BY GADI TAUB
The real danger comes from the court itself, which is now asserting a made-up “right” to remove a sitting prime minister—that is, to nullify the results of a legal election and eclipse Israel’s democratic politics and institutions through its own self-perpetuating fiat. The protest movement that arose to defend the court’s power (and its backers among the country’s economic and military elite) are together attempting to block the redemocratization of Israeli politics, as the reforms intended to do.
This is not some innovative hypothesis. If you read Hebrew, you can hear some protesters and their backers in the country’s establishments announcing their intentions more or less explicitly: Democracy is the very thing they are out to prevent. The movement’s ideologues are longtime staunch opponents of the democratic form of government who have devoted whole academic careers to opposing it; their political leaders in parliament and outside it use the term “democracy” in a deliberately deceptive way, as they sometimes admit; and their street-level ringleaders more or less openly confess disdain for the mass of enfranchised citizens. Most poignantly, when it comes to the rebelling IDF reservists—virtually all of them from elite unites, mostly in the air force—they don’t even bother with lip service to the idea of majoritarian decision-making. Rather, they express open contempt for the majority of Israel’s citizens, peppered with thinly veiled references to ethnicity, religiosity, and class.
At least some of this unabashed condescension must be fairly obvious, even to foreigners—especially those like Friedman who claim to be in touch with Israeli opinion. At around the time that Friedman wrote his piece, it seemed like a military coup against Israel’s democracy was in the making. News stories accumulated about more and more reservists declaring they wouldn’t report to duty unless the reform was shelved. Speculation about Israel’s battle readiness, or lack thereof, filled the news cycle. For the most part the media framed the issue as a story about heroic reservist martyrs determined to fight “the battle for democracy” rather than calling it what it was: a bunch of officers threatening to jeopardize Israel’s security if the parliamentary majority did not yield to their demands. As the title of one Haaretz piece read: “A Military Coup Is Underway in Israel—and It’s Completely Justified.”
Some writers were not content with cheering on the rebelling reservists. Sima Kadmon, a senior political pundit for the popular daily Yedioth Ahronoth, wrote a full-page piece on the paper’s prestigious page 3, calling on the brass to take command of the situation. The title said “Only They Can Make Him Stop” (July 19, 2023). The piece called on the IDF chief of staff, the head of Mossad, the chief of the National Police and the head of Shabak (Israel’s General Security Service) to walk into the prime minister’s office and tell him “Enough!” thereby forcing him to overturn his cabinet’s policy. In normal language, we don’t call that “democracy.” We call it a military coup…
The issue is, of course, straightforwardly political. Here’s what’s behind it: When Netanyahu took office, the attorney general ruled that he is barred from dealing with the reform due to a personal conflict of interest. As long as Netanyahu’s trial is going on, he can’t intervene in any policy which has to do with the legal system. This is absurd on its face, not only because the reform has nothing to do with a criminal trial that is already underway, but also because a prime minster, who is the head of the executive, can’t be barred from dealing with the gravest crisis Israel suffered in years. But the AG and the court want a sword above Netanyahu’s head, so they have hinted that disobeying the conflict of interest dictum can trigger the incapacitation clause—if the court so decides. The court does not want the legislature to take away its leverage on Netanyahu by clarifying that this would not be a legitimate use of the clause.
All this should have been laughed away. It’s obviously ridiculous. Except it may amount to the gravest threat to the democratic form of government in the only democracy in the Middle East: a court which asserts its power to nullify elections and remove prime ministers at its whim. Thomas Friedman notwithstanding, this is not a “check on political power”—this is raw political power, unchecked. Anyone who shares the belief in liberty, limited government, and democracy must be horrified by these developments.
But I suspect that none of this is what actually interests Friedman, who appears to be acting according to the dictates of the current Democratic administration. In this sense he may indeed be translating from English to English: He is translating White House policy into simple threats calculated to put fear into the natives.
Biden has his own reasons to want to get rid of Netanyahu. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, no man can embarrass the Biden administration about its Iran policy more than Netanyahu can. Pretending that judicial reform is actually on the minds of the president or his team is a bit of a stretch. But there’s one thing Biden’s team does share with Radman, Ehud Barak, Richter, and many others in the protest movement: They all think the reform could be leveraged to topple Netanyahu. For in the end this is what all this is really about—finding a way to bypass democracy in order to remove a leader that can’t be beaten at the ballot box.