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None of this, though, matters to Attias. He doesn't care about healing wounds; he just wants the Arabs hemmed in and out of sight. And we treat Attias like he only speaks for himself, like what he does is happening on the moon.

Of course, not every minister in the government is prejudiced; some are just idiots. A case in point is Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz. He actually thinks that the future of Zion can be secured by changing Arabic place names on highway signs.

Then there is Yossi Peled. This minister-without-portfolio suggests that we boycott US defense contractors and sell arms to nations not on the White House's BFF list to register our displeasure with Barack Obama's Mideast policies.

Apparently, Peled wants Israel to risk $3 billion a year in foreign aid, lucrative defense projects with the US and superpower backing at the UN Security Council to keep on building in the settlements.

A sign of still deeper dysfunction, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently told the Americans that he'd remove illegal outposts if the US took a harder line on Iran. In other words, Bibi would enforce our own laws only if first paid a political bribe.

NOW, TO be fair, we've had crummy ministers before. The Bibi government is just the reductio ad absurdum of our political system - a fractured partyocracy that panders to ideological sectors, not real communities.

See, there's no such thing as an Israeli citizen. There are just haredi voters, secular voters, Arab voters, etc., and we all vote as if no one else existed in the country. Likewise, the politicians act as if they were responsible to no one but their parties.

Accordingly, the system encourages behavior that borders on madness as even the center must pay homage to the radicals. Indeed, if Netanyahu were to fire Lieberman, Attias and Co., their parties would bring down his government.

The only way to end this farce is through regional representation. By dividing the country into voter districts, we can make each and every Knesset member beholden to the people. A first-past-the-poll system in each district would likewise temper extremist positions as assorted factions would need to band together to win.

Unfortunately, our current crop of "public servants" has no interest in fixing the status quo. So to make a change, we will need to rally from the bottom up. If we don't, we may wake up one day to find a country not worth defending.

The writer is a freelance military reporter based in Tel Aviv.