162 - Israel: Existential Class Warfare and the Demise of Zionism
Israelis were the fourth happiest people in the world, after a clutch of Nordics, according to the World Happiness Index, about which I wrote a week ago. But as the angry protests of the last few weeks in Israel against Prime Minister’s Binyamin Netanyahu’s plan to emasculate judicial independence and authority have demonstrated, millions of Israelis are no longer filled with joy.
A drastic demographic shift within Israel has precipitated the clash of ideologies: Sephardic and Mizrahi-descended Jews now outnumber Ashkenazim; Orthodox adherents are more numerous than more secular believers. The tumult in today’s Israel reflects the final muscling to power of those who want to overturn the democratic/secular footings on which Zionists constructed the young state.
Nearly 1 million Israelis (out of a total Jewish population of 7.6 million) took to the streets in an unprecedented rejection of their decidedly right-wing government’s promise to forbid judges from being able to rule against decisions of and laws made by the Knesset, Israel’s unicameral parliament. Moreover, Netanyahu seeks to transfer power to nominate judges from an independent committee of lawyers and jurists to the Knesset and himself.
Until now, the judiciary has since Israel’s birth exercised a separate brake on the otherwise unbridled power of the Knesset and executive. Its “judicial supremacy” has been an essentially separate wheel of power in a country with no written constitution and a set of basic laws that were only partially developed and never completed. Israel’s Supreme Court has in the past declared settlements in the Palestinian West Bank illegal, rejecting claims to special status and privilege by the Haredim and ultra-orthodox religious followers of hard-core belief groups.
But, for the first time in Israel’s history, those very extremists are in political power. Netanyahu bounced back (as he has often done) from narrow political defeat in the 2021 parliamentary elections to win narrowly in late 2022. Last week, he agreed to “delay” his “reforms” and to give Israelis a month-long break from politics during the Passover period, which starts Wednesday night.
Netanyahu is an acknowledged master at revving up identity politics. When none of the center political groups with which his Likud Party had previously been allied chose to join him, Netanyahu cobbled together a coalition of religiously and political extreme factions; it included representatives of the right, the far-right, and the ultra-far-right. When that mosaic of resentment triumphed, including two smaller parties headed by convicted criminals and two more run by virulent proponents of Israel’s Biblical claim to all of the land that is now Palestine, Netanyahu granted control over the police, finance, the interior, and health to persons formerly on the Israeli political fringe. He also promised the creation of a new paramilitary pretorian force (a “national guard”) to a disciple of Meir Kahane, the American-born bomb-thrower who was assassinated in 1990. Tom Friedman, in the New York Times, said that Netanyahu was behaving irrationally. On the contrary, like so many scheming opportunists, Netanyahu is very rational.
These new partners of Netanyahu want to overcome the rulings of the Supreme Court and other judges because the judiciary has hitherto almost always ruled to constrain the ability of the Orthodox and their allies to run roughshod over Israeli democratic practices. They have decided that the privilege of avoiding compulsory military service was not absolute for those who study the Torah full-time. They have tried to limit the ability of the Haredim and others to avoid secular schooling.
Netanyahu personally also needs to reduce the power of the nation’s court system because for five years he has been battling a case against him of corruption, begun when he was prime minister in 2016. (He has served twenty-seven years as prime minister.) Netanyahu wriggled out of a plea agreement drafted in 2021 that would have prevented him from remaining as prime minister yet again while the corruption charges were outstanding. (Netanyahu has behaved as an increasingly more autocratic prime minister in this decade.)
Apparently, the corruption charges have been pending for so long because prosecutors have been laboriously interviewing 300 possible witnesses to Netanyahu’s alleged repeated misappropriation of state funds and peddling of influence for profit. But exactly why the interrogation of potential witnesses is taking so long and why the Jerusalem District Court has permitted so many delays is not fully evident. All we know is that Netanyahu does not want to lose his premiership, which could mean jail. (One recent prior prime minister spent a year in prison for fiddling expenses.)
