Israel’s left and its war against Netanyahu
It’s not quite the same as our left’s war against Trump, but it has harmonic vibrations.
The left in Israel has a more powerful court system to do its bidding. In the following excerpt from an article by Caroline Glick, “MQG” stands for the “Movement for Quality Government.” Love those Orwellian titles:
…[L]ate last month MQG submitted a new petition asking the justices to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As in the case of Deri, MQG’s petition is based on a political rather than a legal argument. MQG argues that as a criminal defendant, Netanyahu is unfit to serve. The premier, MQG insists, is acting with a conflict of interest by overseeing judicial reforms while on trial. And as a result, the justices should declare him unfit and remove him from office.
Never mind that the justices have a conflict of interest since it is their powers the government’s proposed reforms would check. Never mind that in a bid to prevent politicized judges and prosecutors from overturning the will of the voters, the law explicitly permits prime ministers to serve not only while standing trial, but even if convicted. And never mind that the charges against Netanyahu have fallen apart in Jerusalem District Court.
MQG saw with the Deri ruling that the justices feel no inclination to respect either the law or the will of the voters when their personal interests are at stake. And indeed, last week, Justice Daphne Barak-Erez gave the attorney general and the government a month to explain why the court shouldn’t overturn the votes of 2.4 million Israelis who voted for Likud and its coalition partners to return Netanyahu to the Prime Minister’s Office.
In a withering response to Bark-Erez’s order, Justice Minister Yariv Levin described MQG as “a gang of lawyers who do not respect the outcome of the election, working to carry out a coup and remove the prime minister from office.”
Levin continued, “It’s not surprising that the partners in this effort are the same ones leading the opposition to judicial reform: the leftist group which refers to itself as the Movement for Quality Government, the attorney general and the Supreme Court. This effort to oust the prime minister in contravention of the law, while trampling on the democratic election, is no different from a coup that is carried out with tanks.”
Ah, but it’s not a coup or an insurrection when the left does it. When the left does it, it’s a fortification.
Glick adds that the Israeli media is fully complicit in this endeavor. Sound familiar? Also, on the education front, the Israeli left has spearheaded a post-Zionist curriculum in the public schools:
…“[D]emocracy” curricula like those promoted by MQG are disguised efforts to subvert Israeli democracy. In the case of its school programs, the subversion comes in the form of post-Zionist indoctrination.
While claiming to oppose religious coercion, the actual goal of the “democracy curricula” is twofold. First, it seeks to bar Jewish Israeli schoolchildren in nonreligious public schools from learning about the Bible, Jewish history, religious traditions and holidays. Second, it strives to replace Judaism with post-Zionist curricula. To the extent Judaism is taught, it is taught from a critical perspective.
Similar to Critical Race Theory curricula in the United States, which indoctrinates American schoolchildren to believe their country was born in the sin of racism and has no moral claim to justice, groups like MQG advance “democracy” as a means of gutting Israel’s Jewish character and indoctrinating Israeli children to believe that there is something inherently wrong with Jewish nationalism and national self-determination. The “democracy” programs in the schools indoctrinate children to believe that the only moral way for Israel to organize itself is as a post-Jewish “state for all its citizens.”
The Glick article goes on to describe the Biden administration’s support for the MQG’s efforts against Netanyahu. No surprise there.
Left-wing Jews in Israel hate Judaism? Bizarre, although there are left-wing Jews in the US who have similar feelings about the traditional religion.
The people who do this sort of thing…in whatever country…think they’re going to end up on top, or at least not against the wall.
Well, knowing neither of those are true may be some satisfaction at the end.
Kate:
Leftists often hate religion. Any and all religions – except leftism, which is a sort of religion-substitute. Nothing bizarre about that.
The parallels and similarities to Trump are many. But there is one crucial difference: Bibi is far more disciplined, focused and clever. He first became prime minister 27 years ago and has been the object of scorn and hatred from the left ever since (obviously, especially since he returned to power in 2009). They are relentless in their quest to destroy him but, thus far, they have failed…and failed…and failed.
Ultimately, DeSantis, more than Trump, may become the American Bibi. Here’s hoping
Neo,
I don’t think there’s anything ‘sort of’ about it. Leftism in its many forms (but especially ‘Woke’ Identity Politics) is a Godless religion, adhered to as dogmatically as any fundamentalist sect.
Worse than “La Traison de clerics?”
