Caroline Glick: Israel’s democratic collapse
Israeli democracy is in critical condition.
Sunday, the High Court of Justice ruled that the government’s natural gas policy is unlawful. The policy, which was negotiated with foreign energy companies, was to be the basis for developing the massive offshore Leviathan gas field. It was supposed to anchor future gas prices, ensure gas revenues for the government and energy security for the country in the coming decades. On the basis of this policy outline, the government negotiated deals to supply natural gas to Egypt, Turkey and Jordan.
Given the enormous cost of developing offshore gas fields, the policy, which was determined in close consultations with legal experts and regulators, determined a base price for natural gas that would be frozen for 10 years. The point of the price freeze was to encourage investors to take the financial risk of exploring and developing Israeli fields. The price freeze guaranteed them a minimal profit on their investment.
In a healthy democracy, the court would never have agreed to adjudicate the populist petition against the government’s gas policy submitted by a consortium of radical NGOs.
Under normal rules of standing that apply in every other mature democracy in the world, the petitioners would have had no right to submit their petition.
In states not controlled by a legal junta, as the people’s elected representative it is the government’s sole prerogative to determine the state’s energy policy and to sign deals with foreign governments and investors.
How a Court Sank Israel’s Economy
For the first several decades of its existence, the state of Israel was the butt of the old Jewish joke about Moses leading the Jews to the one place in the Middle East without natural resources. But after the discovery of vast natural gas fields off its coast (as well as shale oil on land), the jest no longer made sense. As Arthur Herman wrote in a feature in the March 2014 issue of COMMENTARY, the potential bounty from the Tamar field that has already begun producing natural gas and the far bigger Leviathan site on which development has not yet begun had the potential to make Israel the world’s next energy superpower. The prospect of not only energy independence but also of a large export business that would not only enrich the Jewish state but enable economic ties that would create new relationships and alliances that would make it far more secure.Michael Lumish: The European Union Can Go Straight to Hell
The only worry about all this was not whether the gas could be brought out or whether it would play a part in transforming Israel’s economy. The only problem was whether Israel’s fractious political system and over-regulated economy and a judiciary and bureaucracy that seem most comfortable when stifling innovation and growth rather than enabling it would find a way to gum up the works and stop the gas fields from being exploited. Unfortunately, we now have the answer to that question.
Yesterday’s ruling by Israel’s High Court of Justice struck down a deal that Prime Minister Netanyahu had brokered between the government and Texas-based Noble Energy – which has taken the lead in developing Israel’s big energy project —and an Israeli firm that would have allowed work on Leviathan to begin.
This decision is the culmination of years of maneuvering that pitted Netanyahu’s government against a coalition of left-wing opponents determined to stop the project.
Jihadi violence in Europe, we are to understand, is because the Europeans have failed to suckle Arab-Muslim immigrants close enough to their breasts and if only they would be more open and gracious then the Jihadi immigrants would become harmless accountants and fishermen and shoemakers.
The truth, of course, is that Arab-Muslim imperial ambitions, grounded in hatred of the infidel - particularly the Jew - is what drives their violence throughout the world upon non-Muslims. It is due to western and American racism that the West blames itself for Muslim violence against its own people. It is because western "liberals" think of non-whites as inferior creatures in need of protection that they refuse to assign agency to their "little brown brothers" who are in need of protection against the allegedly aggressive West.
The current western-left attitude toward non-western people "of color" is reminiscent of, and in part derived from, nineteenth-century notions of "white man's burden." The condescension is so rich that the western-left refuses to even acknowledge that it is not their culture, but the Arab culture that has been the most successful imperialist-colonialist power within recorded human history, since the Romans.
The Europeans, in their ideological blinkertude, pay lip-service to Palestinian-Arab responsibility for the long Arab war against the Jews, but they always pressure and blame the Jews.
At the very least, the boycott movement “would swing into virtually nothing” if there was no Israeli-Palestinian conflict “to tag unto,” he argued.
I have to say, I love these European geniuses. What he is saying - if I can figure the math correctly - is that if there were no Arab-Israel conflict there would be no BDS movement against the Jews of the Middle East to begin with.