But there is much more to this peculiar Israeli story than the religious extreme right wanting to evade judicial oversight and Netanyahu giving up all kinds of principles to stay out of court clutches. Deep down, what is at stake is the ultimate control over Israel’s existence as a democracy and its until now central place as a modernizing, liberal-leaning, rule of law, human rights-observing outpost in a tough, mostly monarchically autocratic neighborhood.
Drilling down even farther, Netanyahu has become the witting accomplice of a collection of mostly religiously extreme operatives who want to undo the very basis on which Israel became a nation as a refuge for Jews fleeing the Holocaust and Stalinist oppression. The Jews who settled in British-mandated Palestine in the 1920 and 1930 and then forged the new Zionist nation and ousted Britain in 1948, expelled Palestinians from their homes, fought wars against their Arab neighbors, and established the new Israel were mostly Ashkenazim – either Jews from Europe or descendants of European Jews. They were Zionists, following Theodor Herzl’s late nineteenth century proclamation of the new Zion. Most Supreme Court judges reflect the ideals of the founding Ashkenazim.
These mostly European-descended Jews created a democratic Western-oriented state. It gained support from Washington, London, and Paris, and fought endless deadly battles to secure its existence. Then it opened its doors as a “European-minded” state to Jews dislodged from much of the non-European parts of the world. Those post-independence immigrants, very much welcomed by the secular Jews who founded Israel, were the Sephardim and the Mizrahi from as far away as India and Morocco and all parts of the mostly non-European world.
Ashkenazi Jews ruled Israel largely alone until the late 1970s, when the Likud Party, drawing in part on the newcomers and on the Orthodox Jews who had begun to settle in Israel, overcame the Labour Party (and its predecessors) of Israel’s founders.
The struggle for control of Israel turned deadly when a young decidedly anti-liberal assailant shot Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 because Rabin had welcomed the Norwegian-brokered Oslo Accords and their promise of lasting peace between Israel and Palestine. When the Accords broke down and Yasir Arafat’s Second Intifada reached its peak early in this century, Israel more and more became polarized between those – mostly Ashkenazi-descended – and those mostly from the Sephardic/Mizrahi strains of Judaism (echoes of Sunni/Shia competition) who want to “take back” more and more of the land between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.
Today, more than half of all Jewish Israelis are of Sephardic/Mizrahi descent and background. Moreover, 13 percent of all Israelis are religiously ultra-Orthodox. Another 40 percent or so are Orthodox by practice. Only 43 percent self-identify as secular. Thus, the secular Jewish state that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion established and for which Rabin died is largely at risk.
What is happening now in the battle over judicial supremacy represents not just democracy v autocracy. It is more than Netanyahu wanting to behave more and more like Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India – or even in the manner of a Putin.
The religiously ultra-Orthodox and those who want to push all Palestinians into Jordan are ascendant; they want finally and forever want to take Israel away from the Ashkenazim who lorded over them at the beginning. They believe they, not the founding class, are the true inheritors of the Land of the Bible.
Netanyahu is of Ashkenazi heritage. But he has successfully sold himself and Israel’s founding vision of democratic secularism to the newcomers, and to their wish to push aside any barriers to remaking Israel into an Orthodox, narrowly autocratic, state run by and for the formerly downtrodden. Israel has descended into class warfare, about which few talk openly.
But there is one more factor that helped Netanyahu’s Likud coalition lose power from 2021 to 2022. Fully 21 percent of all the 9 million citizens of Israel are Arabs. If the Ashkenazim allied again with the Arab parties, one of which was in the last government, the Orthodox right and Netanyahu could be thwarted. Another step in that direction would be the defection of just five Knesset members from Netanyahu’s coalition to the opposition, many of the leaders of which were originally Likud politicians.
Restoring the opposition to power with Arab help could stabilize the future of Israel. That would even be a fulfillment of the Zionist dream. But Israel is deeply at odds with itself. Whether and how it can ever come together in internal peace, much less with the Palestinians (not the Arabs) next door, is hard to imagine or predict. Sustaining a truly democratic Israel is going to be a difficult endeavor, especially when Netanyahu’s leadership is so compromised, even blighted and self-serving. His compulsive overturning of the liberal Zionist ideals of the nation’s founders continues to compromise Israel’s very existence.
Happy Passover to all!