We’ve finally found something that Republicans, Democrats and independents agree on: if a person is convicted of a felony, they should not be eligible to be elected president.

This, we find, from a Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday.

The backdrop here is, former president Donald Trump is facing multiple indictments with felony exposure for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and maintain classified documents following his single term in the White House.

Not surprising that Democrats (82 percent) and independents (67 percent) think a person (ahem, Trump) shouldn’t be eligible to be president with a felony conviction.

Republicans (58 percent), that’s another story.

But then you can think: the majority of Republicans there are probably thinking the current president, Joe Biden, must be guilty of something, and if he is, he shouldn’t be president, either.

Those same Republicans are still largely coalescing behind their indicted former POTUS, to the tune of 57 percent support for Trump to win the 2024 GOP nomination, per this week’s Quinnipiac poll.

Anti-“Woke” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the one-time heir apparent, is way, way back in second at 18 percent.

It would seem that the big issue for DeSantis is, he’s not facing any current indictments for trying to overthrow the government or keep classified documents for his personal use.

Republican voters, god love ‘em, don’t think Trump should be prosecuted for the coup (85 percent), though you can imagine they’d be all for prosecution if it was a Democrat.

That’s the one thing frustratingly missing from this poll: no questions about Hunter Biden.

The chatter on the right-wing interwebs has it that Hunter Biden’s crimes – two tax charges, a third involving not checking a box on a form – are infinitely more serious than those involving Trump trying to overthrow the government and sell government secrets.

It would be nice to have that quantified.

Maybe next poll.

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A group of Virginia and North Carolina U.S. House members are leading an effort to get the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to deny Mountain Valley Pipeline’s requested extension of its Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for the Southgate project.

The certificate is needed for construction of a 73-mile proposed extension of the MVP that would span from southern Virginia into northwestern North Carolina.

A letter from Virginia Democrats Jennifer McClellan and Bobby Scott and North Carolina Democrats Valerie Foushee and Kathy Manning was signed onto by two dozen other House Democrats.

In the letter, the lawmakers points out the potential climate and environmental justice risks from the pipeline, including risks to drinking water quality.

According to the North Carolina Department of Environment Quality, MVP Southgate would impact 301,994 square feet of regulated riparian buffers, 13,986 linear feet of streams, and 12.4 acres of wetlands.

“As Members of Congress committed to addressing the climate crisis, we… urge the Commission to deny an extension of the Certificate for MVP Southgate,” the lawmakers wrote. “If built, this pipeline would lock homes and businesses in the Southeast into the long-term use of natural gas during a critical moment in which we must transition away from fossil fuels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

Since the initial filing for Southgate, Congress has taken action to fight climate change and advance environmental justice through passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. The law invests billions of federal dollars to support residential and commercial alternatives to natural gas.

“In the five years since the Southgate extension was proposed, the energy landscape has continued to evolve, further diminishing the need for additional gas for residential purposes,” the lawmakers wrote. “Clean energy generation continues to grow, and home electrification has become more accessible through the passage of federal climate and clean energy legislation… Given this changed landscape, the Commission should not rely on its previous and now outdated determination that there is a market need for this pipeline.”

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The Biden administration is becoming increasingly alarmed by the rapid growth of AI, and the growing number of exploitable weaknesses in artificial intelligence-related products.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is pushing AI companies to step up on the security front, before the terminators take over.

“While representing an important improvement upon the status quo, the voluntary commitments announced in July can be bolstered in key ways through additional commitments,” Warner wrote in a series of letters to tech companies including Apple, Midjourney, Mistral AI, Databricks, Scale AI, and Stability AI in which he requested a response detailing the steps they plan to take to increase the security of their products and prioritize transparency.

As AI is rolled out more broadly, researchers have repeatedly demonstrated a number of weaknesses in prominent products, including abilities to generate credible-seeming misinformation, develop malware, and craft sophisticated phishing techniques.

In July, the Biden administration announced that several AI companies had agreed to a series of voluntary commitments that would promote greater security and transparency.

The commitments were not fully comprehensive in scope or in participation, though, with many companies not publicly participating and several exploitable aspects of the technology left untouched by the commitments.

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Rotarian Al Jubitz, founder of the War Prevention Initiative, has pointed out an ill-starred coincidence: the town of Lahaina was burning on the anniversary day, even at the very hour (11:02 a.m. in Japan is 4:02 p.m. in Maui) that the United States dropped its second nuclear weapon on the people of Nagasaki back in 1945.

We have no need to rehash the controversy over whether Japan was ready to surrender even before President Truman decided to use those two city-extinguishing “gadgets” (as Oppenheimer and his team called them in an initial euphemism, one followed by many others, including “peacekeeper”) to quicken the end of a brutal war.

