There’s no euphemistic way to describe what is happening before our eyes. The current government wants to clear away all obstacles not so that no one will prevent it from ruling, but so that no one will prevent it from committing crimes.
The classic definition of an organized crime ring is “an organized, hierarchical group whose purpose is to engage in criminal activity.” The government’s legal coup isn’t the end, but the means.
The government wants to appoint criminals as ministers and dubious cronies to key civil service and municipal posts. It wants to assemble a cast of senior police officers who will smash the anti-coup protests by beating up demonstrators and filling the emergency rooms, as well as a head of the Justice Ministry department that investigates police misconduct who will close all the cases against violent officers.
It wants to carefully select CEOs of government companies who will allow it to flood those companies with party central committee members and their relatives, and thereby carry out an act of political bribery. It wants to appoint weak regulators who will sell public assets to tycoons at rock-bottom prices.
It wants to appoint a top prosecutor who will close the cases against Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu and open investigations against protest leaders and political rivals. It wants to replace bureaucrats with commissars who will help it deter and punish critical media outlets while nurturing outlets that enslave themselves to those in power.
It wants to appoint judges who will turn a blind eye when the Palestinian village of Hawara goes up in flames, but take a hard line against anyone who endangers the government’s stability. It wants to gain control of the Civil Administration in the West Bank so it can continue its work of dispossessing the Palestinians and whitewashing illegality.
This plot by the Netanyahu/Levin/Ben-Gvir/Smotrich gang is more dangerous to Israelis than all the plots by the Musli, Abu Latif, Haya and Mulner gangs put together. “Power is a disease one has no desire to be cured of,” former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was an ally of the Sicilian mafia, once said. During his seven terms as prime minister, Italy had all the characteristics of a mafia state.
“How to protect the country against those who represent it, who control it, was a problem,” author Leonardo Sciascia wrote in a novel that foreshadowed the future. “The state was held prisoner and it was necessary to free it.”
There’s a clear connection between the destruction of institutions that make democracy possible and extreme nationalism, institutionalized corruption and systematic exploitation of the public purse. It’s happening today in Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other countries where governments have lost all their inhibitions and moral scruples. Leaders like this generally treat the state’s resources and assets as merchandise to be traded to special-interest groups in exchange for the latter keeping the government in power.
Israel is racing in this direction at dizzying speed. Ending the courts’ ability to overturn government decisions they deem unreasonable was merely the appetizer. It won’t be possible to stop this crime against the country without a stubborn, persistent public battle and gatekeepers who are willing to pay any price.
In Italy, it ended in bloodshed. Palermo is strewn with memorial plaques for the judges and investigators who lost their lives. Here, fortunately, gentler methods are being used against the gatekeepers – the permanent emotional terror spewing from the government’s poison machine and the court journalists; coordinated, humiliating attacks in cabinet meetings; and threats of removal.
Italian investigative judge Giovanni Falcone, who followed the traces of this mafia state and was murdered at age 53 along with his wife and bodyguards, is a model worthy of emulation by anyone whose spirit the government is trying to break, from the demonstrators through the attorney general to the Supreme Court justices, who are now standing at a crucial intersection.
“He who is silent and bows his head dies every time he does so,” Falcone once said. “He who speaks aloud and walks with his head held high dies only once.”