Ethical Business and the Failure of Unionism

Why should we seek out a more ethical business / worker relationship? The interplay between participants in any relationship, either commercial or personal, is concerned with achieving an end goal; all relationships are in their essence, a negotiation. We seek to dominate nature, we endeavour to gain advantage for ourselves and our family over others; this striving is a natural survival strategy. Channelled positively it benefits the individual, the family and society. But its abuse has been a salient feature of human interaction for all of recorded history.

If we commodify everything, this philosophy of objectification taken to its logical extreme, enabled the Romans to view slaves as property, not dissimilar to any other object in the home. Thus one patrician punished his family by depriving them of their inheritance. He ordered the deaths of all 255 of his slaves.  If people are no more than commodities to be traded, it isn’t murder. This is why Nazi ideology revered ancient Rome.  We glorify Rome for its aesthetic while conveniently forgetting the overwhelming evil by which it survived and prospered.

Rome and Germany were extremes. So was the old Soviet empire. In between them, regimes of the Left and the Right use legislation or regulation to gain an advantage for their supporters or to scale back the advantage that their rivals enjoy.  Perhaps therefore the greatest failure of modern capitalism is that negotiation between parties is no more than a cease fire between hostilities.  A peace treaty should set out an achievable, realistic vision. That means workers having a say in the remuneration package of the main board. A partnership that not only engages but also embraces both sides without either one endeavouring to undermine the other also acts as a restraint on mutual manoeuvrability, power without leverage becomes a negotiation.

The abuse of power precludes it and therefore ‘the city’ would not be impressed. Business, we are told, must have flexibility.  So all salaries should be part tied to overall company performance and part fixed. Lower paid employees will have a greater percentage fixed and higher paid employees a higher percentage variable.   The maximum remuneration package of the highest paid should also be restricted because the distance between the Chief Executive and the cleaner has grown to a degree that one is no longer responsible for the other.   Society is not charity, nor is it unbridled greed.  If a company profits from society it has an obligation towards it.

Society is either the Roman vision or the biblical one.  In the Jewish bible land owners were instructed to leave barley (Deuteronomy 24:19) in their fields for the poor.  A strong society is a healthy society and only one that cares (for whatever reason) can continuously optimise the creative stimulus to uninterrupted growth.

At the same time, altruism is over-rated. We can want to benefit ourselves as well as to create a benefit for others but the degree to which we encourage the stranger to participate in our success voluntarily and without desiring to hurt them, this is the mark of our humanity and not our success at their expense.

This realisation is central to the failure of the union movement and the business community today.  Personal ambition and tribal greed has become the raison d’être for both.

The Middle Classes in Crisis

One English national paper screamed from its front page “Cameron war on scroungers”. The government declared its intent to legislate to make it easier to ‘get rid of workers who failed to make the grade’.

I will declare my interest from the beginning. I am in my mid 50’s and with huge relief I recently volunteered to be made redundant, after 23 years of tireless dedication to a toxic employer. Most of that time I worked at the centre of the management structure although in terms of ambition I never rose above the ideal of doing what was right and therefore had no time for the networking that is essential for progression in the corporate world.  In BT PLC one was always on the look out for the next job. It was part of ‘strategic thinking.’  So I understand the hidden meaning behind the quotes.  It has never been about laziness.  In its misguided attempt to retain voters it is returning us to the politics of ‘us and them.’

I apologise in advance if anything I am going to say sounds bitter. It isn’t. It is no more than the cynicism born of experience. Something our political leaders know only from the vantage point of power and its abuse.

My reservations serve no political bias. When the Labour Party Prime minister, Gordon Brown accused an elderly (and lifelong) Labour supporter of making a racist statement he had not lived next to a newly refurbished house that was progressively trashed by a refugee family who had used it as a drug den and almost certainly as a whore house. When this family finally left in the middle of the night the local authority were greeted by a building they had no choice but to entirely rebuild from the inside in order to make it once again inhabitable.  The home had been trashed and, infested with rats.  Local authority responsibility began and ended with funding the lifestyle of that family. The neighbours were warned not to leave their babies unsupervised because babies have no protection against being attacked by rats. Children kept away from school were ignored and any cries for help from we, the victims of local authority benevolence was disputed as racially inspired intolerance to the multicultural flower that had blossomed amongst us.

