Can Israel Survive the Disaster Netanyahu Has Steered the Country Towards?

Israel – that is, the state of Israel within the so-called Green Line (the pre-1967 boundaries) –  is, or has been until now, a democracy, but a rather weak one. It is far weaker in this respect than India, the United States, Canada, and many Western European countries. It has no constitution, no real distinction between the legislative and executive branches of government, a unicameral legislature (the Knesset), and effectively no checks upon the power of the government except the courts, in particular the Supreme Court that also sits as the High Court of Justice. The current prime minister, Bibi (Benjamin) Netanyahu, and his ministers and supporters are now trying to eliminate that hindrance.

The mechanism they have chosen is a blitzkrieg of anti-democratic legislation in the Knesset, where they have a majority (64 out of 120 seats). Leading this strategy, ironically, is the Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, a fanatical, ideological opponent of the High Court. The first, and crucial, major bill they are on the point of passing changes the composition of the committee that makes appointments to the Supreme Court as well as to lower courts. If the new law comes into effect, the government will have total control of such judicial appointments (as opposed to the present situation, in which there is a delicate balance in the committee between politicians and judges, along with representatives of the Israel Bar Association).

But Levin has already announced a further, detailed program of legislation, which the government euphemistically defines as “legal reform.” It includes a law allowing the Knesset to overrule judgments by the High Court with a simple majority of one vote; a law stripping the legal advisers to government ministries of their binding authority (possibly the most radical and dangerous of the new proposed laws); and other bills enshrining the legal supremacy of the Jews over all other human beings in Israel-Palestine (notably the Palestinian Arab citizens of the state, and of course the nearly three million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories who already lack any and all human rights). There are also bills in progress that would allow the government to incarcerate its critics at will, to suppress freedom of expression and freedom of the press, to enforce elements of Jewish religious law in the country as a whole, and so on. One should bear in mind that, unlike in India and the US, there is no separation of religion and state in Israel; all personal status laws, for example, are within the sole jurisdiction of the religious authorities serving the various communities.

Three forces

Three conceptual matrices, or political forces, are driving this campaign to undermine the democratic foundations of the state, such as they are. The first, and the most desperate, likely has to do with Netanyahu’s personal legal predicament. Since 2019 he has been facing charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust that were submitted to the courts by his own appointee, Avichai Mandelblit, the then State Attorney. The case may drag on in court for years; but the proposed changes in the committee of judicial appointments would allow Netanyahu to stack the High Court with stooges of his choosing (with an eye to the moment when he would appeal a conviction).

Secondly, the hardcore political and social base of the Israeli right – the so-called Bibists – is composed of voters, many of them from families who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s from Arab countries, who have a ferocious, though irrational, hatred for the High Court of Justice. They believe, mistakenly, that the court is a bastion of the old Ashkenazi or European elite, whom they resent, and they fail to see that the High Court is there to protect them and their rights. For the Bibists, like for many people throughout the world, democracy means only majority rule, even if it leads to the tyranny of the majority. Netanyahu has himself incited his base against the courts as part of a populist, authoritarian ideology; the explicit goal is to achieve and maintain Jewish supremacy in all of Israel-Palestine. Bibists detest the very idea of universal human rights and equality for all.

Thirdly, insofar as the anti-democratic forces have an intelligible, though patently immoral, political goal, it is the annexation to Israel of all Palestinian territory west of the Jordan River – that is, the occupied West Bank, which has been colonised for decades by Israeli settlers living on Palestinian land (mostly with the active collusion of the Israeli courts). For the more extreme right-wing nationalists, such as finance minister Bezalel Smotrich who has publicly proclaimed his programme, annexation comes with a plan to expel the entire Palestinian population from their lands and homes. Despite the fact that the record of the High Court when it comes to Palestinian matters is far from honourable, the hyper-nationalists see the Court – with some justice – as a major obstacle to achieving their goals. Over the years, there have indeed been moments when the Court ruled against the government and the Israeli settlers, occasionally even forcing them to evacuate small bits of stolen Palestinian land. There is no doubt that a mass expulsion of millions, whatever the circumstances, would be ruled illegal by the High Court in its present, relatively balanced composition. Hence the need to politicise the court, thereby destroying its independence and subordinating it to the government’s decrees.