What is infinitely more significant for us is what events like the Lahaina holocaust portend for the looming history of our future on Planet Earth. If Lahaina carries an echo of Pearl Harbor, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, it also ties together the two largest challenges our species faces together, nuclear war and climate catastrophe.

The two crises are unavoidably and intimately linked. The nine nuclear powers are plunging headlong into the renewal of their nuclear arsenals at just the moment they need to be finding novel ways to cooperate to mitigate global warming. The money and scientific brainpower desperately needed for the conversion to sustainable energy continue to be drained into an international deterrence system which, as we have seen in Ukraine, does nothing to deter the scourge of war. And should deterrence break down completely, no victory is possible for anyone.

In the case of both challenges, there is no impediment to workable solutions other than the lack of sufficient political will and the resistance of powerful special interests—though these are more than enough to accelerate our drift toward a twin apocalypse. This drift is perpetuated by a media environment where the indictment of a clownish conman for a dangerous but ultimately banal conspiracy to steal an election takes up a quantum more space in the press than more hopeful stories appearing at the same time, such as the children, exercising political will at its finest, demanding that the state of Montana live up to its constitutionally guaranteed environmental protections.

Even as we drift, a new idea has been pressing into our collective mind for almost a century: the fates of everyone on the planet are intertwined. This was always true, but now we know it both through the science of ecology, and through the poetry of seeing the curve of Earth from space. We’re all in this together. We have only one small home, in the shape of a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.

What I do to conserve energy, or waste it, in my local situation affects everyone else globally, and vice versa. My security is only as strong as the reliability of the circuits and wires in all the nuclear bombs out there, only as strong the training and restraint of the people who maintain them at the ready, only as sure as the communication systems that may be vulnerable to error or misinterpretation, only as healthy as Montana’s willingness to phase out coal. The Golden Rule that appears in all the major world religions turns out to have deep practical, logical, and scientific implications that call for a profound change in the way we think and act.

Our radical interdependence has been reinforced by our explorations of deep space by the Hubbell and Webb telescopes. Everything on earth, human, plant, rock, or the miracle of water, derives from atoms forged in the furnaces of stars. Everything is part of the same emergent story that is 26.7 billion years old. We all come from the same place and face the same fate together.

But our thinking has not caught up to such fundamental principles. We remain religiously sectarian and politically factional, blind to a more planetary vision of our self-interest. The hollowness of our avoidance has become a cavern in which we all sit passively, waiting for experts to find us a way out.

And there are experts. We know a lot about how to resolve our conflicts nonviolently. We know more than we ever did about how to communicate clearly, how to share our separate assumptions across languages and cultures to ensure understanding. We can model possible futures with our computers. With their help we can see how the potential of nuclear winter renders the whole enterprise of the nuclear arms race irrelevant at best, malevolent in fact.

But even the most knowledgeable and experienced establishment experts (as one of the most revered, Henry Kissinger, admits) have no idea what will unfold once the chaos of conventional war, say, between the United States and China over Taiwan, escalates to the nuclear level. There isn’t a single general or statesman on Earth who can predict what will happen, let alone control it to any one party’s advantage. This reality in itself points to the only solution: survival requires us to go to war against war itself.

In the same way the global climate emergency also invites us to go to war against real enemies like rising levels of greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures, and to mobilize on the level of urgency that the allied powers did during World War II, when our leaders knew that citizens were waiting to be called to sacrifice for a larger cause. The decimation of Lahaina has brought out that spirit of cooperative good will—can we summon a similar spirit to prevent global conflagration and build a world where children can flourish?

Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide.”

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Construction will begin next week on a $10 million Waynesboro road project that will open up the new city business and industry park to potential suitors.

Finally, right?

The two-lane, 1.6-mile Waynesboro Southern Corridor, which will run roughly parallel to Interstate 64 between exit 94 and exit 96, will extend Shenandoah Village Drive east to Lyndhurst Road, follow North Oak Lane to the South River, then cross into the Nature’s Crossing Technology Center to connect eventually at South Delphine Avenue.

The new road, which will take two years to complete, has been, in effect, 12 years in the making, as part of the slow road to development of Nature’s Crossing Technology Center, which has been taking forever to spring from the dirt following the politically controversial purchase of 170 acres of agricultural land back in 2011.

City leaders dawdled for several years over what to do with the $3.475 million of scrub brush that was spent to purchase the land from the political allies of former Mayor Frank Lucente, with Lucente himself saying in 2015 that he couldn’t support efforts to partner with VDOT to build the access road needed to open up the property for development out of concern that it “may not prove profitable.

Even as the do-little political leaders dragged their feet, work was done at the staff level to keep things moving forward, pushing the road project into the VDOT Six-Year Improvement Plan in 2013, and leading to the state transportation agency approving the project to qualify for SMART SCALE funding in 2016.

