Israel is experiencing in the last three months an extraordinary political and constitutional crisis, and the country is in turmoil. After five elections in less than four years, Binyamin Netanyahu returned to power last December, to lead the country as its Prime Minister (for a sixth time in a long career where he ruled Israel 15 of the last 27 years).
This time he formed a political coalition with two ultra-orthodox Jewish parties, and with two extreme Jewish right-wing nativist and racist parties, one of them led by a convicted Jewish terrorist, Ben-Gvir, who is currently the Minister of National Security (i.e., Police), eager of creating a ‘national guard’ under his direct supervision.
Netanyahu’s coalition in the unicameral Parliament (Knesset) has a majority of 64 to 56 members from the opposition, though the popular vote’s difference in November 1, 2022, was just of 30,000 ballots to the benefit of the ruling coalition (in a country of 9.5 million people).
In contrast, the previous government that ruled Israel for one year and a half (June 2021-December 2022) included a coalition of several political parties from conservative to progressive, right, center, and left-wing, Jews and even an Islamist conservative Palestinian party. I assume that many Israelis nowadays are nostalgic of that ‘normal’, ‘boring’ coalition that served all of its citizens.
In the last three months, the Israeli government has focused its main political efforts not in facing the Iranian threat or broadening the Abraham Accords, but rather in the so-called ‘judicial overhaul’. This is a legal ‘blitzkrieg,’ a brutal and speedy attempt of enacting a package of seven laws that, if adopted, would neutralize the Supreme Court (and High Court of Justice) as an independent branch of the state, fatally damaging the already vulnerable and fragile system of ‘checks and balances’ in the Israeli democracy.
That package includes the possibility of the Parliament to overrule the legal decisions of the Court; politicization in the selection of judges; forbidding the Court from intervening in the discussion of Basic Laws; and turning the legal advisors of Israeli ministers from professional civil servants into political appointees. The coalition has managed so far only to enact only one related ‘personal’ law that grants Netanyahu immunity from being suspended in his functions by the General Attorney or/and the Supreme Court.
To explain the significance of the proposed ‘judicial overhaul’, the reader should understand that Israel is (still) a liberal democracy (excluding most of the West Bank that is under military occupation). Israel has a parliamentary system where the executive power (the government led by the PM) has to get a coalition of at least 61 out of 120 members of parliament, and then it automatically controls the legislative power (the Parliament). Without a written constitution but rather a series of Basic Laws, the Supreme Court has become in the last decades the ultimate guarantor of the individual rights of Israeli citizens, both Jews and Palestinians (Israel has a minority of two million Palestinian citizens).
Thus, the ‘judicial overhaul’, euphemistically described as ‘needed judiciary reforms to restore the balance between the three branches’, if passed, would turn Israel into an illiberal democracy, in a process that reminds us of what happened to Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. In other words, what Netanyahu and his political partners are trying to do is not a ‘judicial overhaul’, but rather a political coup d’etat instrumented from above (the Israeli version of Fujimori’s ‘autogolpe’ in Peru, or what the former President of Peru, Pedro Castillo, currently in jail, tried to do recently, to get control of the Congress and the Judiciary).
In the case of Netanyahu, it should be emphasized that his direct motivation to engineer these dangerous political/judicial moves is related to the fact that he has been indicted and he is currently facing a three-year long trial for corruption. He has a vested interest in assuring that the future Supreme Court judges will positively discuss his appeal when and if he is convicted.
And now to the good and extraordinary news. A large segment of the Israeli population, including secular and religious, ‘right’ and ‘left’ (in their opinions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), conservative and progressive, intellectuals and workers, business, high-tech entrepreneurs and reservists in the Israeli army have all rebelled against this attempt of a coup d’etat. They brought about the Israeli Spring, demonstrating in the streets for the last thirteen weeks against the government’s intention of changing the political regime. They are the ‘conservatives’ who want to keep Israel as a functioning democracy, whereas Netanyahu and his partners are the true radicals and anarchists.
When Netanyahu fired the Defense Minister to warn him of the dire security consequences of passing the package of laws last week, Netanyahu behaved as a dictator and fired him (by the way, a week later the Defense Minister is still in his job, since he never got the official letter from the Prime Minister; nowadays one can say cynically that Netanyahu is not even capable of firing a minister properly).
On the night of Mar. 26, about 650,000 Israelis (the equivalent of 23 million U.S. citizens!) spontaneously took to the streets. On Mar. 27, following a general strike of the trade unions (with the ultimate weapon of closing Israel’s international airport), Netanyahu paused the attempt of ‘self-coup’, and called for negotiations under the mediation of the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog (mostly a ceremonial figure, but within the general consensus). President Herzog already prepared a conciliatory blueprint to genuinely reform the judiciary, and to keep the Israeli liberal democracy in place, which has been in principle accepted by the opposition leaders. The prospects of a consensual solution to the constitutional crisis remain dim.
As we head this week to celebrate the Passover festival of the Jewish freedom from autocrat Egypt, and as we are on the eve of Israel’s 75th anniversary in three weeks from now, I think that we Israelis can be proud of our extraordinary civil society, the unknown heroes (including many of my colleagues and students at home), who have resisted the attempt to change the political regime in such a brutal way. We can also be proud of the massive peaceful demonstrations, as well as the relatively measured reaction of the Israeli police (compared, for instance, with the turmoil in France regarding the retirement age…).
As a scholar in international relations, I tell my students that the historical record shows us that liberal democracies thrive in economic terms and also tend to win wars and live peacefully with each other, so there is a moral stake and national interest in keeping Israel as a liberal democracy (at least within its sovereign borders). Hence, I use the opportunity to thank President Biden for his pointed remarks and his genuine concern about the fate of the democracy in my country.
Unfortunately, in the last three months we have moved from being the ‘start-up’ nation to the ‘messed-up’ nation, having the worst government in the history of Israel that has lost its domestic political legitimacy in such a short amount of time. Yet, the extraordinary reaction of Israeli civil society shows both the resilience and concern for the fate of Israeli democracy. It is difficult to predict what will come next (the Scriptures warn us against forecasting).
The fate of Israeli democracy remains vulnerable: we do not have a written Constitution or a clear separation of powers; we do not have a European Union above of us to monitor the state of our democracy; we are a small, unitary state, rather than the gigantic federal USA; and we have an existential and intractable national conflict with our Palestinian neighbors far from being resolved. And yet, in this Festival of Freedom (for Jews) and Redemption (for Christians), I am proud of being Israeli and witness the ’Israeli Spring’ and the extraordinary feat of its civil society stopping an attempted coup. Happy Passover and Happy Easter.
