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March 2017

After the Storm – A Review By Marilyn Penn

The first thing you’ll notice about After the Storm is the height of its star, Hiroshi Abe; in a country where the average male is 5′7″ this man is a towering 6′2″ and looks like Gregory Peck – both wonderful attributes. Except that this casting interferes with the plot. We’re asked to accept this character as a down and out writer, unable to summon the money he owes his short ex-wife for child support and reduced to borrowing from his short sister and stealing from his shorter mother. But all we can think is – are you kidding me? this guy could get a job in a minute as a model or movie star earning way more money than he did with his novel. He’d be plucked right off the sidewalk by ten different modeling or movie agents before he walked three blocks in downtown Tokyo. Imagine casting George Clooney as Willy Loman and you’ll understand the problem.

As I tried to overcome this stumbling block, I looked around the theater and saw the man next to me fast asleep, two women chatting, several others having the need to organize their handbags. It was then that I realized that I too must have nodded off as I couldn’t recollect seeing something that was clearly a prior occurrence. This is a very quiet film about some very dull people with very ordinary life problems. You need a Chekhov to make something out of soporific material and writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda is not that man. In a year in which LION featured a spectacular screen debut for irresistible young Sunny Pawar, you can’t interest audiences in a reticent boy of similar age (short) who has no screen personality As he and his father decide to weather the eponymous typhoon in a playground, we are forced to acknowledge that this is too misguided to be a good bonding moment What if a tree branch came whirling towards them to smack the very tall man in the head? The old mother comes across best of the bunch but since that’s saying so little, I can’t praise her performance either. Miss this unless you’re having serious trouble napping………………

Gorsuch’s Foes Embarrass the Senate Democrats’ attacks on his past decisions are so formulaic that they read like a recipe. By Orrin G. Hatch

During last week’s confirmation hearing for Judge Neil Gorsuch, some of my Senate colleagues heard from teachers who were using the occasion as an educational tool. Indeed, Supreme Court confirmation hearings can be a civics lesson for the nation. They offer unparalleled insight into the Constitution and the proper role of judges in our system of government.

I have participated in 14 of these hearings during my four decades on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The nominees are typically highly talented lawyers and judges. The Senate’s role is to probe their qualifications and judicial philosophies. At its best, the process is removed from the pettiness of partisan politics.

I take this duty seriously. Although I am a committed conservative, I have voted for the Supreme Court nominees of both parties—even those I might not have chosen myself—as long as I have been assured of their fitness for office. I helped shepherd through President Clinton’s nominees, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Both had shown themselves to be honorable, capable jurists with reputations for careful, nonideological work on federal appeals courts.

What sort of civics lesson were the American people treated to last week? Judge Gorsuch’s performance was outstanding. Enduring more than 20 hours of questioning over two days, he displayed an impressive command of the law and an intellect befitting someone with his stellar credentials. He showed that he understands the proper role of a judge in our system: to apply, not make, the law. Throughout, his demeanor was serious, thoughtful and humble. These qualities have defined his judicial service for the past decade and will serve him well on the Supreme Court.

In stark contrast was the astonishing treatment Judge Gorsuch received from many of my Democratic colleagues. Whatever their motivation—be it the outcome of President Obama’s lame-duck nomination during last year’s election, an unwillingness to accept the November results, or the desire for judges to push a liberal political agenda—they have apparently decided to wage a desperate, scorched-earth campaign to derail this nomination, no matter the damage they inflict along the way. We are now watching the confirmation process through the funhouse mirror.

Consider the Democrats’ demand that Judge Gorsuch answer politically charged hypotheticals about future cases. For decades, Supreme Court nominees of both parties have rightly refused to comply with such demands. To offer an advisory opinion is inconsistent with the Constitution, which gives judges the authority to make a decision only within the legal and factual context of an actual case. Judges should be neutral arbiters, and asking them to prejudice themselves raises serious due-process concerns for future litigants, who deserve the opportunity to make their arguments in full.

When Judge Gorsuch politely explained his inability to answer such questions—often while giving an extensive rationale for demurring—he was lambasted by some of my Democratic colleagues. Yet these senators have gladly embraced the very same answer from nominees in the past. It is hard not to interpret their attacks as hypocrisy.