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Virginia politicians are, largely, staying away from the, count ‘em, fourth indictment of former president Donald Trump.

I could only find two on-the-record comments, both brief, from Virginia’s congressional delegation – one from a Democrat, Gerry Connolly, the NoVa Dem who is a senior member of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, the other from a Republican, Bob Good, who maintained his perfect record for using a Republican criminality crisis as an opportunity to claim corruption on the other side.

“The President continues to weaponize the federal government against his political opponents to cover up his corruption,” Good, who represents the Fifth District in the U.S. House, said in a tweet.

For the record, the fourth indictment, announced late Monday night, is a state-level indictment, involving Trump’s efforts to try to get election officials to “find” 11,780 votes to give him Georgia’s electoral votes three weeks after the state had already certified its final results.

But, sure, that’s Biden weaponizing the federal government.

Connolly offered this statement:

“A fourth indictment for Donald J Trump. He and his band of misfits must be held accountable for their efforts to overturn an election. No matter the office one once held, criminal actions that threaten our democracy must be prosecuted.”

Strangely silent on the indictment was Sixth District Republican Ben Cline.

One of the 18 people indicted with Trump in the racketeering scheme in Georgia is Sydney Powell, who, as AFP contributor Gene Zitver noted in a short column on his ClineWatch website, Cline referred to as “my friend” in a social media post last year.

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The Freedom to Vote Act is federal legislation that would build on many of Virginia’s successes to make it easier to vote.

U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia announced her support of the legislation today, which would expand voting by mail, protect early voting and make additional reforms to improve ballot access for the American people.

“In recent years, Virginia has taken major steps in making popular reforms to our democracy — reforms that have made it easier for every voter to make their voice heard. The Freedom to Vote Act would protect Virginia’s progress and bring these reforms — as well as long overdue election standards — to every corner of America, no matter the zip code,” Spanberger said. “At a time when many state legislatures across the country want to go backwards, we need to protect our democracy from these partisan attacks, improve voter access, and promote confidence in our elections. This bill answers that call.”

Several provisions of the federal legislation have already been enacted in the Commonwealth, including automatic voter registration, online voter registration, same-day and Election Day voter registration, and no-excuse mail voting. Additionally, the Freedom to Vote Act elevates the voices of American voters by ending partisan gerrymandering, as well as by cracking down on the undue influence of secret money in U.S. elections.

The legislation is backed in the U.S. Senate by U.S. Sens. Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia.

The Freedom to Vote Act contains three sections:

Voter Access and Election Administration

• Automatic Voter Registration and Online Voter Registration: Enacts an automatic voter registration system for each state through the state’s motor vehicle agency and ensures voters in all states have access to online voter registration.
• Election Day Holiday:Makes Election Day a public holiday.
• Uniform Early Voting: Ensures voters have access to at least two weeks of early voting for federal elections, including two weekends, while accommodating small election jurisdictions and vote-by-mail jurisdictions.
• Same Day Voter Registration:Ensures every state offers same day registration at a limited number of locations for the 2024 elections and at all polling locations by 2026, allowing election officials, especially in rural areas, time to implement the new requirements.
• Federal Minimum Standards on Vote by Mail and Drop Boxes: Ensures all voters can request a mail-in ballot, improves the delivery of election mail, and puts in place minimum standards to ensure drop boxes are available and accessible to all voters.
• Strengthens Voter List Maintenance Standards: Requires that the removal of voters from the rolls is done on the basis of reliable and objective evidence and prohibits the use of returned mail sent by third parties to remove voters.
• Counting of Provisional Ballots: Requires provisional ballots to count for all eligible races within a county, regardless of the precinct they were cast in.
• Standards for Voter Identification: Promotes voter confidence and access by requiring a uniform national standard for states that require identification for in-person voting and allowing voters to present a broad set of identification cards and documents in hard copy and digital form. States that do not have a voter identification requirement would not be required to make any changes.
• Voting Rights Restoration for Returning Citizens: Restores the right to vote in federal elections for people who have served their time for felony convictions after they are released from prison.
• Expanded Voting Access Protections for the Disabled, Native Americans, Military, Overseas Voters, and Underserved Communities: Includes targeted protections to promote accessible voting to communities facing unique challenges.

Election Integrity

• Preventing State Election Subversion: Establishes federal protections to insulate nonpartisan state and local officials who administer federal elections from undue partisan interference or control.
• Protection of Election Records, Election Infrastructure, and Ballot Tabulation:Strengthens protections for federal election records and election infrastructure in order to protect the integrity and security of ballots and voting systems.
• Voter-Verified Paper Ballots, Reliable Audits, and Voting System Upgrades:Requires states to use voting systems that use paper ballots that can be verified by voters and to implement reliable post-election audits. Also provides grants for states to purchase new and more secure voting systems and make cybersecurity improvements.
• Non-Partisan Election Official Recruitment and Training: Tasks the Election Assistance Commission with developing model training programs to recruit a new generation of election workers and provides dedicated grants for training and recruitment.
• Comprehensive Voting System Security Protections: Puts in place election vendor cybersecurity standards, including standards for manufacturing and assembling voting machines, among other key security measures.
• Establishing Duty to Report Foreign Election Interference: Creates a reporting requirement for federal campaigns to disclose certain foreign contacts.

