Israeli Democracy Faces a Mortal Threat
Israel now finds itself in one of the gravest crises it has ever known. Even after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the dangers the country faced were less tangible: In November 1995, it was clear that a new prime minister would be instated in a lawful, orderly transition. The situation now is different. Three of the Israeli Parliament’s most extremist, nationalistic members—Minister of Justice Yariv Levin; Constitution, Law and Justice Committee Chair Simcha Rothman; and Benjamin Netanyahu, the near-omnipotent prime minister—are acting with all their might and no qualms to create a new legal system in place of the present one, which they claim discriminates against them and does not represent their worldview or values.
Legally, they are within their rights: In Israel’s most recent election, last November, the parties that now form the ruling coalition came out four members ahead in the 120-member Knesset. But they are employing a rushed and belligerent procedure that is unprecedented in Israel. Their objective is to enact not only a series of changes to the extant system, but a total alteration of the country’s DNA.
[Yossi Klein Halevi: Netanyahu’s betrayal of democracy is a betrayal of Israel]
If the initiators of this so-called judicial reform are able to complete their legislative process, they will effectively revoke rule of law in Israel. The judiciary would be subordinated to the Knesset and the government, and new judges would be appointed by politicians. In other words, the citizens of Israel would no longer be guaranteed legal protections against the arbitrariness of the regime. If the process is seen through, Israel will cease to be a democracy and could, under certain circumstances, deteriorate into a dictatorship.
Netanyahu is embroiled in legal proceedings, having been charged with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. He has proved himself willing and able to do anything within his power to alter the entire legal system in order to avoid going to prison. To that end, he has allied himself with the most messianic, thuggish, and unsavory elements of Israeli society, and has handed crucial and highly sensitive government portfolios to their representatives. Does this man have any constraints?
Netanyahu claims that his victory in the last election—which he won by a margin of 30,000 votes—entitles him to enact what he calls the “reform.” Yet Israeli citizens did not vote to authorize such a drastic course of action. Practically speaking, the changes making their way through the legislative process mean that the prime minister would have the power to make whichever decisions he sees fit, with no allowance for the wishes, principles, or welfare of half the nation.
Every Israeli belongs to one or another minority. Each of us might be a victim of abuse under this or that law, subject to institutionalized discrimination based on our sex, race, religion, nationality, or sexual preference. And that, in part, is why hundreds of thousands of Israelis are taking to the streets every week to protest this hasty coup. They are demanding an immediate halt to the consideration of these antidemocratic laws, followed by serious and fair negotiations over the future attributes of Israel’s judicial system. As of this writing, Netanyahu and his people have refused to slow their legislative steamroller even for a second, and the protesters are also going full steam ahead: blocking highways, filling city squares, disrupting daily routines. The entire state is trapped in this chaos; fear and worry prevail.
The coming days will be pivotal for the country’s future. A single bullet could launch the drama into a completely different place, where members of both camps would take the law—or rather, lawlessness—into their own hands, bringing about a far more terrifying reality than the one we are living in. But even if this nightmarish scenario does not materialize, Israel is still in the throes of learning a tragic lesson about itself.
Where to start? Perhaps with astonishment at how quickly most Israelis have lost their sense of power and existential security, a sense that had seemed solid to the point of arrogance, and has now dissolved into a fear that their national home—and perhaps, any day now, their private homes—will burn.
Television and radio studios are filled with pundits prophesying civil war. Right-wingers attack protesters with fists, tear gas, and even stun grenades. There have been attempts to run over protesters. Talk of “blood on the streets” and “the destruction of the Third Temple” is in the air, with heart-wrenching echoes of traumatic historical memories.
Can a stranger comprehend this dizzying shift from a sense of immense power to the fragility and anxiety that has suddenly gripped an entire nation? Without understanding this mechanism of the national psyche, I am not sure it is possible to decipher “the Israeli.” And perhaps the greatest story of Israeliness today is the shattering of an illusion that all Israeli leaders worked so hard to nurture: our miraculous national unity, which we are expected to strive for with all our being. Now that the cracks in our society have been exposed, it is also apparent how brittle and false this so-called unity always was, and how hostile to one another the various constituents and their beliefs are.
