Israel, on the Road to a Theocracy

We are facing a major assault on Israel’s democratic-secular identity, with an unholy alliance between nationalism and religion at its core.

A longtime friend told me this week about a call he made to the principal of his young son’s elementary school. He asked how it was possible that at an institution that defines itself as science- and technology-oriented, the boy was coming home laden with homework on Torah rather than math.

Of course, this matter can’t end with the principal or in second grade. The comprehensive Haaretz investigation on changes being made by Education Minister Naftali Bennett to the educational system and curriculum are surreptitiously passing us by. And then there’s the new coalition deal between Bennett’s party, Habayit Hayehudi, and the two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism.

The Education Ministry will be transferring one billion shekels (about $257 million) to ultra-Orthodox educational institutions, in return for an allocation of hundreds of millions to the Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization and local authorities in West Bank settlements.

We are facing a major assault on Israel’s democratic-secular identity. The attack on secularism is by necessity an attack on democracy. The ultimate source of authority is no longer the state and its institutions. The sources of inspiration are not liberal humanism, human rights, the enlightenment movement and science. They are supplanted by a higher power, holy men, the metaphysics of an Eternal Israel, holy scriptures, rituals and prayer. As part of road safety lessons, children of Israel are learning the Traveler’s Prayer.

This assault has a clear political context, of course. At its core is an alliance between nationalism and religion. Its goal is to ensure a vision of a Greater Land of Israel and the perpetuation of ignorance – on the road to a theocracy.

Everything is connected, including the string of appointments to top positions. The sole nominee for attorney general, Avichai Mendelblit, was not initially religious but became observant. The incoming chief of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, was a student of Rabbi Haim Druckman’s at the Or Etzion yeshiva. Yoram Cohen, the head of the Shin Bet security service, is religious and a graduate of a yeshiva educational institution. His former deputy, Roni Alsheich – the new Israel Police chief – was a student at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem.

They might all be worthy appointments, and heaven forbid that we disqualify anyone from public office due to private beliefs. But the problem in Israel is that religion is not separate from government, and over the years it has also become less and less separate from right-wing West Bank settler politics.

Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, a settler who wears a skullcap, determined that counterterrorism laws should not apply to Jewish terrorists in the territories, since there is no need to deter that particular group. That’s no longer a legal-security concept, but rather a theory of the chosen people.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has surrounded himself with officeholders from religious Zionism, is a man who does not believe in God. Netanyahu is motivated solely by utilitarian considerations. In the assault on secularism, he is joined by innocents, those professing innocence and useful idiots. Some have cynical interests, while others have good intentions.

Beginning with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid – who dons a prayer shawl and has his wife conduct the ritual involving setting aside a portion of the Shabbat challah – it includes an endless number of public projects and campaigns involving dialogue and returning to our sources and bringing us together. But the effort to bring us closer is only ever in one direction.

Nearly 20 years have passed since Sefi Rachlevsky revealed the concept of “the Messiah’s donkey” to the broader secular public. The subject has recently been revived in the Makor Rishon newspaper by Rabbi Moshe Ratt, from the Karnei Shomron settlement: “The role of secularism was necessary at the stage in which religious Jewry could not run the country and the army. Today, it can be said that secularism has concluded its historical role,” he wrote. It turns out that a donkey, even when it’s older, is still a donkey.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.693098

Of course didge will dispute this and say he knows more than people actually living there, but hey ho lol

So the bases for this claim is more religious homework.
Yeah I did piss myself laughing.
Show me any proposed laws, that is going to fundementally change Israel from secular to a theocracy?
That means the state will be run by religious laws, not secular

Gracious, just ignore everything else then, like you normally do lol.

So when sassy is called out to prove her stance here, she cannot produce the proposed law changes which would have to change all laws to those found within the Torah

Israel Turning Into Theocracy

It is becoming increasingly obvious that a break between Israel and Diaspora Jewry, particularly its American variety, is fast approaching. The reason for this is that Israel is slowly but inexorably turning into a conservative theocracy while the Diaspora is largely dedicated to liberal democracy.

The strategy of the "pro-Israel" camp among American Jewish organizations and neoconservative pundits has been, so far, one of avoidance of unpleasant facts coupled with unpleasant insinuations about the loyalties of those who insist on taking them seriously. But denial can work in only the short term, and only with an American Jewish population that identifies closely with Israel and relates all threats back to the Holocaust. These conditions, like the generation that sustained them, are not long for this world. Once this aging constituency is gone, the truth will prove unavoidable and it will be too late to deny it any longer.