Consider also the way some of my colleagues misrepresented Judge Gorsuch’s record. Their attempts were so formulaic that they read like a recipe: First, cherry-pick one of the judge’s opinions in which a sympathetic victim lost. Next, gloss over the legal issues that informed his decision in the case. Then fail to mention that his opinions were often joined by colleagues appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama. After that, ignore the many times that Judge Gorsuch ruled in favor of similar litigants. End with a wild assertion about how Judge Gorsuch must be biased against “the little guy.”

The Tax Reform Damage The GOP health debacle makes pro-growth reform more important but also much harder.

Republicans are consoling themselves that after their health-care failure they can move on to tax reform, and they have little choice. The large complication is that the Freedom Caucus’s ObamaCare preservation act has also made a tax bill much harder politically even as it makes reform more essential to salvaging the Trump Presidency and GOP majorities in 2018.

President Trump campaigned on breaking Washington gridlock, increasing economic growth and lifting American incomes. The health collapse undermines those pledges. The legislative failure is obvious, but less appreciated is that House Speaker Paul Ryan’s reform included a pro-growth tax cut and major improvements in work incentives. The 3.8-percentage-point cut in taxes on capital income would have been a substantial increase in after-tax return on investment, nearly half of the eight-point cut in the capital-gains tax rate that helped propel growth after 1997.
Now that’s dead, and so is the replacement for the especially high marginal-tax-rate cliff built into ObamaCare’s subsidies. These steep tax cliffs as subsidies phase out are a major hindrance to work, as University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan has shown. The Ryan bill would have been a significant boost to economic growth and labor participation. The critique that it would not have helped “Trump voters” was willfully false coming from the left and uninformed on the right.

This lost opportunity now makes tax reform even more important as a growth driver, but the health-reform failure also hurt tax reform in another major way. The Ryan bill would have reduced the budget baseline for tax reform by some $1 trillion over 10 years. This means that suddenly Republicans will have to find $1 trillion more in loopholes to close or taxes to raise if they want their reduction in tax rates to be budget neutral.

That means picking more fights with industries that fear they’ll be tax-reform losers. Take the irony of Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas. He trashed the House health bill far and wide, but he also represents Wal-Mart, which hates the House GOP’s border-adjustment tax proposal that would raise some $1 trillion in revenue to pay for lower tax rates. By helping to kill the Ryan health bill, Mr. Cotton has now killed $1 trillion in tax and spending cuts that would have made it easier to pass a tax reform without the border-adjustment fee. We look forward to seeing the Senator’s revenue substitute.

Law Takes a Holiday And anarchy follows. By Victor Davis Hanson *****

In the 1934 romantic movie Death Takes a Holiday, Death assumes human form for three days, and the world turns chaotic.

The same thing happens when the law goes on a vacation. Rules are unenforced or politicized. Citizens quickly lose faith in the legal system. Anarchy follows — ensuring that there can be neither prosperity nor security.

The United States is descending into such an abyss, as politics now seem to govern whether existing laws are enforced.

Sociologists in the 1980s found out that when even minor infractions were ignored — such as the breaking of windows, or vendors walking into the street to hawk wares to motorists in a traffic jam — misdemeanors then spiraled into felonies as lawbreakers become emboldened.

A federal law states that the president can by proclamation “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.” Yet a federal judge ruled that President Trump cannot do what the law allows in temporarily suspending immigration from countries previously singled out by the Obama administration for their laxity in vetting their emigrants.

In the logic of his 43-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Derrick Watson seemed to strike down the travel ban based on his own subjective opinion of a president’s supposedly incorrect attitudes and past statements.

Some 500 “sanctuary” cities and counties have decided for political reasons that federal immigration law does not fully apply within their jurisdictions. They have done so with impunity, believing that illegal immigration is a winning political issue given changing demography. In a way, they have already legally seceded from the union and provided other cities with a model of how to ignore any federal law they do not like.

The law states that foreign nationals cannot enter and permanently reside in the United States without going through a checkpoint and in most cases obtaining a legal visa or green card. But immigration law has been all but ignored. Or it was redefined as not committing additional crimes while otherwise violating immigration law. Then the law was effectively watered down further to allow entering and residing illegally if not committing “serious” crimes. Now, the adjective “serious” is being redefined as something that does not lead to too many deportations.

