When the Knesset curtailed the power of Israel’s supreme court this week, it was a pivotal moment in the country’s history. Should the law be enacted, and survive legal challenge, it will undermine the independence of the nation’s judiciary and its role as the guarantor of its liberal-democratic values. But this is the price that Benjamin Netanyahu is prepared to pay to keep his government together – even if divisions in Israel deepen.
Mr Netanyahu leads the most ultranationalist and religiously conservative government since the country was founded. His politics are those of division. Those on the streets, threatening strikes, or in the army refusing to serve, are the enemies he wants to have. He casts them as liberal Israelis who want to retain the status quo that the country’s more nationalist and religious citizens want to smash. Israel’s social contract has already been broken in part by rising inequality: a fifth of Israelis live below the national poverty line, but so do almost half of the ultra-Orthodox – and a third of Arab Israelis.
While voicing demands to protect democracy within Israel, the protesters have been noticeably quieter about the denial of freedoms to Palestinians on the West Bank, which Israeli forces have occupied since 1967. True, some demonstrators chanted “Where were you in Hawara?” at security forces following the horrendous attack by Israeli settlers seeking revenge for the murder of two brothers shot dead by a Palestinian gunman. But the army was there – and has been criticised for doing very little to stop what even Israeli rightwing commentators called “Jewish terrorism”. A better question for Israelis is why they were in Hawara at all.
The extremist allies of Mr Netanyahu have been growing in political significance due to the unchecked expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied territories and the sharply rising ultra-Orthodox population. Their political parties are the bulwarks of the government: Religious Zionism, which embraces an ideology of Jewish supremacy, and United Torah Judaism, which wants the ultra-Orthodox way of life undisturbed and subsidised. Both groups need each other to remain in government. Both see the supreme court as a block to their ambitions. The success of the far right is down to Mr Netanyahu, who has polarised Israeli politics in the last 15 years. He has normalised outright racism, political smears and lies. The scale of deceit is such that Mr Netanyahu, who claims to be an energetic 73-year-old, shocked the public last week by undergoing emergency surgery for a long-known heart problem.
The ruling coalition won last year’s election by the narrowest of margins, just 30,000 votes. Yet it proposed all but abolishing the role of the supreme court as the sole check on executive power. When the backlash did for its original plans, the government decided to achieve its aims by “salami-slicing” its programme into a number of smaller bills. This way it can weaponise its supporters’ outrage by suggesting that their opponents protest too much.
There’s no sign that the government will slow down. One member of Mr Netanyahu’s party says that the government is ready to push further measures to “override” court rulings that strike down legislation. The ultra-religious party now wants military draft exemptions cemented in Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Law. It is difficult to see how Israel’s current character can be preserved if the politics of compromise and consensus are abandoned in this arrogant manner.
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