Last week, Alex Kushnir, a Knesset member from the secularist Yisrael Beytenu party, released a campaign video in which he complained that the government-run insurance program covers physical exams sometimes requested by Orthodox women for religious purposes. These exams, according to Kushnir, are performed “at the expense of the health budget, at the expense of those same people who are lying in the halls of hospitals, at the expense of those waiting months for medical tests, at the expense of those who are waiting to get a flu shot.” To the editors of the Jerusalem Post, Kushnir’s “crass” and “ugly” rhetoric should have no place in Israeli public discourse:

In other words, [Kushnir is insinuating that] the Ḥaredim . . . are to blame for the collapse of the entire health system. If only this minuscule fraction of the budget were not spent providing a religious service to the few women who seek it, Kushnir claims, then all of the country’s sick would have comfortable hospital beds, it would not take months to wait for an MRI, and there would be no shortage of flu shots in the land.

Kushnir then takes this example to absurd extremes, and asks what’s next—colonoscopies to ensure that people eat kosher food, random checks on the street to see if men have been circumcised? What makes the video even more distasteful is an illustration of a hideous looking woman with her arms outstretched saying to a rabbi, “Check me. I am pure now.”

It’s election season in Israel—again. And one of the many ills of yet another round of political campaigning is that we will now have three more months of politicians sowing division in their search for voters. We will have three more months of politicians who believe that the only way they can build up themselves or their party is by disparaging others. And the two most popular targets to demonize are Israeli Arabs and the Ḥaredim.

Israel, which needs a modicum of solidarity to face its enormous challenges, cannot afford a situation where one segment of the population demonizes another—even during an election campaign.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.