opinion
Israeli Sovereignty and American
Intervention Elliott Abrams
T he streets are seething. Police have clashed with
demonstrators, and there have been not only
arrests but some violence. Hundreds of thousands and
likely millions have protested proposed government
actions. Unions have called for nationwide strikes.

Government reactions have elicited even more fierce
opposition. Israel? No, France.

Most recently, protests have intensified when the
government completely bypassed the parliament to
push through by decree a broadly unpopular provi-
sion raising the retirement age. In response, President
Biden has said exactly nothing, and other figures in his
administration have been equally quiet.

“We remain deeply concerned by recent develop-
ments, which further underscore the need in our view
for compromise,” National Security Council spokesman
John Kirby said on March 27. Why was he talking about
Jerusalem and not Paris?
What explains the Biden administration’s interven-
tion in Israeli politics, where officials including the U.S.

ambassador to France, the secretary of state and the
vice president have all jumped in? It cannot be the
facts of the situation. In Israel, the government has
done nothing yet about judicial reform, while in France
President Macron simply blasted through the protests.

There are four explanations, all political and all
worrying. First, this dispute in Israel is in significant ways a
contest between conservative, more religious parts of the
society and leftist, more secular ones. That is obviously a
generalization, but it isn’t an accident that the chairman
of the Knesset law and judiciary committee pushing the
reforms is from the Religious Zionist Party. And neither
is it an accident nor a surprise that a Democratic Party
administration in the United States should be backing
the secular left over the religious right.

Nor is it an accident or a surprise that the main media
supporters of the Biden administration, such as CNN,
The Washington Post and The New York Times share
those views and push the administration to voice them.

One aspect of the judicial reform struggle in Israel is
a kulturkampf between “advanced” sectors of society
and those they see as backward. In American terms,
Hillary Clinton in 2016 insulted the “deplorables,” and
Barack Obama talked in 2008 of people who “cling to
guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like
them.” Rightly or wrongly, Americans on the left see the
Israeli debate in similar terms.

Second and similarly, it should not be surprising that
14 APRIL 13, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
a Democratic Party administration will criticize what it
views as right-wing governments and leaders in other
countries. There has been plenty of official criticism of
the Polish and Hungarian governments, and criticism
from the liberal media of Prime Minister Modi in India.

Meloni’s victory in Italy was received on the American
left as a dangerous move back to fascism.

We’ve seen this movie before when it comes to
Democrats and Israel. Jimmy Carter despised
Menachem Begin. In 1996 and 1999, the Clinton
administration intervened in Israeli elections to support
Shimon Peres against Benjamin Netanyahu.

Asked in a 2018 interview whether it would be fair to
say that he tried to help Peres win the election, Clinton
replied: “That would be fair to say. I tried to do it in a
way that didn’t overtly involve me.” In 2015, Foreign
Policy magazine carried a story with the headline
“Obama is Pursuing Regime Change in Israel.” That
time, it was an effort to back Labor Party leader (and
now president) Isaac Herzog against Netanyahu, and
the article concluded that “Both Obama and Kerry
would love to see Netanyahu out and Labor’s duo of
Herzog and Tzipi Livni in. And they’re doing everything
they reasonably can — short of running campaign ads
— to bring that about.”
And that time, just like now, Netanyahu was denied
a White House meeting while top officials met with
Herzog. As The New York Times said on March 29 of
Biden and Netanyahu, “There is no love lost between
the two leaders ...” When asked whether Netanyahu
would be invited to the White House, the president
replied sharply: “No. Not in the near term.”
Third, the issue of the Supreme Court is especially
neuralgic for Americans on the left. The U.S. Supreme
Court has long been a liberal icon in the United
States, idealized by Democrats for decades because
it was controlled by an activist majority. Democrats
applauded decisions on such matters as abortion and
gay marriage that gave victories the Democrats could
not win at the ballot box. More recently, Democrats
have attacked the court because it now has a conser-
vative majority. Democrats see that Israel’s Supreme
Court is activist and hands down “progressive” rulings,
so they believe it must be supported.

Finally, it must be said that American intervention has
been invited by many Israelis fighting against judicial
reform. They’ve invited it through their rhetoric, saying
that this American ally was on the verge of fascism.

When Herzog proposed a compromise, Ehud
Barak infamously tweeted the old photo of Hitler and
Neville Chamberlain with Herzog’s face substituted
for Chamberlain’s. Ehud Olmert and a thousand other
commentators used the word “coup” while yet more
spoke of a “blitzkrieg.” Opposition leader Yair Lapid
spoke of a “journey towards destroying Israeli democ-
racy.” All of them spoke in English to U.S. audiences,
and in the demonstrations in Israel many signs were
in English as well — all to appeal for the intervention
of American Jews and the United States government.

