Israeli PM threatens its democracy

Ever since it came into existence, Israel has faced existential crises.

Now, by opening a new front against its founding democratic ideals, Benjamin Netanyahu has brought Israel to the brink. A country so often fighting external enemies is now at war with itself.

Bowing to protests that paralyzed the country and destabilized its army, the prime minister backed away from a full confrontation this week. But this is merely a tactical retreat, not a defeat.

It is the pause before the putsch. That’s how Yuval Noah Harari, perhaps Israel’s best-known historian, described the governing coalition’s attempt to remake Israel’s governing system. By undermining the Supreme Court, Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet tried to free itself from judicial restraint.

“It is not a judicial reform but more akin to an antidemocratic coup,” wrote Harari, author of the bestselling “Sapiens.”

By empowering itself to overrule judgments, and to choose preferred judges, the coalition would place itself above the law rewriting laws it didn’t like. For the embattled Netanyahu, who faces long-standing corruption charges, it seemed a made-to-measure escape hatch from justice.

But by trampling on the foundations of Israeli democracy, the prime minister overstepped. Netanyahu triggered massive demonstrations on the streets and a nationwide strike that extended to Israel’s diplomatic missions abroad (including in Toronto and Ottawa).

The protests also reverberated in Washington, where Israel’s protector has had enough. U.S. President Joe Biden is hosting his second democracy summit this week and, with Netanyahu scheduled to provide pre-recorded video comments on how his country remains a model for the Middle East, the timing could not have been more inauspicious.

The problem with Netanyahu’s majoritarian rule is that it ignores minority rights. Liberal democracy is not merely about elections, but checks and balances that constrain untrammelled power.

Netanyahu’s margin of victory was razor thin, and followed several indecisive elections in recent years when power alternated back and forth. In such a polarized and deeply split country, he lacks a strong popular mandate to weaken the judiciary.

For Canadians accustomed to premiers who override the Charter of Rights, not our finest hour, there is an important contrast with Netanyahu’s attempt to circumscribe the high court. Canada has a clear separation of powers, a written constitution, an upper chamber of Parliament and federal-provincial power sharing, all of which limit the powers of a prime minister.

In Israel’s system of proportional representation, parliamentarians owe their positions to the parties that put them there, not the people who elected them. Coalitions give rise to smaller fringe parties who can hold the country hostage to their demands ruling over a domestic population that includes a large minority of Israeli Arab citizens, while also occupying millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and controlling the borders of Gaza.

After losing power in the previous election, Netanyahu orchestrated his comeback by making common cause with the most extreme voices in the Jewish settler movement, anti-Arab racists and anti-Palestinian nihilists. The prime minister’s ambition is to secure a get-out-of-jail card, but his coalition partners’ agenda is to reconfigure the justice system to suit their own idea of majority rule.

This is not merely a nation of right versus left, or hawks versus doves. The demographic shifts extend to religious fault lines (ultra-Orthodox versus secular), ethnic divisions (Ashkenazi versus Sephardi) and outspoken immigrant communities (notably from the old Soviet Union).

The demographics and the politics have long favoured Netanyahu’s career. A population explosion among ultra-Orthodox families has fuelled the religious right; a failed peace process (in which he played a hand) has extinguished the old peace camp of the left.

I watched Netanyahu early in his political arc, when peace broke out with the Palestinians and Israeli society faced another existential crisis. As the Star’s Middle East correspondent, I saw him promote and profit from incitement against the peace process, which culminated in the assassination of then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

During the late 1990s, that office belonged to Netanyahu. When he held forth in two interviews with me, the prime minister didn’t hold back on his contempt for the Palestinians while paying lip service to peace.

All these years later, he is back in that office again, contemptuous not only of the Palestinians but many of his own people. He will not change his ways now.

This week, after supposedly declaring a truce in Israel’s civil war, his government laid the groundwork for creation of a new paramilitary “national guard” under the control of Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister. Ben Gvir is the far-right coalition partner and radical settler leader convicted of racist incitement against Arabs.

Yes, it is reassuring that so many Israelis walked off their jobs and took to the streets to stop the slow dismantling of democracy. But the reality is that Netanyahu keeps winning elections despite his worst depredations.

It is a dispiriting time for Israel and Israelis. This column began with a quote from Harari, but the last word also goes to him, as a prescient historian who writes about the evolution of society and democracy:

“I have never seriously considered leaving Israel … I always thought it was more important to stay and try to change things here than to leave for somewhere calmer and safer. But … I doubt whether I could go on working in a place lacking any meaningful protection for minority rights and for the freedom of expression.”