Additional factors

Other factors of consequence come into play at this critical juncture. Of all the destructive acts Netanyahu has perpetrated, the most shameful is his rehabilitation and legitimisation of the overtly racist, and often violent, ultra-nationalists, such as the present Minister of National Security (a newly invented post), Itamar Ben Gvir. These ideological heirs to the Kach movement of the rabid Jewish supremacist Meir Kahana, from the lunatic fringes of the Israeli system, have in the past been repeatedly barred by law and cabinet decisions from running for parliament. Now they are lynch-pins in Netanyahu’s extremist coalition. Their strength is growing and, as usual in such cases, Netanyahu’s delusional belief that he can control them has already been shown to be false. For that matter, does he really want to control them? Without them, his coalition will collapse.

Another crucial component of the coalition comes from the ultra-Orthodox or Haredi communities, who constitute at this point 13.5% of the population and whose birth rate must be among the highest in the world. Historically, the Haredi politicians and rabbis were once moderate, even anti-nationalist; but over the last decades their constituency has been “nationalised” and now mostly aligns with the right. Like several of his predecessors, Netanyahu has, to put it simply, bought their allegiance; Haredi men are usually exempt from serving in the army and, generously subsidised by the state, contribute little to the Israeli economy. Given this lopsided situation in which a certain segment of the population carries the whole burden of serving, and if necessary fighting and dying for the state, not to mention paying taxes, while another large segment takes no part in such irksome matters, it is not surprising that the Haredi politicians hate and fear the Supreme Court, which might (in theory) take away their privileges. They obey a higher, God-given law that always trumps the civil courts of the nation-state. That said, the Haredi communities are not homogeneous; one can hope that someday some among them will revert to their original peace-oriented stance. Meanwhile, even voices from within the Likud, the ruling party, have publicly acknowledged that the anti-democratic legislation is meant to appease Haredi voters.

Netanyahu has brought this country to the brink of civil war. There is a deepening economic crisis, the direct result of the anti-democratic blitz. Moody’s has downgraded Israel’s credit status. The high-tech industry, the backbone of the country’s GNP, has in recent weeks transferred billions of dollars in assets to places outside the country. The army, especially the reserve units, is coming unstuck; hundreds of reserve officers, including combat pilots and the intelligence units, have announced that they will refuse to serve under a dictatorship. The secret and not-so-secret services have warned that the crisis is turning into an existential threat to the state. Heads of municipal councils all over the country are threatening to go on hunger strike. America, Israel’s primary support in the world, has backed away from Netanyahu in disgust. Sector after sector has joined the huge, Gandhian-style protests against the new legislation and the political agenda behind it. Last week, close to half a million protesters came out into the streets all over Israel. Something here has shifted; there is an awakening; robust resistance may yet block the government’s designs. It has already forced the prime minister to put a temporary hold on the legislation until the spring session of the Knesset, which began on April 30.

Crisis long in the making

There are deeper roots to the crisis. In a highly non-trivial sense, the state with all its organs and institutions has been taken over by the religious nationalists – once a marginal political force that in recent decades, after the 1967 war, has grown exponentially to the point where they determine government policies. They include, or at least actively support, the half-million or so Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories. Much of Jewish history over the last two millennia or so has been marked by a pendulum swing between a normative, humane, and moderate Talmudic orthodoxy and recurrent outbursts, sometimes on a grand scale, of messianic, eschatological movements that claim, literally and blindly, that God’s redemption is near. The last devastating cataclysm of this sort took place in the seventeenth century in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe with the emergence of the false Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi. We are living through another, potentially fatal such outburst in our time. Israel is split more or less down the middle – not simply and superficially between right and left blocks but between the apocalyptic, fundamentalist hyper-nationalists and the older model of Zionist pragmatists. Note, however, that the latter have been quite prepared to accept and sustain the ongoing state terror of the Occupation, the heart of the Israeli malaise that in itself undercuts the claim that Israel is a functioning democracy.

One last remark. It is wrong to think of Netanyahu himself as motivated by purely egoistic concerns, including the lust for unbounded power and the wish to take revenge on a legal system that has had the temerity to bring him to court. True, he seems oblivious to the catastrophic consequences of his actions. (What would you do if you were prime minister and your Minister of Defence, a hard-core right-winger, told you and the public that the new legislation has to be aborted before the security of the country is badly compromised? Netanyahu, true to form, fired the minister but had to reinstate him a few days later because of nationwide protests.) But it is also clear that the prime minister is a committed ideologue on the right – the far right – who has consistently, from the beginning of his political career, set as his ultimate goal the irreversible shattering of the Palestinian national movement in all its shapes and forms, with its historic aims. He has had some success in this endeavour; Palestine is in disarray. There is only one minor problem with the project. In the long run it cannot, and will not, work.

David Shulman is an Indologist and an authority on the languages of India. A professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he is an activist in Ta’ayush, Arab-Jewish Partnership. His latest book is More Than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India, published in April 2015.