Israel it’s a boiler with too much steam, too much steam building up in its tank about to explode, sending its bolts flying in all directions.
Deadly attacks by young Palestinians on Israelis coincide with an expansion of Israeli settlements and settlers burning Palestinian villages. And also with a popular uprising against the prime minister’s maneuvers Benjamin Netanyahu to control the judiciary. Together, these factors threaten to bring about a disruption in Israeli governance unprecedented in the country.
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A measure of the seriousness of the situation is the fact that several former Mossad chiefs some of the most respected officials in Israel have denounced Netanyahu’s coup (attempted coup) in the judiciary; Most recently, Danny Yatom spoke up. According to Haaretz newspaper, he told Israel’s Channel 13 News on Saturday night that if Netanyahu goes ahead with his plans to effectively remove the independence of the Supreme Court, fighter jet pilots and special forces could lawfully disobey government orders.
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“They signed a treaty with a democratic country,” Yatom said. “But the moment, God forbid, the country becomes a dictatorship and they receive an order from an illegitimate government, then I believe disobeying it would be legitimate.”
This is not idle speculation. In recent days, about 250 officials from the military intelligence agency’s special operations branch signed a public letter declaring that they will “stop working” if the government proceeds with its autocratic judicial reform, the Times of Israel reported. They added their voice to groups of military pilots of airplanes, tanks and submarines, as well as sailors and other special forces members who signed similar letters.”
Israel has never experienced simultaneously a Palestinian intifada, a Jewish settler intifada, and a citizens’ intifada for justice. But that reality has started to unfold since Netanyahu’s farright government took office.
Ohad Zwigenberg/AP 02/27/2023
A Palestinian walks past cars vandalized by Jewish settlers in Hawara in the West Bank Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP 02/27/2023
On Sunday, a Palestinian gunman killed two Israeli Jews near Nablus in revenge for the deaths of 11 Palestinians at the hands of Israeli forces in the city a few days earlier. Settlers then burned and demolished at least 200 properties in four Palestinian villages in the area where the killings took place. And this comes after about 160,000 Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday night to resist an attack on Netanyahu’s judiciary, which had told his cabinet ministers, “I want to give you a fist to punch” the protesters.
Violence between settlers and Palestinians is nothing new. But at a time when this coincides with the most ultranationalist and ultraOrthodox government in the history of Israel a country now ruled by messianic religious fanatics whose goal is to annex the entire West Bank and who are now Police forces, finance, and crucial military functions Israel’s traditionally reticent ministers, who normally draw lines to deter such action, have been replaced by servants determined to erase all lines.
However, the new factor that can really shake Israel’s democracy is Netanyahu’s plan to essentially end the independence of Israel’s Supreme Court under the guise of “judicial reform.” Ignoring polls showing a majority of the public opposes the judicial coup — and despite calls from the Israeli and US presidents to delay the changes until they can be submitted to a national dialogue on the issue — Netanyahu and his extremist allies are leaving to just shove them down the throats of Israelis through the Knesset in the coming weeks.
The breakneck speed of the maneuver really exposes Netanyahu’s complete fraud when he sweetly insists to foreign leaders and journalists that he only intends to make a few technical corrections with the aim of bringing Israel’s Supreme Court closer to the higher courts of the US, Canada or to bring Israel to France.
And even? So let’s ask this question: Which Israeli leader would risk civil war within his country, a break with Jewish democrats around the world, a break with the US, significant damage to Israel’s hightech wonders and now a public dialogue with them ? The Israeli military declares that it will not die to protect a dictatorship. What Israeli leader would risk all of that for some technical improvements in the judiciary?
Netanyahu would risk everything in exchange for something big, very important and personal. And it’s a judicial reform he hopes would end his trial on charges of embezzlement, bribery and fraud that could land him in prison. The “reform” of the judiciary would also give his rightwing coalition unfettered powers to build colonial settlements wherever it pleases, seize control of Palestinian lands, and funnel taxpayers’ money into religious schools of Orthodox Judaism, where young people learn only Torah must, not mathematics, science or literature or serve in the army.
In other words, there is nothing honest about this “reform” of the judiciary. It’s a power maneuver Netanyahu wants to engage in so that with a snap of his fingers — a simple majority with a marginal seat in the Knesset — he can overturn any Supreme Court decision.
Therefore, the protest movement against the coup of the judiciary continues to gain strength. Israel is not Hungary, where the leader can simply impose autocracy on the people. A huge crowd gathered in downtown Tel Aviv on Saturday night to hear, among other figures, Ehud Barak, the former prime minister and former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. Barak could not have said more clearly how existential this moment is for the country.
constitutional crisis
If Netanyahu’s coalition passes these “new dictatorial laws” as defined by Barak in the coming weeks, they will be “repealed by the Supreme Court” and ruled illegal. If that happens and the government then takes steps to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision, the four key “janitors” of Israeli security the chief of staff of the armed forces and the directors of Mossad, Shin Bet and the police must decide who gives them orders . “This will lead to an extremely serious constitutional crisis,” Barak said.
“When the threshold is crossed,” he added, “and dictatorial laws are put into practice, responsibility will shift to us, the citizens of the country. We must follow the tradition established by Gandhi in India 80 years ago and by Martin Luther King in the US 60 years ago of following the path of nonviolent civil disobedience. (…) This is the right, even the duty, of citizens when their governments act in ways that break the rules of the game and run counter to the country’s fundamental norms and value systems.”
Finally, something I’ve never seen before: a reality check from one of Israel’s coolest startups. On Monday, Assaf Rappaport, CEO and cofounder of Wiz, a cloud security startup, announced that his company just raised $300 million in a Series D investment round valued at $10 billion. Normally this would be very good news for Israel, but Rappaport said his company cannot ignore what is happening in the country.
“We share the sorrow of the families who lost loved ones in the last day and are concerned at the rapid deterioration of the security situation on both sides,” he said. “Unfortunately, given the blow to the judiciary, the money we raise will not go to Israel. (…) We know of worried investors and entrepreneurs discreetly taking their money out of the country, and of workers worried about their future in Israel.”
“Wiz has been successful thanks to the extraordinary ecosystem in Israel, but now we face an existential threat. We believe it is vital for the government to prioritize the peace and safety of its citizens and suspend any legislative maneuvers that could make the current situation worse.”
Hey Friedman, these days it seems like you only write about Ukraine and Israel. Don’t you have anything else to say?
It’s not an accident. I believe that if Ukraine is conquered by Vladimir Putin and Israel becomes a false democracy like Hungary, the whole world will go down the wrong path.
Israel is the only true democracy with an independent judiciary in the Middle East. Ukraine defends the European Union, a giant engine of the rule of law, free markets, human rights and democratic norms, even if not all EU countries fully embrace it. If democracy is undermined in the EU and Israel, democracies everywhere will find themselves in greater jeopardy. / TRANSLATION BY GUILHERME RUSSO