The ethic of protecting the vulnerable should not be at variance with the contract of protection for all of us implicit in the health of any democratic society. But where its universal application clashes with every day practice it is because we have chosen to treat society’s ills by dispensing cash unconditionally.  Unlike in the USA there is no legislation to protect the neighbours of rentees. Associations set up to house the homeless have no incentive other than profitability based on management fees received.  Benefits packages often exceed the after tax wages of the middle classes that fund them.

It should not surprise anyone that the Conservative Party undertakes to protect big business from its own folly in times of austerity by facilitating high unemployment which in its turn minimises pressure on wages. It is not simply a factor of increasing materials costs contributing to inflationary pressures; inflation accelerates when business raises its prices in order to protect its profit margins.  In the UK the ‘Centre’ is theoretically represented by the Liberal Democrats and they aspire to represent the ‘true’ middle classes. The Left attacks the rich and the right attacks the poor – neither engages in serious discussion of the reasons for the increasing disparity between the two. Perhaps this is because both vie for the same voters as the Liberal Democrats. And perhaps it is best to describe the Liberal Democrats as the Party of fashionable prejudice, its ideas and ideals shaped by intellectual currents rather than by ethical principles; this protean political force attempting to transect differences by sanctimonious and tendentious political posturing that leaves them hovering indiscriminately between the two sides.

In the UK today if we exclude sociological factors we can define up to 80% of people as belonging to a ‘middle’ class which no longer is so easily defined or whose loyalties can no longer be attributed to a specific characteristic.

The traditional left wing electorate was the industrial non-management classes. But the boundaries separating the classes have become blurred by the overlapping of salary ranges. A member of the lower classes is as likely to vote Conservative as they are to vote Labour.

If the theory of democracy is correct then happiness should pull more nations into the democratic fold and away from totalitarian regimes. Those countries that are not sufficiently free will experience unrest on a scale that will either create the momentum for positive change or in the pessimistic point of view create the kind of unrest that will destroy these same middle classes. Witness the former Soviet Union and the Arab Spring.  Both have created a window of opportunity for fascism to take power (as has now occurred in Egypt).

The impetus to seek unfettered growth has been given the status of a new religion but a concomitant quality of this ‘ideal’ is the rampant individualism without which the former would not be possible.  It has created the conspicuous wealth which in its turn fosters the destructive avarice and fear that could tip the world over into a maelstrom of revolution and counter revolution. The rise of the anonymous corporatist  and monetary hegemon devoid of altruism or even the parochial will to national improvement is the stuff of nightmares feeding a perceived anti-capitalist rebellion that is itself fuelled by fascism.

Until the middle of the 20th Century a definition of class would rightly have seen the middle classes as being located between the rich and the poor. This defined itself by what we could afford in terms of cultural and educational attainment. But today, income distribution has widened to include people at both ends of society.  We exclude academic definitions and economically throw as wide a net as is practical because sociologically by labelling we create inequality.

Aspirations define us but are less tangible.   Aspirations, fed by global travel, the national loss of identity, cultural confusion and an ever present communications bombardment of ideas and visual temptations inevitably leads not to satisfaction levels that are higher than they are today, but to expectations that are difficult if not impossible for all but the wealthiest to sustain.

The availability of arable land used for growing basic food stuffs is contracting as food prices continue to rise.  The cost of providing a safety net has become prohibitive and an all pervasive feeling of insecurity already infects the no longer comfortable middle classes.  Perhaps it is insecurity and fear itself that makes economics the best determinant for class consciousness today and based on this fear, defines the new lower classes.

I provide BT as a microcosm for what afflicts society.  My first experience of ‘BT Values’ occurred in an ‘away’ training course. We were all warned that as ambassadors for BT we must behave with decorum. The senior manager leading the event had brought his secretary with him and it soon became clear that she provided other services besides typing.  On the final evening during our farewell supper the directors’ wife rang up and asked to speak to the secretary. ‘Discretion’ descended into farce as our distraught secretary drank too much and then argued with her lover in front of the other (non BT) diners. A different standard applied to this senior manager of the company.  During the next couple of decades more than two senior officers were embroiled in scandals that BT successfully hid from the public.