Israel is no democracy, and it never has been with regard to the 4 million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. It has always been a decidedly imperfect democracy concerning its own Arab citizens.

Lately, however, it has become less and less democratic with regard to the rights of its Jewish population. For reasons of demography, the Israeli body politic is increasingly dominated by Haredi Jews on the one hand, and secular nationalists, many of whose families emigrated from Russia, on the other. Neither group demonstrates any intrinsic interest in liberal political niceties like free speech, minority political rights or civil liberties.

The trend was already evident when the government passed a bill that makes any initiator of a boycott, whether consumer, academic or cultural, liable to be sued in civil court for damages by anyone who feels impacted by the boycott. A boycott is a fundamental right of free speech.

Personally, I make it a point to boycott any Jewish philanthropy that contributes to the continued occupation of the West Bank. I do this for what I understand to be Israel's well-being more than for that of the Palestinians, but if I were to say so aloud in Israel, I could be sued.

American organizations objected to the bill, but Israeli politicians, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, did not care. Now we see it was just a precursor to a whole host of anti-democratic legislation and regulation.
Among the bills that either have already become law or may be about to are:

A law, proposed by Likud party Knesset member Ofir Akunisthat would prevent political nongovernmental organizations from accepting more than NIS 20,000 from foreign governments or international organizations.

A law, authored by Yisrael Beiteinu Knesset member Faina Kirshenbaum, that will demand that all organizations not funded by the Israeli government pay a 45% tax on all donations from foreign states.
A law that regards film production and asks that cast and crew swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state.

A law that increases the fine for slander, NIS 50,000, to NIS 300,000.
Some of these proposed laws may not come to pass, but the intent of all of them is the same, and this is, sadly, the definite direction of Israeli politics. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman attacked those groups that seek to uphold civil liberties in Israel, for Jews as well as for Arabs, as "collaborators in terror." Netanyahu has recently announced that not only will Israel begin expanding Jewish settlements in Jerusalem, but it will also confiscate Palestinian land for the purpose of retroactively legalizing illegal settlements, in direct contravention of the promises of both of Netanyahu's previous predecessors, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. The thrust of these actions is consistent with the political forces driving them — for instance, the dozens of municipal rabbis who not long ago issued an edict against renting or selling real estate to non-Jews (meaning Arabs), and the group of rabbis' wives who wrote a collective letter suggesting that Jewish women avoid all contact with Arab men.

It's true that Israel is home to many liberal Jews who would prefer to live in a secular democracy governed by the civil laws based on the precepts of the Enlightenment. But they are clearly a minority and getting smaller with the birth of every Haredi's sixth or seventh child. What's more, the American Jewish community does not intervene politically on behalf of, nor identify psychologically, culturally and religiously with, the Israeli minority.

So better to face the facts today, when the situation remains at least partially in flux. Kiddushin 39b in the Babylonian Talmud tells us, "And wherever the potential for harm is ever present we do not rely on miracles." Yet those who refuse to recognize the coming conflict between Israeli theocracy and Diaspora democracy are doing just that.

http://www.nationinstitute.org/featuredwork/nationbooks/2510/israel_turning_into_theocracy/

Still no evidence of any policy changes which would turn Israel from secualr to religious law

Not a single law from the Torah produced as evidence

Is Israel On The Verge Of Becoming A Theocracy?

Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation will decide tomorrow if it will back legislation that would sometimes require Israel’s secular courts to issue rulings on the basis of halakha (Orthodox Jewish law).
 