Civic Participation and Empowerment

• Non-Partisan Redistricting Reform and Banning Partisan Gerrymandering: Requires states to abide by specific criteria for congressional redistricting and makes judicial remedies available for states’ failure to comply. Allows states to choose how to develop redistricting plans, including the option of having an independent redistricting commission.
• Combatting Secret Money and Election Interference (DISCLOSE Actand Honest Ads Act): Requires super PACs, 501(c)(4) groups, and other organizations spending money in elections to disclose donors and shuts down the use of transfers between organizations to cloak the identity of contributors. Ensures that political ads sold online have the same transparency and disclosure requirements as ads sold on TV, radio, and satellite.
• State Election Assistance and Innovation Fund: Establishes a self-sustaining fund to finance critical investments in state-led innovations for our democracy and election infrastructure. The fund is financed through an additional assessment paid on federal fines, penalties, and settlements for certain tax crimes and corporate malfeasance. States would be allotted an annual distribution for eligible democracy and election-related investments. States could select to access their full distribution or a partial distribution, or roll over their distribution for future use.
• Nonpartisan Oversight of Federal Election Law: Improves the ability of the Federal Election Commission to carry out oversight and enforcement responsibilities.
• Stopping Illicit Super PAC Coordination: Creates “coordinated spender” category to ensure single-candidate super PACs do not operate as arms of campaigns.

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When the US gives arms to other nations, that is touted as diplomacy. If so, diplomacy needs a major makeover.

In 1978, against all predictions of success, Jimmy Carter sought to bring peace to the Middle East/North Africa (MENA). Others had presumed to try and had miserably failed, with all manner of wars featuring Egypt and others attacking Israel or Israel attacking them.

From 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973, those nations seemed to jump into the buzzsaw of war more than once every 10 years.

Carter sought, and got, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to join him at Camp David to see if they could manage to prevent the next war, at least between Egypt and Israel. Sadat hated Begin. Begin loathed Sadat. What could go wrong?

Begin had a history as a terrorist. True. Against British officers, but also against random civilians in the area. He led the bombing plot that succeeded in killing many of them in the King David Hotel in 1946. If anything, that seemed to make him more attractive to Israelis, who saw that as part of their war of liberation, not a campaign of terror.

Begin was a master of setting low expectations and promising little, while working hard to deliver more. He said he saw Carter’s talks as just preliminary discussions toward when to have more detailed negotiations.

Sadat was a more cosmopolitan, relaxed, fashionable leader, prepared to go big if it worked to the advantage of Egypt.

Carter patiently worked with their teams for 13 days, staying there, not leaving in the sort of Attention Deficit Disorder that plagued other American would-be deal brokers in the past and would again in the future. In the end, they succeeded and the peace between Israel and Egypt has held ever since. Sounds like a win-win, right?

Not so much. There are long-range negative consequences to elements of the side deals that continue to this day and have cost many lives. It all relates to arms transfers–the sale or giving of weapons and munitions as diplomatic carrots. In the case of the vaunted Nobel Peace Prize-winning Camp David Accords, the malevolent aspect was the weapons aid Carter promised to both Israel and Egypt, aid the US has kept up ever since, arming both countries and assuring that many innocent lives would be lost.

With its advanced weapons from the US, Israel inflicts mass civilian damage on Palestine from time to time. For example, during Operation Cast Lead it killed more than 1400 Palestinians, many of them children and other noncombatants, while Israel suffered only 13 mortalities, a 100:1 ratio that has been typical of such armed conflicts. That is structural violence at its worst. This is only possible because of the “peace” deal brokered by Jimmy Carter.

Egypt had made the rights of Palestinians a trumpeted centerpiece of its deal at Camp David. I would assert that the results did not benefit Palestinians whatsoever.

And Sadat may have been a bit liberal compared to Egyptian leaders before and since, but all the weaponry that Carter offered him to induce the success of the Camp David talks has also been used to oppress people–especially Egyptians themselves–and to empower increasingly dictatorial Egyptian leaders. That oppression led to Arab Spring but Arab Spring was unraveled by the well-armed (by the US) Egyptian military and now it is a military dictatorship.

Perhaps Carter could not have foreseen those terrible outcomes of his efforts to bring peace to the region. But after this sort of thing plays out in the MENA, in Central Asia, in Colombia, and elsewhere, diplomats and other international negotiators should know better.

