Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the Likud, is up and running for yet another election campaign, as so many times in the past. This time, however, he is running despite three serious criminal indictments hanging on his neck. After lengthy deliberation, the attorney-general, who holds the statutory authority to file charges against him, decided to indict Netanyahu. Does…

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the Likud, is up and running for yet another election campaign, as so many times in the past. This time, however, he is running despite three serious criminal indictments hanging on his neck. After lengthy deliberation, the attorney-general, who holds the statutory authority to file charges against him, decided to indict Netanyahu. Does…

The wrestling match between the political and the judicial, between the elected representatives and the professionals, is becoming ever more intense. The current justice minister, Amir Ohana, is the prime minister’s personal political appointee. His ministry is home to the critically important State Attorney’s Office, against which he has launched a fierce attack. He is doing so donning a suit…

Businesses and companies play a central role in our lives. We work for them, purchase their products and services, and invest our money in them. They influence our quality of life, standard of living, and life expectancy. They shape our ideas and beliefs through their power over the media, culture, the sciences, and politics. They hold title to a majority…

The recent elections were waged to a large extent over the issue of the relations between religion and state. As is often the case in election campaigns, this one exacerbated the already acute tensions that this issue routinely arouses, and demonstrated that even after 70 years Israel is still in the throes of a fierce conflict on the very character…

Israelis woke up depressed when it became apparent that the rerun election had not produced a clear winner, and that the political system remained paralyzed. But when the dust settles, it may turn out that there was indeed a winner after all, one that rises far above all the squabbling parties: normalcy. First, the overall picture is that democracy has…

In The Jewish War, the historian Josephus Flavius attributes the Jews’ defeat by the Romans and the destruction of Jerusalem to the internal conflicts among the Jews, both outside and especially inside, Jerusalem. Then, as now, the Jewish people were divided between the Land of Israel and the Diaspora, and the domestic disagreement had an impact on the entire Jewish…

Recently a report about religion in public life, which examined religious coercion and the limits on freedom of religion worldwide, was published in the US. On a number of parameters, Israel was placed in unsavory company, somewhere between Iran and Afghanistan. So are we Iran? Not really. The report builds “dry” parameters that are applied to different countries in an…

The appalling turn of phrase recently used by Israel’s Minister of Education Rabbi Peretz to describe Jewish assimilation as a “second Holocaust,” once again brings to the fore the question of Jewish identity from a moral and systemic perspective, in all its complexity. Unlike other issues of “religion and state,” this one concerns not only those who live in Israel,…