Over the past two years, things in Israel have gone from serious and degenerating, then presenting a stark warning to us about tyrannical decline — THIS is what the Left does here, and will do to you (in the US) next (courtesy of Neo, Glick, and commenters here) — to a bare victory and now, suddenly, a dogfight: the Ruling Class Left versus The people.
Am I missing something in this barest outline? Corruption of the Judges and the just-us “system” as the linchpin of systemic political institutional decline — with Leftist counter-Constitutional decay as the Judas kiss enabling the treason.
I’m also reading this longer piece by Alina Kutnicki, Israel “On The Brink…” https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/on_the_brink_of_judicial_reform_israels_leftists_grow_panicked.html
Is another cold civil war turning HOT?
In these days of “To the most hysterical go the spoils”, the amount of misinformation being bandied about and the hysteria it has intentionally been intended to provoke has become The Narrative of the moment.
Can’t expect any of it to calm down any time soon, though it must.
Additional analyses, perhaps more measured than Caroline Glick, that describe the current impasse…
Peter Berkowitz:
“Israel’s Constitutional Counterrevolution”—
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/05/israels_constitutional_counterrevolution_148820.html
Jonathan Tobin:
https://www.jns.org/a-democratic-revolution-against-a-court-with-unlimited-power/
https://www.jns.org/opinion/americans-shouldnt-be-swayed-by-the-israeli-lefts-freakout/
And from Legal Insurrection, it looks like the latest election results are being criticized by all the “right people” and media orgs., who have demonstrated their commitment to “Democracy” and “Truth” for so long now that nothing they say either about Democracy or Truth (or much of anything) should be taken at face value.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/11/mainstream-media-throws-temper-tantrums-as-netanyahu-returns-to-power/
its another idol, the notion you shall be as gods, they deceive themselves they are bringing heaven on earth, but their end state, is to bring about hell,
now benda didn’t think that the treason was not on the left, but toward bourgeois interests, a distinction rarely made,
bibi is a force of nature, who had lasted this long over the span of time, has he made mistakes notably in the prisoner exchanges probably, look at bennett and gantz, the ones they proferred as bibi lite, but they were nothing of the kind,
Neo, you’re right about leftist hate for religion. This is true for Christians as well as Jews. It’s just jarring to see a proposal in Israel from ethnic Jews proposing to strip its children of an understanding of their history. But, now that I think of it, that’s precisely what the CRT fanatics are doing to our children, stripping away their history.
What’s interesting about this ‘post-Zionist’ curriculum (antagonistic to Judaism as well) is that it could only please the Arab population, an indeterminate segment of that part of the population which is neither Arab nor Jewish, and that segment of the Jewish population which is analogous to our repulsive chatterati (and favor the Meretz list in elections). That’s 30% of the population at most. Democracy.
Israel has a ‘flexible constitution’. If the Knesset wishes to repeal the enabling legislation creating the court and dismiss its members, it can. If it wishes to restore Aryeh Deri to office, it can annul the decision. The court and the Attorney-General seem to be counting on the refractory character of the party system to keep them from being removed from office.
I’m also reading this longer piece by Alina Kutnicki, Israel “On The Brink…
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Not taking her seriously. The left is attempting to proceed by using its positions in the legal profession and the media. They’re likely not in a position to be forthrightly coercive.
I do believe that generally, Western Leftist are more tolerant of Islam, as long as it does not appear ” radical”, than they are of Christianity.
Israel is an officially Jewish but mostly secular country, and I can see that many people would prefer for it to be completely secular. The problem is that if it did become completely secular, it would quickly become completely Islamic (through immigration), and then “it” would no longer exist any more.
“…That’s 30% of the population at most….”
The problem is that the country is basically divided in half ballot-wise.
As the Left gradually discredited itself (since Oslo, etc., i.e., over 20 years ago and in the interim)—with the avid assistance of Israel’s “Partners in Peace”(TM)—and the country’s electorate, as a result, shifted rightward, those voters uncomfortable with a potential government made of a significant religious component (and this would have included a fair number of moderately religious voters) went to look elsewhere for a viable alternative to the right, which would need the religious and ultra-religious parties to form any potential government.
Lapid and his Yesh Atid (Tr. “There is a Future”) party filled that need, with the upshot being that in the past several elections before this last one, the number of Knesset seats won by Labor and Meretz diminished gradually but significantly; finally, in this latest election they entirely failed to reach the threshold of voters that would have enabled them to have representatives in the Knesset (Parliament). Had they merged and run as a single party, as they were advised to do by several, including Lapid, that joint list would have sent members to the Knesset, returning the country—ONCE AGAIN—to a political stalemate and most likely making the current government an impossibility.