But BT is less generous with its workers. In its hierarchy of greed it provides its employees with a basic wage; its middle and senior management receive compensation packages that increase at an exponential rate even when as a consequence of their personal morality they are incapable of managing even the most basic inter-relational adversity with competence or compassion. The HR function elides comfortably into limiting the damage to brand that dysfunctional indifference and over exuberant mismanagement arbitrarily creates. In the largest of BT’s money earning departments turnover has reduced by 5% every quarter over at least, the last 5 years. The only way that management can increase its profit margins and therefore its payouts to its shareholders, is by reducing staff numbers, (at the same time that it increases the work load of those remaining employed). As a consequence, fear and dishonesty is encouraged rather than being kept at bay.

BT periodically sends out stress surveys. It is not because it cares that it does this but because it must demonstrate its proof of ‘preventative’ initiatives employed in order to keep lawsuits against the company to a minimum.

I am not saying that UK PLC differs in some way from elsewhere on the Globe.  BT PLC like UK PLC (and sadly the entire political spectrum is undifferentiated in this area) is incapable of defining itself in moral terms that consistently and coherently articulate a secure and a just future for all, so it takes sides; it looks after its own while it betrays any trust it is able to successfully betray without consequences to it or its followers.

Symbolism and a new start

Kfar Etzion was the site of the execution style murder of over 100 people, including an Arab family, by the Arab Legion on May 13, 1948.  The Arab Legion was British funded and commanded by British Officers so this massacre carried out the day before Israel declared its independence was a warning to “the Jews” of what awaited them and it embarrassed the British Government. Nevertheless, this momentary diplomatic discomfit failed to prevent the Arab League (on the 28th of May 1948) from ethnically cleansing the Old City of Jerusalem of its Jewish population and subsequently razing to the ground all physical evidence of Jewish life in the Old City.

History is problematic because it is inconvenient. There is very little beauty in the story of human history.  Death and dishonour has accompanied much of what has been accomplished by man. Even our myths are too often immersed in indescribable pain.  Unless that is, we deny everything, absolutely.  Power affords the opportunity to whitewash our past in order to sanitise that which we find inconvenient to remember.

In Israel, the Right will try to legislate as a reaction to this revisionist and revanchist policy. But the Left is no less guilty.   Diffidence is a short term escape from ignorance. It is instructive that the Left is so easily duped into following Arab propaganda even when it is so patently false. I say duped because the alternative is to admit that they readily embrace a lie and that they are all too comfortable with their own prejudices.

So when Arab MK Jamal Zehalke (a member of the Israeli parliament) screams at the Jewish radio host (as occurred in an interview in January 2010) that the first modern Jewish city built from scratch (on sand-dunes) is Arab property (Tel Aviv); or when as frequently occurs, Arab leaders tell us that Jerusalem has no Jewish history, we should all be able to appreciate that the Jewish reaction will be one of suspicion or outright mistrust towards those people or organisations that embrace the pornographic anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish propaganda with which we are intermittently showered.

If you deny me my past or rewrite it in your image why should I hand over trusteeship of any part of my homeland to you?

But before we become the thing we oppose most we should appreciate that we exhibit many of the traits we fear.

The Neturei Karta is a Jewish religious sect that denies the validity of Jewish statehood.  They believe that Jewish self-determination is a sin against God and that only the Messiah can bring about Jewish national self-governance. A community that actively advises the nation’s enemies in order to undermine what they see as an illegitimate national enterprise offers only contempt and hatred for those that are to them, a constant reminder of the failure of their religious aspirations. Their collaboration with Israel’s enemies (at events in the UK, the USA, in Europe and in Iran) and their contempt for those people less ‘righteous’ than they are makes them as much of a danger to Israel as the nuclear terrorist and their bomb.  Legislate to confiscate their land and property. Excommunicate the community from the Jewish nation.  If they then select to relocate to Western or Eastern Palestine that is their choice.  A nation can only have a relationship based either on fear or on mutual respect. With the Neturei Karta the latter is unrealisable which is why they will dress their children in concentration camp uniforms and call all those people with whom they disagree, Nazis.  They are no different to the Islamist who believes that their god has given them the right to dominate all other nations and will brook no argument to the contrary.  Fundamentalists of all stripes immerse themselves in intolerance and only as an expedient to protect their lifestyle do they conceal their true nature.