And those invitations fell on fertile American ground
for all the reasons mentioned previously. Take the
words of Rabbi Eric Yoffie, long-time leader of the
Reform movement. Writing in Haaretz on March 2,
he said, “I have never once lobbied against an Israeli
government. But Netanyahu’s judicial coup, his offen-
sive against democracy, must be stopped. That means
U.S. Jews must do the unthinkable, and urge a strong
American hand with Israel.”
This is a dangerous precedent. When Clinton inter-
vened (twice) in Israeli elections he tried to hide his
actions; he knew they were indefensible if exposed.

Now there’s a new model that justifies and indeed
idealizes foreign interference — demanding that the
United States intervene in domestic matters in Israel
in a way that never happens to any other democracy.

Those on the left should realize first that two can
play the same game. It isn’t hard to imagine a conser-
vative Republican president in the United States and
a left-of-center prime minister in Israel serving at
the same time. Will conservative Americans hence-
forth demand intervention in Knesset votes, or in
Israeli elections, because some proposed policies are
strongly opposed on the right?
Judicial reform is about the most “domestic” or “inter-
nal” issue one can imagine. If outside interference is
legitimate on that issue, are there any issues where
foreign intervention, whether by diaspora communi-
ties or foreign governments, should be considered
illegitimate? The struggle over judicial reform has many aspects.

The decision of those who oppose reform to invite,
indeed to plead for, American intervention in this
complex and fateful internal contest damages Israeli
sovereignty and self-government. One can only hope
that when the dust has settled, Israelis will — whatever
their views on the Supreme Court — come to agree
that the appeal to foreign intervention over the Jewish
state’s internal political structures was a damaging
mistake and a dangerous precedent. ■
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern
Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and
chairman of the Tikvah Fund. This was originally
published by The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.




nation / world
Last Surviving Prosecutor of
Nazis at Nuremberg Dies at 103
Benjamin Ferencz, the last surviving
member of the prosecuting team at the
Nuremberg trials that convicted Nazi
ringleaders for crimes against human-
ity, died on April 7 in Florida, JTA.org
reported. He was 103.

Ferencz was 27 and a gradu-
ate of Harvard Law School when he
was named as the chief prosecutor
at the Einsatzgruppen Trial, in which
20 members of the SS mobile death
Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz at the
squads were convicted of war crimes
Einsatzgruppen Trial in Nuremberg,
and crimes against humanity. Two
which lasted from September 1947
others were convicted of membership
until April 1948
in a criminal organization.

Slight and boyish looking, he is seen in newsreel footage of the trials speak-
ing deliberately and passionately in an accent shaped by his upbringing in
Manhattan. “Vengeance is not our goal, nor do we seek merely a just retribution,”
he tells the tribunal. “We ask this court to affi rm by international penal action,
man’s right to live in peace and dignity, regardless of his race or creed. The case
we present is a plea of humanity to law.”
Ferencz went on to play a key role on the team that negotiated the watershed
1952 reparations agreements under which West Germany agreed to pay $822
million to the state of Israel and to groups representing Holocaust survivors.

Ferencz was featured in two recent documentaries about the Holocaust and its
aftermath: Ken Burns’ PBS series, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” and “Reckonings:
The First Reparations,” a 2022 fi lm funded by the German government.

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KimmelCulturalCampus.org Finland to Become First Foreign Buyer of Israel’s David’s Sling
Aerial Defense System
Finland is set to become the fi rst foreign buyer of Israel’s David’s Sling air defense
system, the country’s defense minister announced on April 5, JNS.org reported.

The deal is worth some $347 million, and includes further options worth $237
million, according to a statement from the Finnish Defense Ministry.

The announcement came one day after the Nordic nation became the 31st
member state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

David’s Sling, developed by Rafael Advanced Defensive Systems together with
U.S. defense giant Raytheon, is designed to intercept ballistic missiles, UAVs,
enemy planes and other aerial threats.

Wikipedia via JTA.org
Cyberattack Crashes Websites of Several Israeli Universities
A coordinated cyberattack took down the websites of major Israeli universities
on April 4, JNS.org reported.

A hacker group calling itself “Anonymous Sudan” claimed responsibility for the
attack on its Telegram account, stating that the “Israel education sector has been
dropped because of what they did in Palestine.”
Institutions impacted by the attack include Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva, the
Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, the Open University of Israel and
Reichman University in Herzliya.

“These are service-disrupting attacks — those that only bring down websites
and do not steal information — and can be recovered from relatively easily.

However, it can be assumed that these groups are trying to produce more signif-
icant attacks, including ransom attacks and data theft,” Check Point, an Israeli
cybersecurity fi rm, said in a statement. ■
— Compiled by Andy Gotlieb
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 15