We’ve been here again and again. Arms to Saudi Arabia to make them happy. Then they decimated Yemen, turning a poor country into the worst humanitarian crisis on earth, thanks to weapons and munitions marked Made In America. Meanwhile, US humanitarian aid to Yemen, while helpful, is a snowball thrown into a hell created in part by US arms sent to the region.

Why does all this happen? Is it misplaced altruism?

Oh HTTFN (Hell To The F___ No). This is the arms industry, controlling State, controlling Congress, controlling it all the way to the US presidency.

The biggest obscenely profitable war profiteering corporations benefit enormously whether the US sells weapons or gives them. It all means cost-plus, no-bid contracts for them. The enormity of the grift and the bloodshed is staggering. It’s bipartisan. Trump bragged about his arms deals with Saudi Arabia and Biden is quieter but doing the very same.

Who pays for it?

We do. US taxpayers pay for every nickel in arms aid to Ukraine and many other countries, and it just means the war profiteers are rolling in profits that are reminiscent of what former Office of Management and Budget David Stockman meant when he told a reporter, “The hogs are really feeding now.”

They are feeding off your elder health care.

They are feeding off your student loans.

They are feeding off your sketchy infrastructure.

They take what is withheld from your income at paycheck time and they divert it to war profiteers.

And they are the ones most responsible for the ballooning federal debt and deficit. Congress can fuss all day long over inane culture war issues that are less than a rounding error in the federal budget, but the real theft from all of us who work for a living is from the war profiteer corporations. Congress can pretend that Social Security and Medicare are making us impoverished but it is the contractor corporations who take more than anyone from our paychecks, quite literally.

Only the American people can correct this. It will not be done by those we’ve elected so far, with some noteworthy exceptions. Change it up. Bring in those who are actually committed to fixing this.

This is not naive. This is the new realpolitik.

When American diplomats are dealing with trying to bring peace, they have much more than US weaponry to offer. Much much more. They can offer humanitarian aid. They can offer increased refugee numbers accepted into our country. They can offer many opportunities to foreign students to study here or support for decent universities in the warring nations once they make peace. They can offer better trade terms. There are many carrots, many inducements.

The sticks should be economic and reputational. For example, the US might tell a belligerent nation to stick with the agreement you signed and you will gain, or if you don’t you will be punished economically by the majority of countries and your reputation will suffer.

In short, coercion is not limited to violence and arms never need to be any sort inducement. This should be a law. Congress? Come in, Congress…

Seriously, if it were a law we wouldn’t waste our immense resources approving the $60 billion in military aid to Ukraine (so far). We would instead busy ourselves with finding those who can devise a solution through honest peace talks.

This is how peace came to places like Liberia and to the Philippines. Other gains besides weaponry can bring the parties to agreement.

The US is the number one supplier of weapons and munitions in the world. We are not helping by doing this. We are producing more death, more repression, more war. This can, and should, change.

Dr. Tom H. Hastings is Coördinator of Conflict Resolution BA/BS degree programs and certificates at Portland State University, PeaceVoice Senior Editor, and on occasion an expert witness for the defense of civil resisters in court. 

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The socio-political turmoil in Israel which is manifested by the pervasive hostility, distrust, and disdain between the religious nationalists and secular liberal Jews is tearing the country apart. The Netanyahu government’s determination to subordinate the judiciary to the whims of elected officials does not only compromise the independence of the judiciary, but it has also exposed the other shortcomings of Israel’s democracy which is exacerbating the schism between the two camps and taking the country to a point of no return.

To prevent Israel from self-destruction, the demonstrators who tenaciously and relentlessly poured into the streets by the hundreds of thousands to protest against the so-called judicial “reforms” must not be satisfied by simply restoring the independence of the judiciary. The conflict over these “reforms” offers a historic opportunity to examine and rectify every aspect of Israel’s democracy which has been compromised since the day of Israel’s inception. Regardless of how difficult such an undertaking might be, it is imperative to embark on it to prevent future onslaughts on Israel’s democracy by aspiring authoritarians while ensuring its sustainability for generations to come.

There are five areas of reforms that will preserve and substantially strengthen Israel’s democracy.

Ensuring the independence of the judiciary

For all intents and purposes, the battle over securing the independence of the judiciary has only begun. Given that the government succeeded in passing a law that cancels Israel’s “reasonableness standard,” which allowed the Supreme Court to review and strike down government policies that were deemed unreasonable, the courageous demonstrators must remain vigilant and relentless in their fight for the independence of the judiciary. When the Knesset resumes its legislative session in October, the Netanyahu government is still determined to enact additional laws to subordinate the judiciary to the legislative branch, thwart the courts from intervening in cases of human rights violations, and most critically, take control over the committee that appoints judges, including Supreme Court justices.

