opinion
A ‘Resistance’ Coup Just Defeated
Israeli Democracy
Jonathan Tobin
A fter months of increasingly strident mass
protests against his government’s plans to
reform Israel’s out-of-control and highly parti-
san judicial system, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
appears to have given in to the pressure.

He said he was going to be “delaying judicial reform
to give real dialogue a chance.” But it’s highly doubt-
ful that this will merely be a timeout that will help his
supporters regroup and enable opponents to calm
down and accept a compromise on the issue.

On the contrary, Netanyahu is waving the white flag
on judicial reform — and everyone knows it. And since
the ultimate goal of the protests was not just preventing
legislation from being passed but to topple the govern-
ment, it’s far from clear whether the prime minister can
long stay in power after this humiliation since his allies
are shaken and his opponents won’t be satisfied until
he’s ejected from office.

Whether that will happen remains to be seen. But the
consequences of the events of the last months go far
beyond the future of the Israeli legal system.

Netanyahu’s announcement is leading to celebra-
tions on the Israeli left as well as among their foreign
supporters, especially in the Biden administration and
liberal Jewish groups. And they have good reason to
celebrate. The anti-Bibi resistance was able to sell the
world a false narrative about their efforts being nothing
more than a successful effort to defend democracy
against the efforts of would-be authoritarians who
wanted to create a fascist theocratic state.

But the notion that an uprising of the “people” has
stopped a “coup” by Netanyahu and his allies is pure
projection. What the world has just witnessed was itself
a soft coup. Fueled by contempt for the nationalist and
religious voters whose ballots gave Netanyahu’s coali-
tion a clear Knesset majority in November and imputing
to them their desire for crushing political opponents,
the cultural left has shown that it has an effective veto
over the results of a democratic election.

In exercising that veto, they have given Israel’s
enemies, who don’t care how much power the courts
have or who the prime minister of the Jewish state is,
ammunition that will make their international campaign
to isolate their country more effective.

More importantly, they’ve broken rules and set
precedents that will impact future Israeli governments
no matter who is leading them. They’ve shown that
not even an election can be allowed to break the
left’s stranglehold on effective power via a system of
16 MARCH 30, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
courts and legal advisers that have effectively made
Israel a juristocracy rather than a country ruled by the
representatives of the people. That sends a dangerous
message to the people whose votes determined the
outcome of the election — that their views don’t matter.

The opposition didn’t play by the rules
Netanyahu and his fellow coalition members made a lot
of mistakes in the last few months. The prime minister
was inhibited by an outrageous ruling from the attor-
ney general that effectively silenced him on the most
important issue facing his country.

He had been criticized for trying to force fundamen-
tal change to the justice system via a narrow partisan
majority without a consensus. But those who say this
are hypocrites. A left-wing Israeli government forced the
disastrous Oslo Accords with an even narrower major-
ity. Democrats like President Joe Biden, who make the
same claim, also seem to forget that the Obama admin-
istration he served did the same thing with health care.

Given the way his opponents have been willing to go
to any length to defame or delegitimize him and even
to drag him into court on trumped-up flimsy charges of
corruption, Netanyahu underestimating his opponents
is hard to fathom. Having broken a three-year-long
political stalemate by gaining 64 seats in the Knesset
to form the first clear majority since he won in 2015, the
prime minister somehow thought his foes would play
by the rules and let him govern.

He failed to understand that his opponents were
prepared to set the country on fire, destabilize its
economy and even weaken its national defense to throw
him out. The notion that restraining the power of the
court — something that opposition leader Yair Lapid
used to support before he realized that latching on to the
resistance would give him a chance to erase his defeat
last year — was the point of the protests was always false.

The same could be said of the claim that preventing the
courts from selectively exercising unaccountable power
without any basis in law was the end of democracy.

With the chaos in the streets, the prime minister
already had his back to the wall. But the widespread
refusal of many reservists, especially among those
with skilled positions such as pilots, to refuse to report
for reserve duty threatened the country’s national
security. Along with general strikes that forced closures
at airports and shutdowns of medical services, that
proved to be the last straw and led already shaky
members of the coalition to lose heart.

The coalition was slow to mobilize its voters, who,
after all, did outnumber the opposition in the recent
election. The government’s supporters were forced
to watch impotently as their leaders faltered, feuded
among themselves and failed to act decisively to fight
the battle for public opinion.

Going forward in the face of a resistance that was
ready to trash even the most sacred of Israeli civic
traditions involving national defense to gain a political
victory became impossible. And with his party losing
discipline, and the U.S. government and many leading
institutions of American Jewish life similarly backing
the opposition, Netanyahu had no choice but to try and
prevent any further damage.

Implications for the future
Will that happen every time the right wins an election
from now on? Probably. That means not only will the
juristocracy defend its power, but its supporters are
permanently committed to thwarting the will of voters
who may continue to outnumber them in the future.

And how will a theoretical government of the left
react if large numbers of right-wing opponents try to
play the same game? If the debates over the disastrous
Oslo Accords and the 2005 Gaza withdrawal are any
gauge of their behavior, they will crack down on their
opponents in ways that Netanyahu hesitated to do this
year with widespread jailing of dissidents.

While the left threatened violence against their
opponents and even civil war if they didn’t get their
way about judicial reform, who really believes they will
hesitate to initiate one if they are in power and the right
rises up in the streets the way we’ve just witnessed?
What’s more, Netanyahu’s opponents have (whether
they realize it or not) also legitimized arguments aimed
at denying that Israel is a democracy. While his foes
think that this will only apply to times when the right
wins elections, they may come to realize that to the
antisemites who assail the Jewish state in international
forums and in American politics where the intersec-
tional left is increasingly influential, that will also apply
to governments led by parties not named Likud.

Ultimately, Israel’s citizens — whether through
democratic elections or mob actions that break govern-
ments and Knesset majorities — will determine their
fate. And those who look on from abroad must accept
the outcome of these struggles.

Yet far from defending Israel from authoritarian
forces, the protesters have established a precedent
that will haunt future governments of all kinds and
shake the foundation of its democracy. Whether that
damage can be undone remains an open question. ■
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish
News Syndicate).