On Sunday night, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, a reserve major general whose mother had been a Polish refugee on the S.S. Exodus. His offense was patriotism. The night before, Gallant had appeared on prime-time national television, calling for a dialogue on the fate of the Israeli judiciary and a temporary halt to the legislative process that is, in effect, assaulting it. The growing rift in our society is penetrating the I.D.F. and security agencies. This poses a clear, immediate, and tangible threat to the security of the state. I will not lend my hand to it, he said. A source close to Netanyahu, changing the subject, said that Gallant was fired for his feeble and weak response to the rapidly growing number of reserve officers who, in protest, are refusing to appear for service.
The response from the street was anything but feeble. Overnight, mass demonstrationsof tens of thousands of mostly young peopleerupted across the country, building on what have become regular Saturday-night events in the major cities. (During the rest of the week, some show up for improvised, digital teach-ins and spontaneous strategy sessions in towns and neighborhoods.) Protesters were especially focussed on Tel Aviv, where police used water cannons to clear the vital Ayalon expressway. People lit bonfires and chanted, Democracy or revolt! and, Youve taken on the wrong generationand, increasingly, Bibi, go home.
On Monday morning, all universities suspended classes to protest the legislation, which they described as undermining Israels democratic foundations; key hospitals curtailed medical services; and the Histadrut labor federation, which represents most public-sector employees and in which Netanyahus Likud is assumed to be very influential, joined with business leaders to call for a general strike. Ben Gurion Airport partially shut down. Banks closed after 1 P.M. One of Netanyahus criminal lawyers reportedly said that, if the judicial package went ahead, he would cease representing him. Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister and chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, who had been both Netanyahus commander and a champion of Gallants rise, told a TV interviewer, Pausing the [judicial] overhaul wont stop the protests. Weve passed the point of no return.
By midday, Netanyahu, who had previously dismissed the demonstrators as anarchists, was reportedly planning to capitulate. And key members of his cabinetincluding his justice minister, Yariv Levin, who has spearheaded the assaultwere walking back their threat to resign if he did capitulate; they were considering, instead, how to hold on to power and buy time, with the religious zealots Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich insisting on eventual passage. Then, during the evening, without mentioning Gallant, or restoring him to his post, Netanyahu finally did precisely what his defense minister had asked for: he suspended the effort to bring more elements of the judicial package to a vote in this session of the Knesset and agreed to a period of dialogue with members of the opposition, though he stressed that he reserved the right to reintroduce the package in subsequent sessions. One way or another, we will enact a reform that will restore the balance between the authorities, he said.
Even before Netanyahu acted, the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, and the opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid had welcomed an opportunity for a real dialogue; in fact, Herzog had presented his own formula for judicial reform earlier in the month. Yet both Herzog and Lapid committed to enshrine protections for equality and individual liberty in lawwhich, arguably, some of Netanyahus theocratic allies could never accept. Dialogue, in that case, only delays the inevitable collision. Indeed, it is no longer clear that reappointing Gallant, or even merely suspending the judicial assault, will calm down the streets. (Dialogue with a threat of the packages reintroduction hanging over the talks would be, Barak had said, between the wolf and the lamb, about what to eat for dinner.)
Shikma Bressler, a forty-two-year-old physicist at the Weizmann Institute, has emerged as a leader of the protests. On Monday, she addressed a crowd of some hundred thousand protesters that surrounded the Knesset. She said that the government must abandon the package altogether and agree only to changes that are arrived at by broad agreement. Meanwhile, the far-right La Familia group, which is centered in Jerusalem and has a history of violence, announced that it was also planning to go to the area around the Knesset on Monday night, to protest in favor of the judicial overhaul. The hard rights demonstrations proved small by comparison, but nobody who has witnessed its yearly marches on Jerusalem Day would doubt that they could grow. Israelis, like Californians, live on a geological fault line and try not to think about the big one. But they have also lived on a political fault line, and many now fear that this may, indeed, be the big one.
It is hard now to see how demonstrators will trust Benjamin Netanyahus government remaining in power, irrespective of the suspension of his partys judicial package.
The eruption began last Thursday morning. Netanyahus coalition passed an amendment to what is known as the Basic Law: Governmentbasic laws are pieces of Israels jigsaw constitutionrestricting the terms by which a Prime Minister can be required to take a leave of absence owing to medical incapacity, and so, in effect, prohibiting the High Court of Justice from ruling, as it might have before the new law, on whether Netanyahu could be forced to take a leave if the exercise of executive authority entailed a manifest conflict of interest.
This, all knew, was a premptive strike: Netanyahu is on trial for fraud, bribery, and breach of trustall of which he has deniedand yet he heads a government that is famously aiming to reform, as he puts it, the very judiciary that is trying him. (A complementary bill, not yet enacted, would allow politicians to pocket money donated for their own medical and legal expenses; it might let Netanyahu keep more than quarter of a million dollars that he had received from a relative to use to cover his legal expenses, while potentially inviting all politicians to engage in, well, fraud, bribery, and breach of trust.)
The amendment was also Netanyahus opening gambit, the first law in a legislative package that menaces the judiciary more seriouslya package that Yariv Levin and the chairman of the Knesset Justice Committee, Simcha Rothman, were rushing through serial Knesset votes. The package would, among other things, empower a simple Knesset majority to pass or reverse Basic Laws, forbid the High Court to rule on them, and override the High Courts abrogation of any subsequent law. It would also turn ministerial legal advisersnow legal watchdogs of the (still) independent attorney generalinto the political appointees of ministers.
Most immediately menacing, as it was scheduled for a vote this week, was an amendment to the Basic Law: Judiciary, which would give the coalition control over the method for appointing High Court justices and other judges. (Currently, the nine-person appointments committee includes two ministers, two Knesset membersone or more of whom is from the coalitionthree High Court justices, and two representatives of the Israel Bar Association; seven votes are needed, which accords the governments members a veto.) Pass the law on appointments and you dont need the rest of the package, Suzie Navot, the vice-president for research of the Israel Democracy Institute, told me, because the High Court is the only institution that can limit the power of the majority.
Netanyahu, for his part, claims that it is the High Court that has been roiling the country, promiscuously overturning Knesset legislation that expresses the right of the majority to have its way. On Thursday night, he called for unity but then proceeded to advance six common smears of the Court. (The next night, Danny Kushmaro, a news anchor on Channel 12, Israels main television station, took the unprecedented step of debunking those smears, one by one.) Over the weekend, in London, where he met Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Netanyahu described himself to Piers Morgan as a classical liberal aiming to achieve balance.
The problem, however, has never been an activist Court that doesnt know its limits but, rather, a quasi-theocratic state apparatus that, from the start, has only partially observed liberal-democratic boundariesallowing rabbinic control over marriage and divorce, or separate state-supported school systems, for exampleand left other civil rights unprotected. Netanyahus theocratic allies, to whom hes made himself hostage, see themselves as custodians of the general will, which is, they believe, divine. Democracy is the decision of the majority, the decision of the people, Simcha Rothman said, in 2021, noting that, for himself, the term means doing what the Holy One, blessed be He, says.
Original post:
Has Benjamin Netanyahu's Assault on Israeli Democracy Been Stopped? - The New Yorker