Is Israel On The Verge Of Becoming A Theocracy?
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com
Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation will decide tomorrow if it will back legislation that would sometimes require Israel’s secular courts to issue rulings on the basis of halakha (Orthodox Jewish law), Ha’aretz reported. Courts would be required to rely on halakha when existing case law does not provide a clear decision in the matter at hand.
The bill is sponsored by two members of Knesset from the right-wing Zionist Orthodox HaBayit HaYehudi Party, Nissan Slomiansky and Bezalel Smotrich.
If the bill passes, it will “bring Israel closer to becoming a religious state and contravene Israel’s essence as a democratic state, which is the nation state of the Jewish people,” Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer, vice president of the Israel Democracy Institute, said.
A law passed in 1980, after Israel’s right-wing led by Menachem Begin formed a bloc with haredim and took Knesset, orders secular courts to use Jewish heritage when ruling on a matter that cannot be otherwise resolved through existing law or judicial precedent. Secular court judges, the 1980 law says, should base their rulings on “the principles of freedom, justice, integrity and peace of Jewish heritage.”
But, Slomiansky and Smotrich claim, judges rarely do this because the law is vaguely worded and because the secular courts are allowed to rule by inferring judgements from alternative secular legal sources.
The new law proposed by Slomiansky and Smotrich says that in cases in which a legal matter has no judicial precent, case law or actual Knesset-passed law to resolve it, secular court judges would have to turn to halakha to find a source for their ruling before using alternative secular legal sources (like, for example, case law from other Western democracies).
The new law would also spell out where in the vast compendium of halakha secular judges should look to for their rulings. The proposed law’s language explicitly says “judges may rule on the basis of the Code of Jewish Law.”
Over the weekend, the Israel Democracy Institute issued a legal opinion against the proposed bill that warns this proposed bill “will badly damage Israel’s status in the world and portray it as a state in which religious laws rule rather than democratic principles.”
The Israel Democracy Institute points out that the 1980 law mandates that if a secular court doesn’t resolution to an issue of law in existing case law by allowed inference, it must rule “in the light of the principles of freedom, justice, integrity and peace of Jewish heritage” – wording which makes clear secular law and existing legal precedents take precedence over halakha.
But the new bill proposed by Slomiansky and Smotrich changes this order of hierarchy and inserts halakha into the judicial process before legal inference. The proposed bill also removes the phrase “the principles of freedom, justice, integrity and peace of Jewish heritage” and replaces it with the term “halakha.” That gives short shrift to Jewish theology (for instance, the theology of the great medieval Jewish scholars known as the Rishonim) and commands secular judges to rely on a compendium of halakha that is by no means the final word on Jewish law.
“One wonders why Israeli law would want to take in, without the required screening or filtering, principles of religious law that was written thousands of years ago and consists of entire areas that are not compatible with a sovereign state in the 21st century, like discrimination against women and non-Jews?…[The proposed bill is nothing more than] religious coercion that infringes of the right to freedom from religion, a freedom already undermined in Israel today by legislation, especially in issues of personal status,” the Israel Democracy Institute’s paper says.

http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2015/10/is-israel-on-the-verge-of-becoming-a-theocracy-789.html

http://freethinker.co.uk/2015/10/16/is-israel-lurching-towards-theocracy/

Is Israel lurching towards theocracy?
Israel’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation is to consider a bill that could herald the first step toward making Israel a country governed by Jewish religious law.
The sponsors of the new bill, led by Habayit Hayehudi Knesset member Nissan Slomiansky, above, take issue with the fact that the existing law does not obligate the courts to apply the principles of Jewish law (halakha), so they are seeking to amend the provision.
The idea was roundly condemned by the newspaper, Haaretz. It said in an editorial:

It’s difficult to understand why the sponsors of the bill think it appropriate for a democratic country to adopt the principles of ancient religious law.
Why should the entire Israeli population, a large portion of whom are not religious and some also not Jewish, be subject to Jewish religious law? And this with regard to a religious legal system that systematically discriminates against populations such as women and non-Jews.
Secular judges and judges who are not Jewish will be required, according to the proposal, to rule according to the principles of religious law. In order to ‘make things easier’ for them, the proposed law provides for an official institute to ‘translate’ Jewish law into modern language and make it accessible to all judges.

It concluded:

Beyond the message of extremism and coercion that the bill sends, it would strengthen questions about the legitimacy of Israel as a democratic country. The more evidence that Israel provides of its Jewish religious-state characteristics, particularly of the kind that imposes religious laws on residents who are not religious and not Jewish, the argument that Israel is a country that respects the rights of its citizens is substantially weakened.

So a bill considered which may not see the light of day

Hilarious

When and if they do I shall condemn such an act

You miss the whole point Didge as you always do. It's asking and suggesting that Israel is on the road to a theocracy. And you really should do something to control your bladder as the inside of your legs must be all scabby by now lol.

Claiming something is on the road to Theocracy, based on a billwhich will make slight changes oin the law, when you fail to even grasp what is a theocracy, shows how completely deluded you are.
Even this bill is not going to change many of the laws.

Do you wan me to explain to you what a theocracy is?

Not me making the claim is it?  It's the people in Israel, but then again, you know more about Israel that they do, in your head anyway lol

Yes some people wrongly fear this happenning and this comes off some minor media soureces?

I think you like they have over exagerated this

Well as everyday I leave you looking so utterly clueless sassy and you again here cannot understand what a theocracy is and based on your historica knowledge. its more fun for me to show how absurd yout views are

The best was exposing the 3 of you for being utterly racist  lo