JNS
Democracy must be restored to Israel
Caroline Glick
January 12, 2023

“For years now, Israel has seemed to me like a man sleepwalking toward a cliff. Now we’ve fallen from it.” So proclaimed author Hillel Halkin in a hysterical requiem for Israel published last week in The Jewish Review of Books. Halkin’s metaphorical cliff is the right-religious bloc’s electoral victory on Nov. 1, 2022 and the formation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sixth government two weeks ago. Halkin explained to his concerned readers that it isn’t that Israel stopped being a democracy on Nov. 1. Far worse. On that day, Israel lost its soul. And Halkin identifies the culprit: Judaism. In language redolent with antisemitic tropes, Halkin blamed “Judaism” for destroying “Zionism,” which he argued, oddly, “sought to cure us” of Judaism’s “fantasies and delusions … only to become infected with them itself.” READ MORE