The logical end is no immigration law at all — and open borders.

There is a federal law that forbids the IRS from unfairly targeting private groups or individuals on the basis of their politics. Lois Lerner, an IRS director, did just that but faced no legal consequences.

Perhaps Lerner’s exemption emboldened New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to invite IRS employees via social media to unlawfully leak Donald Trump’s tax returns. Later, someone leaked Trump’s 2005 tax return to MSNBC.

There are statutes that prevent federal intelligence and investigatory agencies from leaking classified documents. No matter. For the last six months, the media have trafficked in reports that Trump is under some sort of investigation by government agencies for allegedly colluding with the Russians. That narrative is usually based on information from “unnamed sources” affiliated with the FBI, NSA, or CIA. No one has been punished for such leaking.

Trump Haters Call for Presidential Assassination No facet of the First Amendment shields those who promote the murder of the president of the United States. By Deroy Murdock

Never in my 53 years have I seen people so casually and cavalierly advocate the murder of the president of the United States. Trump haters are eager to make assassination great again.

Such comments are not just muttered by demented vagrants as they relax on subway grates. Those who say such things too often are prominent, powerful people with platforms from which they publically spew their potentially lethal venom.

Calvin Broadus, Jr., alias Snoop Dogg, recently released a music video for a rap song called “Lavender” in which he aims a handgun right at the skull of a clown dressed as President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Dogg — who pled no contest to felony gun possession in April 2007 — pulls the revolver’s trigger. Out pops a red and white flag that reads: “Bang.”

Hilarious.

Imagine the national collapse that would have ensued if, say, a country-music star released a video in which he leveled a shotgun at an Obama-like clown, only to have sawdust fly from the barrel.

In response to muted criticism of Mr. Dogg’s video, rapper Clifford Joseph Harris Jr., a.k.a. T.I., called Trump a “F***ing Tangerine Tanned Muskrat scrotum skin, Lacefront Possum fur Wig wearing, Alternative fact, Atomic Dog diarrhea face a** man!!!!”

Also from the relentlessly tasteful world of rap “music,” Big Sean’s freestyle number contributes this to the national debate:

I know Jay proud of me, he put this ’round my neck/ And I might just kill ISIS with the same icepick/ That I murder Donald Trump in the same night with.

Madonna, the global pop star whose albums have sold 306 million copies, erupted at the January 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C.: “Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”

Meanwhile, Adam Pally, star of Fox TV’s Making History, told TMZ that if he could travel through time and spend an hour with anyone, “I’d have to kill Trump or Hitler.”

Soon after Trump was elected, British journalist Monisha Rajesh remarked, “It’s about time for a presidential assassination.”

Matt Harrigan former CEO of PacketSled, a San Diego-based cybersecurity company, was eerily specific about his desire to whack Trump.

“I’m going to kill the president. Elect,” Harrigan posted on Facebook last November. He added that he was “getting a sniper rifle and perching myself where it counts. Find a bedroom in the whitehouse that suits you m*****fucker. I’ll find you.”

FISAgate: The Question Is Not Whether Trump Associates Were Monitored It’s whether it was done abusively. By Andrew C. McCarthy —

In light of how controversial the matter has become, it’s unfortunate to find so much uniformed commentary, especially in cable-TV land, about foreign intelligence collection and its so-called minimization protocols — particularly, the guidelines about revealing, or “unmasking,” the identities of Americans whose communications are “incidentally” intercepted.

The question arises because of reporting — most recently, the coverage of disclosures last week by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes — that the communications of figures associated with the Trump campaign were intercepted “incidentally” by U.S. intelligence agencies because they had some interaction with people connected in some way to foreign powers, principally Russia. The Trump associates subjected to such intelligence-agency monitoring certainly include former national-security adviser Michael Flynn, who was intercepted when speaking with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. In addition, the intercepted individuals probably include at least three others: Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign until being ousted in July (when reports surfaced of payments to him by the former government of Ukraine — a Putin puppet regime); and two others, Roger Stone and Carter Page, who had informal connections to the campaign (but longstanding ties of varying degree to Trump and Manafort).

