Our main goal is to make Israel a genuinely Jewish state instead of a secular "state of all its citizens." That means changing just about every facet of the governing of Israeli society. Four fundamental areas that must be changed immediately are:
Family-
Strengthening the traditional family structure through legislation and tax benefits.
Unfortunately, family violence is a problem in Israel. According to statistics, the phenomenon seems to be worsening, or at the very least, more people are willing to openly admit to the problem.
It is obvious that the remedy for family violence is not treatment of its symptoms: the police cannot tackle the root of the problem, and neither can new laws, gun control, the court system or shelters for battered women. The issue must be addressed on the background of the Western concept of family, which stands in stark contrast to traditional Jewish family values. Moreover, raising the issue of family violence on the premise that husband and wife are two separate sides with different or even conflicting objectives -- or that assumes that because they are of equal importance they have no natural affinity toward gender specific roles -- only adds fuel to the fire. The Western values that we have adopted -- permissiveness, competitiveness, feminism, individualism and total openness -- are not only incapable of solving the problem, but are rather its cause.
By adopting Jewish family values, we can extricate our society from the vicious cycle of violence. We must once again view the Jewish family as the foundation of our nation. The Jewish family is an organic unit, a mutually created and momentous work of art, a microcosm of the Holy Temple and a vessel for G-d's Divine Presence. In the Jewish family, husband and wife are two halves of one persona, the expression of one, unified will. The Torah directs the family with strong morals and values. Its invaluable guidance nurtures a happy, serene and unified family.
Belief based leadership for Israel must herald traditional Jewish family values and educate our children to strive to create a healthy Jewish family. Nothing can be more integral to the building of a healthy nation.
Education-
A comprehensive curriculum that includes a daily hour of Jewish heritage, Jewish history and Jewish identity for every Jewish child.
The educational curriculum will reflect Israel's values and ethics. Teacher's salaries will be raised significantly to reflect their honored position as educators toward a moral and ethical way of life on both the national and personal level.
While well versed in Western culture, most Israeli children (and adults) are sorely lacking basic knowledge of their Jewish heritage. Even some of the most basic concepts in Judaism -- concepts for which their ancestors sacrificed their lives -- are foreign to today's average Israeli. Most of the soldiers now being inducted into the Israeli army were never in Jerusalem. Most of the students in Israel are not even familiar with the Shema Yisrael prayer.
Judaism does not belong only to religious Jews! Most of the Jews in Israel define themselves first as Jews and only after that as Israelis. Nevertheless, their children are steadily disengaging from their Jewish roots.
Jewish history, tradition, Jewish heritage and Jewish identity studies are no longer a luxury. They are a vital to our future. Educating Israeli youth about their own heritage in a non-coercive manner will connect them and their parents to their legacy and to Jewish values.
As an important step in this direction, Manhigut Yehudit -- The Jewish Leadership Movement -- proposes to include a daily hour of Jewish heritage studies for every student in Israel's educational curriculum.
Security-
Stopping Oslo and the Road Map. Declaring sovereignty over all areas of the Land of Israel that are in our hands. Learn more
Although most people call it security, but actually, underlying our security problems is the basic question of how we relate to our Land.
Stopping Oslo and the Road Map. Declaring sovereignty over all areas of the Land of Israel that are in our hands
Israel's Army: Attack Your Attackers -- First
Anyone familiar with Israel's cities is used to the sight of soldiers and policemen armed in full battle gear on patrol. But instead of guarding Israel's borders or operating deep in enemy territory, they are diligently guarding Israel's shopping malls, busses and restaurants.
The Israeli army has adopted a bunker mentality, but that is no surprise. Its very name, Israel Defense Forces, leaves no room for doubt. Our army -- successor of the pre-State Haganah ("Defense") military organization -- adopted its name and also its mentality.
Modern Zionism transformed self-defense into a holy value. For the Western- inspired Zionist ideology, only self-defense is legitimate, while attack or conquest are deemed immoral. Finding it impossible to function in such a perverted ideological/moral structure, the IDF adopted the principle that "the best offense is a good defense." This slogan, adopted by the IDF in the years that it was highly motivated, is testimony to the moral quandary in which it found itself when attempting to justify attacking its enemies. But even when the IDF attacked, it was but a tactic within the framework of a strategy of defense.
