Judge Jeanine Pirro: Mitt Romney Awoke a Sleeping Giant.

Judge Jeanine: Mitt Romney awoke a sleeping giant. By Jeanine Pirro. Video. Justice w/ Judge Jeanine. Fox News, March 6, 2016. YouTube.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Making Donald Drumpf Again.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Donald Trump. Video. LastWeek Tonight, February 28, 2016. YouTube.

The Genius Secret Trump Knows About U.S. Politics. By Robert W. Merry.

The Genius Secret Trump Knows About U.S. Politics. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, March 2, 2016.

Merry:

Israel’s Options in a Chaotic Middle East. By Yossi Klein Halevi.

Israel’s Options in a Chaotic Middle East. By Yossi Klein Halevi. Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2016.

Halevi:

Faced with a new Palestinian uprising, Israelis have shelved the idea of a two-state solution—and have found surprising new allies in a disintegrating Middle East.

One recent morning, a Palestinian teenager stabbed a security guard at the light rail station minutes from my home in Jerusalem. About an hour later, I drove past the station and was astonished to see—nothing. No increased police presence, not even police barricades. The guard had managed to shoot his attacker, and ambulances had taken both away. Commuters were waiting for the next train. As if nothing unusual had happened.

The ability to instantly resume the pretense of normalcy is one of the ways that Israelis are coping with the latest wave of Palestinian terrorism. For the last six months, Palestinians—some as young as 13—have attacked Jews with knives and hatchets and even scissors, or else driven their cars into Israeli crowds, killing over two dozen people. (About 90 Palestinians have been killed carrying out the attacks.) The violence was provoked by the unsubstantiated Palestinian claim—strongly denied by the government—that Israel intended to permit Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a place sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

The almost daily attacks tend to blur together, though several have become emblematic—like the stabbing murder of a mother of six in her home while her teenage daughter ran to protect her siblings. Still, by Israeli standards, the violence so far has been manageable. Israelis recall that in the early 2000s, when suicide bombers were targeting buses and cafes, almost as many victims would die in a single attack as have been murdered in the current wave of terror.

Israelis have been here before. In 1992, a monthslong stabbing spree by Palestinian terrorists in Israel’s streets helped to catalyze one of the great upsets in Israeli politics, the election of Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister, ending over a decade of rule by the right-wing Likud Party. The stabbings were the culmination of a four-year Palestinian revolt against Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. This first intifada (“uprising” in Arabic), as it came to be known, forced the Israeli public to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism. It also convinced many Israelis that the Likud’s policy of incremental annexation of the West Bank and Gaza was simply not worth the price.

Until the first intifada, Israelis had tended to regard control of the territories won by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War as benign, bringing prosperity to the occupied as well as to the occupiers. As the intifada took hold, Israeli anger turned not only against the Palestinians but against the ruling Likud. There were antigovernment riots, and Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was widely ridiculed for his passivity and lack of vision.

Today, too, there is widespread disaffection with a Likud government’s response to stabbings. Some 70% of Israelis say that the government has been ineffectual, and nearly as many say they feel personally unsafe. Yet, unlike 1992, there are no antigovernment demonstrations, and few calls for a resumption of the moribund peace process.

Indeed, a private poll recently commissioned by one of the parties in the coalition government reveals that only 4% of Israelis consider the peace process their highest priority—the lowest percentage for any major issue. Improbably, the Likud remains the most popular party. And what little support the Likud is losing isn’t to the left but further to its right, to parties advocating a tougher response to terror and the annexation of large parts of the West Bank.

One reason for the radically different responses in 1992 and 2016 is that Israelis are living in a very different Middle East. The Middle East of the early 1990s seemed a place of promise: An American-led coalition, including Arab states, had defeated Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, while the Soviet Union, sponsor of Arab radical regimes and the Palestinian cause, had vanished. Palestinian leaders seemed ready to negotiate an agreement with Israel, and a majority of Israelis, especially after the first intifada, were ready to try.

In today’s disintegrating Middle East, by contrast, Israelis question the viability of a Palestinian state. Which Arab state, Israelis ask, will be a likely model for Palestine: Syria? Iraq? Libya?

