Netanyahu is turning Israel into an authoritarian state

It’s time for the U.S. to recon­sid­er its ties to Israel.

For over sev­en decades, the US has been the con­stant and most sup­port­ive of Israel’s allies, pro­vid­ing it with for­eign aid, mil­i­tary aid, mil­i­tary intel­li­gence, etc.

And all dur­ing that peri­od Israel was also spy­ing on its biggest bene­fac­tor.  Remember the Jonathan Pollard case in the late 1980s?  For all we know, they may still main­tain a spy net­work here, even if it’s with the knowl­edge of the CIA.

Ever since Israel became a nation in 1948 it has been sub­ju­gat­ing the Palestinian pop­u­la­tion, tak­ing more and more of their ter­ri­to­ry for expand­ing Israeli set­tle­ments in which Palestinians are exclud­ed.  Even many Israeli cit­i­zens are appalled at the treat­ment of Palestinians and state their out­rage publicly.

Recently, the atmos­phere in Israel has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly, with the elec­tion – once again – of Benjamin Netanyahu as the leader of the gov­ern­ment, despite his cur­rent legal prob­lems after being indict­ed for breach of trust, accept­ing bribes, and fraud.  His far-right polit­i­cal posi­tions and the bare-major­i­ty far-right Knesset are work­ing dili­gent­ly to change the laws in Israel to weak­en its court sys­tem, which is the only check at present for run­away government.

The Israeli gov­ern­ment was large­ly estab­lished fol­low­ing the pre­cepts of both the American and English sys­tems, but now seems to be going the way of oth­er author­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments, which vest ulti­mate pow­er in an individual.

All this is strange con­sid­er­ing that the path on which Israel seems to be embark­ing smacks so much of what hap­pened in Germany in the 1930s, when Hitler was giv­en what was con­sid­ered a minor role in gov­ern­ment and then pro­ceed­ed to use pro­ce­dur­al process­es to wrest con­trol for himself.

Surely Israeli cit­i­zens are thor­ough­ly famil­iar with the hor­rors and excess­es of the Holocaust.  One must won­der if they are equal­ly edu­cat­ed about the events that led to that dis­gust­ing piece of world his­to­ry when pow­er in the German gov­ern­ment passed from the peo­ple to an indi­vid­ual and his appoint­ed and select­ed sup­port­ing gov­ern­ment.  Is it pos­si­ble that the major­i­ty of peo­ple in Israel don’t see the sim­i­lar­i­ties between what is hap­pen­ing there now and what hap­pened nine­ty years ago and led to the destruc­tion of six mil­lion of their ances­tors and predecessors?

The encour­ag­ing thing hap­pen­ing now in Israel as a result of the bare-faced makeover of their con­sti­tu­tion is the upris­ing of hun­dreds of thou­sands of Israelis against Netanyahu, and the threat of thou­sands of mil­i­tary mem­bers refus­ing to serve if these reforms are approved.

Netanyahu is expect­ed to vis­it this coun­try soon, at the invi­ta­tion of President Biden.  Our President should revoke that invi­ta­tion and let the world know that the United States will not sup­port the extreme mea­sures now tak­ing place in Israel.  Netanyahu must become a pari­ah amongst all the world’s nations which sup­port democ­ra­cy and abjure authoritarianism. 

It’s time for any mutu­al defense con­sid­er­a­tions which exist between our two coun­tries to be sub­ject to the require­ments of ensur­ing democ­ra­cy, some­thing every­one assumed would con­tin­ue to exist in Israel, but is slip­ping aside.