Nunes’s disclosures further suggest that the communications of others associated with Trump’s campaign (perhaps even Trump himself) were also intercepted. During the press conference, a reporter asked, Nunes, “Was the president [i.e., Trump] included in that incidental collection — his communication?” Nunes responded, “Yes.” Based on the little that has been reported, the interception and handling of these communications seems more disturbing because, according to Nunes, they have nothing to do with any known government intelligence investigations of Russia. Unless there is some legitimate connection to foreign activities, the specter of political spying hovers.

The reported intelligence collection efforts raise four separate questions that are too often conflated in the commentary:

1) Should the communications of Trump associates (all of whom are U.S. citizens, so far as we know) have been intercepted in the first place?

2) Regardless of whether the interception was proper, should the identities of the American citizens have been “masked” in order to protect them from, among other things, being smeared as subjects of government investigations?

3) Regardless of whether masking was called for, should the fact that the American citizens’ communications had been collected and reviewed in connection with investigations — presumably, intelligence investigations, not criminal probes — have been disclosed throughout the “community” of U.S. intelligence agencies?

4) Should that fact have been publicly disclosed, including in leaks to the media? (Spoiler alert: As my use of “leaked” indicates, public disclosure is a major no-no. In fact, it’s a felony no-no.)

Islam and the Jihad in London It’s not non-Western. It’s anti-Western. By Andrew C. McCarthy

It was a careful choice of words, Bernard Lewis being nothing if not careful. In 2004, the West audibly gasped when its preeminent scholar of Islam famously told the German newspaper Die Welt,“Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” if not sooner.

Listen carefully. He did not say that Muslims will be the majority population in what is still recognizably Europe. No, Professor Lewis said “Europe will be Islamic.”

We are not talking about Muslims here. We are talking about Islam. Lots of individual Muslims desire peaceful coexistence, even assimilation. But Islam’s aim is to prevail. So, yet again this week, Lewis’s foreboding has been brought to the fore by a jihadist mass-murder attack, this time in London.

As we go to press, five innocent people are dead after Khalid Masood, a terrorist acting on unambiguous scriptural commands to war against non-Muslims, rammed his rental Hyundai SUV into dozens of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, many of them tourists taking in the iconic views of Parliament. About 50 people suffered injuries, some of them grave, so the death toll may yet rise.

Masood, a burly 52-year-old weightlifter with a long criminal record that included vicious stabbings, then crashed the car through the gate at Westminster Palace, home of the West’s most venerable democratic legislature. He alighted brandishing two long knives, which he used to kill Keith Palmer, a police officer who, pursuant to British policy, was unarmed despite being assigned to provide security at one of the world’s foremost terror targets. Masood was finally shot dead by a protection officer attached to England’s defense minister.

There immediately began the ritual media pondering over Masood’s motive. Yes, what could it possibly have been?

I’m going to stick with the patently obvious.

Masood was born as Adrian Russell Ajao on Christmas Day, 1964, in Kent county, just outside London. His 17-year-old single mother remarried two years later, and he was known as Adrian Elms (his stepfather’s surname) until converting to Islam when he was about 40. Prior to that point, while fathering three children with his wife, he had several arrests, some for violent attacks. During at least one of the resulting stints in prison, like many inmates, he began indoctrination into Islam.

David Goldman Book Review: The Benedict Option, by Rod Dreher

You Can’t Go Home Again (But You Can Hide Out)

The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, by Rod Dreher. Sentinel Press. 262 pages with index. $25.00

There is something inherently odd about the Benedict Option, the view that Christians should retreat from the world into small and tightly-knit communities where they may live a Christian life with a minimum of disturbance from the evil side of modernity. Christianity by its nature has a universal mission. It speaks to the evil of our age that devout Christians want to encyst themselves against the secular world.

Rod Dreher, a prominent conservative writer, describes his Benedict Option as follows:

We live liturgically, telling our sacred Story in worship and song. We fast and we feast. We marry and give our children in marriage, and though in exile, we work for the peace of the city. We welcome our newborns and bury our dead. We read the Bible, and we tell our children about the saints. And we also tell them in the orchard and by the fireside about Odysseus, Achilles and Aeneas, of Dante and Don Quixote, and Frodo and Gandalf, and all the tales that bear what it means to be men and women of the West.