The Netanyahu government must have no illusion about what the ramifications will be should it procced with its disastrous plans, as some of the consequences of its earlier actions will only be compounded if Netanyahu refuses to stop his nefarious design to reshape the judiciary and conform it to the whims of his messianic, reactionary and staunchly nationalist partners.

What has already happened should be a wakeup call that the government can ignore only at it peril. High-tech workers and companies are looking to relocate, with 80 percent of Israeli start-ups registered in foreign countries rather than in Israel this year alone; emigration is significantly on the rise; foreign investment in start-up companies is drying out; the shekel is sinking; doctors are looking to relocate oversees; Moody’s and Morgan Stanley are issuing gloomy reports about Israel’s economic future, downgrading its credit and advising their clients not to invest in Israel; thousands of pilots and other military reservists are not reporting for their voluntary service, which impedes military readiness; and Israel’s international standing is at an all-time low.

To be sure, the amalgamation of economic (especially from the high-tech industry) and military power is what has strengthened Israel’s hand politically and diplomatically over the years. The rapid erosion in these particular sectors poses a significant threat to Israel’s security and economic wellbeing.

The demonstrators must now doubly prepare to resort to any peaceful means to thwart further judicial “reforms.” This includes rallies, demonstrations, work stoppages, civil disobedience, and general strikes; they must prepare to for these peaceful acts transparently to leave no doubt in the minds of Netanyahu and his colleagues that the initial fight over “reform” was a rehearsal for what might come, that it could paralyze the country completely should the government not heed their call.

Indeed, as Andrew Jackson observed, “All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary.” Indeed, in the final analysis, an independent judiciary is the beating heart of democracy and any compromise between the government and the opposition that might be achieved must, under no circumstance, undermine the independence of the judiciary.

Separating state and religion

Another fundamental foundation of democracy is the separation between state and religion, which was not the case from the day of Israel’s inception in 1948. Whereas initially David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of modern Israel and first Prime Minister, granted undue authority to the rabbinical institutions for the sake of projecting unity, believing that ultimately “Liberal Judaism” would eventually win out, the opposite has occurred. The religious parties and the state institutions further increased their power and became an integral part of most Israeli coalition governments and the most ardent supporters of the settlements.

The question is, given the presumed secular nature of Israel’s democracy, why should the rabbinical institutions be allowed to govern the lives of liberal Jews concerning marriages, divorce, circumcision, bar mitzvahs, and so on, while restricting the government’s activities on Sabbath?

This runs completely against the essence of democracy, which derives its moral strength and legitimacy from individual autonomy, as people should be able to exercise self-determination and control over their own lives and be granted equal rights as well as accepting equal obligations. As Laurence Overmire observed: “The separation of church and state protects people of all faiths and no faith. No religion should be able to exercise control over a government and thereby dictate its theology onto any diverse group of free people.”

Thus, neither liberal Jews, nor the Hasidic community, nor religious extremists should be allowed to infringe on each other’s right to live as they see fit, which is exactly what democracy stands for when it comes to the separation between the state and religion. However, each side has obligations to the state to meet as well, which is why the religious community in Israel should not be exempt from meeting those obligations as they currently are, shirking military service in favor of Torah study. This too is inconsistent with democracy, when the burden to protect the nation is not shared equally by its citizens.

What is worse is that the religious community depends almost entirely on government funding to finance their institutions—funds which are largely generated from the liberal hard-working taxpayers whom the staunch nationalists and religious fanatics chastise and look down upon for being secular.

The liberal Jewish community, which is the engine behind Israel’s economy, should now insist that, and never rest until, a new basic law is enacted to codify the separation between state and religion that would unshackle secular Israelis from religious doctrine that often infringes on their private life. The law should also require that observant Israelis who do not want to serve in the army for religious reasons, should instead be required to perform community service for two years to serve the nation, only in a different capacity than soldiers. This will not only benefit the communities who require such services, it is consistent with Jewish values to come to the aid of those in need and will also allow these young Orthodox Jews to acquire certain professional skills which they can use to make a living should they elect to do so.

To be sure, the observant community should live, just like the secular community, as they see fit and be provided with necessary funds to run their institutions, provided that they contribute socially to the welfare and wellbeing of the larger Jewish community. A basic law that enshrines the separation between religion and state will offer the only guarantee to prevent the continuing conflict between the two camps while preserving one of the main fundamentals of democracy.

Ending the occupation

Ending the occupation is sine qua non to the preservation of Israel’s democracy. Indeed, as long as Israel remains an occupying power and applies two set of laws in the West Bank—one for Israelis including the settlers, and one set of military laws that govern the Palestinian community—Israel is not and will never be a true democracy. Successive right-wing governments have been systematically misleading and brainwashing the Israeli public to justify the occupation on the grounds of national security. They have been methodically portraying the Palestinians as an irredeemable foe while describing the occupation as central to keeping the Palestinians at bay and preventing them from ever establishing an independent state of their own.