Few Israelis believe that a Palestinian state would be a peaceful neighbor. In part that’s because the Palestinian national movement—in both its supposedly moderate nationalist wing and its radical Islamist branch—continues to deny the very legitimacy of Israel. The Palestinian media repeat an almost daily message: The Jews are not a real people, they have no roots in this land and their entire history is a lie, from biblical Israel to the Holocaust. The current wave of stabbings has been lauded not only by the Islamist Hamas but by the Palestinian Authority. “We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem,” said Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas in September. “Every martyr will reach paradise.”

The result is profound disillusionment with the peace process across the Israeli political spectrum. Writing recently in the left-wing newspaper Haaretz, the political scientist Shlomo Avineri, long one of Israel’s leading voices against the occupation, lamented that the Palestinian national movement regards Israel “as an illegitimate entity, sooner or later doomed to disappear.” Labor Party leader Yitzhak Herzog, in a dramatic reversal of his rhetoric in last year’s election, recently conceded that there was no chance anytime soon for a deal with the Palestinians.

Most Israelis still support, at least in principle, a two-state solution. Many understand that the creation of a Palestinian state is an existential necessity for Israel, extricating it from a growing pariah status in the world at large, from the wrenching moral dilemmas of occupying another people, from a demographic threat that endangers Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state. And they understand that the continuing expansion of settlements on the West Bank will only complicate Israel’s ability to withdraw eventually.

But a majority also regards a Palestinian state as an existential threat. They know that it would place Tel Aviv and Ben Gurion Airport, the country’s main link with the world, in easy range of rocket attacks. A Palestinian state also could result in a Hamas takeover of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israelis sense that they have exhausted their political options toward the Palestinians. In the 1970s and ’80s, there was widespread enthusiasm for the expansion of Israeli settlements in the territories. Sooner or later, many Israelis believed, the Palestinians and the Arab world would accept this “Greater Israel”—a Jewish state including the West Bank and Gaza. But that dream was shattered in the first intifada of the late 1980s.

In its place, Rabin offered an alternative dream, promising (in a slogan of those days) “to take Gaza out of Tel Aviv and Tel Aviv out of Gaza.” In 1993 he launched the Oslo peace process, shaking hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn. But the dream of a negotiated solution also shattered, with the wave of suicide bombings that began in 2000 and became known as the second intifada. The violence followed Israeli offers to withdraw from most of the territories and to uproot dozens of settlements. Almost overnight, a once-vigorous Israeli left, which had assured the public that Israeli acceptance of a two-state solution would be reciprocated by Palestinian moderation, all but collapsed.

Finally, Israel tried a desperate third approach: unilateral withdrawal, dismantling Israel’s settlements and army bases from Gaza in 2005. Many Israelis saw that move as a test case for a future unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank. Ehud Olmert was elected prime minister in 2006 on the promise that he would do precisely that if there was no credible Palestinian partner.

But in the years following the withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas, which seized power there in 2007, fired thousands of rockets at Israeli communities along the southern border, all but destroying normal life there. Israel has since fought two wars in Gaza, trying to stop those attacks. The turmoil—and the vehement criticism around the world of Israel’s military actions, which Israelis overwhelmingly saw as self-defense—has convinced many unilateralists that repeating the process in the West Bank is simply too risky.

Today, Israelis have essentially embraced the status quo as the least terrifying option. The problem with the status quo, however, is that it isn’t static. The current terror campaign has, for the first time, included relatively large numbers of Palestinians from East Jerusalem who, unlike Palestinians in the West Bank, are able to freely travel in Israel. And radicalization is spreading even among Israel’s Arab citizens, a handful of whom have participated in terror attacks.

At the same time, settlement-building in the West Bank continues—though at a slower pace than in the past, according to the Peace Now Settlement Watch, an anti-occupation NGO. This did not deter the European Union from its recent decision to make a distinction in labeling between products made in settlements and those made in what it considers Israel proper—a move endorsed by the Obama administration.

Israel finds itself in perhaps the most frightening time since the weeks before the Six-Day War, when Arab armies massed on its borders and Arab leaders threatened to destroy the Jewish state. Terror enclaves now exist on most of Israel’s borders—Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Islamic State on the Golan Heights and in Sinai, Hamas in Gaza. Tens of thousands of missiles are aimed at Israeli cities and are capable of reaching any point in Israel. Iran is emerging as the region’s dominant power, even as it remains on the nuclear threshold. And a growing international movement to boycott the Jewish state has deepened Israelis’ sense of siege.

