Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is accustomed to mockery from the left for his conviction that Israel is on the brink of grave danger from Iran. But now he faces harsh words from one of the far right’s most renowned ideologues.
While the Israeli cabinet has been grappling with some of the most harrowing decisions it has ever faced — from the deliberations over the release of Gilad Shalit, to some particularly stringent conditions imposed by President Obama — the religious right wing community in Israel has been engaged in its own disputations about nothing other than the role of the women’s body in contemporary Israeli politics.
So, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, the settler rabbi who was encouraging soldiers to disobey orders to dismantle outposts, appears to have backed down. But according to a surprising new poll, there are plenty of Israelis who think that insubordination in the army is okay.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably been laboring for too long under the misapprehension that democracy means government by majority. We probably also assumed, foolishly, that a consensus is a prevailing view shared by most of those present.