Rabbi Pruzansky's Blog

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

Plato disparaged democracy – “rule by the people” – and assumed that the people’s passions would in fact create an “ochlocracy,” or “rule by the masses,” also known as “mob rule.” In truth, even democracies struggle with majoritarian control over a helpless, outnumbered minority. In a comment attributed to Benjamin Franklin, he allegedly opined that pure “democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner.”

The sentiment is real even if he didn’t say it. As such, the USA protected the rights of all citizens, especially the minority, by enacting the Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments to the US Constitution, which prohibited the infringement of the people’s right to worship, assemble, free speech, bear arms, and others.

Israel’s besieged democracy has for years grappled with the effects of mob rule, where ironically the mobs that torment the citizenry are not majorities but distinct minorities. For example, many Haredim have taken to the streets again, blocking roads, train tracks, clashing with police, disrupting lives, and generally disgracing Torah, all to avoid having to fulfill the mitzvot of defending Jewish life and protecting the land of Israel.

They merely borrowed the tactics – with, it should be noted, considerably less sympathy from the police, media, courts, and legal system – of the Israeli left, the Kaplanistim, who have protested the results of the last election for… well, since the day after the election of 2022. In fact, there have been leftists who have been protesting against PM Netanyahu since he started winning elections three decades ago. They, too, blocked highways, fought with police, damaged property, threatened to desert the military (no small factor, according to Hamas sources, in launching their invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023), and leave the country altogether, but only after they would wreck the economy.

Additionally, these leftists brought to Israel the phenomenon of loudly and violently protesting outside the homes and offices of politicians, bureaucrats, and government workers, harassing their children and families, and with complete immunity from prosecution because of their favored status in the media and legal system. The Haredim learned well, if not ethically or wisely, and recently attacked the home of a Supreme Court justice they dislike.

While the outcome of the Haredi protests is speculative – they know how to play the political game as well as anyone – the Kaplanist mob has been inordinately successful – derailing judicial reform, trying to throttle every government initiative and appointment, and generally mucking up the wheels of government. This is mob rule at its best.

Of course, the Kaplanistim could not have succeeded without the protection of the most exalted mob of all – the unelected, self-appointed Supreme Court majority that runs roughshod over Israel’s elected government and legislature. The Court long ago abandoned any pretense of following the law as enacted by Israel’s elected legislature. Instead, it unilaterally carved out a set of guidelines that tolerates no review, criticism, or revision and that reflects the political priorities and value system of Israel’s far left. Like those jurisdictions in the USA whose election laws foster unchecked and undetectable cheating, Israel’s Supreme Court has found the sweet spot in which it can trample on every other governmental or societal organ without constraint.

That it essentially still insists on the right to appoint its own successors – for the protection of “democracy,” as it claims – and will tolerate no legislated limitations on its powers, at present cannot be stopped, and even new Knesset elections will not change that dynamic. Indeed, sometimes the mob rogues wear robes.

The legal establishment – with the fired-but-still-serving Attorney General at the head – constitutes still another mob. It too brooks no dissent, follows its own internal moral or immoral compass, and is not inhibited by any laws. It is assisted by such organizations as the ironically named “Movement for Quality Government in Israel,” for which the only requisite “quality” is avid allegiance to a secular, leftist, anti-religious, and anti-conservative view of government, Israel, and the world. This organization benefits from the Supreme Court’s universal open-ended standing for all litigants – and is exhibit one why the right to file a lawsuit needs to be restricted to those whose personal interests or rights are affected by a particular government action and not simply because one has chosen to be a national nudnik.

It is true that the AG stumbled recently in trying to obstruct the appointment of several key government officials – whose appointments do not require her approval at all. Perhaps the Court allowed these confirmations because there was simply no basis in law to stop them, no remotely credible way even to fabricate a new ruling to delay them, or to postpone to some future date the inevitable moment when the majority of Israelis will rise up and cease following the dictates of this mob. That moment will be a real constitutional crisis – when the people reassert the rule of law from one of the mobs that usurped it. Certainly, we should pray that calamity never comes.

What all these mobs have in common is that each purport to represent the people and reflect their will. The Haredi mob claims to speak for all of “Torah Jewry,” obviously false because many Haredim and almost all non-Haredi religious Jews recoil from their tactics and goals. Similarly, the Kaplanist mob claims to represent the “gatekeepers,” those people who know what is best for the State of Israel and its citizens, who resent the intrusion of all these uncouth, uncultured immigrants who have stolen their state from them and must learn their proper place in the social hierarchy, even learn it the hard way. And, likewise, the legal mob represents the “enlightened citizenry,” in Aharon Barak’s own choice phrase, and is obligated to impose its liberal, refined vision on the backwards rubes who unfortunately, as they see it, comprise a majority of Israelis and consistently vote for conservative and religious parties.