And yet—precisely because of the Iranian threat against the Sunni world and of regional instability generally—the Arab world is opening up to Israel in unprecedented ways. Even with the Palestinian issue festering, Saudi Arabia has all but acknowledged a security dialogue with Israel, and Israeli officials are now being interviewed in Saudi media, which not long ago referred to Israel as the “Zionist entity,” refusing even to name the Jewish state.

Security cooperation between Israel and Egypt, focusing on containing Hamas, hasn’t been so warm since the Egyptian-Israeli peace process in the late 1970s. Ironically, as the movement to boycott Israel spreads in Europe and on American campuses, Israel is gaining growing acceptance in the Arab world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently called on Arab leaders to publicly acknowledge that they now regard Israel not as a threat but as a strategic partner.

Beyond the Arab world, an increasingly embattled Turkey is negotiating a rapprochement with the Jewish state. Turkey’s rival, Greece, once among the most vociferous pro-Palestinian voices in the European Union, has become one of Israel’s leading European allies, deepening military and economic ties and opposing the EU’s decision to mark West Bank settlement products—and this under a left-wing government.

In this bewildering new world, Israelis sense not just unprecedented threats but also opportunity. Mr. Netanyahu has suggested the possibility of a regional agreement between Israel and Arab countries that would bypass a dysfunctional Palestinian leadership and create some form of Palestinian state, with security arrangements negotiated between Israel and Arab leaders. But that’s a scenario for an uncertain future at best.

In the absence of any peace process, there are steps Israel needs to take. A settlement freeze would send a much-needed signal that Israel’s long-term interests in the territories are confined to security needs, not to implementing historic claims. The government is debating granting work permits within Israel for tens of thousands of Palestinians, to ease an increasingly hard-pressed West Bank economy. Mr. Avineri, writing in Haaretz, called for replacing the Israeli blockade on Gaza, intended to prevent Iranian weaponry from reaching Hamas, with border controls supervised by Egypt and the EU. With Hamas trying to dig tunnels under the Israeli border and threatening to attack Israeli communities, that isn’t likely to happen soon. Still, Mr. Avineri concluded, Israel needs to begin a long-term process of ending the occupation and saving itself as a Jewish and democratic state.

Meanwhile, Israelis are debating how to balance moral and democratic norms with fighting terrorism. So far the government has resisted demands from the far right to adopt draconian measures, like expelling the families of terrorists to Gaza. When the army chief of staff, Gadi Eizenkot, recently told high-school students that he opposes trigger-happy responses to terrorism, he was attacked by some on the right. But he was publicly backed by the hard-line Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who said, “We need to know how to win and still remain human.”

Boycotted and courted, threatened by genocidally-minded enemies and by a corrosive occupation, and facing the possibility of war at any time on any border, Israelis deal with reality one day at a time. A recent song by the local rock band, Blue Pill, summed up the Israeli way of coping: “We’ve taken some blows / taken a deep breath and moved on.”

Mr. Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, is the author of “Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation.” He is writing a book about the future of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

History’s Role in the War on Jews. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

History’s Role in the War on Jews. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, February 29, 2016.

Tobin:

In recent years, a rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe has called into question the long-term viability of Jewish life in Western Europe. Given the involvement of terror groups in some of the spectacular instances of anti-Jewish violence, much of the discussion about the topic has been on the influence oft immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, who have brought with them a mindset that is rooted in the conflict with Israel. But as much as those incidents are eroding the notion that Western capitals are safe places for those who wear items that identify them as Jews or even shop at businesses that cater to Jews, the problem can’t be pinned entirely on immigrants or radical Islam. What has happened in Europe is that at the same time a movement led by cultural elites has stigmatized the Jewish state and Jews that support it as illegitimate. But the notion that we can separate crude violence from the protests of intellectuals is misleading.

