All my life I've been pro-Israel for reasons I never gave much thought, and several adult Jews I encountered in my troubled life as a teenager were a great blessing to me at pivotal moments. I was decidedly non-religious then – inattentive to the Roman Catholic teachings of my childhood and only casually dabbling in the New Age paganism that constituted my spiritual life from age 12 to 28 (precisely my years of alcoholism and drug addiction.) My first wife was a similarly non-religious Russian Jewish girl who married me...

Israel’s parliament, or Knesset, passed the first of several judicial reforms proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on Monday, defying protests and pressure from the White House.

The new law prevents courts from using their own idea of “reasonableness” in blocking government policies. Critics had long argued that the “reasonableness” doctrine allowed the left-leaning judiciary to abuse its power, and that it tended to do so more often against Israel’s conservative governments.