Ohad Zwigenberg/AP Photo
Israelis protest against plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to overhaul the country’s judicial system, March 18, 2023, in Tel Aviv.
Israel has been rocked with the most significant and broad-based protests in its history over the past weeks. They were sparked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to subordinate Israel’s judiciary to himself. It would limit judicial review, allow the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) to overturn judicial decisions by majority vote, and grant the government greater powers to appoint judges.
Not coincidentally, Netanyahu is currently on trial for breach of trust, fraud, and accepting bribes; the plan would allow him to stack the court with judges sympathetic to himself. His government already passed a law preventing him from being removed from the prime minister post over corruption. Another provision would allow another Netanyahu ally, Aryeh Deri, to serve in the Cabinet after he was banned from doing so by the courts because of two prior convictions for tax evasion, fraud, and bribery.
It’s all reminiscent of how Victor Orban consolidated power in Hungary. With the courts out of the way, Netanyahu and his extremist allies would be free to “close down opposition newspapers, deny workers the right to strike, abolish academic freedom, criminalize homosexuality, outlaw Arab parties, disenfranchise Arab citizens or—perhaps most crucially—change the electoral system itself in a way that would guarantee a permanent hold on power,” as Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes. Even just limiting or ending the franchise for Israel’s Arab citizens, which the Israeli right has already attempted to do in small ways, would make it all but impossible to dislodge Netanyahu, since their votes would now be a critical share of any opposition.
Protests were driven to a fever pitch when Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for criticizing the plan, as Jonathan Guyer at Vox and my colleague Harold Meyerson both explained. Tens of thousands of protesters filled the streets in Tel Aviv, joined by many prominent Israelis, like former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Yair Lapid. Labor unions announced a general strike, and many businesses halted operations. Most ominously, military leaders told Netanyahu that reservist soldiers who are central to Israel’s military operations would stop showing up. The Biden administration also exerted intense diplomatic pressure, arguing that the plan would undermine Israel’s reputation. “They cannot continue down this road,” Biden himself said.
All this prompted Netanyahu to put the plan on hold. But he also signed an order creating a new “national guard” under the control of ultra-right-wing Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir—suggesting they might be biding their time to set up a paramilitary force that will beat down the protests, since the military is too sympathetic to them.
Though many of the protesters might disagree, from the outside it is obvious that the root cause of Israel’s problems is its treatment of Palestinians, particularly in the occupied territories.
Over the last couple of decades, Israel has steadily moved from a de facto system of apartheid to a de jure one. In the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, of course, about five million people have no representation in the government that controls every facet of their lives—directly in the West Bank, and indirectly in Gaza, where an Israeli blockade that controls all imports and exports, plus regular military assaults, has rendered it into a desperately poor open-air prison camp. But as the think tank B’Tselem explained back in 2021, Arabs in Israel itself have also become steadily more oppressed second-class citizens. The 2018 Basic Law defined Israel as the “nation state for the Jewish people.” Arab citizens have numerous restrictions on immigration, movement, property ownership, and so on, while those living in East Jerusalem have few rights at all. That legal inequality is buttressed by chronic, blatant discrimination at all levels of Israeli society.
From the outside, it is obvious that the root cause of Israel’s problems is its treatment of Palestinians.
Netanyahu, with his extensive corruption scandals and swaggering authoritarianism, is easily recognizable to students of pre-1994 South Africa. The apartheid regime there was also riddled with corruption, self-dealing, and violence—it was only natural for the leaders of a political system bent above all on dominating and repressing the Black population to run the government for their own benefit. Whipping up racist panic produced votes for these corrupt politicians.
The same was true of the Jim Crow apartheid system in the South. Racist disenfranchisement laws also took the vote away from a large swath of lower-income whites, and the economy in the region was managed by and for the benefit of corrupt good-old-boy networks. Whites who did have formal political rights risked the same violence directed at Blacks if they chose to speak out against the system.
Israeli apartheid set the stage for Netanyahu and his corruption. Now, the only way he can avoid disgrace and imprisonment is by setting himself up as a de facto dictator through alliance with openly fascist parties. There’s no other word for Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party, who advocates for deporting Arab citizens whom he deems “disloyal,” whose living room once had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, a terrorist who massacred 29 Palestinians at a mosque back in 1994, and who was convicted in 2007 of “incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organization” for carrying signs that said “expel the Arab enemy” and called the elected Arab members of the Knesset a “fifth column.” The same is true of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who recently called for a Palestinian town to be “erased” and said, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”
The current Netanyahu government is clearly aiming at full annexation of the West Bank, and probably a campaign of ethnic cleansing—or worse—to make room for more Jewish settlements. That would come with a heaping dose of anti-LGBT discrimination and misogyny, as the far-right parties, and the ultra-Orthodox who vote for them, are virulently bigoted.
Now, regular readers might be objecting at this point, given that I have previously argued against the principle of judicial review here in the U.S. In general, I do believe that democratically elected legislatures ought to have the last word about the interpretation of laws. But that doesn’t mean one can’t act prudentially in a crisis. The problem with Netanyahu’s plan is not so much about the courts themselves but what he intends to do with his new power—namely, erase his corruption convictions, stop any further investigations, set himself above the law, and cement permanent power.
Stopping him is far more important than any abstract principles of government. Besides, democracy is not just about formal procedures—behavioral norms and especially the actions of the population matter just as much. No apartheid state can be a real democracy. But the actions of the protesters prove that Israel’s democratic institutions are not yet entirely a fiction. The government can be constrained with coordinated action.
The question now is whether the protest movement can also come to grips with the occupation and apartheid. For decades, center-left and moderate factions in Israeli politics have preferred to look the other way at the problem, fearing that enfranchising Palestinians would threaten Israel’s status as a Jewish homeland, and unwilling to seriously confront settler fanatics. But this dithering has rendered a two-state solution all but impossible, as Israeli settlements have steadily cobwebbed across the West Bank. The remaining crowded and disconnected Palestinian enclaves are not a realistic foundation for a sovereign state.
Moreover, when Naftali Bennett formed a coalition government with the support of Palestinian parties in 2021—the first time they had ever been in government, with the sole condition of Netanyahu not being prime minister anymore—Bennett’s party suffered a massive backlash simply from the association (though non-Netanyahu factions still could have defeated him had they been able to come together).
Netanyahu and his extremist allies, by contrast, have a clear and consistent plan: Jewish supremacy, full-blown apartheid, and authoritarian rule. Indeed, it’s the logical extension of what Israeli policy has been for decades now. As I see it, the partial freedom and democracy Israelis currently enjoy will have to be extended to everyone under Israeli rule, or it will collapse into Hungary-style authoritarianism sooner or later. As Lincoln famously said, “It will become all one thing, or all the other.” The future is currently in the hands of the protest movement, but they might not get another chance.
