opinion
‘Two Israels’: What’s Really Behind
the Judicial Reform Protests
Andrew Silow-Carroll
W hen Benjamin Netanyahu put his controversial
calls for judicial reform on pause two weeks
ago, many thought the protesters in Israel and abroad
might declare victory and take a break.

And yet on April 1, some 200,000 people
demonstrated in Tel Aviv, and pro-democracy
protests continued among Diaspora Jews and
Israeli expats.

On its face, the weeks of protest have been about
proposed legislation that critics said would sap power
from the Israeli Supreme Court and give legislators
— in this case, led by Netanyahu’s recently elected
far-right coalition — unchecked and unprecedented
power. Protesters said that, in the absence of an Israeli
constitution establishing basic rights and norms, they
were fighting for democracy. The government too
says the changes are about democracy, claiming that
unelected judges too often overrule elected lawmakers
and the will of Israel’s diverse electorate.

But the political dynamics in Israel are complex, and
the proposals and the backlash are also about deeper
cracks in Israeli society. Yehuda Kurtzer, president of
the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently
said in a podcast that the crisis in Israel represents “six
linked but separate stories unfolding at the same time.”
Beyond the judicial reform itself, these stories include the
Palestinians and the occupation, a resurgent patriotism
among the center and the left, chaos within Netanyahu’s
camp, a Diaspora emboldened to weigh in on the future
of Zionism and the rejection on the part of the public of a
reform that failed the “reasonableness test.”
I recently asked observers, here and in Israel, what
they feel is really mobilizing the electorate, and what
kind of Israel will emerge as a result of the showdown.

The respondents included organizers of the protests,
supporters of their aims and those skeptical of the
protesters’ motivations.

Conservatives insist that Israeli “elites” — the highly
educated, the tech sector, the military leadership, for
starters — don’t respect the will of the majority who
brought Netanyahu and his coalition partners to
power. Here are the emerging themes:
Defending democracy
Whatever their long-term concerns about Israel’s
future, the protests are being held under the banner
of “democracy.”
For Alon-Lee Green, one of the organizers of the
12 APRIL 13, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
protests, the issues are equality and fairness. “People
in Israel,” said Green, national co-director of Standing
Together, a grassroots movement in Israel, “hundreds
of thousands of them, are going out to the streets for
months now not only because of the judicial reform
but also — and mainly — because of the fundamental
question of what is the society we want to live in."
Shany Granot-Lubaton, who has organized
pro-democracy rallies among Israelis living in New
York City, says Netanyahu, National Security Minister
Itamar Ben-Gvir and the coalition’s haredi Orthodox
parties “are waging a war against democracy and the
freedoms of citizens.”
“They seek to exert control over the Knesset and the
judicial system, appoint judges in their favor and legalize
corruption,” she said. “If this legal coup is allowed
to proceed, minorities will be in serious danger, and
democracy itself will be threatened.”
A struggle between two Israels
Other commentators said the protests revealed
fractures within Israeli society that long predated the
conflict over judicial reform. “The split is between
those that believe Israel should be a more religious
country, with less democracy, and see democracy as
only a system of elections and not a set of values,
and those who want Israel to remain a Jewish and
democratic state,” Tzipi Livni, who served in the cab-
inets of right-wing prime ministers Ariel Sharon and
Ehud Olmert before tacking to the center in recent
years, recently told Haaretz.

Author and translator David Hazony called this
“a struggle between two Israels” — one that sees
Israel’s founding vision as a European-style, rights-
based democracy, and the other that sees that vision
as the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland.

“Those on the first side believe that the judiciary
has always been Israel’s protector of rights and
therefore of democracy, against the rapaciousness
and lawlessness of politicians in general and
especially those on the right. Therefore an assault
on its supremacy is an assault on democracy itself.

They accuse the other side of being barbaric,
anti-democratic and violent,” Hazony said.

As for the other side, he said, they see an activist
judiciary as an attempt by Ashkenazi elites to force
their minority view on the majority. Supporters of
the government think it is entirely unreasonable “for
judges to think they can choose their successors,
strike down constitutional legislation and rule
according to ‘that which is reasonable in the eyes of
the enlightened community in Israel,’” said Hazony,
quoting Aharon Barak, the former president of the
Supreme Court of Israel and bane of Israel’s right.

The crises behind the crisis
Although the protests were ignited by Netanyahu’s
calls for judicial reform, they also represented push-
back against the most right-wing government in
Israeli history — which means at some level the
protests were also about the Israeli-Palestinian con-
flict and the role of religion in Israeli society. “The
unspoken motivation driving the architects and sup-
porters of the [judicial] ‘reform,’ as well as the protest
leaders, is umbilically connected to the occupation,”
writes Carolina Landsmann, a Haaretz columnist. If
Netanyahu has his way, she writes, “​​There will be no
more two-state solution, and there will be no territo-
rial compromises.”
Nimrod Novik, the Israel Fellow at the Israel Policy
Forum, said that “once awakened, the simmering
resentment of those liberal Israelis about other
issues was brought to the surface.” The Palestinian
issue, for example, is at an “explosive moment,”
said Novik: The Palestinian Authority is weakened
and ineffective, Palestinian youth lack hope for a
better future, and Israeli settlers feel emboldened by
supporters in the ruling coalition.

Religion and state
Novik spoke about another barely subterranean
theme of the protests: the growing power of the haredi,
or ultra-Orthodox, parties. Secular Israelis especially
resent that the haredim disproportionately seek
exemption from military service and that non-haredi
Israelis contribute some 90% of all taxes collected. One
fear of those opposing the judicial reform legislation
is that the religious parties will “forever secure state
funding to the haredi Orthodox school system while
exempting it from teaching the subjects required for
ever joining the workforce.”
What’s next
Predictions for the future range from warnings of a
civil war to an eventual compromise on Netanyahu’s
part to the emergence of a new center electorate
that will reject extremists on both ends of the politi-
cal spectrum. ■
Andrew Silow-Carroll is the editor at large of the
New York Jewish Week and the managing editor for
ideas for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.