Dreher’s book has both the charm and merit of a participant’s account of the practicalities of withdrawing from the world. The first half of the book tries to account for the decline of Western civilization, an issue to which I will return later; the strongest chapters come later, recounting the experience of the religious who have tried to separate themselves from secular society, and exhorting the reader to embrace work, risk, and faith. Christians should be prudent, that is, not seek needless career martyrdom in pursuit of principles where victory is impossible; they should save themselves for family and community. Where believers are driven out of certain professions by the new secular inquisition, Dreher says, they should instead be entrepreneurial. Christians should rediscover the trades, where the religious can make a living without signing on to secular ideology. They should buy from other Christians and help Christians find employment.

These examples and exhortations will be of great help to religious people who find it impossible to protect their children from the plagues of pornography and commercialism that erode the content of contemporary life. Dreher proposes sensible, well-considered measures to achieve family and community independence from mainstream society rather than radical demonstration.

Jews have no business telling Christians how to conduct their lives, but there is something in the Jewish experience that resonates with the idea of withdrawal from the mainstream of society. When I speak to Christian groups the question I hear most often is: “How do the Jews keep their children in the fold?” The answer, of course, is that most of us don’t. As the joke goes, the difference between Donald Trump and a liberal Jew is that Trump has Jewish grandchildren.

When Are Bystanders Complicit? By Richard Baehr

The Crime of Complicity: The Bystander in the Holocaust by Amos N. Guiora, Ankerwycke, April, 2017

Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah, was born in Israel, moved to America as a child with his family, and later moved back to Israel, where he had a long career in the Israeli Defense Forces, serving in the Judge Advocate General Corps. In recent years he has been a faculty member at several American law schools. For the record, Amos is a friend, and we both attended Kenyon College.

Guiora’s grandparents on his father’s side were murdered at Auschwitz. Both his mother and father had near death experiences in Nazi occupied Hungary and Yugoslavia towards the end of World War 2. In his new book, Guiora examines the role of the bystander during the course of the years when Germany and its proxies slaughtered approximately six million Jews in Europe, nearly 2/3 of the prewar Jewish population on the continent.

Guiora’s key question surrounds whether this Nazi extermination program could have succeeded without the complicity of many people in the countries of Europe, who were not themselves perpetrators of the crimes against the Jews. Were they innocent bystanders or guilty themselves for failure to assist those in immediate need, oftentimes their neighbors. The author clearly believes that many more Jews could have been saved had bystanders intervened, and the bystanders were in many cases guilty of the crime of complicity.

Guiora extends his analysis to a more general approach to evaluate complicity of bystanders to crimes that they see in the modern world, including suggested language for when standoffish behavior by bystanders is in effect unacceptable, and subject to penalty of some sort.

My major problem with Guiora’s analysis relates to whether his suggested approaches to complicit behavior by bystanders today would have had any impact during the dark days of 1939-1945. The United States is a country with the rule of law and established procedures to deal with those who break the law — either as perpetrators, or as bystanders when the laws were changed in many places to make bystander complicity (however it should be defined) illegal. In Nazi occupied or controlled Europe, the idea that bystander behavior would have been better — more intervention to help the beleaguered Jews marching or being rounded up had there only been laws on the books to punish those who did not help the bystander if there were no physical risk to themselves — seems highly unlikely. At the Israeli Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, there are dedications to the righteous among those in Europe who took personal risks in order to shelter or assist in some other way the Jews of Europe. In essence, there were those whose values, ethics, or personal moral code required or enabled them to act. These people were a distinct minority among many others who were either indifferent or worse — in some cases creating additional pain for the Jews in distress.

Anti-Semitism in Europe during the pre war period and in World War 2 was widespread, more open than is acceptable today for most Europeans, (though that seems to be changing), and had a long ugly history in many of the countries where the highest percentage of pre-war Jews perished during the Holocaust. It is interesting that Guiora’s parents had little or no confidence in their neighbors or countrymen behaving any better than they actually did. Guiora’s father was saved from death by an attack by Yugoslav partisans on a march toward Hungary from a camp in Serbia. Yugoslav history during World War 2 was one of the bloodiest in all of Europe (10% killed), and resembles to some extent modern Syria, with shifting alliances and targets among ethnic groups with long histories of grudges toward others in their country carried over centuries. That his father was saved was more happenstance than noble behavior by a group. Tito’s partisans wanted to defeat the Nazis, not look out for the Jews.