The goals of each mob are different – but their tactics are roughly identical. It is to irritate, aggravate, and infuriate as many innocent people as possible, not to convince them of the rightness of their views but simply to compel acquiescence to their demands so that normal life can be restored. The mobs do not want to influence – they will never achieve a majority – as much as they want to wear down those whom they perceive as obstacles to the fulfillment of their vision.

The leftist mobs have certainly been more successful than the Haredi mob, if only because their numbers are greater and they retain a near monopoly on positive media coverage. The media mob is also quite potent. But the Haredi mobs are also technically successful, as the repeated riots undermine the effort to pass any draft legislation, just as future riots would prevent the implementation of any law that was passed. In Israel, it is better to be the mob than to be the king, or the prime minister, or the governing coalition. This is only because we have come to tolerate mob rule.

As election season nears, we can expect the sundry mobs to become even more active. One explicit goal of the left is to create enough havoc in society so that the conservative voters stay home, deducing that elections don’t matter. But, in fact, elections do matter. Paradoxically, the only curb on the mob is the voter. If the mob rules, then individual rights will suffer, the religious complexion of the state will be diluted, the peace fantasies of the left will be revived – and the Court will support every outrage and every repression.

We should note well how the mob operates during elections. Anything that can be construed even remotely as religious, conservative, or pro-government will be deemed a “threat to democracy,” a hackneyed phrase that has been so overused by the left in several countries in the last few decades that it usually means the opposite. In reality, anyone who applies the phrase “threat to democracy” to others is usually the greatest, and perhaps only, threat to democracy in Israel. It is they who have the most contempt for the people. It is they who fear most the ballot. It is they who are likeliest to contest the vote and try to smother the voice of the people.

Those whose instinct it is to take to the streets and rampage when they do not get their way – those whom the Torah describes (Shemot 32:25) as “faru’a,” unrestrained, unbridled, broken loose – are the very last people who should be handed the levers of power. They would never tolerate the same right to protest and riot in their opponents that they assume for themselves.

The power to stop the mobs of all sorts is in our hands.

(First published at Israelnationalnews.com)

No self-respecting media outlet in Israel should be interviewing a brazen Jew hater like Tucker Carlson, which means that he will probably follow up his interview with Channel 13 with several others. Carlson has been dubbed by President Trump as a “Low IQ person” and “not very bright” and nothing he said in his most recent interview challenges those characterizations.

The interviewer Udi Segal occasionally tried to push back but also shamefully refrained from refuting some of the more outrageous statements and implications. What should Segal have countered? And how can we repudiate Carlson’s rhetoric and immorality?

Take first the low-hanging fruit. Carlson excoriated the beeper operation that wounded several thousand Hezbollah terrorists and the elimination of leaders such as in Lebanon, Gaza or Iran as “political assassinations” that are wrong and immoral. But by what stretch of his fevered imagination is killing terrorists immoral? Must they be killed only in the act of terror – or after the act? These are organizations funded by a terror state whose avowed goal is to destroy Israel and that goal has been hardly theoretical. Iran and its proxies have spent the better part of forty years trying to murder as many Israelis and Jews as possible and have long threatened – even boasted about – Israel’s impending destruction.

It comes out that according to Carlson’s twisted logic, a nation cannot defend itself by assassinating the leadership of its foes nor by killing terrorists.

The worst of Carlson’s distortions is his repeated references to the murder of innocents, especially children. “Killing innocents is never acceptable.” “Killing children is never allowable… it is evil.” Although he has other times labeled such actions genocide, this time he sufficed to call them “atrocities.” As such, he concluded, Israel is as much a terror regime as is Iran or any of the terror entities it purports to fight against.

“You can’t kill people who haven’t done anything wrong.” That is true in normal times but the morality of war is different. Certainly, one cannot target civilians intentionally, but how would Carlson combat terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah who hide among civilians, including children, store their weapons in violation of international law in civilian homes, hospitals, schools, and houses of worship? If killing children is “never allowed,” do terrorists then gain total immunity when they use children or other civilians as human shields?

That would seem to be Carlson’s only conclusion, which qualifies him to be a good Quaker and a pacifist, but not much of a Christian. Even Christianity understands the concept of a “just war” and only a nation with a death wish bent on national suicide would adhere to such a morally bankrupt standard. That is one reason why no country does. Carlson’s approach gives evildoers an insurmountable advantage. Would he want to live in a country that followed his rules? I doubt it.

It comes out that war according to Carlson cannot be waged against terrorists who hide among civilians nor against their leadership that dispatches them to murder real innocents. If you can’t fight the leaders and you can’t fight the terrorists, whom can you fight? Apparently, wars can only be fought against terrorists who volunteer to be killed. In the alternative, in Carlson world, Israel should remain morally pristine and allow itself to be destroyed. That will show ‘em! But no thank you.