Furthermore, successive Israeli governments have been promoting the notion that the Palestinians are bent on destroying Israel even if they establish their own state, while normalizing the occupation of the West Bank as if it were simply an extension of Israel proper. Eighty percent of all Israelis and 92 percent of all Palestinians were born after the occupation began in 1967. The occupation is dangerously eroding Israel’s moral standing and social fabric regardless of what kind of spins are put on it. It is not only destructive for the Palestinians, instigating militancy and endless violence, it has fueled a rise in antisemitism as the ruthless occupation is being associated with the Jews, as we are currently witnessing. To be sure, the Israeli occupation is logically skewed, politically counter-productive, and misleading from a national security perspective.

The current Israeli government openly calls for the annexation of the West Bank, which not only makes a mockery of Israel’s democracy but leaves the Palestinians with no other option but violent resistance. Indeed, the occupation and the way Israel is treating the Palestinians is apartheid in the full meaning of the word. The multitude of Israelis who have been fighting to preserve the independence of the judiciary must fight with the same vigor, tenacity, and commitment to end the occupation if they really want true democracy to prevail for generations to come.

To that end, the government must remain under unrelenting public pressure to create a path that would lead to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the context of an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian confederation. (My entire proposal on the creation of such a confederation can be found in World Affairs Journal.)

Establishing a constitution

One of the reasons behind the judicial crisis is that Israel does not have a written constitution, especially one that would require a supermajority (two-thirds) of the Knesset to amend any basic law and prevent any amendments by a simple majority, as was the case of the “reasonableness” bill which passed by a meager majority of 64 out of 120.

Israel’s democracy as it is currently formulated lacks necessary safeguards and can be manipulated to conform with the ideological or religious leaning of the government at any given time. The constitution should rest on foundational provisions over which reaching a consensus is a must.

Given however the diversity of opinions, ideologies, religious beliefs, political leanings, and different visions about Israel’s future, it will be extremely difficult to reach a consensus on establishing a constitution. Nevertheless, Israel’s many basic laws can form the basis for a constitution, which can be built upon. To that end, representatives of all current political parties should convene on a regular basis and commit, from the onset, to continue working on drafting a constitution until they reach a consensus.

Some of the fundamental provisions of the constitution should obviously include judicial independence; separation between religion and state; comprehensive human rights regardless of race, color, gender, ethnicity, or religion; equality before the law; freedom of expression and the press; free and fair elections; and a clear definition of the legal prerogatives of the government, its obligation towards citizens, as well as the relationship between the military and the government. Ultimately, a constitution that encompasses all the above provisions will provide the necessary safeguards to protect and sustain democracy.

Reforming Israel’s electoral system

Much can be said about the inefficiency and intricacies of Israel’s electoral system. Israeli elections are largely fair and free but nevertheless there is a need for substantial reform. For the purpose of this article, it suffices to focus on one critical aspect of Israel’s electoral system. Any reforms should aim at reducing the number of political parties by raising the electoral threshold from 3.25 percent to perhaps 7 or 8 percent. This change alone would compel smaller parties who roughly share similar ideological and political leanings to merge and create a larger party, which would also help to reduce polarization. But more important, it would prevent small parties from being kingmakers and having outsized power to form as well as precipitate the collapse of a government if their demands are not met. With fewer parties, each party would naturally gain a greater number of seats and will be able to form a coalition government without the need for a party of only 4 or 5 Knesset members, which under the current structure holds the government hostage to the narrow demands that serve the sole interest of such a party, even at the expense of the nation’s interests.

Moreover, the fewer the number of political parties in any coalition government, the fewer compromises will have to be made in order to avoiding settling on the lowest common denominators to reach consensus on any policy. This change alone would allow most governments to complete their four-year mandates and prevent frequent elections. During the past four years the country went through five elections, which is absurd to say the least. There is no doubt that this one change alone will dramatically improve the government’s functionality and further enhance its democratic underpinnings.

In conclusion, Israel has never faced the kind of social and political turmoil it is currently experiencing. The foundations of Israel’s democracy as a representative government—independence of the judiciary, equality before the law, social justice, religious freedom, freedom of press and expression, and protection of human rights—must be guarded with zeal. These democratic pillars have largely been enshrined in basic laws and any tampering with these pillars betrays the very essence behind Israel’s creation.

Israel, which was established as a home to protect the security and the rights of every citizen and welcomes any Jew regardless of their religious affiliation, country of origin, or gender, has been alarmingly eroding in recent years.

The whole nation must now rise up and revive the moral tenets and the democratic values on which the country was created, and live up to the vision of its founders.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

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“The greatest danger to human civilization and the planet is the inability to believe that tomorrow can be different . . .”

