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The threshold of dictatorship

Given that Israel lacks a formal constitution — its idealistic 1948 Declaration of Independence and a series of easily amended “basic laws” are no substitute — and that the same coalition controls the government and the parliament, [we are seeing] a near-Putinization of what has until now been a liberal democracy for 75 years. Netanyahu would effectively control all three branches of government.

This reflects a vulgar view of democracy as amounting to a tyranny of the majority, wildly out of sync with the American system of checks and balances on top of guarantees for each citizen secured by the Bill of Rights.

… Israel is by now on the threshold of dictatorship. Yet we are optimistic, because the massive resistance movement that has arisen in Israel, with hundreds of grass-roots organizations working together and more being created by the day, shows that President Herzog was actually right. It shows that after years of indifference and fence-sitting, the liberal-democratic camp understands that it needs to fight for its freedom and the future of Israel as a liberal democracy, in a determined manner and for the longer term.

Margaret Soltan, July 28, 2023 1:52PM
Posted in: democracy

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
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truffula, commenting at Historiann

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Dagblog

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Dissent: The Blog

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Perplexed with Narrow Passages

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