Guiora lays out examples of where appropriate bystander behavior today might involve nothing more than using a cellphone, if one is in the presence of a crime, to notify authorities that someone was at risk of physical harm. No intervention is required which would impose the risk of physical harm to the bystander or his family. There could be other extenuating circumstances as well. He suggests that bystander complicity might result in a $500 fine upon conviction.

The type of legal approach suggested by Guiora is certainly a mainstream suggestion, already in existence in a few states, and would draw both proponents and opponents, depending on how one feels about personal autonomy and personal responsibility. But Guiora is certainly correct that doing nothing is often a contributing factor to creating harm for victims of attacks. This week, there was a report of a gang rape in Chicago seen by 40 people on Facebook, none of whom thought to notify authorities.

Violent crime rates in the United States are on the rise again after a long period of decline, and the clearance rate is way down from earlier periods. People won’t “snitch” on their friends or neighbors or volunteer to correct a fake news record (e.g. Michael Brown was an innocent victim walking with his hands up when shot by a policeman). But it is likely that police could identify who watched and did nothing on a social media site whose primary beneficiary at this point appears to be the company receiving ad revenue.

Guiora believes that laws that make bystander complicity legally liable will have a deterrent effect, making it more likely that fewer crimes are committed with wide public exposure. However, whether this is likely depends on whether the sanction is sufficient to change bystander behavior and or perpetrator behavior. Will the possibility of a $500 fine cause someone to call 911 when they see a crime being committed on Facebook, something they get to view because one is linked to at least one of the perpetrators who was proud to send video around of his “accomplishment”?

When I was a young child of 12 or 13 in New York, I was robbed on a subway train by three adults with knives and clubs while coming back home from Madison Square Garden to the Bronx. So too were two friends who were with me. The train car was an express during the robbery, with no stops, and no one else in the car lifted a finger to intervene. They buried their heads in their newspapers (this was back when people read newspapers). We all surrendered what we had, and that seemed enough for the robbers. But what if the perpetrators had been more malicious and had decided to pound us physically? My guess is that would have created even a greater inhibition for action by the bystanders on the train, none of whom would have been identifiable in any case after the event. The idea of bystander complicity being punishable will only work if there is no risk of physical harm to an intervener and the requirement for action is something as simple as a call to 911. But will a statute requiring such behavior result in more intervention (this occurs at times today with no legal sanction for non-intervention), or more people disappearing while crimes are being committed to avoid ever being questioned or judged?

Amona and Israel’s hobbled sovereignty: Moshe Dann

The destruction of fifty-one Jewish homes in Ofra and Amona in February by order of the High Court raises questions about Israel’s claim to be “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The evictions made no sense, and, although Prime Minister Netanyahu signed an agreement on behalf of the government with the residents of Amona to provide alternative housing in a new community, he has failed to honor his commitment. The families remain in distress, helpless and homeless.

Absurdly, this destruction and others served no one. Jews were traumatized; Arabs can’t use the land for security reasons and because they cannot prove ownership; most Israelis perceived it as a national disgrace; it alienated many and undermined trust in the High Court and the government; and it wasted money and resources. No one benefited!

Although Jews were accused of building on “private Palestinian land,” the question of who owned the land was never heard by an Israeli civilian court. No valid proof of ownership was presented. The destruction, moreover, violated the law in Israel and all other democratic countries: someone who has built in good faith on land which he/she later discovers belongs to someone else is entitled to pay compensation to the legal owner when the value of the building is worth more than the land.

Touted as “the rule of law,” the destruction was intended to demonstrate the power of the High Court regardless of any government decision, or legal issue. The High Court’s decision was meant as a clear political message to the government: it, not the government, would decide the fate of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, “the settlements.” The High Court’s assertion, therefore, challenges the basis of Israeli democracy, the role of its judiciary, and its definition as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

The struggle over that definition arose in 2011, when MK Avi Dichter proposed a Basic Law: “Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The purpose of his bill was to codify the nature and values of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and to prevent Israel from becoming a binational state. Although supported by the government coalition, including PM Netanyahu and opposition MKs, it did not pass a preliminary reading.