Nazi language precludes discussion. It is intended to provoke and to gain publicity.  It works....it is not intended as a means of engaging in dialogue with anyone. Democracy is consensual, mutual and is predicated on an assumption of self-restraint. Those that oppose freedom manipulate this forbearance by the threat of violence.

In a number of western countries Holocaust denial is a criminal offence as is wearing clothing or displaying paraphernalia associated with the Nazis.  It is punishable by the loss of liberty.

Language and behaviour are symbols of attitude and it is how we react to it that creates the dialogue between segments of society.

So Israel can make holocaust denial a criminal offence as well as the wearing of the paraphernalia associated with the era. There should be no immunity from prosecution for Members of parliament calling their colleague a fascist because violence begins with language. The same should apply to clergymen (of any faith) who think their beliefs give them the right to assault others either verbally or physically and justify it by reference to past prophets or holy books. Clergymen given diplomatic status that abuse it by minimising the shoah or taking the side of the enemy should have their diplomatic status revoked.  Democracy is restraint even when you disagree with me. No wonder the followers of the Arab world have such contempt for democracy.  We fear their violence. To them, the ends have not only justified the means but proven their value.

Respect can only be achieved if we agree that in spite of the hostility inherent within disparate theological positions there is never an excuse in the twenty first century for bigots to use ancient texts to justify modern discrimination. We choose the battles we wish to fight.  The parlous state of western philosophy is based on too many accommodations with those to whom we can never agree.

Israel needs a constitution and a preamble that defines the Jewish foundation and Israeli character of the State. At the same time it should formally separate religion and state.

The Gettysburg Address was given by Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War in 1863. I would like to borrow liberally from it, as follows below:

“The right to self determination for the Jewish people of this land has been denied to us for many centuries.  Our persecution has been a consequence of this bigotry and we have had no safe house anywhere because of it.  There are too many, to this very day, incapable theologically or politically, of accepting our equal rights here, or anywhere else.

Three score and four years ago our fathers and mothers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.

Even before this beginning we were engaged in a great struggle against tyranny, and it continues to test whether this nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are compelled here to be dedicated to the great tasks remaining before us – to honour our dead and take from their sacrifice increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their lives. We here resolve that our dead shall not have died in vain- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.

Respect is not an option, it is a human right. We recognise that this state, forged in a time of great darkness and ignorance shall strive for justice for all and for peace for all people.”

Human Malice and Ethics

In the late 1980’s I rented accommodation in the same house as two women from Zimbabwe. It came as a surprise to me and my politically correct friends that these ladies were not only jingoistic but profoundly racist.  In retrospect it was illogical, an act of unintended ignorance that we could consider ethnicity, religious affiliation or historical experience as being a bar to prejudice.  Being ‘Black’ and having successfully overthrown the ‘White’ devil regime (Rhodesia) these women knew that because they had suffered only they had the right to judge what was ethical and what was not; only they could define racism.

I then met two ‘doctors’ who had escaped from Poland in the 1970’s and pursued careers in computing science in the UK. They were Catholics.  As was I suppose inevitable, one day they were talking about their homeland. They referred to The Poles and The Jews of Poland.  I naively corrected their ethnic subversion by clarifying that they meant Polish Catholics and Polish Jews. These computer scientists looked at me with pained confusion. Poles were Poles and Jews were Jews. Aryan ideology saw both Slavs and Jews as racially inferior and as being unworthy of existence. A thousand years of national co-existence and the annihilation of three million Polish Catholics and three million Polish Jews meant nothing to this son and daughter of Poland.  Though both Jews and Catholics had suffered Nazi purification my Polish Catholic acquaintances were intellectually incapable of internalising either a shared humanity or, a shared national identity.