Until this very day, the state of Israel is submerged in the moral swamp of almost exclusively defense-based strategy.
Zionism and Western Values
One of the major factors shaping Israel's distorted security morals is the 2000 years in which the Jewish People were in exile. During these years, Jews were not even allowed to defend themselves, while initiating attack was out of the question. Generations of Jews lived their lives yearning for a mode of self-defense, engraving this aspiration deep in the Jewish psyche.
An even greater influence on the Israeli defense-only maxim is Western (Christian) influence. Modern Zionism is a product of the19th century European Jewish Haskalah movement (the "intellectual" movement called The "Enlightenment" that encouraged the largely religious Jews of Europe to study secular subjects and to abandon religious life style). Inspired by the Western/Christian culture of its times, Haskalah promoted Christian values in an attempt to enable Jews to integrate more successfully into European society.
Turning the Other (Israeli) Cheek
Christianity holds pacifism in high regard, calling upon its adherents to "turn the other cheek" when encountering aggression. This principle made aliyah to Israel with the Socialist, Haskalah -- informed new immigrants who founded the State and defined its security culture. Thus, self-defense and turning the other cheek became super-values of Israeli society. These principles -- recognizing the enemy's motives, justifying his aggression, sacrificing soldier's lives so as not to harm hostile enemy civilians, the willingness to retreat, forgive and to extend the other cheek -- became so much a part of Israel's psyche that even the national camp unwittingly adopted some of these values.
Christianity is a religion of the individual and not of nations. The Western nations never intended to base their national lives on the values of Christian morality. The Jewish People, though, forever strive to lead moral lives -- as individuals and also as a nation. Abandoning its own heritage, the Zionist leadership perversely adopted Christian morals and values on a national level. For the first time in history, a nation is attempting to realize Christian values and to live its national life accordingly. That nation is the Jewish nation in the state of Israel, in our generation.
Facing a cruel enemy, we arm ourselves with the perverted and false Christian standards for war. Not surprisingly, we find ourselves continuously battered and turning the other cheek.
Divine Morals
Return to Jewish values, return to ourselves and return to the Land of Israel means return to Divine morals. Our sages expressed Divine security morals in the adage, "If someone plans to attack you, be sure to attack him first." (Sanhedrin 72).
It is imperative that we return to the life-giving values of the Torah. Our security culture must be motivated by the principle that potential aggressors will be attacked before they have any chance to cause us harm. The battle must move from within our cities to enemy territory. An aggressive security stance is not only necessary, but also Jewishly moral. When this principle is applied in our security culture, we will, with G-d's help, see a genuine change for the better in Israel's security
Defeating Terror: The Jewish Road Map
Terror and the accompanying sense of suicidal despair to which Israel's government has surrendered is a tactical problem that needs an urgent solution. Terror forces us to take a long and hard look at our interaction with the non-Jews living in Israel, as well as the non-Jewish nations of the world.
"It's not enough to fight terrorism", explain the spokesmen of the Left. "You have to fight its motivation, to dry out the swamp in which it develops". In this, they are definitely right. A good political program should remove the Arab motivation to fight against us.
Motivated By Hope, Not Despair
What is the Arab motivation to fight us? The Left claims that the Arabs are motivated by despair. They have nothing to lose, and consequently they are committing suicide. Until now, no one has seriously attempted to challenge this argument. The national camp has accepted as axiomatic the basic assumptions of the Left -- that the Arab despair is due to both a lack of national self-determination and to their economic plight. Thus, granting self-determination to the Arabs and improving their economic conditions would arouse their sense of hope, eliminate despair, and remove their motivation to fight.
However, this argument fails to fit the facts: prior to the Oslo Agreements there were no suicide bombers. Indeed the appearance of the suicide bombers was after the Oslo Agreements, Israel's tremendous concessions, and the hopes they engendered.
The Arabs in Israel have never sought self-determination. There is not and there has never been such a thing as a Palestinian nation. There has never been a Palestinian state, and there is no cultural difference between an Arab living in Shechem or one in Damascus -- not in language, religion, or customs.
