The images of Israelis protesting in the streets of Tel Aviv are arresting. They have continued for months, sparked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government’s attempt to introduce judicial reforms that would undermine Israeli democracy. Rarely in the history of the State of Israel have there been mass protests of this scale against the government, and they have continued even after Netanyahu and Justice Minister Yair Levin appeared to back down earlier this month.
In the week that the State of Israel celebrated its 75th anniversary (5 Iyar on the Hebrew calendar), it is clear that this existential crisis has not passed. The weekly rallies in Tel Aviv have continued, but so too have demonstrations in support of the reform package. Only this week, some 200,000 protestors came out in Jerusalem to demonstrate their support for the government’s plans. “The nation decided it wanted reform, and there are some who are protesting the reform, and they’re deciding in our place that there won’t be a reform,” one protestor told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “The minority is deciding what is good for the majority.”
Both the religious right who support the reforms, and the moderate secularists (it is not quite correct to call them either “the left” or even liberals) who oppose it claim to be “the majority” defending the State of Israel’s political institutions, indeed its very soul; they both profess to be the real Israelis. Meanwhile, Diaspora Jews who retain a strong ideological commitment to the State of Israel look on with horror as the “Zionist dream” seems to evaporate in a cloud of conflict, authoritarianism, and the looming threat of a government crackdown.
The State of Israel of their imagination is a shining beacon of democracy and progressive values. Those are, after all the dominant values of Diaspora Jews, particularly in the United States, where almost three quarters of them consistently vote for the Democratic Party and half regard themselves as liberals (with only 16 percent identifying as “conservative”). Their mytho-ideological Israel is a fetish onto which they project their most cherished ideals… and they have for decades.
That the real State of Israel (whose government, after all, is in a rush to abandon democracy itself) is not such a paragon produces a cognitive dissonance that can only be explained by way of a declension narrative. That story goes like this: The State of Israel took a sharp right turn when Menahem Begin became Prime Minister in 1977 and his Likud party consolidated power over the following years with support from post-Soviet immigrant voters who had a marginal commitment to democracy. This narrative allows progressive Zionists to draw a sharp line between the “good Israel” and labor Zionism of the past, and the “not-so-good Israel” and the right-wing chauvinistic Zionism that has dominated Israeli politics for all but thirteen of the last 45 years.
It is a powerful myth that allows liberal Zionists to disavow any responsibility for the State of Israel’s violations of human rights and international law and claim that what is happening in the State of Israel today, is a historical “aberration” that can be set right. Labor Zionism (the putatively kinder and gentler variant), it maintains, is the true anima of the Zionist project. David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Berl Katznelson, and a whole battalion of bucket-hatted kibbutzniks apparently slumber on a Jewish Avalon, waiting for the call to deliver the State of Israel from “bad Zionism.”*
History says otherwise. While labor Zionism was rarely (although occasionally) as explicitly racist as the right-wing Zionism that animated Herut and its successor party Likud, it was no less expansionist. The first steps to establish illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank were taken by taken by the Labor government of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, along with the outright annexation of East Jerusalem and some other territories in violation of international law.
Nor are the State of Israel’s fragile democratic institutions the work of Begin, Netanyahu, Likud, or any right-wing Israeli bogeyman; they were built by the old labor Zionist establishment, which held an unbeatable majority in the Knesset into the 1970s and, above all, by Ben-Gurion himself. This is the State of Israel’s great hubris: it is a republic without a constitution. Government is constituted by 11 Basic Laws, which can be amended, repealed, and created by a simple parliamentary majority, except Article 4 of the Basic Law: The Knesset, which mandates that members of the Knesset are chosen by free election, and that seats are allocated by proportional representation.
The myth goes that Ben-Gurion abandoned the hope of creating a constitution after years of wrangling with the factions in Israeli politics, particularly with the religious parties. It is true that Israeli politics have always been fractious, yet Mapai (Ben-Gurion’s party) enjoyed a sizeable majority of almost 70 seats with the support of other labor Zionist parties throughout the period before the adoption of the first Basic Laws in 1958, and it never expected to lose it. Historians like Benny Morris and Tom Segev have noted that Ben-Gurion, despite his complaints of how hard it was to get agreement among the Israeli factions, was not really that eager to see his power – which he thought would go on forever – restricted by a constitution… so he didn’t really push that hard.
Segev noted in his biography of Ben-Gurion, A State at Any Cost, that the first Israeli prime minister “opposed a constitution because such a document would have made it harder for him to constrict human and civil rights and to bolster Mapai’s grip on power.” Indeed, he contemplated establishing a kind of dictatorship – or at least a populist authoritarian regime – in the mid-1950s, when his personal power had begun to slip.
In the absence of a constitution, the State of Israel could limit the right to vote, abolish civil and human rights with a simple legislative majority – which Netanyahu has. The current governing coalition has 64 seats, four more than a majority, and just a few seats short of the supermajority required to amend Article 4 of the Basic Law: The Knesset. If it had those seats, it could, in theory, abolish the country’s democratic foundations and establish a dictatorship. Only the Supreme Court could prevent that or other possible outrages, like rendering all non-Jews stateless or incorporating all of the Occupied Territories into the State of Israel, under Article 15 of the Basic Law: The Judiciary.
This is why Netanyahu government is so eager to amend just this Basic Law. And it has the votes to do it, even if it has been temporarily set back by the scale and vehemence of the demonstrations against the plan.
