Jack Engelhard
Jack Engelhardhttp://www.jackengelhard.com

The Americans I talk to are baffled over what’s going on there in Israel…. specifically, on Lapid saying that if re-elected, Jews would be forbidden to pray on the Temple Mount.

First, Lapid was never elected. As it is in Israeli politics, he cut some deals and Bingo.

So Lapid gets to stay prime minister until the elections November 1, when anything can happen.

A candidate needs to score 61 Knesset seats to secure a clear-cut victory, which is one homerun less than Aaron Judge’s 62 for the Yankees.

But the Knesset can be terribly inhospitable for a contender with a dream, and it’s been forever since anyone has reached the magic number without jumping through hoops.

Hence, the backroom arm bending to form coalitions, even if it means sharing unholy leadership alliances with members of the Muslim Brotherhood…as with Bennett.

Next, Jews have been forbidden to pray on the Temple Mount for some time, so why is this news?

It became news when Lapid appealed to the Palestinian Arabs to give him their votes…which is when my friends asked, “Is Israel an Arab country?”

Muslim prayers on Temple Mount
Muslim prayers on Temple MountSliman Khader/Flash90

Shocking…but it was meant as a red-flag, a wake-up call.

Generally, these are pro-Israel Christians who get dizzy when trying to keep up with Israeli politics.

Israel was, is, and always will be a Jewish Country. It’s all there from the Hebrew Bible, to the Balfour Declaration and elsewhere, onto the thousands who died on the battlefields, 1948/49, 1956, 1967, 1973…all for the purpose, to this day, through the IDF, of establishing and maintaining Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people.

Never did these Jews fight and die for Israel to become part Jewish, part Arab. That’s ridiculous.

But strange and ridiculous things happen when the leftists run the show, as in America, as in Israel. Over here, Biden has his own two-state solution in the works, which is to bring in millions of illegal migrants in order to diminish American exceptionalism, but to promote America as a third world country.

Over there, Lapid, if “re-elected,” intends to turn Israel into just another country through amending Israel’s Nation-State Law, which, to keep it simple, prioritizes Israel’s Jewishness.

No more of that, for Lapid.

Under the Law, passed 2018, other citizens are assured equal rights, but must understand that Israel is Jewish.

Too Jewish, according to Lapid.

Thus, he supports a two-state solution “to separate ourselves from the Palestinians.”

Has he never heard of Gaza and what happens when you give them territory? Give them even more and they become thorns and thistles to Israel overhead and underfoot.

So far as his promise to keep the Temple Mount safe for Arabs at prayer, but not Jews…where throughout the Holy Land are Arabs forbidden to pray?

There is no such place. Arabs can pray everywhere they want, which indeed does beg the question, whose country is this anyway?

"Lest they pray"; police escort Jews on Temple Mount
"Lest they pray"; police escort Jews on Temple MountFlash 90

Meanwhile, as in the United States, November is coming up fast. Here, Republicans are expected to win the House, perhaps the Senate.

But Democrats have one big edge…the full support of the media, which daily brings up Jan 6, but never Hunter Biden.

Over here, they’re all about stopping Trump from coming back. Over there, they want to make sure, even by law, that Netanyahu has no chance.

Do we?

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com