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.




opinion
Judaism Doesn’t Want You to Wander
and Live Just Anywhere — or Does it?
Ben Harris
JTA illustration
I was a remote worker long before the pandemic made
it a thing, but it was only this year that I really took
advantage of it. Early on the morning of New Year’s
Day, I boarded a plane from Connecticut bound for
Mexico, where I spent a full month sleeping in thatch-
roofed palapas, eating more tacos than was probably
wise and bathing every day in the Pacifi c. I’ll spare you
the glorious details, but suffi ce it to say, it wasn’t a bad
way to spend a January.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found myself again and again
coming into contact with expats who had traded in their
urban lives in northern climes for a more laid-back life in
the tropics. There was the recently divorced motorcycle
enthusiast slowly wending his way southward by bike as
he continued to work a design job for a major American
bank. There was the yoga instructor born not far from
where I live in Massachusetts who owned an open-air
rooftop studio just steps from the waves. There were the
countless couples who had chosen to spend their days
running beachfront bars or small hotels on the sand.

And then there were the seemingly endless number
and variety of middle-aged northerners rebooting their
lives in perpetual sunshine.

Such people have long mystifi ed me. It’s not hard
to understand the lure of beachside living, and part of
me envies the freedom to design your own life from
the ground up. But there’s also something scary about
it. Arriving in middle age in a country where you know
nobody, whose language is not your own, whose laws
and cultural mores, seasons and fl ora, are all unfamiliar
— it feels like the essence of shallow-rootedness, like a
life devoid of all the things that give one (or at least me)
a sense of comfort and security and place. The thought
of exercising the right to live literally anywhere and any
way I choose opens up a space so vast and limitless it
provokes an almost vertiginous fear of disconnection
and a life adrift.

Clearly, this feeling isn’t universally shared. And the
fact that I have it probably owes a lot to my upbringing.

I grew up in an Orthodox family, which by necessity
meant life was lived in a fairly small bubble. Our house
was within walking distance of our synagogue, as it
had to be since walking was the only way to get there
on Shabbat and holidays. I attended a small Jewish
day school, where virtually all of my friends came from
families with similar religious commitments. Keeping
kosher and the other constraints of a religious life had
a similarly narrowing eff ect on the horizons of my world
and thus my sense of life’s possibilities. Or at least that’s
how it often felt.

“I spent a full month sleeping in thatch-roofed palapas, eating more tacos than was probably wise and
bathing every day in the Pacifi c.”
What must it be like — pardon the non-kosher
expression — to feel as if the world is your oyster? That
you could live anywhere, love anyone, eat anything and
make your life whatever you want it to be? Thrilling,
yes — but also frightening. The sense of boundless
possibility I could feel emanating from those sun-baked
Mexicans-by-choice was seductive, but tempered by
aversion to a life so unmoored.

The tension between freedom and obligation is baked
into Jewish life. The twin poles of our national narrative
are the Exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai,
each commemorated by festivals separated by exactly
seven weeks in the calendar, starting with Passover. The
conventional understanding is that this juxtaposition
isn’t accidental. God didn’t liberate the Israelites from
slavery so they could live free of encumbrances on the
Mayan Riviera. Freedom had a purpose, expressed in
the giving of the Torah at Sinai, with all its attendant
rules and restrictions and obligations. Freedom is a
central value of Jewish life — Jews are commanded
to remember the Exodus every day. But Jewish
freedom doesn’t mean the right to live however
you want.

Except it might mean the right to live any place you
want. In the 25th chapter of Leviticus, God gives the
Israelites the commandment of the Jubilee year, known
as yovel in Hebrew. Observed every 50 years in biblical
times, the Jubilee has many similarities to the shmita
(sabbatical) year, but with some additional rituals. The
text instructs: “And you shall hallow the 50th year.

You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land for all
its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: Each of you
shall return to your holding and each of you shall return
to your family.”
Among the requirements of the Jubilee was that
ancestral lands be returned to their original owners.

Yet the word for liberty is a curious one: “d’ror.” The
Talmud explains its etymology this way: “It is like
a man who dwells [medayer] in any dwelling and
moves merchandise around the entire country” (Rosh
Hashanah 9b).

The liberty of the Jubilee year could thus be said to
have two contrary meanings — individuals had the right
to return to their ancestral lands, but they were also
free not to. They could live in any dwelling they chose.

The sense of liberty connoted by the biblical text is a
specifi cally residential one: the freedom to live where
one chooses. Which pretty well describes the world we
live in today. Jewish ancestral lands are freely available
to any Jew who wants to live there. And roughly half the
Jews of the world choose not to.

Clearly, I’m among them. And while I technically could
live anywhere, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to. I like
where I live — not because of any particular qualities of
this place, though I do love its seasons and its smells
and its proximity to the people I care about and the
few weeks every fall when the trees become a riotous
kaleidoscope. But mostly because it’s mine. ■
Ben Harris is the managing editor of My Jewish
Learning, where a version of this essay fi rst
appeared. JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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