Netanyahu's Radical Ministers Have Declared War on Israel's Security Services
In a direct continuation of their all-out war against the justice system , some members of this Israeli government have simply declared war on the police and the army
Ravit Hecht,
Haaretz, 28 June 2023
It’s
hard to describe what is happening here now – the resumption of the
horrific car crash the governing coalition calls “the legal reform,”
coupled with the
loss of control over the most radical settlers in the West Bank – as
anything less dramatic than a chaotic disintegration, to the point of
sparking fears of the Lebanonization of Israel.
While businessman Arnon Milchan is describing his
warped relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
from a Brighton hotel – in this time of trouble, an almost a comic
interlude amid our grim reality – Israeli streets are gradually
descending into chaos. In Pardes Hannah, people are burning
gay pride flags. In Petah Tikva, they’re running over demonstrators, and a gun was even drawn there (by a rightist, obviously).
Yet even that is small change compared to the pogroms in the West Bank, where the so-called hilltop youth have also decided to fight the army and its officers because the latter aren’t giving them a free hand to burn down Palestinian villages.
This anarchy is unprecedented, because Israel has never before had a government in which some members have simply declared
war on the security services – the police and the army. This
is a direct continuation of their war of annihilation against the
justice system and government legal advisers.
The fascist right identifies all these agencies as obstacles to suppressing the protests against the government’s planned legal coup, and therefore to establishing a dictatorship or an ethnocracy. And now, enormous pressure is being applied to the heads of the security services to serve the interests of the coup.
Following
the weeks of dialogue over the legal upheaval, during which the Knesset
was sleepy and boring, Knesset Constitution Committee chairman Simcha
Rothman’s
circus has resumed.
Once again,
we’re seeing the same fights, the same wholesale ejection of opposition
MKs, the same screaming (and the same one and only MK Tally Gotliv).
Despite
the harsh results of their first stab at this legislation, Rothman and
Justice Minister Yariv Levin are staying the course. The bill to
restrict use
of the reasonability doctrine that
the committee is now considering is the worst and most extreme of the possible versions.
The legislative
process is similar. Instead of setting up an outside committee headed
by, say, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, the author of an article
that Levin’s camp is exploiting to dwarf the Supreme
Court’s status next to that of the politicians, their plan is to fast-track the legislation during the month-plus remaining in the current Knesset session.
People
involved in the committee’s work say Rothman originally planned to
prepare the bill for its first of three required Knesset votes by next
week. But because he
is abroad until Thursday, coupled with a filibuster by the committee’s
opposition MKs, the vote will apparently be held only in around two
weeks (if the coalition isn’t preparing some deceitful trick).
“The longer the time before the legislation reaches the plenum, the more the protests will grow and the more trouble they will be in,” one opposition MK on the committee said.
Committee sources also said that Levin, for whom Rothman acts as an agent, is busy solely with an aggressive fight to push the legislation through and his political fight with Netanyahu. “Yariv Levin doesn’t want a reform,” one senior Likud official said. “Yariv Levin wants chaos, because that’s the only way he can finish Netanyahu.”
Asked why Netanyahu hasn’t managed to impose his authority over Levin – assuming he wants to – one Likud source replied, “Netanyahu has tied his fate to Levin. Levin built phalanxes that control Likud, and Netanyahu can’t come out against them. Essentially, this whole affair is the anyone-but-Bibi ranks versus Levin’s ranks, while 80 percent of the public can’t understand what they want from their lives.”
It’s
not clear that Netanyahu – who has abandoned the statesmanlike guise he
assumed after the night of massive protests against his planned
dismissal of Defense
Minister Yoav Gallant –
is at all interested
in stopping the legislation. Weakening the legal system suits him, as
does one of the current bill’s main goals, which coalition members have
stated openly in recent days: enabling the cabinet to fire Attorney
General Gali Baharav-Miara, who isn’t blinking
in the criminal cases against Netanyahu, without the Supreme Court
being able to stop it.
On Monday, MK Efrat
Rayten (Labor) asked Rothman during the committee session whether this
is the goal of eliminating the reasonability doctrine. Her question was
left unanswered.
But why wait for Rothman to return, or get bogged down in speculation? At Tuesday’s session, Rothman’s place was filled by MK Yitzhak Pindrus (United Torah Judaism), who, in response to a question from MK Karine Elharrar (Yesh Atid), loudly and joyfully declared that the government should oust Baharav-Miara because she was appointed by the previous government. He thereby joined Moshe Gafni, Itamar Ben-Gvir and other coalition members who have called for her ouster.
One can also find sympathy for this idea in the statements issued by Levin and Netanyahu following Tuesday’s demonstration in front of Levin’s home in Modi’in. Both demanded that the attorney general take action against the demonstrators. This looks like a renewed, well-organized effort to mark their target.
Security services falling to settler power
And if the abuse of the attorney general and the justice system is already second nature, a chaotic style that we have learned to live with, the massive pressure on the police and the Israel Defense Forces can only be defined as unprecedented.
On Monday, before deliberations on the reasonableness law got underway, a meeting was called by MKs Almog Cohen, Ohad Tal, Erez Malul, Ariel Kallner and Moshe Roth on the issue of roads being blocked by protesters opposed to the judicial coup. Police and prosecution representatives were called to appear. Facing them, as is usually the case in the current Knesset, were not only extremist MKs but a host of right-wing organizations and settler lobbyists.
What was billed as deliberations was in reality an organized attack on the police and prosecution representatives, who were bounced back and forth between two axes of anger and grievance – one for daring to curb the settler violence and the other for not getting tough enough with those protesting the judicial overhaul.
Even under the extremism that has become the norm, what occurred tested the limits. For example, when Cohen and Moshe Saada shouted at the police representatives to investigate “this evening” a student who came to speak at the committee – almost alone in representing “the other side” – because he dared to say that now that the government was resuming its legislative drive, roads would be blocked again, too.
The police and prosecutorial representatives – no doubt some of them supporters of the right – look traumatized. They see themselves as servants of the state, and in crazy times like these they are being torn at from every direction. In the Knesset, they are treated as defendants on the witness stand.
Even the IDF is far from complacent. Sources speak openly that control to a large degree has been lost over the monster that has emerged in the West Bank, and even more so in the wild twilight zone called Northern Samaria. Ministers encourage attacks on senior IDF officers, such as the campaign the settlers are conducting against Benjamin Brigade Commander Eliav Elbaz.
“The government is deceiving the security arms,” says Gadi Eisenkot, MK and former IDF chief of staff. “When Yoav Galant, who is still seen as a ‘savior’ compared to other government officials, and Bezalel Smotrich, the second minister of defense, order the removal of the barriers to Homesh, and on the other hand do not evacuate eight illegal outposts that appear within a day, they undermine the army and its commitment to enforcing the law.”
As
Eisenkot explains: “For two years already the situation in Northern
Samaria has been deteriorating, but the problem has escalated in the
last half year. The
core of the disaster is the coalition agreements, in which Netanyahu
gave Smotrich control of the Civil Administration, thus undercutting a
body composed of the army, police, Shin Bet and civilian administrators.
... When you add to this the governmental coup,
which is turning the country upside down, and the conscription law that
will expire on Sunday and will divide 12,000 Haredim eligible for army
service from the other 70,000 [who are exempt], we are sliding into a
situation like none we have ever experienced.
The security chiefs are being forced into a test like none they have
ever faced before.”
We can only conclude that not only was the governmental coup never dropped from the coalition’s agenda, but that it is taking shape on the ground, without the need for Knesset legislation at all.