Labelling something evil presumes evil intent. The very notion of collateral damage reflects the idea that wars always cause unwanted suffering to innocent people. (I set aside for a moment the cogent point that most of these civilians are not innocent at all but a part of the terror operation and planning, nor is a child suicide bomber or decoy entirely innocent.) The death of innocents in war is tragic – but tragic is not the same as evil. He is, to be kind, simplistic in his reasoning. Carlson sounds like someone who denounces as “evil” the act of cutting into the flesh of another human being and cannot distinguish between the surgeon and the stabber. If he doesn’t realize that, then Trump’s assessment of his intelligence is accurate.

In Carlson’s world, terror will always win. It could be that as long as the only victims are Jews, that is a price he is willing to pay to remain morally pure. But there is no such thing as a casualty-free, non-lethal war, and if he thinks he has the moral high ground by claiming such purity, then he is the terrorist’s best friend.

In Carlson’s world – as in many other haters of Israel – Israel has the absolute right of self-defense, as long as we never use it or as long as no one has to die if we do use it. He called Israel the world’s most violent country – a patent falsehood – but revealing no appreciation of the constant terror we experience and the relentlessness of our enemies. He lamented Israel’s “loss of morality.” He shouldn’t; the truth is, we never lost it, while he never had it. His moral compass is askew. Perhaps he is also missing the idea that we need not subscribe to his moral notions that are based on “universal principles.” But G-d’s word goes forth from Jerusalem; our moral scruples and conduct should be based on the Torah. If anything, we wage war in a way that dilutes the Torah’s imperative that protecting Jewish life is our priority and our possession of the entire land of Israel is a fundamental Torah objective.

“Israel is not a democracy because millions of Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza do not vote,” and according to Carlson, nor is America because Trump embarked on an unpopular war. If only the interviewer spoke a better English and countered with the obvious: the Arab residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not citizens of Israel and no more entitled to vote in Israeli elections than are illegal aliens in the USA, against whom Carlson has railed for years. Those Arabs are citizens of the PA and entitled to vote there, but do not blame Israel if elections there never take place. And the USA is a republic, technically, not a democracy. The citizens vote for their representatives. Those representatives do not take polls before making decisions but are elected to make decisions. If Carlson does not know this, and he should, then see Trump: Above.

Finally, Carlson asserted repeatedly and quite aggressively that the USA has no “obligation” to give Israel either arms or money. Of course, no one ever claimed that the US has such an “obligation” so this was an easy straw man to browbeat. Here, too, Carlson – whose poor grades prevented him from graduating with his college class – betrays an ignorance about statecraft. No nation has an obligation towards any other nation but only to its own citizens and those who legally seek succor in its borders. Nevertheless, nations do have interests, and in pursuit of those interests they establish alliances, have foreign relations, and trade with other countries, including the sale of weapons. (The US does have an unfortunate record of, from time to time, arming countries that became their adversaries or were otherwise hostile.)

Arguably, Israel has been the USA’s most reliable ally in the world, if you consider support for US global objectives, shared enemies, provision of vital intelligence, and symmetrical voting patterns in the United Nations. If the US sells weapons to Israel, it does so in furtherance of American interests (which, by the way, certainly do not include the bolstering of Islamic terrorists). The proof is that when certain presidents – misguided as they were – decided it was in the US interest to halt weapons sales, they did. (Read: Biden.) If the US subsidizes part of those weapons sales, it is to shore up America’s arms industry and ensure that Israel does not seek weapons elsewhere or manufacture its own, which would undercut the US defense establishment. It doesn’t bother him that the US trades with a host of unsavory actors across the world, including China which is now buying American oil while tormenting its own people. Apparently, no Jews, no news.

But a future president may determine that a pacifist USA is an ideal and that arms sales should be halted, just as the current president may cave in to pressure from the likes of Carlson and others and sign a deal with Iran heavy on rhetoric, light on substance, and with little chance of implementation of anything that remotely protects our interests. We would do well to remember that the interests of Israel and the USA are often aligned but are never identical. Will our prime minister have the strength to rain on the Trump parade and refuse to agree to a cease fire in Lebanon that leaves Hezbollah armed and dangerous? Ditto with Hamas in Gaza? Will he succumb to pressure to withdraw from these territories or do the right thing and settle them with Jews, once and for all? And the “no obligation” mantra should mean that Israel retains complete freedom of action against any regional enemy, despite American wishes for a cease fire.

Yes, let us remember that nations have interests, not obligations, and remember further Lord Palmerston’s dictum that nations have no permanent allies, only permanent interests. That applies to us as well. Our interests are not merely survival but building a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

If anything, Carlson’s diatribes should alert Israelis to Palmerston’s truism and its consequences.

Indeed, he is not that bright and not that moral. In fact, I wish that Tucker Carlson hated true evil as much as he hates Jews and Israel. But we will survive him too, and this era’s history will easily be written without reference to his angry words, his caustic opinions, his shallow reasoning, and his vile hatreds.

Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, Esq., former pulpit rabbi and attorney, serves as the Senior Research Associate for the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy (JCAP.ngo), the Israel Region Vice-President of the Coalition for Jewish Values, and is the author of six books including “The Jewish Ethic of Personal Responsibility” (Gefen Publishing).