March 24, 2006
*Because we have a Tuesday morning deadline, these were written before the Israeli election results were in.

Another election: One more time

We are glad we didn’t have to vote in Israel’s election this week. We’d find it difficult to make a choice.

Ariel Sharon’s stroke removed his vision and vibrancy from the party he founded, and he left behind an enigmatic Kadima Party. An overly pragmatic Bibi leads the Israeli right by default while failing to win the trust of those he leads. Even without him, Likud is stuck in the recent past, agonizing over a failed campaign against the Gaza withdrawal that always lacked the majority support its proponents claimed. Maintaining a miniscule presence inside a hostile population had little democratic support then or now. Sadder still, Likud’s obstinacy on this point decreases its effectiveness in the debate on Israel’s future in Judea, Samaria and the Golan.

One would have to like Israel’s failed foreign policy to vote Labor because they are advocating the same thing all over again. But most Israelis realize that Labor voters are motivated by their own interests that have little underwstanding or appreciation for either property rights or profit. They also understand that a Labor government would push average Israelis deeper into socialist bondage.

Where to go?

If not one of these three, then one of the 31 smaller parties that urge special pleadings and interests.

We’d probably vote Avigdor Lieberman’s Russian party, Yisrael Beitainu, (While secretly wishing Likud’s Natan Sharansky was at its head.) Not that this party can gather enough votes to organize a government, but increasing its strength would allow them to mediate between Kadima, Labor and Likud. Like most other of the smaller parties, Beitainu is plain-spoken and narrowly focused and its voters fully understand what they are voting for. Cumulatively, mini-parties wield significant power, especially in the absence of a clearcut majority.

It would be better for Israel if its parties were honest and forthright, something that Ariel Sharon was able to convince the voters that Likud was when it won the last two elections.

In the mean time, it is the system that can be blamed for the equivocation we see in an election like this one. The result is that the country gets weak winners who contiually make themselves weaker in order to stay in power. That give us reason to believe that we’ll probably see Kadima under-perform leading to another election sooner rather than later.

Democracies adjust to faulty systems and voters eventually discern what is real and what isn’t. Until things change though, this is the system Israelis will have to live with. Absent real electoral reform they will have to find another Ariel Sharon to pull them together. For now then, their future is in the hands of the factions and the fragmented majorities they produce.

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The Taliban at Yale

Yale’s weak explanation for the welcome they’ve afforded the former spokesman for Afghanistan’s brutally repressive Taliban indicates to us that that they feel that tolerance and acceptance are absolutes and that there are no boundaries as to who an educational institution can accept into its student body. But Yale’s former president Benno Schmidt allows for another opinion when he told the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, “Diversity simply cannot be allowed to trump all moral considerations.”

Even Amy Aaland, Executive Director of Yale’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life, speaking to the Wall Street Journal about Rahmatullah Hashemi taking his meals at Hillel’s Slifka Center, relied on Yale’s definition of tolerance as a valid conceptual basis for his acceptance when she said, “…just living here, (Mr. Hashemi) can learn values and ideals from our society.”

Like many modern, malleable values though, “diversity” is ill-defined and its meaning continues to expand.

Diversity was a concept inititally applied to support the virtues of racial, religious and ethnic tolerance and inclusion, but in this case it seems to have grown to include behavioral characteristics in its application as well. Until now, no one, especially at a prestigious educational institution like Yale, has suggested that any and all forms of diversity are inherently desirable (excluding, of course, ROTC training and military recruiting on campus).

Making space at the table for a member-and senior member at that-of a group that not only discriminates, but uses terror and brutality to enforce its biases, begs the question of whether there are any limits to the tolerance and acceptance used to create a diverse student body.

Would Hillel knowingly invite murderers, pedophiles and rapists to their dining table in the name of diversity? How far can we stretch the boundaries of our tolerance and acceptancethe two?

It would be ironic indeed, if the Taliban and its new Ivy League spokesman moved us to reexamine some of our most politically correct, modern values and caused them to be defined more fully and used more judiciously.

(see James Kirhcik’s piece on this subject in the March 10th issue of the Ledger)

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