The State of Israel is constitutionally fragile by design. It has only been teetering toward a right-wing, antidemocratic, authoritarian regime because the State of Israel is now a right-wing political culture. Despite Labor Zionists’ arrogant belief that they would always be the country’s dominant political force, what remains of the left is reduced to an impotent rump in the Knesset, and the right is eagerly wielding the power that the left once reserved for itself.
Most Israelis regard themselves as conservatives, and that number will only increase, as the Israel Democracy Institute reports, because young people in the State of Israel between the ages of 18 and 24, unlike their counterparts literally anywhere else in the world, overwhelmingly identify as “right-wing.” The IDI has tracked a generational shift, in which the right is now so dominant that only 11 percent of Israelis are on the left. And most of those are older, Ashkenazi and, often enough, inclined to emigrate. In short, Israelis are not the progressive-minded kibbutzniks Diaspora Jews imagine them to be.
We should not be surprised. After three-quarters of a century of promoting a myth of Israeli vulnerability which had a grain of truth during the republic’s early years politicians across the spectrum and the Zionist movement itself have made “security” the State of Israel’s basic ideological premise. All other considerations – common decency, humanity, human rights, and even democracy – are subordinate to security. Anything else is secondary until the absolute “safety of Israel” is secured. That has been the big pitch of the Israeli right at least since the beginning of the Netanyahu era in the 1990s and,
Absolute security is, of course, impossible. In the real experience of insecurity which has been aggravated by succeeding governments’ absolute unwillingness to consider a settlement to the Occupation that might include Palestinian statehood, a great many Israelis are conditioned to accept the far-right’s authoritarian party line: “security at any cost.” Significantly, the number of Israelis who actually feel secure has plummeted from 76 percent to 38 percent in two years, just as Netanyahu was building his right-wing electoral coalition.
Correlation is not, of course, causation, but it is hard not to suspect that the Israeli right’s constant drumbeats about the BDS movement and the threats of Palestinian extremist terrorism stoked by the Occupation and the periodic shelling of Gaza are paying off. Security is the right’s winning issue, and the right is winning.
There has been a great deal of handwringing about how the judicial reforms might damage the State of Israel’s relationship with the United States, its principal sponsor, but I doubt Netanyahu is terribly worried. Writing in the Washington Post, Max Boot opined that “Bibi has already done lasting damage to Israel’s reputation in America.” It remains to be scene whether that is the case, but President Joe Biden’s mild warning that he’s “very concerned” if Netanyahu’s government “continues to go down this road” was hardly a repudiation; it is not like even Israeli violations of human rights and the shelling of civilians in Gaza have ever earned more than Washington’s tepid finger-waving.
If Netanyahu’s angry reply that “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad” is any indication, he hardly takes American righteous indignation seriously.
Netanyahu is certainly aware that relations will be strained, but he is also no doubt aware that the new geopolitical realities – with an imperialist Russia, a Russia-China axis, a truculent Turkey, and a nationalist India – give the State of Israel enormous leverage. Washington is in no position to give Jerusalem the bum’s rush because the Middle East remains unsettled, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are unreliable, and the State of Israel has outsized traction in the US economy. This last, more than anything, is one of the reasons why official America is so strongly, and obsessively opposed to BDS, in fact.
The State of Israel is in the catbird seat, and Netanyahu knows it. He can pretty much get away with anything – and always has – as long as he can throw a democratic fig-leaf on it. And he is even less concerned about the Diaspora Jewish community. The State of Israel colonized the official and institutional Jewish community long ago, and when it speaks through institutions like AJ Committee, B’Nai B’rith, and Jewish Federations of North America it speaks uni-vocally in the voice of maximalist Zionism.
It is hard to say how many diaspora Jews will remain committed to this kind of Zionism regardless of Israeli policy. Many are reflexive apologists of the worst Israeli excesses, and have defended the settlements, human rights abuses, and everything else, regardless of their domestic political investments. One can confidently expect them to support and defend the State of Israel, even if it does become a fully authoritarian dictatorship. They will simply convince themselves that it remains the mythical progressive, social-democratic democracy that they always believed it was.
As for the rest of the Diaspora Jewish community, they don’t really matter. Many have retreated from Jewish communal life as it has become increasingly dominated by maximalist Zionism, and their cultural and religious engagement with Judaism, when there is one at all, is often through groups, communities, congregations, and organization which have already mostly broken with Zionism and the State of Israel. To maximalist Zionists in the Israeli government, as to the ones in Diaspora communal life, we are, in the words of Natan Scharansky and Gil Troy, “Un-Jews.”
Netanyahu has nothing to lose, and he has probably already won. His mistake was, perhaps, moving too quickly, and this is not an error that he will make again. The fact that his government pushed through legislation to create a paramilitary national guard that could be used against internal dissenters is ample evidence that Israeli lawmakers are hardly disinclined to the attractions of authoritarianism. Netanyahu needs only to recalibrate and wait for the demonstrations in Tel Aviv to run out of steam to leverage that fatal flaw in the State of Israel’s institutions and the fragile, non-constitutional, democracy.
This is a tragedy. And we know how tragedies end.
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* Meanwhile, Ben-Gurion’s Labor Party, the last remnant of left-wing labor Zionism which dominated the first three decades of Israeli politics, now holds four of the 120 seats in the Knesset.
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Photo courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency