Israel at the brink

It's not the Israel we've been relentlessly cheerleading these last fifty years. It's not an Israel her founding fathers would recognize.

Yesterday there were two attacks on IDF posts by so-called Hilltop Youth gangs. Who are these "Hilltop Youths?" The new generation of militant settlers that have been coddled and courted by the state for far too long.

There are at least 600,000  Israelis who hold German passports. Well over a million who hold American passports. To say nothing of the hundreds of thousands who can fly "home" to England or Canada or France or Brazil. For several generations affluent secular Israelis have kept that other passport in the bottom drawer as an insurance policy of last resort. If the Arab tide ever rose too high, there was a fall back position.

I think a lot of those secular Israelis are rumaging through the bottom drawer these days. Not because of the Arabs. Because of that radical settler fringe that is no longer on the fringe.

Even Netanyahu, who has done more than any leader to nurture the sense of entitlement that is now on full display in the settler population, seems to be taken aback. Tragically, the so-called Christian Zionists and the American Right won't even notice, and the money and the missles will keep right on flowing.

After all, this is predicted in the Book of Revelations.