Just as regime change never occurs in a vacuum like thunder on a clear day, neither is Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial revolution the mere whim of a zealous justice minister and a thirsty prime minister. revenge against a judicial system that had dared to put him on the bench. Unfortunately, the danger to Israeli democracy will not go away no matter how much Netanyahu's judicial reshuffle is torpedoed. What he calls in Orwellian language "reform" (in reality, we are facing the elimination of the separation of powers and the submission of the judiciary and, with it, the Supreme Court to the control of the parliamentary majority of a country that lacks a Constitution and does not have a second chamber to moderate extremism) is a consequence of the deep cultural fissures that characterize Israeli tribal society and, since 1967 mainly, of the occupation and repression of the Palestinian people.
Right-wing governments have chosen to hide the truth about the repercussions of the moral decline of long years of occupation on the fabric of the mother country. Netanyahu will go down in history as the architect of integrating the monstrous distortion of the Zionist idea (expressed as the repression of the Palestinian people by a Jewish master race) into Israel's political system. If there is a dictatorship in the occupied Palestinian lands, it will also exist outside of them; If the rule of law and fundamental freedoms do not exist in them, they will not exist outside of them either. It is the iron law of communicating vessels.
Israel's ruling party is today a sect of believers indistinguishable from its allies in "Religious Zionism," the obsolete name adopted by the disciples of the late Jewish supremacist Rabbi Kahana and the fundamentalist rabbis of Judea and Samaria. This party is the most refined component of the theocratic fascism that dominates the Netanyahu government today; and judicial remodeling is an essential part of his journey toward a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Netanyahu is, for them, the Messiah's donkey; just as Donald Trump, the hedonistic atheist, was for America's evangelical Christians.
And for the other allies, the ultra-Orthodox, who have always despised secular liberal Zionism but in recent years have turned ultra-nationalist (after all, for the approximately 140,000 ultra-Orthodox settlers, the West Bank is the same Lebensraum that attracted hundreds of thousands of other Israelis), Netanyahu is the figure who, by tearing down the walls of the hated Supreme Court, will pave the way for them to complete and final liberation from conscription and any legal interference with their autonomy. How excessive! A judicial coup executed by a dark alliance with a separatist orthodox community whose objective is to annihilate the values of liberal society, which finances its destroyers with its taxes and sends its children to protect them while they promote a theocratic vision.
A true imperialist is one who is willing to sacrifice democracy for the sake of empire. It is true that the imperial conquests of overseas European countries also unleashed waves of nationalism and racial supremacism, but nothing beats expansion into a territory that is defined as "homeland" and is in territorial continuity with the mother country (see Hitler in Austria and the Sudetenland, Putin in Crimea and Ukraine, as well as Israel's West Bank) in reinforcing the authoritarian state.
The one in charge in the Netanyahu government of institutionalizing such moral suicide is its main ideologue, Bezalel Smotrich, the head of the Religious Zionist Party. The military occupation regime, which by definition is a supposedly “temporary” affair, is what still narrowly shields Israel from apartheid guilt. However, the recent approval of the law annulling Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan in northern Samaria and the "nationalization" of the occupation through the appointment of Smotrich as head of the Civil Administration in the Palestinian territories remove the mask and they show Israel's gallop towards an apartheid state.
The death of the two-state solution and the insatiable agrarian hunger of Israel in the Palestinian lands are the profound reasons that doomed the fate of Israeli democracy to make the title of Gabriel García Márquez's book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a reality. Those who still make predictions in the name of the solution of the two States are all men of honor, as Marco Antonio said in his lament at Julius Caesar's obsequies; but, like him, they proclaim at the feet of a corpse.
Half a million settlers live today in the occupied West Bank, not counting the 240,000 in East Jerusalem. There is no need for Israel to announce official annexation, reality speaks for itself. Attempts at peace have come and gone, from the Oslo Accords, through the Camp David summit and the Clinton peace plan, to the Annapolis process and its ambitious peace proposal. It is likely that all proposals were imperfect. Yet that is how these things always are, "mutually unsatisfactory"; especially when there is no military victor. In reality, the supposed victor, Israel, was morally and politically defeated when it occupied the West Bank in 1967, just as Heinrich Mann referred to Germany's victory over France in 1870: Vae victoryibus! (Woe to the victors!).
The tragedy is that the South African reality that is unfolding in Israel does not and cannot have a South African solution, since there is no scenario in which the Jewish minority allows the rule of the Arab majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. The dystopia that materializes before our eyes will be a state of constant civil war with Jerusalem turned into a local version of Belfast. “You will search in vain for barbed wire fences. / You know things like that / don't disappear," Yehuda Amichai wrote in his "Jerusalem 1967" series of poems.
Those who advocate in good faith for a binational Judeo-Arab state with equal civil rule between the sea and the Jordan harbor an enviable optimism about human nature and the generosity of national movements. Sigmund Freud wrote about the "narcissism of small differences," the same narcissism that has shattered multiethnic utopias in so many places. A binational state has no prospects. Here? In this region where minorities are gassed, where Sunnis and Shiites wage war for dominance and sometimes extinction, and where the region's only multi-ethnic democracy, Lebanon, collapses in on itself in a horrifying sight? What was not possible in Cyprus between the Turks and the Greeks or in the entire universe of the former Yugoslavia, which imploded in orgies of blood and genocide that Europe had not known since the Second World War, should be possible here hand in hand with two nationalisms like the Jewish-Israeli and the Palestinian-Muslim, impregnated as they are with egocentric stories and a righteous feeling of victimhood?
