Earthquakes, heat domes and early wildfires. While the rest of the world is coping with epic natural disasters, here in Israel the catastrophes are one-hundred-percent human-made. The past week’s hot legislative avalanche felt seismic and anticlimactic all at once. The Knesset rushed through a slew of new antidemocratic laws with unprecedented abandon and a large helping of cynicism. The courts put down all of their well-shod feet. If it was an avalanche, the cavalry – even in its depleted state – was prepared to push back the flow.

We feel like survivors, climbing out of the wreck of our county, working through our shock at the boldfaced temerity of our lawmakers, who both exempted, unconditionally, a whole group of able-bodied young people from army service and, in the next day’s vote, extended the term of those who do serve. Who voted to allow the segregation of classrooms by gender and tried to institute a crackdown on our right to free press.

There are some who insist the whole endeavor was less wildfire, more smoke screen. The twisted logic goes like this: The laws (which would be unconstitutional if we had such a thing as a constitution) pass; the courts strike them down; but, in the meantime, Bibi has made a deal that firmly binds the ultra-orthodox parties to the Likud in the upcoming elections. This logic says that the Likud can afford to flip off its own electorate, many of whom make up the ranks of active........

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