Worth mentioning that it is Palestinian intransigence that has given it a foothold.

It was the 1973 Yom Kippur War that led many Israelis to give up on the Labor left that had governed the country since independence and turn instead to right-wing emeritus terrorists like Menachem Begin, who masterminded the King David Hotel bombing that killed 91 people in 1946, and Yitzhak Shamir, who was behind the assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British chief minister for the Middle East, and the Swedish UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, as well as the infamous Deir Yassin massacre of 1948.

Not to mention the neoterrorists like Meir Kahane, whose odious Kach movement spawned the Purim killer Baruch Goldstein in 1994.

Then in 2008, when Mahmoud Abbas turned his back on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s peace proposal, the most forthcoming ever offered by an Israeli government, it led to the reelection of Bibi Netanyahu and, ultimately, to the attempted fascist takeover that was rending Israeli society to shreds until this present crisis.

Without the Palestinians’ obstinate determination to “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” Israel today would still be the benevolent liberal democracy its founders envisioned.