The Feigned Democracy of Israel’s Education Minister

Naftali Bennett’s intervention in the deliberation around his recent statement about “giving our lives” for the settlements occurred Friday on Twitter. “To all those asking: To give one’s life = to make great effort toward a goal,” he tweeted, and ended his clarification by wishing all a peaceful Shabbat.
It was an almost peaceful Shabbat, because even afterward, the debate continued to percolate in an effort to get to the bottom of his initial remarks, made at a conference of all the settlement leaders last Thursday. “We have to mark the dream, and the dream is that Judea and Samaria will be part of the sovereign State of Israel,” he said. “We have to act today, and we must give our lives. We can’t keep marking the Land of Israel as a tactical target and a Palestinian state as the strategic target.”
The reason these words caused a sonic boom is self-evident. The combination of terror and ideology is deadly. The Middle East does not lack crazies who perceive their struggle in the apocalyptic terms of a religious war. That’s why one might immediately wonder whether this remark doesn’t contain some sort of call for Jewish martyrdom, and whether it doesn’t, heaven forfend, encourage the “wild weeds” — the euphemism for those who torched the Dawabsheh home in Duma, those who murdered Mohammed Abu Khdeir, the abusers among the Jewish settlement in Hebron and the pagan worshipers at the “wedding of hate” — to fill a container with kerosene or strap on an explosive bel