But this is the electoral system the country has. It is not optimal; there are problems, and changes were proposed. Some, but not all, of these changes were implemented in the mid-90s, and proving ultimately untenable were scrapped after several elections, whereupon the original rules were reinstated.
The current problem stems from the more extreme members of the current government, and the hysteria, lies, misinformation provoked, swallowed whole and spread further by the “Saviors of Israel and Her Democracy”, primarily the Leftist media, the political leaders of the parties who lost this latest election.
There are concerns; but the power of the Supreme Court has been growing, along with the abuses such power facilitates.
Even those advocating discussion and compromise, such as the President of the country, who himself served as an ineffectual leader of the Labor Party during its waning period, have been castigated as traitors and enemies by the stalwart “Defenders of the Country and Democracy” driven to hysterics and throwing tremendous tantrums, fed by their manufactured “truths” and their fears.
I’m not sure how the country will survive this, as “Biden” is waiting in the wings waiting patiently but ready, with all “deliberate speed”, to insert the blade of “his” long-sought efforts to “transform” the country, together with Israel’s “Partners in Peace”(TM) and other “interested” neighbors, to the southwest, to the north…and a bit further afield…
As for Lapid, he has disgraced himself, having demonstrated convincingly (to me, at least) that he is not the leader he believes himself to be, and has totally jettisoned any and all ability or right to fulfill that role. Others, to be sure, would believe the exact opposite—the country having been divided straight down the middle (similarly to the current predicament of the US)—believing him, and others, to be the heroic warrior defending the country, standing up to Fascism and, yes, even Nazism—creative hyperbole being quite the rage in the country at the moment….
Well, one can hope against hope that, somehow, a modus vivendi can—will—be found.
Example of overwrought headline…on the “Just the News” site of all places(!):
“Dershowitz brokering Israel’s judicial reform as conservatives attempt Supreme Court takeover” [my emphasis]—
https://justthenews.com/world/middle-east/dershowitz-brokering-israels-judicial-reform-conservatives-attempt-supreme-court
Should be, “…as conservatives attempt to limit Supreme Court abuses of power…”
Of course, not everyone would agree to that either.
But it’s hyperbole rules! And everyone just gets increasingly upset, insane and radicalized…
Most unfortunately…(actually, most tragically).
A false equivalence. Dersh misses the point. In Israel the Supreme Court has far too much power, as does the Attorney General. A democratically elected government wants to correct that imbalance. In the US, the Court overstepped in Roe v Wade, and wisely corrected itself in Dobbs.
Meanwhile
https://twitter.com/debostic/status/1628257874811002880
Also true.
The irony being that the Supreme Court, which is supposed to ensure that the government does not overreach, has itself become so politicized that IT must be reigned in.
A case of who watches the Watchers…or, HOW can the Watchers be made to play by the rules…?
I’m not sure how the country will survive this
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Israel is thriving economically, demographically, and in a politico-military sense as well. The one major anxiety is Iran.
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As for the elections, the results were as follows:
8.6%: Arab bloc
10.8%: Labor & Meretz
17.9%: Religious bloc
20.6%: Social-liberal bloc
40.8%: Right bloc
The government majority includes all of the right bloc and the religious bloc bar the 5.6% who voted for Yisrael Beitanu, whose boss has been unwilling to work with Bibi. The left is trying to exploit positions it holds in occupational guilds and bureaucracies in order to get it’s way because it’s very far from being able to prosper electorally.
The left is dramatically weakening this country, which has oceans to help protect us. Israel has enemies next door. This weakening is very dangerous. I was pretty neutral about Israel until the Entebbe raid. Bibi’s brother led that raid and was the only casualty. That changed my mind about Israel. As for the “Two state solution,” I still remember the Dennis Ross column at the time when Clinton tried to broker such an agreement. Here is a fair estimate of what happened.
Contrary to what one hears from some, the Israeli Left really could get away with “saving democracy” (i.e., instituting even more Leftist authoritarianism) in that country. I would not put it past the Israel Supreme Court to invalidate any limitation of their jurisdiction, regardless of the absence of any constitution on which to base their actions. Right now, there is an attempt going on to prevent the judicial reform on the ground of “conflict of interest,” based on the trumped up criminal charges against Bibi. There is little doubt that in a showdown like that, the IDF – which is controlled by leftist generals who worship the US Democratic Party and our woke Pentagon and national security establishment – would back the Supreme Court.