As our Jonathan Neumann pointed out last week recent events at Britain’s two leading universities — Oxford and Cambridge — have started to make “the elemental connection between hostility to the Jewish state and hostility to Jews” apparent to observers. Intellectual thought leaders who have been determined to try to preserve the conceit that their support for isolating Israel is a respectable position that has no connection to traditional Jew hatred are now acquiescing to a cultural shift that treats Jews with contempt. As historian Simon Schama noted last week in the Financial Times, this problem is to be found in the left’s beliefs about Europe’s original sins of imperialism and colonialism. The enthusiasm for the war on Israel among intellectuals is, he believes, to be explained in, “the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Marxist socialism around world,” that means, “militant energies have needed somewhere to go.”

The ability of the left to sell this fraudulent view of history in which the rights of Jews to their ancient homeland is conflated with European colonialism is, the historian thinks, rooted in the ignorance of the history of the Middle East and the Jews on the part of so many otherwise educated people. They have made the jump from criticism of specific Israeli policies to a belief that the creation of Israel was illegitimate and must be rescinded. Schama, who is a critic of the Netanyahu government, points out that such people are not only ignorant of Jewish rights to historic Palestine and the fact that Jewish ties and settlement there has been continuous throughout history but also the facts about anti-Semitism. Schama is correct when he says Zionism is primarily about Jewish self-determination, a concept that is considered sacred when it is exercised by anyone other than Jews.

“History says” anti-Semitism has not been caused by Zionism; it is precisely the other way round. Israel was caused by the centuries-long dehumanization of the Jews.”

If Jews once feared thugs in brown shirts and jackboots, he now points out that the Jew-haters are to be found elsewhere:

It is not the golf club nose-holders we have to worry about now; it is those who, in their indignation at the sufferings visited on the Palestinians, and their indifference to almost-daily stabbings in the streets of Israel, have discovered the excitement of saying the unspeakable, making hay with history, so Israel is the new reich, and a military attack on Gaza indistinguishable from the industrially processed incineration of millions.

That such attitudes have not caught on with the same kind of virulence in the United States is a source of some relief, but it should not lead to complacency. Hostility to Israel on American campuses is growing as academia has proved to be the one beachhead on these shores where the BDS movement has achieved some limited to success. Just as troubling is not merely the way intellectual fashion has branded Israel as the sole nation in the world that is worthy of boycotts and isolation but the fact that Jewish students and faculty are not always pushing back at these calumnies.

The alienation of young Jews from the pro-Israel cause has been a source of great angst in the organized Jewish community. Many on the left blame this trend on the Netanyahu government as well as what they view as an unhealthy acquiescence on the part of the pro-Israel community toward its policies on the West Bank. But the problem here is, as it is in Europe, to be found in an ignorance of history as well as broader trends that have erased a sense of Jewish peoplehood from American Jewish sensibilities.

On a panel discussion in Princeton yesterday where I also spoke about what it means to be pro-Israel and the threat of the BDS movement, Brandeis University historian Rachel Fish pointed out that for all too many young Jews, a belief that there is something dirty about Jews wielding power is at the core of alienation from Israel. In a country like the United States, where assimilation rather than violent anti-Semitism is the only real threat to Jewish existence, the notion of Jews exercising power with the consequent costs and moral dilemmas is off-putting. While I believe it is fairly obvious from the 2013 Pew Survey of Jewish Americans that a declining sense of identification with the Jewish people is responsible for a lot of the negative attitudes about Israel, I think she’s on to something here that tells us something important about attitudes towards anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism as well.

For those who know little about what happens to Jews when they don’t have power, the creation of Israel and its continued importance doesn’t resonate. If you judge Israel solely by a measure of whether it is uniformly perfect as opposed to the context of a war with Palestinians who will not recognize its legitimacy no matter where its borders are drawn, you may be inclined to view it as worthy of being as branded a pariah state. The calls for economic warfare being voiced by groups like Jewish Voices for Peace or for its dismantling by that group’s leftist allies can be seductive when you not only don’t understand that Jews have rights to the country but also that when Jews are left powerless and at the mercy of other peoples, the result is, as Schama notes, a legacy of horror.

