"How can fans of the rule of law and defenders of the legal system . . . talk about damage to democracy in a country where a center-left government shutters. . . nonprofit groups as if they were brothels or gambling dens?"
There are 723 reasons not to support the current government, and another six as a bonus. The 723 people sitting in prison without trial are reason enough to understand that there’s no real difference between the current government and its predecessor. The closing of six human rights groups in the West Bank provides six bonus reasons for anyone insisting that our "government of change" and hope differs from its predecessor.
Now, 729 pieces of evidence show that no significant improvement is apparent in core issues under the center-left government. We could go even further and conclude, at least regarding disgraceful administrative detentions – detentions without trial – that Benjamin Netanyahu was preferable. For 14 years, nearly all of them under his premiership, the number of administrative detainees never reached these monstrous proportions – and then the center-left government arrived.
Mass incarceration without trial and the closing of human rights groups is a good litmus test for the real character of a government and its values. “The law is a Nazi law. It’s tyrannical. It’s immoral – and an immoral law is an illegal law,” Menachem Begin said about the emergency regulations allowing administrative detention. Begin was speaking in May 1951 in the Knesset after members of Brit Hakanaim, a radical ultra-Orthodox underground group, were put in administrative detention.
But his words now apply to Palestinian detainees held without trial, even if no leftist would dare call them Nazi laws as Begin did. Only the right can do that.
Such decisions about mass arrests and the shuttering of civil society organizations are inherently political. They basically rely on one or two people: the defense minister and the prime minister. If these two want, administrative detentions can stop. If they want, the number can be reduced. If they want, the number can be expanded endlessly.
On their order, soldiers will be sent to the offices of civil society organizations made up of nonviolent do-gooders and seal the doors. On their order, the Shin Bet security service will threaten the directors of those groups like their counterparts in Russia or Turkey. Not only will Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz not loosen the yoke on Palestinian society, but in certain matters they'll tighten it more than their rightist predecessor.
The cabinet passed these two tyrannical measures without any real objections. The Labor Party, led by Yitzhak Rabin’s successor, certainly supports them enthusiastically. The new Meretz, whose election slate was chosen this week, certainly opposes them in its heart, but that’s not enough.
Lacking real opposition, every component of the governing coalition is tainted by this sin. The ease with which the center-left adopted these two measures proves what no longer needs proving: The right is sometimes preferable. The right arrests fewer people, sometimes kills less often and at least it isn’t self-righteous.
How can fans of the rule of law and defenders of the legal system, those who warn about a government of Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir and the ascendant Yariv Levin, talk about damage to democracy in a country where a center-left government is jailing hundreds of people without trial for long stretches and shutters nonprofit groups as if they were brothels or gambling dens?
Why warn that Ben-Gvir will carry out his threat to expel opponents of Israel if the enlightened Lapid and Gantz have already arrested them? It’s easy and convenient to brandish the Ben-Gvir threat to unify people in fear. It’s much harder to admit that Lapid and Gantz are no less dangerous to Israeli democracy. Ben-Gvir talks – and Gantz acts.
Yes, it’s unpleasant to compare the scary Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir to the affable, liberal Lapid and Gantz. But in the litmus test, the better people are the ones committing worse acts. We should fear them and fight them.