Yet even as Herzog spoke in Washington, the streets of Israel’s big cities teemed with anger and defiance over the controversial plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to overhaul the country’s judicial system. Those protests, which have raged for months, intensified Monday, after Israeli lawmakers in Netanyahu’s coalition used their razor-thin electoral mandate to pass the first plank of their reforms, stripping the Supreme Court of the power to strike down government action it considers “unreasonable.”
The move, in the eyes of its supporters, returns greater authority to the country’s elected legislature. But analysts and critics, including the Israeli opposition and various Western governments, see it as a major blow to one of the few real checks that exists in Israeli democracy and a grim step toward a form of majoritarian autocracy. “Israeli voters are certainly entitled to evolutionary change, but current ideas about judicial reform are revolutionary in their implications,” observed Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “An unfettered legislature threatens any democracy as much as an unfettered executive does.”
The moment is so profound — and fraught — for the Israeli nation that Alterman cast it as “third juncture” in the country’s history, following the dramatic shift in borders after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the state of Israel’s establishment in 1948. While Netanyahu’s extremist allies eye more radical maneuvers, including the removal of the country’s attorney general, labor unions are mulling launching another nationwide general strike. Thousands of military reservists have vowed not to report for duty with the passage of this legislation, absences which may have grave security implications for Israel’s defense.
Washington, though, has struggled to reckon with what’s in motion. On Monday, a handful of Democratic lawmakers ventured statements of concern. The White House issued a terse release that, without naming Netanyahu, described the vote as “unfortunate” and backed “the efforts of President Herzog and other Israeli leaders as they seek to build a broader consensus through political dialogue.”
But little meaningful dialogue seems to be happening. Herzog, feted by U.S. lawmakers, seems more a helpless bystander in Israel’s maelstrom. And President Biden’s relatively timid rhetoric has been hammered by Republican opponents, who have yoked themselves to the mast of a far-right Israel government that makes little attempt to hide its aims to carry out de facto — perhaps even de jure — annexation of Palestinian lands. At a Christian Zionist forum outside Washington last week, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley scoffed at Biden’s decision to supposedly interfere in Israel’s “internal debates.”
“We need a leader who not only respects Israel, but also respects her people’s right to govern themselves,” Haley said, making no mention of the critical mass of protesters taking to the streets while going on to complain of the cold shoulder Biden offered Netanyahu by declining to invite the prime minister to the White House over the past seven months.
The Republicans last week focused on censuring pro-Palestinian remarks made by a Democratic congresswoman and forced through a symbolic resolution in the House that affirmed “the State of Israel is not a racist or apartheid state” — the latter term one that leading international human rights organizations, as well as Israel’s own, assess as an accurate description of the reality on the ground. It also linked criticism of the Israeli state to xenophobia and antisemitism.
Washington’s overheated discourse on Israel serves as a major constraint on any administration that may want to speak up for Palestinian human rights or against the Israeli state’s democratic erosion.
“U.S. presidents don’t like to fight with Israeli prime ministers. It’s messy, distracting and potentially politically costly especially when the GOP has emerged as the ‘Israel right or wrong’ party,” Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me in an email. And so Biden, he added, does “a good deal of important virtue signaling” on issues like the judicial overhaul and settlement expansion, but with “no serious costs or consequences imposed.”
What the moment exposes is the gulf between the political theater around Israel in Washington and the deepening reality on the ground. While Republicans rail at any suggestion that Israeli state policies can be racist, Netanyahu and his allies often explicitly say that that’s what they are pursuing. Consider how, in May, Justice Minister Yariv Levin argued for the necessity of curtailing the Supreme Court’s powers specifically because controlling the judges would help preserve or further Jewish supremacy in certain contexts.
“Arabs buy apartments in Jewish communities in the Galilee and this causes Jews to leave these cities, because they are not ready to live with Arabs,” Levin said. “We need to ensure that the Supreme Court has justices who understand this.”
And while U.S. lawmakers constantly extol their shared democratic values with Israel, some of their counterparts have a rather specific vision of which values these are. In a radio interview on Monday, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, an extremist, was asked whether Israel could benefit from the mechanisms of checks and balances that exist in the U.S. Constitution — Israel, as my colleagues have discussed, does not have a formal constitution.
“I want to take the good things from the U.S.,” Ben Gvir replied. “I think that the death penalty for terrorists is excellent. I think that distributing guns to people to defend themselves is excellent.”
Figures like Ben Gvir and his close ally, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, are in the driver’s seat in Israeli politics, cheered on implicitly by a large segment of the American political establishment. To many Israelis, this is a shame. “We are governed today by a bunch of militants, nationalists, chauvinists, [and] radicals,” former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert told Rolling Stone. “Reckless, irresponsible, and totally inexperienced people.”
He added that had U.S. administrations taken far tougher lines against Netanayhu’s policies and agendas — and placed Israel’s special relationship with the United States in the balance — it would have had positive effects. “Had such a thing been spelled out, I guess it may have had an enormous impact,” Olmert said.
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