The point here is that those who wish to speak up for Israel need to understand that it is only historical ignorance and willful blindness that can cause us to fail to notice that those who wish to deny Jews the rights to statehood and self-defense — rights that are not denied any other people — are engaging in an act of bias that is indistinguishable from anti-Semitism. While academic anti-Zionists see themselves as promoting a point of view that is distinct from those who are killing Jews in the streets of Paris or Jerusalem, they are, in effect, attempting to provide the killers with a moral legitimacy they don’t deserve.

As Schama observes, in the end, Zionism is the “prize whipping boy” of intellectual in the post-colonial era in search of a scapegoat. Such crusades, he says, always require a villain, and we know who will always play that role in the European imagination. If we are to ensure that this same contagion of hate doesn’t spread any further in the United States, it will take not merely a generation armed with the facts and historical knowledge needed to answer the false charges of the Israel-haters. It will also require the moral courage to stand up against the intellectual fashions of our day that will enable us to stand up to the intellectual anti-Zionists call them by their right name: anti-Semites.

Why Trump and Sanders Were Inevitable. By Michael Hirsh.

Why Trump and Sanders Were Inevitable. By Michael Hirsh. Politico, February 28, 2016.

Hirsh:

The Jacksonian Temptation: Trump vs. Cruz. By Jarrett Stepman.

The Jacksonian Temptation: Trump vs. Cruz. By Jarrett Stepman. Breitbart, February 24, 2016.

Stepman:

Trump’s Jacksonian Nationalism Is Corrosive and Dangerous. By Michael Gerson.

Trump’s nationalism is corrosive and dangerous. By Michael Gerson. Washington Post, February 25, 2016. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Gerson:

The main focus of Donald Trump’s media coverage has been his populist disdain for elites. But his main focus has often been a strident version of American nationalism.

Trump has offered this explanation of his own ambitions: “The reason I’m thinking about [running for office],” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011, “is that the United States has become a whipping post for the rest of the world. . . . I deal with people from China, I deal with people from Mexico. They cannot believe what they’re getting away with.”

It is difficult to discern a foreign policy in Trump’s oeuvre of rambling, extemporaneous speechmaking and Twitter pronouncements. He usually communicates without a hint of actual argument. But there is some consistency to his various statements.

Trump believes that U.S. allies in Europe and Asia have become free riders that should defend themselves and pay their own way. He calls the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty unfair. In exchange for the protection of South Korea, he argues, “we get practically nothing.” Mexico is “ripping us off” and purposely sending us criminals. It must be compelled to pay for a continent-wide wall. Trump proposes to “tax China for each bad act” and has raised the possibility of a 45 percent tariff. Vladimir Putin, in contrast, should be given a free hand in the Middle East to go after Sunni radicals and other opponents of the Syrian regime. And the United States should focus on killing terrorists as well as targeting their families for murder, apparently on the theory that war crimes are a demonstration of super-duper toughness.

As Trump’s political prospects have improved, we are required to give these foreign policy views more serious analysis, which is more than Trump himself has done. When pressed on such issues in debates and interviews, he is utterly incoherent. A man who confuses the Kurds with the Quds Force (Iran’s expeditionary military force) hasn’t the slightest familiarity with current events in the Middle East. And it feels like we have, so far, explored only the fringes of his ignorance.

But it is the theory behind Trump’s threats that is particularly dangerous. He is not an isolationist, in the Rand Paul sense. He is more of a Jacksonian (in Walter Russell Mead’s typology) — preferring a strong America that is occasionally roused to kill its enemies but then returns home and avoids entangling international commitments. The United States, in this view, should vigorously pursue narrow national interests and seek to be feared rather than loved.

This conception of America’s international role was common, before America had a serious international role. A Gallup poll from 1937 showed that 70 percent of Americans thought U.S. intervention in World War I had been a mistake. In early 1940, as German intentions of conquest were clear, less than 10 percent thought the United States should send its military abroad.

But this view of America is as relevant to current affairs as political events in ancient Rome. “The great need today isn’t to ‘beat’ core allies such as Mexico and Japan, while working with Vladimir Putin,” George Mason University’s Colin Dueck explains diplomatically. “On the contrary, the urgent need is to constrain aggressors such as Putin while supporting core U.S. allies like Mexico and Japan.”

