It is hard to see any core principle in Israel's legal system or political system.

 I realized that the problem in Israel in both the political sense and legal sense is an idea in the Talmud. that is a middle position between two opposing opinions does not count if it is just make shift [pollyanna--ad hoc.] you need a middle position that has a reason to it for taking one opinion in one case and the opposite in another case. 

The first case is legal. The original Israeli Supreme Court was a mixture of some who took the English law of the time of the English Mandate-alone. Some tempered that with the law of the Gemara. [Some went more in the direction of Code Napoleon or Roman Law. One of the secularists was both shomer mitzvot [kept the commandments] and a member of Mapai--the Ben Gurion mainly Communistic party.]  Same with government. No uniting line. Likud--straight John Locke. Labor--straight socialism. 

The problem with all this is the lack of a unifying line--core principle. England had common law, belief in Christianity, the importance of one monarch, the Magna Carta and Provisions of Oxford. The USA had a similar set of core principles. The USSR for better or worse had a core principle-Marxism.  It is hard to see any core principle in Israel's legal system or political system.-  or even if there could be.

One thing that is curious is that in Torah law a judge who gets monetary reward for making a decision-all his decisions are null and void. דיין שנוטל שכר לדון כל דיניו בטלים that means a beit din of rabanim is automatically null and void by the law of the Torah. If you add to that the fact that one is not allowed to get paid for learning Torah as it says in Pirkei Avot, nor get paid for teaching Torah as it say in the gemara in reference to teaching TORAH that GOD says  מה אני בחימם אף אתם בחינם "Just like I taught Torah for free , you also must teach Torah for free"--adding all that together it is hard to see how anyone could make money off of Torah.  [Or maybe that is the very idea in the first place? ] 

So you could have a government but you could no have anything like religious judges or teachers getting paid by anyone- not the state--nor individuals.

and  that is a good thing. as for getting rid religious teachers, all i have to say is good riddance. as rav nahman o eloquently termed them '' Torah scholars that are demons'' LeM I:12

 The basic approach to the ARI [R. Isaac Luria] that I hold with is the Reshash--Sar Shalom Sharabi. In fact I prayed with the small sidur of the Reshash for years, and later I found the larger one.  But at some point I decided to go on the path of R. Akiva who according to the gemara ''entered into the higher worlds in peace and left in peace.''--Not that I have anything against being in a state of ''devekut'' [attachment to the infinite light''], but rather I felt one needs the proper ''vessels'' to be able to hold the light-or risk breaking of the vessels. 

[I Also agree with the approach to the Ari of Rav Yaakov Abuchazeira and the Ramchal. Rav Yaakov is the simple ''peshat'' [explanation], while the Reshash is Tosphot. The Ramchal fills in some detail and provides a wider context]

The Litvak Yeshiva World certainly learns TORAH pretty well. There are however a few flaws that i would like to point out. (1) THERE is a lot of seeking ''chumrot'' extra restrictions that often have no basis in halacha at all or little basis. And that leads [as it always must] to ignoring actual requirements of TORAH. (2) THERE is ignoring or ignorance of the herem of the GRA. And though I might be blamed on this same account -but that does not make it okay. (Beside that in my opinion Rav Nahman of Breslov would not be included in the second herem in which the actual signature of the GRA appears at the head of the page.) (3) But it still is a nice fact about the Litvak world that there is an emphasis on not adding and not subtracting from the commandments. That much I have to admit 

When a person thinks about things where reason by its very nature is incapable, these same people go nuts.

It is easy for smart people to see the mistakes of the dumb. But they can also fall into mistakes by being too smart. --It is like the parable of the tortoise and the hare. The swiftness of the tortoise was its own cause of being too slow. So in the Midrash we find the mother of Samuel the Prophet praying that her son should not be too smart nor too dumb. Philosophers have at the disadvantage of being too smart==as Kant himself pointed out in that when the mind ventures into areas of things in themselves self  contradictions arise. and Kant applied that insight to the human personality--when a person thinks about things where reason by its very nature is incapable, these same people go nuts.  

You can see this limitation in Hegel where his system does not recognize the limits of reason. [His system can be likened to PLOTINUS, HEGEL starts from the material world and by the dialectic rises to the Absolute  Spirit. But his system ends with what Plotinus would call THE LOGOS. But plotinus did not stop there. There is something higher than logos, i.e. THE ONE.]

Daddy's little princess becomes the grown lying bitch. .If one is willing to give up one's values because of what a woman says, then he never had any values in the first place.

 KING SOLOMON wrote in Proverbs: ''One man in a thousand I have found (that I can depend on), but even one woman in all that I have not found.'' Does that mean that there is no woman you can depend on, or that the number of women that you can depend on is less than 1/1000? AT any rate, it is clear that Solomon-the wisest of all men [as mentioned twice in the Bible-the Book of Kings and Chronicles], did not think that depending on women is a good idea. Then why are marriage laws in the West deigned to ruin men and their children? It must be because people that make the laws do not learn the Old Testament.

My own thought about this is along the lines of Rav Israel Salanter about the importance of learning Musar [books on Morality from the Middle Ages]-for when men or women concentrate on their responsibilities, they are able to overcome their natural evil inclinations. 

The trouble nowadays is daddy's little princess becomes the grown lying bitch. And whose fault is that? The fact that every man will always support what ever is perceived as a benefit to women, or more accurately any woman.     For men's loyalty one to another disappears as soon as a woman is involved.

And the religious world is no different. The religious bit is just a nice disguise. All Torah values go out the window as long as the approval of a woman is involved 

What I recommend is to learn Torah, Math and Physics [as per the opinions of the medieval authorities that held these last two part of the mitzvah of learning Torah] and not give it up because of a wife that demands one to stop. One's values have to be more important than the puzzy pass. If one is willing to give up one's values because of what a woman says. then he never had any values in the first place.  

It is hard to get philosophy right--I mean the big picture. Plato, Aristotle, KANT are certainly on top and I would have to add Leonard Nelson --of the new Friesian School. BUT even Nelson needs a good deal of clarification as per the friesian.com  of Kelley Ross. However it is a huge mistake in philosophy to have run into the vast array of 20th century ridiculous vacuous pseudo philosophies. [However, I still think that Hegel is a worthy rival of even this Friesian modification of Kant.]  

I think it is too easy to be impressed with 20th century Analytic Philosophy-so as a cure for that disease i recommend Robert Hanna's  book on Analytic Philosophy's fall into the trash bin of history along with existentialism, Post Modernism, The Frankfurt School's neo Marxism. i do not claim to have studied all this thoroughly but i did read a lot of it. The flaws in all of it can take time to see but some are more obvious. It does become to people that are interested in ''big picture'' philosophy--to go back to the serious thinkers--not the superficial ones that sound profound.

 The issue with Hamas is simple. They started the war. so war it is --like Sherman's March through Georgia to the sea. Grind the enemy into the dust. [Why did Eisenhauer not send humanitarian aid to German civilians during WWII?  Why Stalin did not send humanitarian aid to the German civilians in the cities who were starving even though they were not at the front line battles? Japan's civilians were literally starving in all the major cities. WHY did MacArthur not send them humanitarian  aid? Or PERHAPS suggest to relocate them?]