[NOTE: Gwynne Dyer make an important, and unnerving point in the column below: the changes in Israel’s judicial structure & policy voted in the Israeli Knesset last week were supported by a rightwing coalition that does numerically represent the current majority of the Israeli voting public.
Public opinion in Israel was once much more supportive of the previous legal structure. But a combination of events and political struggle swung many voters to the right. This evolution was vividly described by a distinguished American-born Israeli journalist, Larry Derfner, in his excellent and depressing 2017 book, No Country for a Jewish Liberal. This passage from my review sums up his outlook:
In Israel, Derfner grimly laments,
“We are in a post-political era in this country. The central, overriding political fact of national life, the occupation, is no longer a subject for discussion. As far as the public and the major parties are concerned, it’s settled (in more ways than one).”
OPINION: The two-day Israeli military incursion into the Palestinian city of Jenin in the northern West Bank (12 Palestinians killed, one Israeli dead) seems at first glance like just another example of ‘mowing the lawn’. That’s what the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) call these periodic futile raids they make to kill some Palestinian fighters.
Gwynne Dyer is a UK-based Canadian journalist and historian who writes about international affairs.