Less gently put, Trump would be a president who could not reliably tell America’s enemies from its friends. He contemplates actions such as weakening U.S. security assurances to South Korea that might invite war. (Recall the outcome in 1950 of Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s implication that South Korea was outside America’s “defensive perimeter.”) Trump promises actions — like forcing the Mexican government to fund the great wall of Trump — that are, in the formal language of international relations, loony, unhinged, bonkers. His move to impose massive tariffs against China would earn derisive laughter at the World Trade Organization; if he persisted anyway, it might blow up the global trading order and dramatically increase tensions in Asia.

A Jacksonian role for the United States is positively dangerous in a world where many threats — terrorism, pandemic disease, refugee flows, drug cartels — emerge in failed states and hopeless places. It has never been more evident that the success of America depends on an expanding system of free trade, free markets, democratic governance and strong alliances — upheld, in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, by American security guarantees.

Trump’s version of American nationalism without reference to American principles is Putinism by another name. And it is just one more way that Trump would sully the spirit of the nation he seeks to lead.

Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected. By Peggy Noonan.

Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected. By Peggy Noonan. Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2016.

Noonan:

Why political professionals are struggling to make sense of the world they created.

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.

Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.

But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and western Europe is immigration. It is THE issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.

It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.

Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.

If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.

Mr. Trump came from that.

Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.

In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against the Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.

What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.

You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement—charter schools, choice, etc.—because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

And a country really can’t continue this way.

In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.

Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.

Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.

I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.

The Trumpkins’ Lament. By Bret Stephens.

The Trumpkins’ Lament. By Bret Stephens. Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2016.

Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh might be human garbage, but conservatives are wrong to blame them for the disturbing rise of Trump. By Amanda Marcotte. Salon, February 23, 2016.

Stephens:

Where was Mark Levin when Trump was still a big bubble waiting to be popped?

In the 1980s, Eddie Murphy had a hilarious skit in which he explained how it was that Jesse Jackson, then running for president, had a plausible shot at winning the Democratic nomination. The gag involved two white guys voting for Mr. Jackson “as a goof.”

“They get drunk . . . and go like: ‘Let’s vote for Jesse Jackson!’”

“‘I just voted for Jesse Jackson!’”

“And the next day would be like this: ‘He [bleeping] won?’”

I thought of Mr. Murphy’s make-believe drunks while listening to Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin inveigh against Donald Trump following the Republican debate in South Carolina. The Donald had yet again noted that 9/11 had happened on George W. Bush’s watch, adding for good measure that the 43rd president had lied America into war with Iraq.

Donald Trump “sounded like any average host on MSNBC,” marveled Mr. Limbaugh, who was equally aghast that Mr. Trump had defended “Planned Parenthood in language used by the left.”

Mr. Levin was even blunter: “He sounds like a radical kook,” the radio host thundered to his seven million listeners. “To have the leading Republican nominee for president of the United States to make these kinds of statements—and he’s been praised by Code Pink. He should be praised by Code Pink and every left-wing kook organization that hates America. To have him praised for what he said? Terrible. Absolutely terrible.”

It is terrible. So where were Messrs. Limbaugh and Levin last summer, when the Trump candidacy was still a big soap bubble, waiting to be popped by the likes of them?

In July, Mr. Trump said of John McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” The Donald’s trademark insult—coyly calibrated to appeal to voters who lack the brains or the decency to be appalled—should have been the tombstone of his campaign. But it wasn’t, thanks not least to a loud assist from Mr. Limbaugh.

“Trump can survive this. Trump is surviving this,” Mr. Limbaugh exulted. “The American people haven’t seen something like this in a long time. They have not seen an embattled public figure stand up for himself, double down and tell everybody to go to hell.”

In fact, Americans have often seen such figures: Marcus Garvey, Henry Wallace, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche. We just used to have the good sense to dismiss them as eccentrics, lowlifes or clowns. What we haven’t seen are the modern-day keepers of mainstream conservatism developing schoolgirl crushes on the bad boy of the GOP class. “The Republicans are impotent!” swooned Mr. Levin in one September broadcast. “And now this guy [Mr. Trump], who may not be a down-the-line conservative, is standing up to them. And he’s kicking them all over the place.”

Mr. Levin has since become more critical of Mr. Trump, though Mr. Limbaugh seems to be hedging his bets. But both men provided Mr. Trump with the margin of respectability he needed in the early months to make his campaign credible with Republican voters.