But before we condemn either Africa or Europe for this shared racism I recall my discussions with our Arab and non-Arab but Muslim brethren. And they were no different. Edward Said, a towering intelligence and distinguished professor of Harvard University was responsible for much of the moral relativism (different cultures have different standards) and moral equivalence (it is considered acceptable to murder babies because asymmetrical warfare creates the necessity that justifies the action) the Left uses to validate atrocity and genocide in the Islamic world.  Professor Said admitted that even as a Christian, he was sorely jealous of his Muslim brothers because, to be a true Arab one needed the ‘superior’ historic attachment to Muhammad that only a ‘believer’ could genuinely possess.

The universalism of the Left failed to challenge this hypocrisy or perhaps it was simply a fact that the Left was always ethically insipient.

Dozens of racial groups survive in the Near East and all of them have been persecuted by the Arab Conquerors. The dream of global conquest and control has rarely diminished since Muhammad burst out of the Arabian Peninsula in the Seventh Century CE (AD). But that conquest has meant cultural colonisation and theft, ethnic cleansing and genocide.  Animists, Black Christians, Jews, Marsh Arabs, Armenians, Kurds and Assyrians (the massacre of Assyrians in Northern Iraq in 1933 inspired Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to coin the word “genocide”).  The Left says nothing but then, rarely either, does the right.

 

The UN was created out of the ashes of world war two to facilitate dialogue and by multilateral interaction to foreclose on human conflict.  Instead, it remains, like its League of Nations predecessor an Orwellian gaggle of politically promiscuous purveyors of propaganda and elegantly concocted malice. Perhaps that is unfair, a prostitute, by professional design, is indiscriminate while the UN is very discriminating in its targeting of lies.

Here in the UK from time to time we hear that a right wing extremist has been found to be working for some government department or a privatised utility and that we must all be protected from their pernicious and evil influence by their immediate exclusion from the workplace.  But members of the Socialist Workers Party and their Islamic Fundamentalist co-conspirators are permitted to roam freely our corridors even though the threat from them is no less and perhaps even greater.  I have discussed calmly and with careful consideration for the sensitivity of my Muslim acquaintances feelings, their perceptions and desires.  What has most surprised me is the disconnect between the suit and tie, the honeyed words flowing from flawless and refined English mouths and their insistence that human slavery is a natural state of existence. They would never publicly demand a Black racial return to forced indenture but tell the rest of us infidels that we should all choose to live under slavery’s benign Islamic mantle.

So when people tell me that I should be less fearful and more trusting of others intentions, I am unable to make of the enlightenment, my teacher.  I have no desire to pour over the history books for examples of beacons of tolerance and love. All I need is to examine the manifest hypocrisy of my modern Western masters.  Those who always insist only I must turn the other cheek help me to recognize the intellectual decline of Western thought and its concomitant resurgence of and identifying with an anti-Semitic tradition; the all too common insistence that for the sake of world peace and human justice only I need to fall on my own sword.

David Mamet recently wrote that Israel is the modern embodiment of the latent need for human sacrifice.  Perhaps it is the best explanation we have for how we came to excuse hate, proudly celebrated as the legal expression of a particular illumination.

The Arab ‘Spring’, the Israeli Winter

Moshe Arens, a former foreign minister under Menachem Begin in analysing the Arab Spring summarised its salient features as encompassing the following: No respect for human rights, oppression of women, contempt for democratic values; a school system that is backward and encourages ignorance (even in its graduates) and a radical religious population which is increasing as a percentage of the whole.  The recent Egyptian election results recorded over 34% voting for the religiously chauvinistic Muslim Brotherhood and 26% voting for the even more violently racist Salafist movement.

The question must be asked, how is the direction in which Israel is headed any different to its Arab protagonists? It is a question being increasingly raised by foreign officials and Israelis alike.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the celebration of ethnicity. We are all born with labels. Some labels we inherit from our parents while others are imposed on us by society. Too often labels serve no more than to impose the values or prejudices of one group onto another, to reinforce our comfortable prejudices.  When society applies different rules to separate groups it is a form of legalised and intermittent apartheid (another label).

Labels make up our identity.

Identity was initially defined by tribe then by religion and then by nationality. For many of us, it still is.  In the Western world ‘nationality’ supplanted religion in self-identification but did not supersede it.  Religion defined groups and helped create unique national identities.  Built upon multiple layers, identity reinforced the primary group collective.  Again, labels: ethnic, cultural, educational and historical define us.

