Hardly. Israel has been running an apartheid system for decades now, but only now that Netanyahu is going to influence the courts to negatively affect Israelis and not just Palestinians, suddenly Israelis are up in arms.
Netanyahu’s plans are bad and will worsen everything, but the system was already undemocratic to begin with. Courts already denied rights to Palestinians and held minors without access to lawyers, detaining some Palestinians for years to decades without trial. The courts upheld demolition of Palestinian families homes without due process and then when Palestinians petitioned for the same punishment for Israeli terrorists the courts declined to intervene.
Edit: also this judicial change opens Israel up to even more charges of crimes against humanity, as judicial checks and balances are eliminated it means the government is more strictly responsible for human rights abuses.
Yep, that’s the lesson.
Pick one:
- apartheid authoritarianism
- liberal democracy
Can’t have both.
It is an incredibly low bar for a nation to finally draw the line because citizens can foresee how ongoing descent into belligerent populist illiberal authoritarianism eventually reaches the stage where it personally screws over they and theirs. Alas, looking at recent world history, I don’t know if we can take even that for granted. So, uh, yay.
EDIT: I recommend the article, it really touches and expands on this theme.
To fear for the future of Israeli democracy is not to pretend that it was perfect before Netanyahu: how could it be when the occupation of Palestinian territory is now in its 57th year? To quote the slogan of one wing of the protest movement: “Democracy and occupation cannot coexist.” And yet, that cannot be an excuse for inaction: Netanyahu’s judicial coup will make things worse, including and especially for Palestinians. But it also matters to those who are a long way from Israel-Palestine and have no direct stake in it. For this is part of a wider struggle against what is now, somewhat paradoxically, an international phenomenon: ultranationalist populism.
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What’s happening in Israel is very interesting though- what happens when a unified extremist slight-minority votes at 100% while the majority votes at 70%? Democracy fails when democracy votes for fascism.
If you hold your ear to the Israeli media, the situation is more complicated than that. No one really understands the situation on the ground any more, and the maybe natural conclusion that “Netanyahu just got a win, and this is a sign for what’s coming next” is just one among many, many competing narratives, and not even a particularly popular one. I’d say about 75% of conservative pundits who you’d usually expect to cheer this on, instead have a certain doomerist edge to their op-eds, a tenor that basically goes “whoa, fuck, this ‘winning’ cannot continue in this manner, either we find a better way to win or we stop all this winning, or else the entire Zionist project crashes and burns”. Just these past few days about 6 or 7 Likud MKs “independently” declared that they resent being strong-armed by party loyalty to vote for the unilateral piece of legislation (that is: cancellation of the pretext of unreasonability) and that this was the definitely last time; the labor union head honcho expressed a similar sentiment. The most read newspaper in the state, Israel Hayom which is traditionally very pro-govt, published a poll following the vote where the govt conduct has basically destroyed it in the court of public opinion. Clearly a constellation of forces inside Likud leadership has elected to project a peculiar certain message, something like “crap, what a Pyrrhic victory, absolutely not worth the consequences, let’s not do that again”. A lot of anti-‘reform’ voices are calling this a feint, for all sorts of reasons; but right now one way or the other the tone across a lot of the conservative political system, including political media, is very far – even astoundingly, weirdly far – from “fuck yeah we scored”. I don’t know what this implies for the future of these ‘reforms’, if anything, but I wanted to lay this out so as to show the situation is not so simple.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. But the angst is pretty easy to understand: Likud and its supporters are glumly realising that they’re not calling the shots anymore. It’s the far-right that’s on the ascendant and setting the agenda. But what are Likud and Netanyahu gonna do? Once they’ve gotten on the tiger, they’re obliged to ride wherever the tiger wants to go.
If you hold your ear to the Israeli media, the situation is more complicated than that. No one really understands the situation on the ground any more, and the maybe natural conclusion that “Netanyahu just got a win, and this is a sign for what’s coming next” is just one among many, many competing narratives, and not even a particularly popular one. I’d say about 75% of conservative pundits who you’d usually expect to cheer this on, instead have a certain doomerist edge to their op-eds, a tenor that basically goes “whoa, fuck, this ‘winning’ cannot continue in this manner, either we find a better way to win or we stop all this winning, or else the entire Zionist project crashes and burns”. Just these past few days about 6 or 7 Likud MKs “independently” declared that they resent being strong-armed by party loyalty to vote for the unilateral piece of legislation (that is: cancellation of the pretext of unreasonability) and that this was the definitely last time; the labor union head honcho expressed a similar sentiment. The most read newspaper in the state, Israel Hayom which is traditionally very pro-govt, published a poll following the vote where the govt conduct has basically destroyed it in the court of public opinion. Clearly a constellation of forces inside Likud leadership has elected to project a peculiar certain message, something like “crap, what a Pyrrhic victory, absolutely not worth the consequences, let’s not do that again”. A lot of anti-‘reform’ voices are calling this a feint, for all sorts of reasons; but right now one way or the other the tone across a lot of the conservative political system, including political media, is very far – even astoundingly, weirdly far – from “fuck yeah we scored”. I don’t know what this implies for the future of these ‘reforms’, if anything, but I wanted to lay this out so as to show the situation is not so simple.