So Mr. Trump had once supported socialized medicine? That didn’t matter, said Mr. Levin, because the candidate opposed ObamaCare now. So Mr. Trump was conspicuously ignorant about major foreign-policy issues? Who cares, since he was passionate about the “invasion,” as Mr. Limbaugh calls it, of Latin American migrants. So Mr. Trump wants to ban Muslim immigration? Well, Mr. Levin says, at least “Trump has opened the way” to a “national discussion.”

Above all, the Trump candidacy was supposed to serve its purpose as a truck bomb against the “GOP Establishment”—namely, Republicans in Congress who don’t think repeatedly shutting down the government is a smart political tactic; editorial pages, this one especially, that believe in immigration reform and think the GOP can only win as a party of aspiration and inclusion, not fences and deportation; and anyone else who thinks it’s enough to fault Barack Obama for being a lousy president without also accusing him of being a sworn enemy of the United States.

Well, congratulations, fellas. If your avowed purpose was to knock Jeb Bush out of the race, you’ve won. It must feel great.

Then again, it’s looking less great for Ted Cruz, your preferred candidate, who could only manage a third-place finish in a very red state. And it’s looking even worse for the Republican Party, which shows every sign of wanting to give its presidential nomination to an unelectable buffoon who would lose in a rout—to Bernie Sanders.

It’s a lucky thing for conservatives that the likeliest alternative to Mr. Trump for the nomination is the very “establishment Republican” Marco Rubio, the non-jerk of the season who could actually win in November. Too bad his task will be that much harder thanks to the ideological drunks who, when they knew better, cheered the Donald on.

Male Sexual Nature and the Left’s Culture of Denial. By Dennis Prager.

Male Sexual Nature and the Left’s Culture of Denial. By Dennis Prager. National Review Online, February 23, 2016.

Prager:

How the Working Class Can Regain Its Dignity. By Rachel Lu.

How the Working Class Can Regain Its Dignity. By Rachel Lu. The Federalist, February 23, 2016.

Lu:

The Left’s Problem with Jews Has a Long and Miserable History. By Simon Schama.

The left’s problem with Jews has a long and miserable history. By Simon Schama. Financial Times, February 19, 2016.

Schama:

Anti-Israel demonstrations are in danger of morphing into anti-Semitism, writes Simon Schama.

Much of the student left has “some kind of problem with Jews”, said the bravely decent Alex Chalmers last week in his resignation statement as co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club following a vote in favour of Israeli Apartheid Week.

Labour’s national student organisation is launching an inquiry but the “the problem with Jews” on the left is not going away. In January a meeting of the Kings College London Israel Society, gathered to hear from Ami Ayalon, a former head of Shin Bet, the Israeli domestic intelligence service, who now champions a two-state solution, was violently interrupted by a chair-hurling, window-smashing crowd.

Last summer the Guardian columnist Owen Jones made a courageous plea for the left to confront this demon head on. Since then, however, criticism of Israeli government policies has mutated into a rejection of Israel’s right to exist; the Fatah position replaced by Hamas and Hizbollah eliminationism. More darkly, support in the diaspora for Israel’s right to survive is seen by the likes of Labour’s Gerald Kaufman, who accused the government of being influenced in its Middle Eastern policy by “Jewish money”, as some sort of Jewish conspiracy.

The charge that anti-Zionism is morphing into anti-Semitism is met with the retort that the former is being disingenuously conflated with the latter. But when George Galloway (in August 2014 during the last Gaza war) declared Bradford “an Israel-free zone”; when French Jews are unable to wear a yarmulke in public lest that invite assault, when Holocaust Memorial day posters are defaced, it is evident that what we are dealing with is, in Professor Alan Johnson’s accurate coinage, “anti-semitic anti-Zionism”.

The fact is that the terrorists who slaughtered customers at the kosher supermarket in Paris did not ask their victims whether they were Israelis, much less supporters of Israeli government policies. They were murdered as Jews because in the attackers’ poisoned minds all Jews are indivisibly incriminated as persecutors of the Palestinians and thus fair game for murder.