Perhaps just an Israeli-initiated disengagement from most of the West Bank (hopefully political good sense would prevail to carry it out in coordination with the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan as a prelude to a future larger deal in the Jordan-Palestine-Israel triangle). be the last lifeline left for Israeli democracy. Netanyahu lacks the historical greatness for a move as towering as that, and indeed for any bold political move. Netanyahu only knows how to make the kind of peace that carries no political price; and, in the Palestinian sphere, there is none like that.
Unlike his predecessors, who did not see the perpetuation of power as a supreme goal and were therefore willing to risk their political lives fighting for peace in Palestine in an attempt to restore the healthy core of the Zionist idea (corrupted by the nationalist frenzy of the 1967 war), Netanyahu is the quintessential opportunist. For him, the highest consideration was always the preservation of his political base, even if it meant (as can be seen in his current fanatical rule) being held hostage by his allies rather than his guide. .
“Sometimes, in politics,” Charles de Gaulle declared on the eve of the French withdrawal from Algeria, “one has to choose between betraying the electorate or France. I choose France." Netanyahu always chooses the political base. Of course, there is no politics without a base, but clinging to a base in any situation is also the secret to failure in statecraft.
Netanyahu maintains his political base by constantly feeding the Kulturkampf incorporated into Israeli reality. In our country, electoral campaigns do not really develop around platforms and action plans, but rather as part of a continuous clash of values and culture, divergent traditions and inter-ethnic divisions. The gap between the Israel embodied in "Tel Aviv", as a metaphor for a secular and liberal existence open to the world, and its mirror image, the Israel of "Jerusalem" (the religious and orthodox city, trapped in messianic delusions and oblivious to the foreign values, by reason of their universality, of “Tel Aviv”) is Netanyahu's playing field.
With his judicial reshuffle, Netanyahu has launched Israel into its own "Brexit moment." In Britain, Boris Johnson and his sect of overzealous Tories took advantage of the inherent fracture in urban England and the Tory fringe imbued with nostalgia for “Little England” values to drive the country to collective suicide with the help of a fallacious propaganda about the wonders of leaving the European Union. As in the case of the judicial coup in Israel, it was a rebellion against reality and common sense. And, as in Israel, the sect of fanatics that caused the disaster did so with utter disregard for the opinion of "experts." Netanyahu has yet to find a serious economist who has not warned him of the economic decline to come if he persists in his judicial reshuffle.
Israel is heading to the brink in the aftermath of a Brexit-like act of fanatical adventurism; and not only in the economic field, where the miracle provided by high technology is jeopardized and the flow of investment is diverted elsewhere. Elite unit reservists and fighter pilots have also come out against Netanyahu's attack on democracy. It is encouraging and dangerous at the same time, because Netanyahu's judicial madness has forced the army to assume the guardianship of democracy, a role that is not his.
How fanatically stupid judicial reform can be if it denies your army, engaged as it is in a permanent state of war waged in complex theaters of combat, the protection of an independent judiciary from possible prosecution by the International Court of Justice. .
Israeli democracy is a strategic asset and the cornerstone of its national security. This is the message that the United States is trying to convey with increasing impatience to the fanatical government in Jerusalem, and it is also what French President Emmanuel Macron wanted to signal when he warned Netanyahu of the danger of breaking away from the family of democratic countries. If the continued repression of the Palestinian people and the confiscation of their land have not yet led to international sanctions against Israel, this is due above all to our belonging to the family of democratic states. Those who doubt it should ask Vladimir Putin.
The United States is another example of a political system operating in the midst of an ongoing culture war between the liberal America of the East and West coasts and the “deep” America that Donald Trump swept into the White House in 2016. The difference is that American democracy is held together by the foundational cement of a Constitution that enshrines human rights and minority rights, and by the ability of its leaders to reinvent the American dream even when it seems to be on the verge of running out. . Yet today's Israelis have neither a Constitution nor a common dream capable of galvanizing their tribal society. Netanyahu has even divided up the welfare state by building breakaway social welfare autonomies for his constituencies between settlers, ultra-orthodox Ashkenazis and their Sephardic counterparts.
Netanyahu, they say, is historically aware, and he himself even boasts of being the Winston Churchill of the Israeli situation. However, as Netanyahu's idol wrote in his 1937 article "The Age of Government by Great Dictators", the government is not left to the brink of the changing whims of the rulers, "sometimes Pericles or Augustus and sometimes Draco or Caligula". , because "a formidable apparatus of propaganda, slogans and slogans" is capable of altering the opinion of the crowd and thus paving the way for dictatorships that are often "hidden behind the mask of a constitutional structure".
American historian Charles Beard took it for granted that American democracy would survive because it "has neither a Rome nor a Berlin to march on." Now, if Trump almost succeeded in turning Washington into Rome in the United States when he sent a frenzied mob storming the Capitol to get him declared the winner of an election he had lost, the same could happen in Israel as well. In Israel, an entire people and the state budget were held hostage for three consecutive election cycles until Netanyahu got the result he wanted. In what Western democracy can such a situation occur? Protection against government arbitrariness was precisely what the United Kingdom Supreme Court offered when, in September 2019, it forced Prime Minister Boris Johnson to cancel a suspension of Parliament with which he intended to leave the European Union even without the need for an agreement .
We are at a defining moment for Israel's future, and also at an opportunity for major political realignments. Unless Israel has decided to tie its fate to the dark international of authoritarian regimes (it is advisable to follow Freedom House reports on the decline of democracy around the world), its liberal forces must create new political structures and a renewed leadership. forward-looking politics. The narcissistic nuances that supposedly distinguish the parties of the current parliamentary opposition lack real meaning today. If its leaders do not bring a message of hope and a horizon of change to the massive protests in the streets (through the creation, for example, of a great Democratic Party that offers ample room and that addresses the Israeli crisis with the determination of an emergency and treat it in its communicating vessels of society, occupation and constitutional regime) may miss the moment of truth that history has offered them.