i want to believe this, but it sounds completely anecdotal; are/is there some independent article or source that can give us another perspective online?
the poll; report of the ‘not-a-rebellion’ in Likud. op-ed by probably the chief Israeli conservative pundit, Amit Segal. Google translate seems to be having trouble chewing on the link directly, so I reproduce below its output on the text.
The right-wing victory on Monday is an important public victory over the threats of the pilots’ refusal. The Knesset bent the wing of the rebellion, and future Knessets will thank it for that. But one thing is not: a legal victory. On this, the original front of the campaign, it was dealt a fatal blow. Anyone who looks at the picture through lenses free of panic and anger, will come to the conclusion that after seven months, the right has not been able to achieve any of the goals it set for itself in changing the relations between the authorities. The price was too heavy for the government, the right and of course the state, and the goods did not arrive.
Half a year ago, the right-wing set out with a large majority in the public and in the Knesset that was opposed to excessive legal intervention. This week, while celebrating the annulment in law of a reason that was never written into it - a step whose practical meaning is roughly the same as issuing a death sentence for a fairy - it became clear that the court is actually expanding its limits further and further. The Knesset tries to prevent the court from using reasonableness, but a day later the ombudsman pleads to invalidate a basic law on the innovative grounds of a “quasi-judicial silence”. When it is also repealed in three knesset calls, perhaps the quasi-silent judgment will emerge. The High Court of Justice and the ombudsman until today drew legitimacy from a relatively small elite. Today they are cultural heroes in a certain milieu. Gali Beharev Miara, a semi-unknown figure until recently even in legal circles, is received with rockstar applause in theaters.
Amit Bachar, no less unknown, became a mass leader. Aharon Barak recently said with satisfaction that, thirty years late, he has an answer to who gave the supreme court the authority to invalidate laws in 1995: the crowds in the streets in 2023. And all this is the direct fault of the leaders of the current coalition. They had the opportunity to divert the ship twenty degrees, but they tried to sink it instead. Conservatism is not promoted through revolution, it just doesn’t work that way. Let them ask (former chief justice of the SC Aharon) Barak: he is the true father of the Salami method. Toe by toe, for years. In evolution and not in revolution.
Instead, the right gave the left wind in its sails, values to fight for, a common denominator from liberal religious Zionism to Hadash. Under different circumstances, in 2007 Gideon Sa’ar changed the majority needed for the committee to select judges. If not for the veto power granted to the coalition, Noam Solberg and Alex Stein and their friends would never have been appointed. It was a slow and long but irreversible process. So are some of the judges appointed by Ayelet Shaked.
Levin and Rothman had the ability to promote changes a little faster, a little more effectively. But their perception was that all Supreme Court judges without exception are activists, that all the changes to date are not enough. All the conservative academics are freaking out. The ones who should have lit bonfires in Ayalon are actually the coalition voters. They should ask, as the title of the well-known book, why you choose right and get, in the test of the result, left.
I’ve read this a couple times and I’m still not sure what the author is saying. was it translated from modern Hebrew and this is normal tensing or was the author using unnecessarily flowery/verbose language?
The author used a lot of ‘clever’ language, metaphors and figures of speech and google translate failed to process it properly. The message is pretty clear from the sentences that were translated legibly, you can safely ignore the rest. e.g. with “quasi-judicial silencing” vs “quasi-silenced judging” he is making an argument that removing the pretext of reasonableness didn’t actually do anything because the judges will just make up another equivalent pretext under another name.
Clearly having the far right ultra-nationalist, racist and militarist nutters governing the country was only fine as long as the only victims were from a different ethnic group as the majority.
Interesting fact: Israel does not have a formal written constitution. Instead, they have a series of Basic Laws which is like rolling out a chapter at a time. Very interesting reading here.
By the way, the UK also doesn’t have a constitution as a single document.
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