Smiling for Shaked

The JERUSALEM POST featured an article calling Ayelet Shaked, our former excellent Minister of Justice, a figurehead, a puppet on a string which is pulled by Naftali Bennet. Making Shaked a marionette is a blasphemy of the truth. She is, in her own way, an independent thinker who, while always listening to advice and suggestions of others, ultimately makes her own decisions. As it should be !

The URP dislikes her primarily for two very stupid and racist reasons: one, because she is a woman and two, because she is, like most Israeli Jews, religiously secular. Something the haredim cannot stand.

The New Right party is a newcomer on our political scene but it has the potential of being a power that may help Likud to lose its one-sided power.

The thought that Shaked could be dangled by Bennett’s or anyone else’s strings is ludicrous. It brings a smile to my face when I think of my own son, a successful doctor, who is in fact a puppet pulled by strings in the hands of a dominant wife. He is the Bibi of our family and she is the Sara. (Rachmanut!!!)

As a Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked followed the law carefully and made the right decisions. She may often have disagreed with the Attorney General’s opinions or with decisions made by our courts, but her disagreements were with dignity and respect for those with whom she may have disagreed.

I cannot respect an Otzma Kahanist racist party sitting in our Knesset or having a ministerial post in our government. For me, that would be the final straw in the camel’s back to kill our democracy. While it is dying, there is still hope that it can be resuscitated without the Netanyahu clan in its midst.

With the many positive foreign achievements that Bibi successfully made, he is rapidly turning Jewish Israel into an American puppet state, a territory similar to Puerto Rico. No star will be added to the American flag and Israelis, please God, will not have to sing the Star Spangled Banner, but the two nations, different in culture, history of thousands of years, language and traditions can never be molded into one mother-daughter republic. Unthinkable ! Unwanted!

We remember what America was before Trumpism and we must consider what it will be post-Trumpism. Will a newly-elected Democratic president move the embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel-Aviv? Anything is possible. Nothing is permanent. Not even the URP (may it soon disappear).

Trump stumps on the mantra of “making America great AGAIN”. The word “Again” implies that once it was but now it is no more and therefore it must be resurrected from the political graveyard.

Glory be to God, our mantra is “Yisrael Lanetzach.. haya, hoveh v’yihiyeh l’olam va-ed”.. Israel for Eternity. It was. It is. And it shall be forever. No need to make great again that which was and is great and will remain great, albeit pending Sara’s decision to keep it greater without her unwanted help !

One of the greatest women in our country’s history was Golda Meyerson Meier… great not only as a Zionist leader or a distinguished prime minister… but great in her tolerance and respect for differing opinions. A very, very far cry from the recent years of name-calling, insulting leadership in the halls of government.

I have decided, at least for this early moment, to cast my ballot for Ayelet Shaked. I trust her judgements. I have respect for her knowledge of our laws, and I admire the tenacity which she has in standing up to corrupt, anti-democratic, over-zealous, and often anti-Zionists in and out of government.

The New Right may be in fact the real right in who’s path we may follow, leading to the strength of our presently-diminishing democracy.

Only the wise and goodwill of our people on 17 September 2019 can determine our future.