Sublime

Natan Sharansky, a world-renowned human rights activist

Instead of thanks,” said Peres, “we got bombs.”4 He moved Israel’s elections up by six months, confident that Israelis, repulsed by the Right’s assassination of Rabin, would elect him to lead the country. Indeed, polls showed him with a significant lead over his rival, Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party.

Not getting sucked into the Syrian civil war has arguably been Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political achievement (as of March 2018). If it had wanted to, the Israel Defense Forces could have seized Damascus within a week, but what would Israel have gained from that?

philosophers, called tyranny. They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit. Much of the succeeding political debate in the United States has concerned the problem of tyranny within American society: over slaves and women, for example.

centuries-old institutions are increasingly inadequate for confronting ascendant authoritarians. Merely defending a certain sort of democracy is no way to help democracy as an ideal.

the effects of historical knowledge, which shows us the fairly arbitrary choices with which our reality was made. By reminding us of the malleability of the world, it also reminds us of our freedom; as the Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis put it, it is a form of ‘liquid evil’ to believe that there are no alternatives.8

Populism gives life to Michel Foucault’s celebrated reversal of the Clausewitz dictum: Politics is the pursuit of war by other means.