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So many words, so much stupidity.

What is needed is to create immediately a new discourse that will suit the new situation.

How about Torah? It is, after all, the reason for Israel's existence.

To expect Israel’s elites to have shielded it from such trends is unreasonable.

Oh, so pleasures and mammon are so attractive, they just couldn't go back, could they? Having read Judges and Chronicles, one would think the author knows where that philosophy goes seeing as it's been done before too.

Still, the fact remains that Israel’s army and government performed poorly last summer. In no other war did the Israel Defense Force accomplish so little in so much time and with such an advantage in numbers and firepower; in no other did Israel’s government act with such hesitation and confusion.

Well duh, the performance of large numbers of people, not to mention their leaders, might have just a little teensy something to do with their individual moral integrity, courage, self-discipline, and, most important, commitment to a purpose outside one self (see "faith"), that being the difference between doing what's expected and doing the amazing. In Israel, we had become used to (and complacent given) the amazing, as had her enemies. It was her primary deterrant. That deterrant is now seriously jeopardized by the impotence of such superior power that one is afraid to use it.

This is not to say that leaders of early Israel were paragons, but they did live for the G-d that forgives the repentent. Now Mr. Halkin, for twenty points, where do Western standards for individual moral integrity, courage, and self-discipline originate?

Now, a year later... unilateralism is a dead letter.

Just one minor campaign and this guy sings the song of surrender to the very forces that stayed Israel' hand in this Lebanese debacle. Israel had MORE support when it was 'the benighted little country under attack by superior forces.'

Who pays this guy? I guess it's easier to recommend globalism when writing from New York.

In discussing Israel’s post-war despondency, therefore, one must realize that it is not just a reaction to “wartime failure.”

From the theraputic state, to a state in therapy in one swell foop.

For many Israelis, of course, there is no need for a “new discourse.” They have a perfectly serviceable old one, far older than Zionism. It is called Judaism. This would not, however, be a way of rethinking Israel’s situation in the world. It would be a way of thinking Israel out of the world.

Oh, the secular world you want, Mr. Halkin? Living more "out of the world" would be a good thing. After all (and again), Torah is the reason for Israel's entire existence, and the only thing that separates it from the kind of globalist barbarism that excuses millions of deaths across a world of tyranny.