Israel Steps Back from the Brink — for Now
Has Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now become a destructive leader?
After days of extreme tumult, Israel woke up Tuesday morning to what appeared—but still couldn’t be assumed to be—relative calm.
Tumult has in fact been the norm for more than three months, ever since Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced a plan to “reform” Israel’s highly active Supreme Court that actually tramples the court into almost total irrelevance.
It was for fear of that “reform”—and the severe wounding or even nullification of Israel’s democracy that it entailed—that a broad swath of the public, which included mainly the center and left but also part of the right, had been taking to the streets since January in increasingly massive demonstrations to demand a halt to a legislative blitz aimed at stripping the court of almost all powers of judicial review.
The growing and ominous confrontation between the supporters and opponents of the “reform” seemed finally to encounter a referee’s whistle on Monday evening when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—whose right-plus-far-right coalition had been rushing the “reform” through the Knesset with obsessive zeal—finally, publicly agreed on putting the legislative process on hold for a month and launching negotiations on the issue with the two main opposition parties.
Although Netanyahu’s coalition had seemingly agreed to a “dialogue” on the Supreme Court dispute all along, it was no more than a cynical ploy since it came with the proviso that the legislation would continue as the talks were going on—which the opposition parties rightly rejected as equivalent to negotiating with a gun on the table.
What finally brought things to a boil—and got Netanyahu to relent—was a stunning sequence of events from Saturday evening to Sunday evening that sparked unprecedented outrage across wide sectors of the population.
On Saturday evening, in a brief, powerful televised address, Defense Minister Yoav Galant announced that calling a halt to the legislation and starting a dialogue had become nothing less than an existential necessity.
Galant—a member of Netanyahu’s own Likud party—said he was indeed a man of Likud and of the right, and favored in principle a reform of the court.
But he also said the heads of the Israeli army, Mossad, and domestic security had passed him intelligence showing that Israel’s deadliest enemies were not only well aware of the strife and division plaguing Israel, but encouraged to the point that they were poised for a possible multipronged, deadly strike from locations as far-flung as Gaza and the West Bank on one hand, and Syria and Iran itself on the other.
Galant—whose long military career included a stint as head of Shayetet 13, Israel’s legendary naval-commando force—made clear he knew that, in saying what he was saying, he was once again endangering himself. And what he meant by that became vividly clear 24 hours later, on Sunday evening, when Netanyahu appeared to suddenly and summarily fire him.
It was that dismissal of a courageous individual who had warned the whole country about existential peril that ignited nightlong demonstrations in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and elsewhere characterized by a level of outrage unseen so far even in the previous three months.
And it was that situation—with tens of thousands of voters abandoning Netanyahu’s own Likud in fury over his sacking of Galant—that finally led Netanyahu to consent on Monday to apparently bona fide negotiations with the opposition.
So where do things stand?
Regarding Galant, as of Tuesday morning it wasn’t clear whether he’d actually been fired, since he was yet to receive an official letter confirming it. Netanyahu, on the one hand, didn’t like him stepping out of line and making an unauthorized statement; on the other hand, sacking him could turn him into a powerful political opponent and remain a deeply unpopular move.
As for the Supreme Court issue, already by Tuesday morning President Isaac Herzog—who has worked tirelessly to contain the dangerous rift in Israel society—had telephoned invitations to the talks he’ll be hosting and gotten positive responses from Netanyahu’s and the two main opposition parties.
The questions are whether a month can really suffice to settle the profound issues of governance, and checks and balances, that have to be addressed, and whether Likud—with two radical parties breathing down its neck—can really sufficiently moderate the stance it’s taken so far to reach reasonable agreement.
As for Netanyahu and Likud’s political future, it appeared cloudy Tuesday morning as polls found the whole right-wing bloc had sunken drastically in popularity and would no longer prevail in elections, with Likud in particular hemorrhaging voters to former chief of staff Benny Gantz’s centrist National Union party.
By now Netanyahu is, in part, a destructive leader who empowers extremists to keep himself in office at any price. And another fallout of the last few days is a grotesque deal Netanyahu—under threat of his coalition dissolving—appears to have struck with Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, that grants the volatile Ben Gvir, as police minister, control of an unprecedented body to be known as the “National Guard.”
More broadly, in the past three months, with not only dissenting Israelis but also foreign observers appalled by what appeared the imminent demise of Israel’s Supreme Court and puncturing of its democracy, Israel has suffered severe diplomatic and economic damage along with the social strife. The main question is to what extent Israel—still led by Netanyahu’s problematic coalition in which the radical parties hold extortionate power—can recover.