In totalitarian societies labels are used not only to define limits but also to compartmentalise those who are empowered, those who are disenfranchised and the multiplicity of perceived ‘threats’ in between.

All nations are idiosyncratic. By failing to construct a narrative that unites the nation, Israel has created a mishmash of competing communities for whom tribal allegiances are more important than national consensus. 

Contrast this with the Arab 'world' and the difference could easily pose an existential threat not just to Israel but to all humanity. In attempting to unify all people under ‘the’ one god, the Islamic world created a malevolency of violence and benighted prejudice and Israel is now infected by it.  I repeat; by adapting the Arab-Islamic model of intolerance Israel has itself become contaminated. Israel’s political model is one that respects no-one; its most salient feature is its contempt for diversity of opinion.  The sclerotic fiction bound prejudice of the Arab world justifies every betrayal for its race and its god; the Jewish people must not follow their model.

A people incapable of standing as one will fall as one.  We arrived here because we allowed contempt to take the place of honest dissent. Pure proportional representation empowered a political minority with immense influence far in excess of its numeric size.  Xenophobic pronouncements feed fear, not compromise. But also consider how Israel permitted its university professors to demonise the country. Freedom of speech tolerates the urge to self-destruction but why do we pay our teachers to counsel their students on how they may also self-destruct? This masochistic impulse is one chronic symptom of an immature society that is struggling with and neurotically conflicted by its identity.  Fascism of the Left or of the Right, will always exploit self-abuse which is rightly viewed as a sign of inherent weakness. McCarthyism has been a leftist weapon used to intimidate anyone with whom they differed since the 1960’s. The extremists of anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli’ism share a platform with a pride they would be unable to justify were they to apply the same standards to Islam or Europe.  The gauleiters of political correctness reject diversity of thought because it means accepting that there is more than one path to salvation.

If democracy is synonymous with populism then the early twentieth century’s irresponsibility by which the ruling elites dragged the world into two world wars can only be repeated in the twenty-first century because we have renounced responsibility for an ethical domestic or foreign policy.  It is too easy to blame it all on economics.

Gadi Taub in an opinion piece in Israeli newspaper 'Yediot Achranot' commented that the elections in Egypt did not signify a positive change for the people. He said that “liberating the masses may be the dawn of a new oppression”.

This same trend applies across the globe but a nation that has never known freedom has a greater danger of transferring power from one tyranny to another, even more bloody and with less restraint because the escalation in violence is implicit in the mandate. Witness Russia under Communism and Iran under Khomeini'ism.

The internal threat to society is as great as the external threat. Betrayal does not usually come with a tattooed label.  Israel needs national unity; polarisation is an intellectual failure to which all political parties share guilt, equally. And Israeli laws currently being discussed that target specific groups are not just bad laws, they are divisive and anti-democratic laws.

Democracy in peril

When I first stayed in Israel, almost 40 years ago, I observed the behaviours of Western verses Mizrahi sects of ultra orthodox Judaism as being synonymous with the conflicting visions of modernity and conservatism that divided the nation of secular and religious Jew.   Tainted by centuries of persecution and displaying a reactionary response to modernism much of the orthodox world ejected Judaism’s humanistic values and embraced the misogynistic narrative of the cultures from which they so scrupulously stood apart.  But not the Mizrahim (the Jews of Arab lands).

They, like their western cousins were discriminated against, occasionally they were persecuted and killed.  In Israel almost 40 years ago I observed two male Mizrahi ultra orthodox Jews seated next to each other on a bus. It was a long journey from Jerusalem in the South to Safed in the far north. A pregnant woman got onto the bus and one of the men immediately jumped up to let her sit down.

Today, on a bus filled with the ultra orthodox, that woman would remain standing for the entire journey.  Prejudice has triumphed over piety and we in our naivety and indifference excuse this behaviour and call it ‘respect’. We have allowed ignorance to flower.

