A RACE, NOT A RELIGION?:

As the legend goes, in the 16th century Prague's Jewish ghetto was under assault. Hoping to protect his people from slaughter, a rabbi conjured a new entity. Using his hands, he slowly shaped the figure of a man from clay. The rabbi then blew into the nostrils of his creation and whispered the name of God into its ear. Thus animated, the intended savior became a monster, embarking on a furious rampage that killed everyone in sight. This creature is known in Jewish folklore as the golem.

 

To borrow this metaphor of unintended dark outcomes, Israel can now be described as under assault from a new golem, created by radical religious and ultranationalist zealots to battle imagined enemies. Having attained unfettered power, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition of four political parties (Likud, the Religious Zionist Alliance, United Torah Judaism and Shas) purports to rescue Israel from globalist elites, mainstream secular Jews and those they regard as "violent Arabs."

The parties seek their country's "salvation" by stripping Israel's judiciary of its power, destroying the checks and balances needed to sustain liberal democracy, and allowing the reimposition of some religious laws, from bans on leavened bread in hospitals during Passover to discrimination against women. They also seem poised to rub out the so-called "Green Line" marking the 1967 boundary between Israel and the West Bank, undertaking a de jure territorial expansion by annexing portions of occupied Palestinian land.

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