On Monday, the government officially approved the start of a civil war. The final abolition of the courts’ power to overturn government decisions it deems unreasonable confirmed that the idea that it’s possible to defend Israeli democracy through debate, dialogue and consultation, or even through public pressure impressive in both its scope and its seriousness, has no validity.
In retrospect, we can say that hope blinded well-meaning people – the president, the opposition leaders, and also the hundreds of thousands of people who went out in the burning heat and marched to Jerusalem in an effort to sound a wake-up call. Because when a government includes crazy, messianic, criminal ministers with gutter mouths and is headed by a recidivist liar standing criminal trial, there were never any grounds for thinking or hoping that this façade hid a different truth – gentleness, understanding, perhaps fear of self-destruction.
A government that looks like a gang of lawbreakers and acts like a biker gang from hell isn’t a decent government in disguise. What you see is what you get. It’s important to believe what its ministers say.
This is only the first course. In their view, especially after this initial “victory,” the planned legal overhaul must pass in its entirety. They will view any concession, retreat, softening or compromise as an utter defeat.
This is a government that set a goal of demolishing reasonableness through its actions, and it’s no accident that it made abolishing the reasonableness doctrine the first item in its crusade and claimed a monopoly on defining reasonableness, logic and common sense. It stripped the public of the legal safety net the Supreme Court had given it, and in the process, it is also destroying the country’s security and economy.
From now on, there will be one law for everyone, and it will be enforced non-selectively – the law of the mafia. Institutionalized looting of the taxpayers’ money will be legalized, detentions without trial will replace the laws of evidence, militias will roam the streets as representatives of the law, and fear of external enemies will be replaced by fear of the government.
That’s the norm in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt and many other countries to which Israel once had the chutzpah to declare itself superior. Each of them holds “democratic” elections, and all use the term “dialogue” to obscure the government’s crimes.
In Egypt, it’s called a “national dialogue.” Turkey holds referenda that always uphold the devastation. And the same goes for Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia, where the national “dialogue” has produced horrifying results. And in all those countries, one question always arose – “is the army still on the government’s side, and can the government rely on the army?”
In Israel, in contrast, this issue was never even considered. The idea that the Israel Defense Forces would take a moral stand that contradicted the government’s position was fundamentally ridiculous.
But now, Israel has officially joined the group of states in which the army faces a dilemma and is no longer willing to give the government a blank check. This isn’t just because its soldiers could find themselves on trial in an international court, but because they understand that there can be no distinction between their mission as soldiers and their essence as citizens.
Israel’s democratic DNA, which President Isaac Herzog extolled in his honeyed speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, has been infected by a poisonous, warped and destructive mutation of the democratic idea. This requires swift and invasive treatment on every front, before the civil war – which is still (relatively) nonviolent, with no shooting in the streets, no deaths and few wounded – gets worse. This is the stage at which the protests must turn into aggressive but nonviolent civil disobedience.
There’s no contradiction here. When citizens withdraw their money from the banks, factory owners close their factories, school principals strike and health services are reduced to emergency care – that is, when the government can no longer run its citizens’ lives – even the newly minted dictatorship will understand that it has lost its ability to govern.