When the international Boycott,Divestment and Sanctions movement singles out Israel as the perpetrator of the world’s worst iniquities, notwithstanding its right of self defence, it is legitimate to ask why the left’s wrath does not extend, for example, to Russia which rains down destruction on civilian populations in Syria?

Why is it somehow proper to boycott Israeli academics and cultural institutions, many of which are critical of government policy, but to remain passive in the face of Saudi Arabia’s brutal punishment of anyone whose exercise of freedom of conscience can be judged sacrilegious? Why is the rage so conspicuously selective? Or, to put it another way, why is it so much easier to hate the Jews?

Growing up in London in the shadow of world war two my pals and I talked about who might be the bad guys, should evil come our way. We agreed the Jew-haters would not wear brown shirts and jackboots but would probably be like people on the bus. It is not the golf club nose-holders we have to worry about now; it is those who, in their indignation at the sufferings visited on the Palestinians, and their indifference to almost-daily stabbings in the streets of Israel, have discovered the excitement of saying the unspeakable, making hay with history, so Israel is the new reich, and a military attack on Gaza indistinguishable from the industrially processed incineration of millions.

Enter the historian. And history says this: anti-Semitism has not been caused by Zionism; it is precisely the other way round. Israel was caused by the centuries-long dehumanisation of the Jews. The blood libel which accused Jews of murdering Christian children in order to drain their blood for the baking of Passover matzo began in medieval England but never went away, reviving in 16th century Italy, 18th century Poland, 19th century Syria and Bohemia, and 20th century Russia.

In 1980s Syria, Mustafa Tlass, Hafez al-Assad’s minister of defence, made his contribution with The Matzo of Zion, and last year the Israeli-Palestinian Islamist Raed Salah, once invited to parliament by Jeremy Corbyn as an “honoured citizen”, declared that Jews used blood for the dough of their “bread”.

In the 19th century virtual vampirism was added to the antisemitic canon. And the left made its contribution to this refreshment of old poison. Demonstrating that you do not have to be gentile to be an anti-Semite, Karl Marx characterised Judaism as nothing more than the cult of Mammon, and declared that the world needed emancipating from the Jews. Others on the left — the social philosophers Bruno Bauer, Charles Fourier and Pierre Prudhon and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin — echoed the message: blood sucking, whether the physical or the economic kind, was what Jews did.

For the Jews, the modern world turned out to be a lose-lose proposition. Once reviled for obstinate traditionalism; their insistence on keeping walled off from the rest (notwithstanding that it had been Christians who had done the walling) they were now attacked for integrating too well, speaking, dressing and working no differently but always with the aim of global domination.

What was a Jew to do? The communist Moses Hess, who had been Marx’s editor and friend, became persuaded, all too presciently, that the socialist revolution would do nothing to normalise Jewish existence, not least because so many socialists declared that emancipating the Jews had been a terrible mistake. Hess concluded that only self-determination could protect the Jews from the phobias of right and left alike. He became the first socialist Zionist.

But that was to inflict an entirely colonial and alien enterprise upon a Palestinian population, so the hostile narrative goes, who were penalised for the sins of Europe. That the Palestinians did become tragic casualties of a Judeo-Arab civil war over the country is indisputable, just as the 700,000 Jews who were violently uprooted from their homes in the Islamic world is equally undeniable. But to characterise the country in which the language, the religion and the cultural identity of the Jews was formed as purely a colonial anomaly is the product of the kind of historical innocence which is oblivious of, say, Jewish kabbalistic communities in Galilee in the 16th century or the substantial native Jewish majority in Jerusalem in the late 19th century.

None of this unbroken history of Jews and Judaism in Palestine is likely to do much to cool the heat of the anti-colonial narrative of the alien intruder, especially on the left. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Marxist socialism around the world, militant energies have needed somewhere to go.

The battle against inequalities under liberal capitalism has mobilised some of that passion, but postcolonial guilt has fired up the war against its prize whipping boy, Zionism, like no other cause. Every such crusade needs a villain along with its banners and I wonder who that could possibly be?

We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already In Progress. By Joel Kotkin.

We Now Join the U.S. Class War Already in Progress. By Joel Kotkin. JoelKotkin.com, February 16, 2016.

Kotkin: