When I was small, I was taught that my people, the Jews, were meant to aspire to be, in deed as in word, a light unto the nations of the world.

I guess times change.

These days, there’s an entire school of Jewish thought – rooted in Israel and its current government, but found among Jews all over – which has come to relate to the world in a very different way.

This is the Israel whose entire message for the world comes down to this: F You.

This is the school that wakes us every day in Israel with news of some new reason to feel shame, and/or to exercise strenuous, by now habitual, denial.

This is the school whose leaders within the cabinet mark peace talks by announcing new homes for thousands of settlers in volatile areas of theWest Bank and East Jerusalem, all the while condemning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s – and their own – decision to release Palestinian prisoners as a gesture of conciliation.

This is the school whose pupils have damaged and destroyed thousands of olive trees owned by non-Jewish farmers who are trying to make a decent and honest living.

Of course, no school like this can be without its dreaded vice-principal, a man of open-faced malice, a bully extraordinaire. A man like Avigdor Lieberman, whose past of violence of tongue and hand only enhances his role as standard bearer for – let’s call it, for lack of a better term – FUism.

After all, here is a man who, a dozen years prior to being cleared of graft charges Monday, was convicted of striking and threatening a 12-year-old boy in his own settlement. Here is a man who has hinted at expelling and even executing Israeli Arabs he deemed insufficiently loyal.

This is a man who ran perhaps the most frankly racist, anti-Israeli Arab major campaign in Israel’s history in 2009, and with spectacular success.

Many’s the true FUist in Israel and abroad, who would like to see Avigdor Lieberman take over here. And now, as of Monday morning, he can.

In theory, this is a day of pure celebration for FUism. In theory, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the intricacies of Mideast peacemaking with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a resplendent Jerusalem hotel Monday morning, the true fates of Israel and Palestine were being decided in a low-level courtroom a few dingy blocks down the road.

Lieberman has Bibi just where he wants him, the FUist theory goes. Come November 24, if the central committee of Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu faction votes to re-ratify its alliance with the Likud, Netanyahu will be so threatened by the threat of being unseated and replaced by Lieberman, that the prime minister will be unable to make any significant progress with peace talks.

The hell with what Israelis as a whole may want. The hell with what even Bibi may want. Two states, some sort of peace. For the true FUist, democracy – especially when it means support for peace – is for the weak, the lily-livered, the world-worshipping. Not for real Jews.

Real Jews, who have no use for the world, or for other Jews – the clear majority of Jews – who disagree with them.

This is what their F You means: I will do precisely as I please. I will settle the hell out of anywhere I want, and I will do it at exactly the time and in exactly the manner which will incense you the most. I will do it because I can. I will do it because, in the end, you won’t dare stop me. I will do it because the Arabs all want me dead. I will do it because the world was bad to the Jews when they were trying to be a light to the nations and all they got for it was the gas chamber. I will co-opt Holocaust and centuries of blood libel and Jew hate and millennia of expulsion, and I will summarize with a simple declaration of intent:

“F you,” I explain.

In retrospect, though, FUism can notoriously and sequentially fall into the very trap of which it holds its opponents guilty: wishful thinking.

Bear in mind that Avigdor Lieberman may one day be just the man to make peace. Because there is every indication that Lieberman, unlike many of the FUists who celebrate him, has no principles whatsoever.

Just a reminder: The Gaza withdrawal, the single most traumatic defeat suffered by the settlement movement, was carried out by the man who invented, defined and embodied Israeli FUism in the first place: Ariel Sharon.

Written FOR