Israel, as ‘light unto the nations,’ or at least as a light unto its immediate neighbours, is not doing a good job in Parliament.   Verbal violence and the compulsion to call ones rivals ‘Nazis’ and ‘traitors’ is neither congruent with moderation in speech nor demonstrably classifiable as restrained behavior. Our parliamentarians should lead by example. They do not.  Israel needs an independent Standards committee with powers of enforcement that is able to define Knesset ethics.  Provide them with the greater authority to examine standards for all bodies and individuals receiving public funds, and to determine standards of public discourse for everyone drawing on state monies. Calling MK and Science Minister Daniel Herskowitz a Nazi and threatening him, because he is a member of a right wing government that evacuated three illegal settlements, is a frightening development.

The conceit of some to propose legislation against left wing organizations that are in receipt of overseas donations while excluding donations received by the ‘right wing,’ is similarly alarming. I recall Amos Elon writing that four years after World War One had ended Germany had suffered 376 political murders; 22 by leftists (sentenced to a combined total of 248 years in prison) and 354 murders by rightists who between them received a total of 90 years in prison.  Terror begins with the variable application of the rule of law.

A national debate on standards is required if Israel is not going to end up as just one more sad Near Eastern dictatorship.  Left and Right are equally at fault in this failure of debate.

There are those that will argue against any self-control because in the interlude of passionately held belief it is wrong to conceal ones true feelings or fears. But when we call our adversaries ‘Nazis’ or dismiss them as ‘traitors’ we are expressing more than our beliefs, we are labelling our enemy and rejecting debate as without any value. The British parliamentary model of decorum may be an extreme but it has lasted for almost a thousand years.  It works.

Abuse encourages corruption.  The intent of David Ben-Gurion and his ruling party in enshrining the religious / secular status-quo in 1948, leaving religion to the religious instead of formally separating synagogue and state was that they assumed congruence between ethics and religiosity. The problem is that values are a set of beliefs by which you live your life and beliefs are no more than a structured system of values.  Notice the absence of universal ethical constraints.

When an unrepresentative group holds disproportionate political and economic power against the public interest it damages democracy and the best will flee. Israel cannot afford to encourage separation between religious and secular Israelis in education, housing, the military and the workplace.  Without equality resentment festers and violence grows. Secular Israelis must have a voice in their religious destiny because the multiple Jewish sects are too busy defending their own special interests to be morally responsible for our welfare, or the States.

Universal conscription should be without exception and I would excommunicate the Neturei Karta. You cannot live in a country and actively work against its survival. That they justify their actions on religious grounds does not cancel out the crime against the State or its people. MK’s must sign an oath of allegiance and that means they are Israeli and if they are not, they cannot be a member of parliament. They represent not only their constituents, they also represent the nation. If they do not, then they should find employment elsewhere.  This would create problems for some of the more racist Arab MK’s who stand shoulder to shoulder with their racist Arab brothers against the Jewish population of Israel.  But democracy cannot survive unless it has a core set of beliefs to which all are wholly committed.

To desegregate communities, students should be bussed in until populations cease to be islands of prejudiced uniformity or ghettos of ignorant bliss.

I recall the horrified look on the face of a Hasidic friend when I attempted to scribble down his telephone number on the back of my hand. He explained that it was wrong to do so because we are all human and to write on our bodies is to scribble on Gods work. This universalism did not apply to one people, one race, one religion or one orientation.  It is an extreme view but essentially it is an expression of humility before the creator. Now the ultra-orthodox burn down bus shelters that display what they have decided is inappropriate; they spit at women dressed ‘immodestly’ and they spit on people different to them. They have forgotten the teachings of the Torah and it is they who today defile the creator.  Humility has been replaced with intolerance and spite.

Israel with its imperfect and dysfunctional democracy is threatened by extremism and intolerance no less than its neighbours. A series of legislative efforts by the extreme right and orthodox measures accepted by local authorities are a threat to freedom. It is only right for foreign donors whether they are individuals, charities or nations to be registered and that the public should know who they are. Some of them work with the State; many of them are working against it. In the USA all foreign funding must be registered. That is fair. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in being a lobbyist for a foreign entity. But let it all be out in the open.  If it is not, it undermines the level playing field that is part of the fabric of a democratic nation’s strength.   Foreign financial intervention can have the intent to rend the fabric of national consensus or support an antagonist against the consensus.

But the extreme right demands that only “Left wing” donations be registered in its currently debated legislation. This is a grotesque attack on democracy.  A law that targets one group or another is not just a bad law; it is an anti-democratic law.

