Although Golan is no longer among the leaders of this media fraternity - which since the 1980s has developed in parallel to Barak's legal fraternity - his record is notable for his occasional willingness to expose its prejudices, much as Barak exposed the rationale for his anti-legal judicial legacy last Thursday.

What Golan's record shows among other things is that the source of his anger at Barak's anti-Semitism stemmed from Barak's lack of discrimination between "good Jews," and "bad Jews." Golan made his own - more selective - anti-Semitism clear in an article he published in The Jerusalem Post in March 2005. There he explained that from his perspective, religious Jews cannot reasonably expect the protections afforded to other citizens of a democracy, because they are religious Jews.

As he put it, "Religion and democracy simply do not go together. Democracy requires an open mind, freedom of choice, the ability to criticize. Religion on the other hand is based on virtually blind obedience to its priests. What some in the religious settler population want is to eat their democratic cake and, as believers, have their anti-democratic one, too."

Here, not only did Golan expose his ignorance of basic Judaism - a religion founded on deliberation, debate and rebellion against arbitrary power - he demonstrated his illiberal support for authoritarian governance against his political foes. Like Barak, Golan is comfortable with a regime that prejudicially discards the legal rights of one group in favor of the imagined extra-legal rights of another group.

GOLAN'S SELECTIVE anger at Barak points to a second area of Israeli public life in dire need of expansive reform: The media. Today, Israel's Byzantine media regulatory system places massive, non-economic bars on entry of new actors into the electronic media market. These obstacles prevent reliable dissemination of news and information to the public and make it all but impossible for competition to arise in the war of ideas.

For instance, to receive a radio license, new stations must agree to broadcast the hourly news updates produced by either by the ideologically uniform Israel Radio or by the ideologically uniform Army Radio. That is, by law, radio operators are effectively barred from producing their own news and compelled to maintain the media fraternity's monopoly on news reportage and information dissemination.

For the past 20 years, the media fraternity's rigid ideological uniformity has been enabled by over-regulation and maintained through incestuous self-promotion and replication of news gathering models and news line-ups across the newspaper, radio and television spectrum. Like the legal fraternity it protects and supports, the media fraternity has used its power to successfully bar elected officials from setting the national agenda in line with the wishes of the public as expressed at the ballot box.

For instance, from the onset of the Oslo process with the PLO until Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, the Rabin-Peres government never enjoyed a majority of public support for its controversial appeasement policy. But the media blocked all public debate by silencing Oslo's critics as enemies of peace and warmongers. The situation only deteriorated after Rabin's murder.

The same was the case with the controversial - and disastrous - withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza. The media has similarly blocked debate of government economic liberalization policies, and educational reform policies.

The story is always the same. Any policy that weakens the position of unelected officials in favor of elected officials is wrong and must be blocked. By smothering debate and manipulating the flow of information, the media have for decades eroded Israeli democracy and diminished the importance of the public's franchise by weakening the ability of our elected leaders to serve our wishes as we express them when we vote.

During his first tenure as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu attempted to deregulate the electronic media in order to facilitate competition in the war of ideas. His efforts were stymied at the time by his own political weakness and by an ad hoc coalition of the religious Right and the secular Left which banded together to prevent the free market from endangering their existing media organs. Once Netanyahu's attempt was scuttled, the Left wasted no time in using Barak's court to remove the religious Right from the airwaves altogether.

Today, Netanyahu is stronger, and due to the Internet, the media is notably weaker. The time has come to reinstate his proposed reforms from a decade ago. Television and radio waves should be deregulated. The only bar to entry should be the ability to pay for a broadcast license. The only determinant of success should be a station's ability to survive financially.

Israel today faces massive threats to its security, its economic viability and its national character. To successfully lead Israel though its current predicament, our politicians need the powers and protections of a properly functioning democracy governed by the rule of law - and not by radicalized lawyers and journalists. It is time for Netanyahu, his government and the Knesset to seize the moment and reinvigorate Israeli democracy.