Newark, New Jersey — I’m used to visiting stable, dependable America from an ostensible basket-case nation with a perpetually threatened democracy, endless irresponsible populists challenging our legal and political system, and a shrill, superficial and untrustworthy media.

Boy, is the role reversal in full swing.

Our prime minister got castigated by your president after our last elections less than two years ago for ostensible racism, because on election day he warned that Israeli Arabs were streaming to the polling booths. This remark (for which Benjamin Netanyahu duly apologized once the election was won) was deemed conduct most unbecoming by the leadership of the United States of America. Small potatoes by contrast with today’s US, which now boasts a presidential candidate who relentlessly complains about, and sometimes incites against, minority groups, foreigners, and the practitioners of an entire religion.

There has been much (unproven) talk in Israel in recent decades of the cosseting of certain political candidates by the state’s prosecuting authorities — purported liberals deemed by right-wing critics to have gone particularly easy on (“etrog-ed,” in the modern Hebrew vernacular) prime minister Ariel Sharon. In the critics’ view, Sharon should have been prosecuted for a variety of crimes large and small but escaped because the left-wing establishment wanted him, in his late-life dovish incarnation, safely in power. Minor league by contrast with the current US presidential campaign, in which the (lifelong Republican) director of the FBI, James Comey, would seem to be hellbent on smearing Hillary Clinton in the crucial final days before the election.

Read the full article in the Times of Israel