The Israel Defense Forces has launched a further major
ground assault in Gaza – this time with the intention
of taking and holding significant amounts of territory as a
“security buffer”. This appears unlikely to endear the
prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to many of the families
of the remaining 59 Hamas hostages, who may well fear the
worst for their loved ones.
It’s a high-risk
strategy on Netanyahu’s part. But the prime minister is
already walking a political tightrope as he simultaneously
attempts to bend
his country’s legal system to his
will.
Thousands of Israelis have taken to the
streets to protest the prime minister’s recent attempts to
bring the country’s supreme court under government
control. The saga started when he sacked
the country’s most important spy chief, the head of
Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, in mid-March.
This was the first
time a government had dismissed a serving head of Shin Bet,
and the supreme court stepped in to freeze the order until
it had the chance to hear opposition objections.
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The
attorney-general, Gali Baharav-Miara, a vocal critic of
Netanyahu, accused the prime minister of ignoring the law.
This led the government to pass
a no-confidence motion in her as well.
Israel’s
parliament, the Knesset, subsequently passed a law which
would give the government the power to appoint
new members of the supreme court.
The move was
criticised by the Israel Democracy Institute, which described
the new law as a “broader shift toward subordinating legal
and security institutions to political authority” in
Israel. It certainly has the potential to undermine the
country’s system of checks and balances which – as in
many western democracies – rests largely on the separation
of powers.
Israel does not have a single written
constitution. What it has is a set of “Basic
Laws” which provide the rules of governance. Within
these are checks
and balances, which aim to prevent any one institution
or individual from exercising untrammelled control. Putting
the make-up of the supreme court into the hands of the
government would threaten this basic democratic principle on
which Israel has always operated.
On March 19,
Netanyahu posted
on X from the prime ministerial account: “In America
and Israel, when a strong right-wing leader wins, the
leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart
the people’s will. They won’t win in either place!” He
later removed the post and reposted the same thing from his
personal account.
The post linked his efforts to
control the judiciary with the Trump administration’s
loudly voiced campaign against state barriers to its
power.
But anyone who has followed Netanyahu’s
decision-making in recent years will discern a pattern.
Since being charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust
in 2019 (which he denies) he has done anything he can to try
to gain control of the country’s judiciary – for his own
political preservation.
Netanyahu’s
motivations
At the same time, many critics believe
Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza had been with one
eye to prolonging hostilities to delay proceedings in his
own trials. Now it appears that the Israeli prime minister
is attempting a frontal assault on Israel’s
judiciary.
His decision to sack Bar came as the Shin
Bet chief was supervising an investigation into allegations
concerning, as he put it in a letter
to the cabinet before his sacking: “Qatar’s
involvement at the highest levels of Israeli
decision-making, including the Prime Minister’s
Office.”
Equally questionable is the attempted
ousting of Attorney-General Baharav-Miara, who is overseeing
the criminal case against him. Replacing them with more
compliant and loyal individuals would help ensure that
Netanyahu and the policies of his government are
protected.
All of this drew a strong response from the
former consul general of Israel in New York, Alon Pinkas.
Writing in the opposition paper Haaretz on March 21, Pinkas
argued that Israeli “democracy’s guardrails” are
being brought “crashing down fast and furious by
Netanyahu’s design”.
He concluded that the only
two remaining checks on Netanyahu’s power are “the
supreme court and the Israeli public” – adding that the
court can only act when it is permitted. “So the Israeli
public becomes the only potentially effective
check.”
An active civil society is an important
marker of democracy and my research
shows that Israel has a strong history of protest and
extra-parliamentary action across a range of social,
economic and political issues.
There has been a
continuous stream of anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel since
the “black
flag protests” in 2020 in opposition to Netanyahu’s
continuing in power despite facing serious criminal charges.
The protests grew ever stronger, despite COVID safeguarding
regulations.
When the government attempted
wide-ranging reforms which many critics feared would fundamentally
weaken the independence of the judiciary, hundreds of
thousands took to the streets weekend after weekend, forcing
the government eventually to shelve its
plans.
Since the start of the war
in Gaza, the political
focus of protests shifted to broad consensus in calling
the government to do everything in its power to ensure the
release of the October 7 hostages. Now the protests will
focus more centrally back on the considerable public
discontent with the prime minister himself.
It
remains to be seen, now, whether Alon Pinkas is right and
whether the Israeli public can be an effective check against
a leader who appears now to be governing solely in his own
interests.
Leonie
Fleischmann, Senior Lecturer in International
Politics, City
St George’s, University of London
This
article is republished from The
Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Read the original
article.