And to limit the presence of women in the public domain is to encourage the talibanisation of Israel and the Islamisation of Judaism. It is an obscene reaction by a community that is afflicted with an obsessive self worth bordering on idolatry. The oppression of women and their exclusion from society is symptomatic of a community that has lost its Jewish identity and sociopathically externalised its own neurotic fears.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that “an ideological battle must not be waged at the expense of someone who refuses to be sacrificed on its altar.”   The violence of language has not diminished and ideological exuberance remains a poor excuse for libel.

Israel desperately needs an independent public standards authority that is mandated by Parliament to oversee Parliament. Contempt must have its penalties.  To suspend without pay those people in public employment who are unable to control their speech is a good start. And impeachment should be the response we offer to those people who sail with our enemies or attempt to erase our history. It is time to rein in ‘Lashon ha ra’ – the evil tongue.

Know your enemies as you would know yourself

Israel has a problem. Free speech is never absolute. Throughout the free world violence against those who speak out against Islam is creating the effect its perpetrators desired.  Fear. Intellectual apartheid has arisen across the globe. To criticise Islam for its violence and its blood lust is made unacceptable by fear and by economics. Oil and 1,400 million potential customers make for a persuasive silence in choosing ones sleeping partners. Islam has made the UN its propaganda tool and its cash cow. To defame Jews and to demonise Israel is wholly acceptable. Aided and abetted by the fascist left a kind of intellectual autism informs debate. There can be no other explanation for the excessive doctrinal rigidity that permits Muslims, Arabs and their fellow travellers to commit every abuse against human rights but denies Israel the basic rights we in the West take for granted.

It is with this in mind that Israel, surrounded by hostility, is urged by the current US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta today (3rd December 2011) to address what he describes as ‘The Jewish States growing isolation in the Middle East’.

He suggested that Israel reach out and ‘mend fences’ with countries like Turkey, Egypt and Jordan which share an interest in regional stability. He also said that Israel and the Palestinians should ‘get back to the damned table’.

He acknowledged that “If the gestures are rebuked, the world will see those rebukes for what they are and that is exactly why Israel should pursue them."

It sounds fine. But nothing in the extreme anti-Zionist debate that has taken place over the last decade or two supports Leon Panetta’s view.

And Israel is as much to blame for this state of international affairs as its Western interlocutors.

Israel exists because it is a reaction to Islamic, Arab colonialism and prejudice.
Israel exists because Islam is incapable of peacefully co-existing with any minority in its midst except under conditions of Islamic institutionalised inequality.
Israel exists because Jewish Palestinians have a right to self-determination.
Israel exists because the Arab world is inherently racist.

Israel exists because the Jewish state could absorb and did absorb Jewish refugees from the Arab world. This is the same neighbourhood that discriminated against them, and ultimately, ethnically cleansed them from their ‘pure Arab’ lands. And today Israel absorbs black Christian and black Muslim refugees.  The Arab world rapes and kills its refugees. The Arab world has built concentration camps for its refugees and as the third generation of Palestinians are born in its Arab lands it continues to refuse to absorb even a single individual and illegally, denies them the choice of citizenship.

The Muslim nations of Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan – these nations have all been guilty of ethnic cleansing and at least one or two, of genocide.

Israel should be paying attention to the discrimination, religious bigotry and anti-Semitic propaganda of its neighbours because it is a fundamental construct of the war being waged against it and an inseparable trait of Islamic theological identity. It is a failure of Secular Israel that even without a constitution, Israel is more extreme in its anti-religious identity than any other nation at the UN and because of this it is incapable of seriously addressing any issue that has a religious basis to it.

Israel is isolated because the Islamic world smells blood and is excited by it. Israel is isolated because its diplomatic corps is its most dysfunctional government department. Finally, Israel is isolated because it is politically paralysed and ideologically adrift.

Defence Secretary Leon Panetta would be a little more reluctant to point out Israel’s diplomatic failures without first addressing Israel’s neighbours prejudices if Israel consistently stood up for itself and was diplomatically more assertive in the international field.  You cannot win a propaganda war if you do not participate in the debate.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am 'I'? And if not now, when?" Hillel, Sayings of the Fathers.