The unrest in Israel is not over the judicial overhaul — it’s an identity crisis
Is Israel ‘democratic’ first and ‘Jewish’ second? Or vice versa?
Protestors block a road during a demonstration against the judicial reform bill outside the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Jerusalem, Israel, on Monday, July 24, 2023. Israel’s parliament approved a bill that will reduce judges’ ability to overrule government decisions and appointments. Photo by Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Gedalia Guttentag July 26, 2023
Like spectators in a boxing match wondering which of the two battered heavyweights will hit the ropes first, Israelis and international observers of the current upheaval over Israel’s judicial system are wondering: How many more rounds will the two sides go?
Having passed the “reasonableness clause” amendment this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must decide whether to press ahead with the rest of the package of changes — as justice minister and architect of the controversial reforms, Yariv Levin, wants to do — or notch a victory and pivot to other concerns like the economy and security situation.
But for a glimpse of their long-term future, Israelis should look beyond their own political system to a set of parallels overseas. The judicial overhaul crisis is the local version of Trumpism and Brexit — both tell us what happens when ideas go from the margins to the mainstream. Combined with a powerful animating personality, formerly marginal ideas can awaken a powerful new majority, and provoke a national identity crisis.
Let’s start with Trumpism. Mostly forgotten in the retrospective glare of Donald Trump’s ascent is the way that he was able to build on the Tea Party movement’s introduction of a maximalist and populist agenda to the GOP. Components of Trump’s MAGA agenda were new, but Trump’s unique superpower was his megaphone effect. His powerful ability to get and maintain media attention enabled his ability to move ideas on free trade, immigration and the media from the fringes of the Republican Party to its center.
Since those ideas were opposed to the liberal consensus, the controversy over Trump as a political personality quickly became a much more profound referendum on what type of country Americans wanted to see. That’s why Trump continues to be the linchpin of American politics, because epoch-defining identity struggles are not short-term questions.
The same dynamic drove Brexit. For years, the dream of leaving the European Union was the province of “fruit cakes and loonies,” as former British prime minister David Cameron memorably dismissed the UK Independence Party’s outsider campaign.
But suddenly, the fruit cakes won. Boris Johnson’s emergence as a galvanizing figure took the pro-Brexit cause from meshuga to mainstream. Once there, Brexit quickly became a proxy for a referendum over British identity — hence its endurance.
Israel’s judicial overhaul saga has followed a similar pattern.
Last November, two months before the current controversy burst into the open, I sat down in the Knesset with a then-little-known politician — Simcha Rothman, one of the judicial overhaul’s architects.
He described the long march to take the idea of judicial reform, which had percolated since the ’90s, from the fringes to the heart of Israel’s right.
It had emerged out of bipartisan frustration with the creeping power grab by the country’s Supreme Court justices, which originated in a little-noticed legal ruling that took place in the days immediately after Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995.
When the proposed judicial overhaul legislation was announced in January, the ferocity of the debate around the changes quickly made it clear that — like Trumpism and Brexit — they touched on something far deeper than the separation of powers and the limits of judicial influence.
Unlike the cartoonish, hysterical claims of a mortal threat to Israeli democracy exported by left-wing figures such as former prime minister Ehud Olmert, and echoed by foreign media outlets, the truth is that this is a perfectly legitimate debate over the court’s power — one that’s once again become a proxy for an identity war.
Some see it as a tussle over the two elements of Israeli identity expressed in its Declaration of Independence: is Israel “democratic” first, and “Jewish” second, or vice versa? Others speak of a new division emerging between a secular, pluralist “State of Israel” centered on Tel Aviv, versus a religious, particularistic “State of Judea” centered on Jerusalem.
But regardless of labels, the fault lines are clear. For overhaul advocates, checking the High Court’s power is a chance to defend conservative values that are threatened by liberal justices, as Rothman told me. That’s precisely what the largely secular protest movement fears. Instead of protesting in the name of democracy, what they’re actually fighting for is to preserve Israeli secularism’s control of the public square.
Having endured six months of left-wing street protests, airport blockades and public and private sector strikes, plus threats to ground the air force and damage the country’s economy, what can long-suffering Israelis look forward to now?
If the parallels with Trump and Brexit are any indication, this struggle isn’t going anywhere. When fundamental questions about society bubble lava-like beneath the surface and then find a fissure, the eruption can’t easily be contained.
Doubtless, there will be a political ebb and flow: The protests may lose steam, or the current government could fall to a politician like Benny Gantz, who vows to roll the changes back.
But having metastasized into an era-defining societal reckoning, Israelis had better get used to the fact that the judicial overhaul crisis is here to stay.
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