days ended in 1977. Israel changed with the election of center-right, moderately conservative prime ministers like Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Its economy has exploded into a world-leading center of cutting-edge technology and more. And Jews throughout the world correspondingly have moved to the right. In England, the Conservative Party has received 69 percent of the Jewish vote. In Russia and Ukraine, Jews are the most anti-communist of all, and tens of thousands even have left Mother Russia to move Israel even more rightward.

As Israel has moved to the right, the democratic will of its voters repeatedly has been stymied by a last vestige of the socialist order: a Supreme Court that operates as a government unto itself. Although it is called the “Supreme Court,” it is nothing like America’s, although its extreme-leftist practices do indeed offer a warning as to what would befall America if the Democrats ever succeed in their plan to expand the court to 15 justices, adding six more like Sotomayor and the One Who Cannot Define What a Woman Is. Prominent left-wing Harvard Law School legal scholar professor Laurence Tribe famously warned Obama: “Bluntly put, [Sotomayor]’s not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is…. Her reputation for being something of a bully could well make her liberal impulses backfire and simply add to the fire power of the Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas wing of the court.”

The Israeli Supreme Court is an unrestrained separate government. Whereas American courts require a litigant to demonstrate he or she has “standing” to bring a case, Israel lets anyone bring a Supreme Court case, no matter how unrelated he is to the matter. In America, the courts are limited by the requirement that a case have “justiciability.” In other words, they may sit only on matters pertaining to law, not to outside things like, say, military strategy. An American Supreme Court can rule on the legal ramifications of the “War Powers Act” but cannot rule on whether a president, amid war, may drop a bomb or conduct a “surge.” By contrast, the Israeli Supreme Court has no reins to stop it. It even has issued orders as to who may sit for a rabbinical exam.

How do such judges take control? By selecting their colleagues. Imagine how the American Left would like it if future Supreme Court justices would be selected by a panel consisting of Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch and two lawyers who regularly appear before them. Insane? Sure, conservatives would like that now, but it never would have happened because Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch never would have made it to the court, since the panel would have comprised the left-aligned justices of the 1960s. They would have replicated themselves, and so would have their successors. America prevents self-perpetuation by having the president, elected by the public, name the judges, and then the Senate, elected by the public, confirming. Not in Israel. There, the left-wing justices, going back to the years of the socialist founding, sit on the panel and replicate themselves. They hire each others’ kids to be their law clerks. The chief justice even has sat in judgment when her husband was employed by one of the litigants. And the panel includes lawyers who can practice before the judges they help select or reject when first nominated and again when up for renewal. How do you imagine judges treat those attorneys’ clients on cases before their Supreme Court?

So the newly elected Israeli government ran on a pledge to reform the court and transform it from a separate government. As a first tiny step, it just struck down one little thing: the “reasonableness standard.” Under that rule, the Supreme Court unilaterally grabbed power years ago to strike down anything it regards as “unreasonable.” That means it does not have to find any basis in law, any legal precedent — just the justices’ feelings. American attorneys know they must submit legal briefs citing established precedential law. That is why computer programs like “Westlaw” and “Lexis” exist, to help attorneys find case law and statutes they can cite. By contrast, in Israel an attorney can argue, “Your Honors, I know previous judicial opinions would allow that, but — c’mon, Your Honors, that’s just not reasonable.” And with that, the justices can — and do — rule.

So the government of Israel, elected with a clear 64–56 majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats, just passed a law prohibiting the Supreme Court from handing down decisions anymore based solely on whether the justices feel something is “reasonable.” It seems strange that something so obvious even had to be enacted. And how have Israeli leftists reacted, now that left-wing justices have to adhere to actual legal precedent and statutory authority? They have responded by rioting in the streets, blocking traffic on major highways, disrupting the country’s one significant airport, throwing bottles at police, setting fires, and threatening civil war. The mainstream leftist media are egging them on, reporting times and locations to appear for demonstrations. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, one of Israel’s two most-incompetent-ever leaders and now openly in the extreme-leftist Meretz party, is calling for insurrection. He has not had this much fun since he was buddy-buddy with Jeffrey Epstein, meeting with him some 30 times, flying on his infamous plane, a “fixture at his Manhattan apartment.” And he is joined by Ehud Olmert, the single-most-incompetent prime minister in Israel’s history, who later served prison time for financial fraud and who now is begging countries to cut off support for Israel.

What does Joe Biden have to do with all this? In a sane world, nothing. Israel’s leaders do not lecture America on how its courts should work. That is America’s business, and Israel stays out of it, as do all other countries. But Biden, as if he has nothing else to do, has been lecturing Israel’s government not to reform its extreme-leftist, unrestrained court. He is so involved that his comments on the saga appear daily in Israel’s newspapers. It is crazy. And he now has begun using Thomas Friedman of the New York Times as his additional mouthpiece to publish op-eds repeating his messaging.

It is crazy. The situation in Israel is crazy. Biden is crazy.

But things now are straightening out. The guideline to follow: When ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all report that Israel is ending democracy, it predictably means the opposite — voters’ democratic will finally is being carried out. After 30 years of hardline socialism and the following 45 years during which, despite voters choosing center-right, moderately conservative candidates, they still have been getting left-wing results. The society finally is ending the vestiges of its anti-religious leftist socialist swamp.

Originally published in The American Spectator