“A couple of days before Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu began his third stint as prime minister last week, his new double-hatted finance minister and minister in the Defense Ministry Bezalel Smotrich penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal purporting to explain the new government’s motivations. Entitled “Israel’s New Government Isn’t What You’ve Heard,” Smotrich’s aim was to disabuse Americans of the notion that the new Israeli government is out to fundamentally transform the state and its institutions in ways that may look nefarious from this side of the ocean. In fact, according to Smotrich, the intention of the new government is not to scare Americans, but to emulate them by pursuing a classically liberal agenda of freedom of conscience, free markets, individual rights, and checks and balances directly drawn from the liberal American model. For years, Israelis have told Americans that we have unrealistic expectations that they conform to our democratic model and liberal practices, and lo and behold the paragon of religious nationalist Israeli politics is apparently now on our side!”

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