Last Wednesday, a mob of leftists descended on a Tel Aviv hair salon while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife Sara Netanyahu was inside. For three hours, they blocked her from leaving while cursing her and her husband and his government’s package of judicial reform legislation.
The mob violence against Sara Netanyahu was just another expression of the left’s increased radicalism and rising violence in the midst of the Knesset’s efforts to restore limitations on the power of Israel’s oligarchical judiciary.
The most dangerous expression to date of the left’s increasingly thuggish behavior came on Saturday with the news that 37 out of 40 reserve Israeli Air Force pilots who serve in an elite F-15 squadron had announced that they will no longer show up for duty if the Knesset and government advance their judicial reform measures.
To discuss the shocking turn of events and the leading role that retired leftist generals are playing in the left’s efforts to coerce the government to shelve its efforts to restore Israeli democracy, my guest on this week’s episode of the Caroline Glick show is Brig. Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi.
Avivi is the founder and CEO of the Israel Security and Defense Forum (Habithonistim), a social movement and think tank comprised of retired senior officers, soldiers and concerned citizens working to reinstate the Zionist ethos in the IDF and advance national security strategies based on Israel’s national and strategic interests.
According to Avivi, at base, the retired generals leading this effort are anti-democratic elitists who hold the people of Israel in contempt. “This is the story of people who truly believe … that the vast majority of the Israeli people are a mob that should be managed by a small, enlightened group of people,” he said. Those refusing to serve in the reserves because of the judicial reform are making a grave error, he added. “…We fight together, we die together, we defend each other… and we don’t ask what their political views are. We don’t care…When you are willing to bring politics into the army …. it is devastating.”
He advised the government to give no quarter to the pilots or any other reservists threatening not to serve as required by law.
Avivi and I also discuss at length the issue of Iran, which the United States now acknowledges had become a threshold nuclear state. Avivi, who just returned from a round of briefings with lawmakers and policymakers in Washington, D.C., explains how a coordinated U.S.-Israeli-Arab assault on Iran’s nuclear weapons would effectively shore up America’s position as a superpower against Russia and China, prevent economic shocks and regional war and enhance U.S. prosperity and peace.
I devot my opening remarks to an analysis of the central (hostile) role the Biden administration is playing in the events on the ground in Israel and how the rigidity of the post-nationalist ideology blinds its adherents, in Israel, in the United States and beyond to both opportunities and threats, and prevents them from enjoying the basic building block of freedom: freedom of thought.
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