The Left in Israel (including the phony “centrist” parties of Lapid and Gantz) is genuinely post-Zionist. Secular leftwing Zionism started out as a rejection of rabbinic Judaism (which, to be fair, is rather authoritarian by nature) in the name of the Jewish People taking control of their own destiny, without waiting for divine action and independent of the guidance of bearded, black-hatted rabbis. Once the State of Israel was established, the focus of the Israeli Left gradually shifted from the self determination of the Jewish People to the exaltation of the State itself, which was to be “Jewish” mainly by virtue of adhering to the purportedly “democratic” and “liberal” values of the Western Left (which was seen to be the sole legitimate modern descendant of Judaism, by way of Spinoza). Thus, at the same time the Israeli Left demands the withdrawal from the West Bank to maintain a Jewish majority, the Leftist Supreme Court forbids the government to forcibly deport the thousands African migrants who have drifted into the country through Egypt, on the ground that deporting them would insult the migrants’ “human dignity,” thereby supposedly violating “Jewish values.”
At this point, it seems likely that the Israeli Left will ultimately – not in the immediate future, but probably within 20 years — support a binational state incorporating the West Bank, which would clearly be the end of any Jewish majority, but would ensure the acceptance of “Israel” by the US and EU (both of which seem to be under permanent Leftist control) and might even be enough to placate Iran (which is effectively backed in its anti-Zionist aspirations by both the US and EU, as well as by Russia and China). Eventually, secular Israeli Jews, for most of whom Judaism is not even a memory of a grandparent, may decide their best option is to convert and become Hebrew speaking Muslims.
To me, Israel’s situation – both internally and vis a vis its external enemies, including the US Democratic Party – looks very grim. The country’s economic vitality is not going to save it.
Neo – thanks for posting this. It saved me having to compose an overlong comment on an open thread…
Barry Meislin and Art Deco are basically correct about the demographic breakdown.
The potted history is that Labor was originally a patriotic “big tent” secular socialist party during Israel’s founding period. There was even a more extreme Communist party to the left of Labor.
However, the big tent had limits. Labor actively antagonized and disenfranchised religious and non-European Jewish groups as part of its socialist vision: the sincere, ancient faith that brought many Jews to Israel was replaced with the fervor to create secular “New Jews” to stand alongside their comrades in socialist utopia.
Labor was pulled leftward and then cannibalized by its own radicalized children, who perhaps saw the contradictions between Zionist nationalism and one-world kumbaya socialism.
Meanwhile the various disenfranchised groups increased, fought against institutionalized prejudice and prospered despite economic exclusion, and organized politically, led by the Likud – the conservative, free market opposition party.
The catastrophic failure of Oslo – the last great utopian dream – has left mainstream, patriotic, secular Israelis without a political home. It also destroyed what little authority the old Establishment still had, emboldening the disenfranchised Right who had called out Oslo’s folly.
Since Oslo blew up, the former Laborites have drifted between various short-lived “centrist” parties. Have they tempered their taste for one-world socialism? Maybe – but privatisation and reform threaten the old ‘protekzia’ driven crony-ocracy that is their power base. The Supreme court is one such crony mafia.
And they cannot admit the Likudniks were right. They – like many other Left-leaning ‘lovers of humanity’ – cannot shed their own prejudice and animus towards the religious and the Sephardic “Jews of Color” (animus that the media take pains to encourage…). They still repeat the aggrieved Archie Bunker mantra that “the Likudniks and the ethnics stole the country from us.”
… So beneath the legal issues, this is a showdown between elitists who think Israel is their private country club, and millions who, having come up the hard way, will no longer be disenfranchised.
JNS — “Three more judicial reform bills pass first reading in Knesset”: https://www.jns.org/three-more-judicial-reform-bills-pass-first-reading-in-knesset/
Netanyahu is a smart guy but like Trump he sets himself up unnecessarily for trouble a lot of the time. The Israeli Left (the Haaretz crowd) needs to recognize the fact that when the Hamas crowd shouts “Yitbach al Yahud” (meaning kill the Jews) the mob means them too!
