Netanyahu Says His ‘Reforms’ Strengthen Israel’s Democracy. One More Lie - Israel News - Haaretz.com
In the hours after Israel’s Knesset passed the “reasonability” law, the first victory in the government’s program for judicial capture, the country appeared to descend into chaos. Protesters once again flooded cities, towns, the highways and much of Jerusalem, angrier than ever. Police used water cannons – at times employing the vile-smelling skunk water – to disperse them, and braced for a possible effort to storm the Knesset.
The protesters’ rage was tinged with fear. The new law is an amendment to Israel’s Basic Law of the Judiciary, arguably giving it the status of a constitutional amendment. It passed with every single member of the coalition – 64 to zero. The law severely limits the Supreme Court’s power to review government decisions in a country with hardly any structural checks and balances. The few that exist are being strangled.
Yet at the prime time news hour after the vote, Prime Minister Netanyahu faced the nation and said, “This is not the end of democracy – it’s the fulfillment of democracy.”
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He says a version of this regularly: in another no-questions-allowed statement to the media days ahead of the vote, he said: "Fixing the reasonability basis will not topple democracy, it will strengthen democracy."
His government allies say it too: Simcha Rothman, chair of Israel’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, said the bill would “make Israel democratic again,” and his finance minister Betzalel Smotrich told the right-wing rally on Sunday in Tel Aviv that the government would continue the legislation, “because that’s the essence of democracy … the people are entitled to the reform, that’s what they voted for.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Galant on the Knesset floor on MondayCredit: Olivier Fitoussi
Unfortunately for them, campaign slogans still can’t turn night into day. Every single item of the reform is designed to give an already-powerful executive unrestrained power. Israel’s political system is an aberration for democracies – the long menu of structural constraints on the power of an executive or legislature normally found in democracies, from a constitution to a bicameral legislature, is missing.
The argument that one law limiting the Court’s use of the ambiguous “reasonability” concept is not so terrible, is hardly relevant; it’s a slice of the bigger package to undermine democracy that Israelis like to call the “salami” strategy, hence a protester at the Knesset on Sunday hoisted a sign reading: “Polish salami is not kosher!”
Polls have regularly shown that only a minority of Israelis support the judicial plans as proposed by the government, a consistent finding throughout seven months of protest and more strikingly, in spite of an overwhelming decade-long campaign to delegitimize the judiciary.
But one corollary argument of the government has become a particularly powerful message for the right-wing: Remember the disengagement and evacuation of settlers from Gaza, remember the Oslo accords with the Palestinians. Those items are shortcuts for saying: We hated those policies, but we had to accept them from a democratically elected government; now we’re the elected government and you’re the opposition. Accept it – that’s democracy, and it’s only fair.
Accordingly, Smotrich also said in his speech on Sunday, addressing the military and air force personnel who are planning to refuse reserve duty: “I know how you feel." During the Oslo Accords, and what he called the “expulsion” of settlers from Gaza, “I felt real pain along with many others and the feeling that the government pays no attention to us.”
In a TV broadcast after Monday's vote, Netanyahu also made sure to name-check Oslo and the disengagement: “In previous cases of sharp public disagreement, the governments did not extend a hand to opponents of their policies: Not for the first Oslo Accords, not for the later Oslo Accords, not for the expulsion from Gush Katif.”
The fact that Netanyahu voted for the Gaza disengagement numerous times as a cabinet minister hasn’t stopped today’s right-wing from adopting the rallying cry of j’accuse against the democracy movement: “Where were you during the disengagement?”
These arguments portray a moral equivalency that is not so intuitively dismissed. In the eyes of the government and its supporters, the opposition has no right to halt the government’s policy, just as they could not halt the disengagement. They call the opposition’s protest “violent,” for choking off highways, calling strikes, or due to IDF reservists refusing to serve – and a violation of the democratic will of the people.
Additionally, the disengagement is particularly painful to the right-wing, since the Supreme Court rejected all 12 petitions against the policy; the ultimate proof of its intolerable left-wing, anti-Jewish agenda forced onto the true right-wing majority of the people, in the eyes of the right-wing.
And wasn’t expelling the settlers – removing them from their homes against their will – a violation of their rights? Why didn’t the left, or the Court (synonymous in their eyes) come to their defense then?
Ultimately, most of these arguments fail too, either on fact or logic. The claim that today’s opposition is violent is easy to dispel. After seven months with hundreds of thousands of weekly protesters, hardly a window has been broken. Violence has come mainly from heavy-handed police, or individual attacks on protesters (true to form, on Monday night a driver rammed into protesters in the Sharon region.)
It’s true that blocking roads, strikes and refusing reserve duty – even if “voluntary” service – can be seen as civil disobedience, which is legitimate. These do have serious consequences for regular people and should be used sparingly. But of course, the right wing used several similar tactics during the disengagement in 2005, or tried to, for its cause.
The claim of a left-wing court that always rules against the right is less obvious, but the right wing is still wrong. In fact, during the disengagement from Gaza, the Court did what it almost always does regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: it upheld the state’s position. It did not overturn legislation or block policy. That’s exactly what the right-wing thinks the Court should do – it just didn’t like it when the judgment worked against its interests. There is no noble democratic principle at stake.
“Where were you during the disengagement?” asked Finance Minister Smotrich recently of bank executives opposed to the judicial coup. Kfar Darom, Gaza, in 2005.Credit: Nir Kafri
The toughest question for me is why, in fact, did the state forcibly remove its citizens from their homes? It definitely isn’t the kind of behavior I’d like to see in a democracy.
But here’s where the comparison, and the moral equivalency, falls apart. The disengagement, in another iteration, could have been a spark to restart a peace process to end Israel’s most enduring undemocratic practice. Fleeting as it was, I glimpsed that hope at the time.
By contrast, the end goal of the right-wing opposition was to defend settlements, occupation, and annexation through a military regime of permanent inequality. It was an anti-democracy, pro-authoritarian protest movement. Today’s protesters have signs saying “dictatorship only ends with bloodshed,” but apparently authoritarian military regimes also inevitably violate people’s rights – including, eventually, the rights of Jewish Israelis.
Today’s right wing has the same aim as in the past: the current judicial reforms are part of its openly stated plans to advance West Bank annexation. These reforms cannot, by definition, strengthen democracy. Annexation is already happening and when it’s done, Israel won’t be a country with democratic infrastructure tainted by occupation; it will be a non-democratic state with relics of democracy, fit for a museum.
But the democracy movement hasn’t truly earned the democratic high ground yet either. This analysis only works if the pro-democracy protesters commit to democracy in full. If the protest maintains its reticence regarding the occupation, fighting for democracy for its members and forever conveniently eliding Israel’s most extreme non-democratic side, it’s harder to dispute the moral equivalency, and therefore harder to justify the movement’s rougher tactics.
In my teens, I recall an anti-war slogan that said: “Fighting for peace is like f&*%$#ing for virginity.” Fighting for democracy without – eventually, at least – fighting occupation isn’t much different.
Dahlia Scheindlin is a political scientist and public opinion expert, and a policy fellow at The Century Foundation. Twitter: @dahliasc