So writes Derek Johnson of the Global Zero movement, an organization committed to a world free of nuclear weapons. Let’s put it this way: If we can cooperate in our own collective suicide — a.k.a., nuclear war — surely, surely we can cooperate in creating a world that transcends such a possibility. Or are cynicism, war and profit so thoroughly worked into the human social structure that I’m kidding myself? You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, people say, superstitiously (it seems) condemning themselves, or at least their children, to inevitable self-annihilation.

How do we turn Sept. 26 — declared by the United Nations to be (I kid you not) the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons — into a reality? Or does the human future have nothing to do with “us”? Are we just spectators of our own lives, stuck in the world our leaders continue to bequeathed us — a world in which “peace” is maintained at gunpoint and standing armies are what God has wrought?

Is disarmament — nuclear and otherwise — possible only in some parallel universe?

The point I’m reaching for is this: Transcending war is not only possible, but we’re a lot closer to doing so than we realize, and by “we” I mean mainstream consciousness, believers in the genie that science let out of the bottle. Believers in what you might call the “nuclear apple.”

Johnson, writing about that first successful atomic explosion, in the New Mexican desert on July 16,1945, describes it thus: “. . . it is a moment of awe and terror: the power of human resolve pushing past preconceived limits, a door we were never meant to open swinging wide.”

I couldn’t help but picture humanity sitting innocently in the Garden of Eden. Hmmm. Let’s see what this tree has to offer. Science, in service to the God of War, takes a bite of the nuclear apple and now we know more than we were ever supposed to know. Within a generation, not only did we drop two humorously named atomic bombs (Little Boy and Fat Man) on two actual Japanese cities, but we launched what became known as the Cold War and began testing and building multi-thousands of far more powerful nuclear weapons. Seventy-eight years later, Planet Earth remains stuck — not simply with its knowledge of nuclear weaponry, but in competitive conflict between nuclear powers and their allies. While about half the planet is calling for disarmament, the nuclear powers shrug and declare it to be impossible.

That’s a lie!

Tomorrow can, indeed, be different. What’s missing, as far as I can tell, is a uniting spiritual — religious? — belief that this is so. Yeah, we ate the nuclear apple, but let’s not forget: Countless millennia of bellicose human history and prehistory created the context in which that happened. Despite an infinite amount of human awareness that war is stupid and pointless, that it accomplishes nothing except its own perpetuation, humanity has continued to organize itself with war as its political core. This means big powers with standing armies. This means the ongoing development of nuclear weapons across the globe — no matter that something will inevitably go wrong and . . . oops. Boom! Destruction is mutually assured.

So with all this said, how the hell can tomorrow be different? My thought on the matter amounts to this: Humanity is in the process of transcending the nuclear apple, of learning how to think beyond war and domination, winning and losing. We’re in the process of learning how to value conflict and work with it, rather than merely fearing and attempting to quash it. This is no small change. We are in the process of creating a structure of spiritual belief that is bigger than war. All of us are involved in it, and will be for the rest of our lives.

Loving war has always felt easy and natural: “normal.” I remember as a boy, sometime in the mid-’50s, attending a military show with my family at a local park known as Ford Field. Families sat on the hillside and down below, literal tanks rolled, guns were fired, smoke and noise filled the air. After the display, as the soldiers withdrew, the boys in the crowd (and maybe the girls too) swarmed down to the shooting site in search of souvenirs. I found a flattened bullet shell, which became my lucky charm for the next few years. I carried it in my pocket. In church — in the midst of the boring service — I quietly held the bullet, as though in boyish (yikes) worship.

My point is that war goes deep in the human psyche and, despite the hell it creates, our inner adolescent all too often refuses to surrender his belief in it. Humanity has not fully transcended the social organizing principle of war — not when you toss in the corporate profiteering that accompanies it, or the political usefulness of a good enemy.

But as I say, many, many courageous people are involved in pushing humanity to transcend war. The threat of nuclear war makes this crucial. Human evolution is in the spotlight. We must find peace in our souls — in our collective soul. I will continue to write about our evolving, but for now let me close by celebrating Veterans for Peace and the Golden Rule Project.

In 1958 a group of Quakers set sail for the Marshall Islands, in a boat named the Golden Rule, where they intended to put themselves in the way of a planned nuclear test at Bikini Atoll. They were stopped by the Coast Guard, arrested in Honolulu — but a global outrage took hold, which ultimately resulted in the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

Members of Vets for Peace recovered and rebuilt the boat. They note on their website: “The reborn Golden Rule is sailing once more, to show that nuclear abolition is possible, and that bravery and tenacity can overcome militarism.”

Love plus courage, folks! This is part of it — evolution in action.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound.

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