[Read: From this hill, you can see the next intifada]
For how can there be genuine unity among factions that view one another as an existential threat? How can there be unity if we have not truly done the national, civic work to contend with the fury, hostility, and affront that have become so entrenched that the notion of splitting the country into the Israel and Judea of biblical times begins to sound worthy of consideration?
How can there be unity, for example, between the hundreds of thousands of settlers who have seized considerable portions of the occupied lands in the West Bank, which they view as ancestral lands deeded to them by the Bible itself, and, conversely, those Israelis who perceive the settlers as the primary obstacle to a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians—in other words, those Israelis who hold that the settlers pose the greatest threat to their children’s future?
And what of the more than 1 million ultra-Orthodox Jews who refuse to send their children to military service, because, according to their faith, praying and studying Torah is what guarantees the continued existence of the Jewish people? How can unity, or even a reasonable partnership, exist between them and the Israelis whose sons and daughters are required by law to serve in the military for up to three years, some of whom sacrifice their lives for the country?
For so many years, since the State of Israel was established, the majority of Israelis have agreed to this warped arrangement, whereby religion binds itself around politics like ivy, feeds off it, and dictates to all other Israelis a way of life that is alien to them. Are we now taking the first perceptual steps toward a separation of religion and state?
There are other problems, other infected areas—the status of Israel’s Arab citizens, for example—that have remained unresolved through the state’s 75 years of existence, maintaining an impossible and near-miraculous equilibrium. After the shock waves of hostility and mutual hatred provoked by the current government, these questions may well demand real answers and force the creation of a new order, a revised contract among the disparate Israeli tribes—and between each of them and their state.
And we have barely spoken of the occupation. The leaders of the protest movement have wisely decided to suspend—at least for now—the most crucial debate around which Israeli society has been divided for 55 years, since Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Even someone like me, who has been fighting against the occupation for more than four decades, recognizes—albeit sadly—that a public discussion of the occupation would simply divide and dismantle the protest movement, driving away large sectors of the public. At present, most Israelis simply cannot look clearly at the occupation. Not yet. But I find some consolation in the fact that political and social questions that for years have stood stagnant, like swampy waters, may now be starting to move. And perhaps the prospect of rebooting the occupation question will resurface in a new, creative, bolder way, and begin to affect people’s awareness.
Tectonic plates are shifting beneath our feet. I imagine that the people who are trying to hijack the country, who have the audacity to rewrite the Israeli legal system, were not expecting such widespread and zealous resistance. Even the protesters, those who object to the so-called reform, seem surprised at their own founts of fervor, passion, and courage. Hundreds of corporations and organizations, individuals including current and former Shin Bet and Mossad officials, tech executives, El Al pilots, and many other public and private entities are joining the protesters’ ranks every day. Thousands of reservists, who constitute the army’s backbone, have announced that they will not report for duty. Even retirement-home residents in wheelchairs are out on the streets, protesting what they see as the destruction of the state they fought for.
[Michael Oren: Israel’s tectonic struggle]
For years, many of these activists—particularly the youngest among them—were accused of being selfish, cynical, spoiled, of having neither roots nor any sense of belonging to their country. And they were subjected to the worst possible accusation in Israel: being unpatriotic. But then came this great upheaval, and to everyone’s astonishment, it prompted hundreds of thousands of Israelis to uncover both new and old stores of identity, values, and belonging—even to confess their love of Israel, a sentiment previously considered distasteful in some circles.
People who for decades did not fly the blue-and-white Star of David that is Israel’s flag now brandish it at demonstrations, a little awkwardly but nevertheless with pride in their reclamation of what the right wing has appropriated. Many Israelis have suddenly discovered that it is possible to love their country—not with a sentimental, kitschy love, not with fascist idolatry, but rather with a clear-eyed devotion that stems from a desire to make this country our home, and a genuine aspiration to live in peace with our neighbors. This newfound emotion is grounded in a considered and mature civic-mindedness, and an understanding—now all the more profound—of the spirit of democracy, liberalism, equality, and freedom.
This article was translated by Jessica Cohen.