The Histadrut and the “social lobby”, a medley of advocacy groups galvanized by the Histadrut, are the most bitter opponents of Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s economic reforms. The reforms are hurting society’s weaker strata, especially the poor, they claim.

Although no one needs to starve in Israel, there are indeed hundreds of thousands of unemployed as well as those dependent on supplementary income who, caught between low incomes and monopoly-inflated costs, find it difficult to make ends meet.

After careful examination of the record, several media analysts have concluded that many among the foreign media, especially in CNN and the BBC, are actively engaged in a propaganda war designed to delegitimize Israel.

This is a harsh conclusion, but it is obvious that these media mandarins are promoting the Arab propaganda line that Israel is a colonialist power with few legitimate rights to the land, and that it willfully kills innocent Arabs, even children.

Immediately after Oslo, the Palestinian Authority’s “cultural” organs started celebrating “Canaanite festivals.” They were designed to underscore the PA’s newly invented claim that the Palestinian Arabs — whose ancestors conquered Palestine in the seventh century, about 2000 years after the Jewish tribes settled the Holy Land — were actually descendants of the Canaanites, and therefore the land’s “original” inhabitants, possessing a prior claim to it.

Innocently, Israelis dismissed these claims as yet another harmless Arab fantasy. But recently, as widening Western circles subjected to Arab propaganda started questioning Israel’s rights to the land, and suggesting that it was stolen from the Arabs and should be returned to them, Israelis finally realized that the web of historical fabrications, distortions, and outright lies (like the insistence that the Temple Mount was never a Jewish place of worship) spun by the PA and its Western sympathizers is a serious challenge to Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist.

Israeli high schools students can finally learn from two new textbooks (“Struggle and Decline, 1920-1945” and “Uprising and State, 1945-1970”) that the reason the Russian Communist Revolution ultimately failed “was the lack of crystallization of a proletariat and a bourgoise class”, and because “the peasant and the worker were not educated and failed to grasp the nature of the communist economy”. Had they been better “educated” and able to participate, Communism apparently would not have degenerated into a dictatorship, and could have saved humanity from the horrors of capitalism.

Why do our intellectuals, media people and public figures express themselves in such a monolithic fashion? Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, a former Minister of Education, described them recently as “a unitary choir… [that lacks] critical polyphony, singing only one unitary note, [expressing] a collectivist taste”.

Since over fifty percent of the electorate vote center to right, it is also a puzzle why the vast majority of our elites are leftist, often extremely so. And why is there so little creative ferment and almost no dissent within the left?