JNS — “Iranian FM: IAEA officials to travel to Tehran ‘in coming days’ “: https://www.jns.org/iranian-fm-iaea-officials-to-travel-to-tehran-in-coming-days/
Looks to me like Israeli national unity is a dire necessity at this moment in time on the most pressing national security grounds, as all hell can break loose on the entire people when it’s no longer possible to stall for more time to take on Iran, entailing, of course, the potential immediate attacks from Hezbollah raining missiles down out of Lebanon, to be joined in no doubt by Hamas et al from Gaza and cells placed round about Israel internally awaiting their opportunity. Blasted internal squabbling won’t help this need in any way.
But then neither will looking to Robert Malley and Co. for help — looking to the Biden regime is a fool’s game.
Actually, “Biden” wants Iran to become a nuclear power.
(Just ask Occam…)
That is, if you’re “thing” is transformation, then why not transform the Middle East while you’re at it!
Meanwhile, Daniel Greenfield has another trademark no-holds-barred article, this time on the latest round of what is commonly referred to as “The Jewish Wars”…(with apologies to Josephus Flavius, who’d be a rather wealthy man had he ever bothered to register for a copyright on the phrase…)
“Biden Administration Funds Anti-Netanyahu Protest Group;
“A coup in Israel is backed by Washington, D.C.”—
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19433/biden-administration-anti-netanyahu
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
Yes, folks, it’s almost—yikes!—Biblical….
Related:
“Biden Diplomats Trying to Block U.K. Plan to Designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as Terror Group”—
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-diplomats-trying-to-block-u-k-plan-to-designate-iran-militia-as-terror-group/
Heh!
To be sure, Israel should not take these clear signs of “Biden”‘s love and outreach personally. Other American “allies” are also benefiting:
“There’s a Lot More to the Chinese Spy-Balloon Story”—
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/theres-a-lot-more-to-the-chinese-spy-balloon-story/
Contrary to what one hears from some, the Israeli Left really could get away with “saving democracy” (i.e., instituting even more Leftist authoritarianism) in that country.
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Israel has a body of constitutional law, not an entrenched charter. The enabling legislation creating the post of attorney-general and supreme court justice are statutory laws. They can ‘get away’ with this only if the Knesset lets them.
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To me, Israel’s situation – both internally and vis a vis its external enemies, including the US Democratic Party – looks very grim.
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You’re not looking at anything outside of the space between your ears.
Israel is an officially Jewish but mostly secular country, and I can see that many people would prefer for it to be completely secular. The problem is that if it did become completely secular, it would quickly become completely Islamic (through immigration), and then “it” would no longer existany more.
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Israel’s vigorously religious minority is proportionately larger than it was 70 years ago. No, secular enclaves do not inevitably turn into Muslim enclaves. That’s silly talk.
A tiny Marxist minority wants Israel to be completely secular – that is part of the current power struggle. In their own eyes these folks are “many” – and for decades they shaped Israel’s public culture – but most Israelis want Israel to have an explicitly Jewish identity, both in cultural norms and in law.
Skimming off the 10-15 percent Arab minority:
20-30 percent of the Jewish population are “ultra” Orthodox who completely rejected the socialist program.
Another 10-12 percent are more “modern” Orthodox religious Zionists.
The remaining right-of-center voters – Shas and Likud – are very traditional-minded. Although not strictly Orthodox in practice, their level of knowledge and practice leaves most American Reform or Conservative Jews far behind. Their kitchens are kosher and many attend Friday night Sabbath services. Many of them come from North African and Mediterranean Jewish communities.
These people want Israel to be a democracy with an explicitly Jewish publish character, just as Christianity is a part of national identity and observance in many European countries. This normalization of Judaism is part of the Zionist project for most.
They also want their children to receive instruction in Judaism. The educational systems run by Shas and the religious Zionists are burgeoning, and the ostensibly “secular” schools that include instruction in Bible and Jewish history are swamped by parents. As in the US, many parents woke up during Covid to how progressive their kid’s curriculum had become, and are working to change that.
In addition to these longstanding traditional Israelis, many secular children of the old Labor socialists have become more sympathetic to their Jewish roots, just as their attitudes have softened to capitalism. Some of this has been fueled by the influx of Soviet emigres, many of whom are not Jewish. It turns out many of these “secular” Jews still want their grandchildren to marry Jews…
So there is a large MOR majority that wants Judaism to be a part of public national identity.
The tiny minority pushing for complete “separation of church and state” – and spinning any Jewish expression as a dangerous step towards theocracy – have amply demonstrated how little understanding or commitment they actually have to Western democracy… This is yet another cynical attack on traditional values by bitter socialist clingers.