[Salon] Israel: Whose Constitution, Whose Democracy? | Joshua Leifer | The New York Review of Books

(Pardon the lack of more careful editing as I’m not being paid, but if that’s your focus, you won’t “get this” anyway, but will continue with the same old loyalties, and denial of any critical thought, holding perhaps the judgment of those who “discredit” thought with a dismissive “he’s a liberal,” like heard from on the conservative Peter Viereck, Jr. Meaning he probably didn’t oppose the Civil Right and Voting Rights Acts sufficiently, as virtually all other Conservatives did in siding with the Ku Klux Klan, and who offered a “constitutional justification” to them, as these Conservative authors did as well, even while ostensibly disclaiming the Klan, like Buckley claimed to do. (Scroll down to get text out from under the banner.)

Attachment: The Bill of Rights & American Freedom.pdf
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Attachment: THE GOVERNMENT OF''POLAND.docx
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Attachment: 4. Rights and the Virginia Declaration.pdf
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Attachment: 7. The Tradition and the Bill of Rights.pdf
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Coincidentally, this just came in, and it goes to the varied topics, but all joined by intersectionality to the overriding theme I address, which  is that the U.S. “Conservative Movement” (to include those "infected” in the Democratic Party) in the ideas of Kendall, Burnham, and Buckley principally, represented not only a “hard-right movement” to turn U.S. foreign policy in the direction of “Roll-back,” in opposition to “”Containment,” but also an ongoing, nearly complete, ideological “Constitutional coup d’état” (Kendall, to be joined later by George Carey, in the lead, as the attached files clearly and indisputably show, to suppress any dissent to the hard-right supported wars already  underway), which one would think would be of concern to the Committee for the Republic as something to oppose, and not something to be promoted, or even tacitly accepted, as these ideas were intended as an ideological assault in the form of subversion of the U.S. Constitution. But don’t believe me, or someone else you may hear from, but read the  ****** articles yourself, critically, to see the essence of what is being called for. 

Given that


BLUF: "At the Saturday night rallies, powerful former generals and politicians warned the crowds that the dismantling of the judiciary could expose Israeli soldiers to prosecution at the International Criminal Court for human rights abuses by making Israel appear unable to adjudicate such cases satisfactorily.” (TP-they are unable and under Trump, even the most minimal “naming and shaming” by the US ended.)
and:
"The protesters, it can seem, want to protect civil liberties for Jews—freedom of _expression_, LGBT rights, and gender equality—while preserving the existing infrastructure of Jewish supremacy and maintaining Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of Gaza. They appear oblivious to the fact that a state that legally privileges one ethno-religious group over all others can never be a genuine democracy.(TP-that’s the point, to be like what Willmoore Kendall and George Carey promoted, a “Majoritarian Democracy,” which excludes any minority opinion, even by only one vote, per Kendall).
and:
"During Barak’s tenure, for instance, the court provoked objections from the right when it ruled that Israel’s security services could not use physical torture—a decision that was substantively reversed in two cases in 2017 and 2018—or when it required that the Israeli military governor in the occupied territories change the location of the West Bank separation barrier to protect Palestinian private property rights. For Palestinian and human rights advocates, such interventions by the court have themselves been inadequate, because they left the infrastructure of the occupation intact and preserved laws that privileged Jews over non-Jews. In the right-wing imagination, however, the court as empowered by Barak now appeared as a threat both to Israel’s security and to its Jewish character.

"Netanyahu’s coalition aims to reverse Barak’s project of empowering the court and elevating human rights to a constitutional value. (Not coincidentally, the attack on the court also dovetails with Netanyahu’s ongoing efforts to evade conviction in his own corruption trial.) The right insists that Barak’s actions were their own judicial “coup”—a usurpation of the sovereign will of the people as expressed in legislation passed by the Knesset—and rejects the notion that the values of human dignity and democracy should ever win out over Jewish supremacy and state security. In fact, for much of the Israeli right, it has become anathema to suggest that the power and position of the Jewish majority have any limits at all. As the notoriously pugilistic Likud Knesset member and lawyer Tali Gottlieb proclaimed during a March 27 rally in support of the coalition, “The people are the sovereign, and the sovereign decides!”

Right out of Carl Schmitt’s writings, and Willmorre Kendall’s echoing of Schmitt to the “Conservative Movement,” down to the present!


https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/04/13/whose-constitution-whose-democracy-joshua-leifer/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR 04-13-23 Leifer Kohari Wills Benfey Mimms&utm_content=NYR 04-13-23 Leifer Kohari Wills Benfey Mimms+CID_4050fd2d12f38ab6434d6f1893f5d47c&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Joshua LeiferWhose Constitution Whose Democracy

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Israel: Whose Constitution, Whose Democracy?

Joshua Leifer
Many opponents of Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul have called for Israel to finally draft a constitution, but any serious attempt will mean choosing between a democratic state and one that privileges Jewish citizens above all others.

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