 Let's see, what do we have? Yeah, quickly about Israel. I mean, there's a lot more, I think, that can be said about Israel. And I'm sure I will say about Israel in the weeks to come. Two quick things that are going on right now. One is these big, massive demonstrations in Israel against the government with regard to judicial reform. I'll give you a quick outline of what's involved. So today, start with the fact that Israel does not have a constitution. And there is no separation of powers in that sense. There is no real constitution. But what there is is some basic law, what they call basic law, which serves as a pseudo constitution in Israel. And this basic law allows the judiciary to overturn laws that it views counter to the basic law. So somewhat like a separation of powers and a constitution. The judges to the court that, I guess, to make these decisions, the Supreme Court in Israel, are appointed mostly by judges and lawyers. And there lies the problem. The problem is that once the first judges were appointed in the early 1990s, since then, judges have been appointed by their own kind. And like everywhere else, I think lawyers and judges in Israel, there's a bias, left-leaning bias among those people. And what's happened is that the court has been perpetuated into a particular bias for the last 30 years. And that's a left-wing bias. And the court has stepped a number of times has stepped in to declare laws that the legislature had passed as unconstitutional. Or not unconstitutional, opposed to the basic law and therefore illegitimate and thrown them out. And there is a real uproar against this partially because the governments in Israel have often been right of center. And yet that's never reflected in the judiciary, because the judiciary is to a large extent static because politics has no input or very little input into the process. They are representative of the government in the committee that decides who the judges should be. But it's not like the United States where you need Senate approval, where the president nominates and the Senate approves. And you get biased judges. But then when the Republicans come in, they can put in their judges and Democrats put in there. So you get some kind of balance of some kind of reflection of the will of the people. In Israel, none of that exists. So Netanyahu has committed to changing that. And that's a good thing. It needs to be changed. The problem is that Netanyahu is basically changing it in a way that invalidates the court completely. It not only would place politicians in a dominant position of choosing the people in the Supreme Court, which I guess is OK. We do that in many other countries. But he's also going to make it so that the legislature can overrule any Supreme Court decision with a simple majority. Now, that cannot be done in the United States, not explicitly. You can write a new bill. You can change the bill based on the input from the Supreme Court. But when a Supreme Court rules something unconstitutional, that particular thing cannot be done anymore. If a court rules a certain bill as non-objective, and that is non-constitutional because it's not objective, the legislator would have to write a new bill. But the Israeli legislation makes it possible to just overrule the court. The consequence of this is basically to eliminate any separation of powers, any checks and balances, and would be a disaster. So this is the thing. I sympathize with the demonstrators, because I think they are onto a legitimate, oh, I sympathize with the government because I think they are onto a legitimate issue with the court as it is today. And I very much sympathize with the demonstrators who are saying that the way the government is dealing with this, the way the government is providing an alternative to what exists today will make it even worse, and I agree with that. So I think both sides are wrong. I think both parties are wrong here. There are currently hundreds of thousands, or not currently, but over the weekend there were hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets in Israel. Traffic was blocked in all directions. I think this is going to continue until there's some resolution. Netanyahu does not seem to be willing to bend, I think stupidly, because what he's proposal is a bad proposal. I don't know where this goes. It's kind of stuck, and it really, really is not good. The second issue relating to Israel is you've seen a significant increase in violence against Israelis. You've also seen a significant increase in violence from the IDF towards the Palestinian in response in trying to secure peace. I mean, I do not know enough to be able to judge the whole situation between Israel and the Palestinians is pathetic and ridiculous. And Israel will not do the right thing, which is to win this war and get it over with. The Palestinians continue to only be radicalized more and more because the whole situation is like neither here nor there and in this ridiculous state of limbo. And Israel needs to take over the West Bank, to clean house, to demilitarize it, and either to integrate the Palestinians into Israeli society in one way or another, or find some other kind of solution to Palestinian state, which I think would be a disaster or something. But Israel refuses to offer an actual solution to the crisis and therefore leaving it to violence to settle it. And in violence, Israel is better, it's stronger, it's more organized, and the Palestinians don't have a chance. Anyway, a few days ago there was a shooting where basically a drive-by shooter shot some Israelis. There'd been other shootings. Again, violence has increased. But what happened the other day was that some of the settlers, these are Jews who live in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, close to Arab villages, Palestinian villages, they decided to take the law into their own hands. They went to an Arab village in the West Bank. They burnt the place down. As a consequence of their actions, one Palestinian was killed. They burned cars. They stoned cars. They basically became a mob that, you know, a mob on, what do you call it, on a lynching campaign. And these were Jews, right? And in my view, I mean, Israel should clamp down hard on these people. Vigilantism should not be allowed at all. It is one thing to shoot and fight in your own self-defense. It's quite another to go on a rampage and to hurt innocent people who you don't know had anything to do with this. It was a mob riot. It was violent. It was unnecessary. It was an expression of the worst of Israeli society. It's racist. They were hurting Arabs because they were Arabs, whether they had anything to do with the attack or not. Just despicable. And if Israel is a civilized state, as it claims it is, they should try these people. They should send them to jail. They should make them pay the consequence of their actions. I fear that this right-wing government in Israel won't do that, and that is tragic and horrible. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com. I go to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content. And of course, subscribe. 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