On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a new stage to the Russian-Ukrainian war with a ground invasion on multiple fronts. One year later, the largest and most deadly conflict in Europe since WWII has devastated Ukraine and exposed Western weakness.The Center for Security Policy hosted a webinar on February 22, 2023 to discuss the on-the-ground reality for Ukraine and the outlook of the war.Moderator:Frank Gaffney: Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy and host of Securing America with Frank Gaffney on Real America’s Voice NetworkPanelists:Andrei Illarionov: Senior Analyst at the Center for Security PolicyChad Robichaux: Founder and president of The Mighty Oaks Foundation; currently providing aid and spiritual resilience to soldiers on the front lines in UkraineMitzi Perdue: Businesswoman, award winning author, and past president of American Agri-Women; previously visited Ukraine multiple times in the last year, had 18 stories published on the humanitarian crisis she witnessed there, and has started a crowd-funding effort to support mine-clearing efforts in Ukraine

Thirty years ago, Israel’s Supreme Court, known as the High Court of Justice (HCJ), launched a judicial revolution in the Jewish State that vastly empowered itself at the expense of the executive and legislative branches — and representative, accountable government, more generally. The leftist-dominated HCJ granted itself the authority to intervene in, and dictate the outcome of, policy decisions, without regard to the rule of law pursuant to the Israeli constitution, statutes or such considerations as the standing of parties, the justiciability of matters on which it acts and the inappropriateness of arbitrarily selected and subjective “guiding principles” and “reasonableness” as the basis for its rulings. The Court also reduced the executive and legislative branch’s legal advisors into servants of the HCJ instead of accountable appointees of the government. In addition, the HCJ solidified its control over the process for selecting judges throughout Israel not only on its own level, but at all levels, with the effect of erasing any genuine representation by Israel’s elected bodies. The cumulative effect of all these revolutionary changes in the separation and balance of power in the Israeli government has been to introduce what can only be described as judicial tyranny, manifested by unchecked rule by judges and the voiding of the democratic essence of Israel by reducing its elected officials to members of advisory bodies. As the population of Israel has become increasingly conservative politically, the Supreme Court has drifted to the far left. The HCJ’s campaign to vastly enhance its power in the service of an increasingly radical leftist agenda has tarnished its reputation, diminished its credibility and alienated it from a majority of the Israeli people. That majority elected the new Netanyahu government which sought and received a mandate aimed at achieving judicial and legal reforms. To that end, the new governing coalition has set out to reset relations between the branches of government in Jerusalem and to restore the nation’s founding checks and balances. In the process, it is not only reviving and renewing Israeli democracy. It is aligning the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s office once more with the best in modern judicial practice, notably in nations like the United States and Great Britain. Such reform is bitterly opposed by the left, which has taken to the streets in demonstrations and evoked inflammatory and even violent rhetoric against the Netanyahu government and its judicial overhaul. Worse yet, the United States has directly intervened and thrown its weight against such reforms. Team Biden appears to be doing so with a view to not only undermining the Israeli coalition right out of the gate. It also seems intent on packing the U.S. Supreme Court and in other ways mutating our own accountable and representative constitutional system.

The new Israeli government is barely a week old, but it faces an unprecedented array of criticisms — including some outright threats — from domestic opponents and foreign adversaries. Worse yet, both are being encouraged and emboldened by the ill-concealed hostility of the U.S. government. As high-level bilateral meetings take place in this country and in the Jewish State, it is time to examine what is at stake and to avoid further, possibly enduring harm to the bilateral relationship. The Netanyahu government faces arguably unprecedented vitriol from its internal critics among the political opposition and the left-leaning opinion-setting elites. Their attacks focus on the governing coalition’s policies with respect to social issues, legal reforms and foreign policy. Especially neuralgic has been the response to a series of proposed reforms that threaten the monopolistic control enjoyed by a narrow Ashkenazi/secular/left-leaning legal fraternity and that contribute to the increasingly unchecked power of Israeli courts.It appears that the Biden administration is fostering such dangerous fracturing of Israeli society and its mondo politico. For one thing, the United States has remained silent amid such threats to the rule of law and demands for an insurrection against the new, democratically elected Israeli government. It has, instead, adopted what is, at best, a posture of probational judgment of Bibi Netanyahu and his coalition, if not outright hostility towards them.Washington is also aggressively challenging the new coalition in Jerusalem by trying to morph the Abraham Accords into the Oslo framework, whereby Israel’s increasingly strategic and friendly bilateral relationships with its Arab neighbors are once again subordinated to the Palestinian issue and regional progress subjected to a PLO veto. On the status of Jerusalem, itself, the United States is increasingly siding with Jordan — while ignoring the Hashemite kingdom’s fraught bid to reinterpret the Jordan-Israeli peace treaty in ways that limit or terminate Israeli sovereignty in the most critical parts of the Old City and promote the concept of the “historic status quo,” a new term that implies complete restoration of Islamic sovereignty over all the holy places as it was in 1857 under Ottoman imperial rule. And on Iran, the United States insists that it has, for the moment at least, backed off its quest of a new nuclear deal. But it has neither taken it off the table decisively nor materially stiffened policies to isolate the regime (e.g., no snap-back sanctions, no broader designation of sanctions, no regime-change suggestions, no severing of all contacts).