IT CAN'T HAPPEN THERE...:

Wrapping up its business before a long summer recess, the right-wing, religious coalition that rules Israel's Parliament moved aggressively this week to push through its polarizing agenda, piling up points at the expense of its already weakened foes.

On Monday, it empowered the education minister to bar some groups that criticize the Israeli occupation of the West Bank from speaking in public schools. On Tuesday, it accelerated what critics call the creeping annexation of the West Bank by cutting off Palestinians' access to the Supreme Court in land disputes. On Wednesday, it blocked single men and gay couples from having children through surrogacy.

The capstone, though, came Thursday, with passage of a law granting the Jewish people an exclusive right to national self-determination. [...]

On Monday, the chairman of Brandeis University, Meyer G. Koplow, was interrogated by airport security on his way back to New York because, after attending a bridge-building session organized by the educational organization Encounter on the West Bank, he had thrown a brochure articulating the Palestinian point of view into his checked luggage.

He later received an apology from the government.

But in an online post, Michael J. Koplow, Mr. Koplow's son and an executive at the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal think tank, publicized his father's run-in over what he said was "the most rudimentary evidence of basic engagement with the Palestinians," calling the interrogation "yet another example in a seemingly never-ending string of the massive problem that Israel is having with American Jews.

"Israeli Jewish values and American Jewish values increasingly diverge," Mr. Koplow wrote in the post, "and for many American Jews, the values of openness, empathy, and non-discrimination are ones that are harder and harder to find in Israel."

Then, on Thursday, a Conservative rabbi in Haifa was awakened at his home and arrested by the police. He was charged with officiating at a wedding between a Jewish man and woman.

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