The Arabs in the Land of Israel had no independent national aspirations before the advent of modern Zionism. Even afterwards, the Arab national aspiration focused solely on the territory in which the Jews lived. The national Arab movement never focused its aspirations on the Land of Israel but on the State of Israel. It directed its claims solely against those regions that the Jews attempted to hold. The Arab nationalist movement in Israel initiated the War of Independence before Israel conquered Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, and before the right of Arabs to return to their former homes was relevant. Their purpose was clear: To prevent the Jews from establishing their own State in a parcel of land far smaller than that bounded by the "green line".
The Arabs of the Land of Israel never had any national claims regarding Judea, Samaria and Gaza when these areas were controlled by the Jordanian Arab Legion and by the Egyptians. The PLO was established before the Six Day War and focused its national aspirations within the borders of the "green line", on the territory held by the Jews after Israel's War of Independence. It was only after the Six Day War, when Yesha and Jerusalem were liberated by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), that the situation totally changed: the stolen Palestinian homeland was no longer the coastal plain but apparently only the mountain region. Why? Because the Jews were holding it.
There is no positive national Arab motivation. They have no desire to return to a "homeland" in order to realize their "Palestinian" nationalism. The moment any Arab army, whether of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, or Egypt, holds any territory in the Land of Israel, Palestinian nationalism vanishes without trace. The motivation of the Arabs of the Land of Israel is negative -- they simply don't want Jews to be there.
No one has ever accused British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin of being pro-Jewish, but his 1947 analysis has been proven correct:
"To the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. To the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine".
If the Arab motivation is negative, this does not mean that the Arab violence is due to despair. On the contrary, it is motivated by hope. The Arabs cannot be in despair because they never held any land in Israel. Rather, they are full of hope for what seems to them to be the realization of their dream: to eliminate Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.
The more the Jews abandoned their national aspirations in the Land of Israel, the greater the Arab's thirst for murder and their motivation to fight. Suicide bombings occurred only after the State of Israel recognized the existence of the "Palestinian nation", their legitimate aspirations, and their right to establish a state in the Land of Israel. Fostering their hope was the source of the violence. Eliminating the Arabs' hope of driving us out of our country will restore calm.
We are defining the desirable situation vis a vis the Arabs as a state of calm, and not peace. The reason is that the fundamental hostility of the Arabs cannot be eliminated, because of their Islamic culture. In addition, the Jewish interpretation of the word "peace" means far more than non-belligerency and it is preferable for us to realistically define the interim goals of our political program. True peace will only come when the whole world recognizes its Creator, and the special role assigned to His chosen people and the Holy Land.
Extending Israeli Sovereignty Over Yesha
Almost forty years have passed since we liberated Israel's heartland in the Six Day War. Every day that has passed without our imposing Israeli sovereignty over all of Yesha, and without concentrating our major development and settlement efforts in this region, has aroused hopes among our enemies. Every time we froze settlement efforts the Arabs rewarded us with murderous attacks. Every time we uprooted settlements, we intensified the blood bath. The Arabs saw that the Jewish hold on the Land of Israel was weakening and took it as a reason to fight.
A simple examination of terrorism since the establishment of the State of Israel leads us to an unambiguous conclusion: when Israel displays no signs of defeatism, the level of terror is far lower. Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the number of terror victims has skyrocketed, greatly exceeding the number of Israelis victimized by terror from the establishment of the State of Israel and until the accords were signed.
The political program of the belief-based leadership -- "The Jewish Road Map" must not be founded on destroying Arab despair but on destroying Arab hope. Their hope of expelling us will be destroyed when we make it clear that we will always maintain our hold over all parts of the Land of Israel. Eliminating the Arabs' hope for our destruction will eliminate terrorism.
Response to Terrorism
The IDF will be ordered to respond very strongly to any acts of terror that may occur until the Arabs recognize the new reality. Based on the precedent of the pre-State Jewish settlements, Jewish settlements will be built immediately in any region from which terror originates. As soon as the Arabs realize that the Jews are going to stay in the country forever -- and that they will be expelled for attacks upon Jews -- the terror will vanish.
Justice
Electoral reform to ensure that Supreme Court justices are elected by representatives of the people and reflect their values. Learn more
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