Israel: A Jewish State

"Our residents in southern Israel have endured these missiles for more than fourteen years. Many children and teens have known only life in a war zone...."
"How would you want your own government to deal with a similar onslaught in your neighbourhood? What do you want us to do? Lie down and die?"
"They say I am very calculated and not very sensitive. There are many things that bother them [her critics] and I don't see or feel it...."
"If you get into emotions, then it disturbs your work."
Ayelet Shaked, Jewish Home Party, Israeli Justice Minister

Ilia Yefimovich / Getty Images   Ayelet Shaked, Israel's new justice minister

 

The multifarious political parties expressing all the different shades of left, right, religious, secular, and colours in between have finally added to the capability of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to put together yet another fractious government. It has taken time, as is usual for Israel's proportional representative electoral results for agreement between some of the parties to support the slender majority that Likud under Mr. Netanyahu achieved in the last election.

It seems he has had to take a deep breath and invite a woman whom he would prefer not to have encumber his administration, to high office to achieve that tightrope balance leading to a cabinet with which to execute his electoral authority.  He has elevated to the Justice Ministry, a totally focused, committed woman who sees the need to enshrine into law the obvious, that Israel is a Jewish state. That she also opposes a two-state solution with Palestinians is hardly surprising.

No one wants neighbours whose focus is on your elimination as a neighbour. The fledgling state-to- be has aspirations to destroy the existing state with which it has always been on a war footing while claiming otherwise to the international community. While inciting its people to 'resist', as code for attack, the neighbour which must deploy military troops to ensure that maniacal Palestinians loathing the Israeli presence do not continue their terroristic campaign.

This 39 year-old secular Israeli woman stands on the principle that threats against the existence of Jews and Israel have gone on too long, have been ignored by the international community which itself engages in hypocritical entitlements to claim pride in active anti-Semitism, and that to her, it is far more vitally important for Israel to be protected from Hamas and Fatah than that Israel get 'credit' globally for assenting to a Palestinian state which will manoeuvre itself into a better attack position.

Israelis themselves, in the balance, have experienced far too many lethal attacks, have tired of being the universal scapegoat of all that has gone wrong in the world, and have good reason to be suspicious of any recommendations coming out of the United Nations whose general body as well as its executive body (Security Council) have imposed conditions upon Israel not demanded to be met by any other country in the world.

"The Shaked appointment is a reflection of the public mood in Israel, whether we like it or we don't. She is very anti-Palestinian. She has violent discourse and all that, but in that, she reflects the public mood", commented Yakov Rabkin, a historian at the Universite de Montreal. It is 'violent', evidently to express distrust of Palestinians who have been taught from childhood to adulthood to hate Jews and to be viciously and authentically violent toward them.

Palestinians through the Palestinian Authority have never recognized Israel as a Jewish state, but the world expects Israel to recognize a Palestinian state in which the President of the PA states categorically that no Jews will be permitted to reside within its territory. Imagine the horror expressed by a condemning world if Israel ever decided to shed itself of the presence of Palestinians granted Israeli citizenship. Meanwhile, Christians and other Middle East minorities have safe haven in Israel, and nowhere else in the geography.

But she does have her defenders, some coming from surprising quarters as when Tzipi Livni, co-leader of the Zionist Union alliance stated: "I profoundly disagree with the views of Ayelet Shaked, members of Jewish Home and the new government in general. But I strongly condemn the chauvinistic attitude of these images [Ayelet Shaked portrayed with Nazi insignia], especially those with the SS uniform."

One would most certainly imagine so.