Israel’s long war between
the generals and extremists is not going away
By Jonathan Cook
March 30, 2023:
Information Clearing House
- - Israel edged closer
to civil war over the weekend than at any point
in its history. By Monday night, in a bid to
avert chaos, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to put a
temporary halt to his plans to neuter the
Israeli courts.
By then, city centres had been brought to a
standstill by angry mass protests. The country’s
attorney general had declared Netanyahu to be
acting illegally. Crowds had
besieged the parliament building in
Jerusalem. Public institutions were shuttered,
including
Israel’s international airport and its
embassies abroad, in a general strike. That
was on top of a near-mutiny in recent weeks from
elite military groups, such as
combat pilots and reservists.
The crisis culminated with Netanyahu
sacking his defence minister on Sunday
evening after Yoav Gallant warned that the
legislation was tearing apart the military and
threatening Israel’s combat readiness. Gallant’s
dismissal only
intensified the fury.
The turmoil had been building for weeks as
Netanyahu’s so-called
“judicial overhaul” moved closer to the
statute books.
At the end of last week, he managed to
pass a first measure, which shields him from
being declared unfit for office - a critical
matter given that the prime minister is in the
midst of a corruption trial. But the rest of his
package has been put on pause. That includes
provisions giving his government
absolute control over the appointment of
senior judges and the power to override Supreme
Court rulings
It is hard to see a simple way out of the
impasse. Even as Netanyahu bowed before the
weight of the backlash on Monday, the pressure
began mounting on his own side.
Far-right groups launched a wave of angry
counter-demonstrations, threatening violence
against Netanyahu’s opponents.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the police minister and
leader of the fascist Jewish Power party,
initially vowed to
bring down the government if Netanyahu did
not press ahead with the legislation.
But in the end, his acquiescence to a delay
was bought at a typically steep price: a
National Guard will be established
under Ben-Gvir’s authority. In practice, the
settler leader will get to run his own fascist,
anti-Palestinian militias, paid for by the
Israeli taxpayer.
Lack of democracy
Fancifully, coverage of the protests
continues to frame them simplistically as a
battle to save “Israeli democracy” and “the rule
of law”. `
“The brutality of what’s happening is
overwhelming,” one protester
told the BBC. But if the protests were
chiefly about democracy in Israel, the large
minority of
Palestinians living there, a fifth of the
population, would have been the first on the
streets.
They have a highly degraded form of
citizenship, giving them inferior rights to
Jews. They
overwhelmingly stayed home because the
protests weren’t advancing any conception of
democracy that embraces equality for them.
Over the years, international human rights
groups have slowly come to acknowledge this
fundamental lack of democracy, too. They now
describe Israel as what it always was:
an apartheid state.
In fact, it is only because Israel lacks
in-built democratic controls and human rights
safeguards that Netanyahu was in any kind of
position to bulldoze plans through for the
judiciary’s emasculation.
Israel’s political system permits - by design
- tyrannical rule by government, without
decisive checks or balances. Israel has no bill
of rights, or second chamber, or provision for
equality, and the government can invariably call
on a parliamentary majority.
The lack of oversight and democratic
accountability is a feature, not a bug. The
intent was to free Israeli officials to
persecute Palestinians and steal their land
without needing to justify decisions beyond a
claim of “national security”.
Netanyahu has not been trying to destroy
“Israeli democracy”. He has been richly
exploiting the lack of it.
The only flimsy counterweight to government
tyranny has been the Supreme Court - and even it
has been relatively supine, fearful of weakening
its legitimacy through interference and
attracting a full-frontal political assault. Now
that moment may be just around the corner.
Culture war
A superficial reading of events is that the
growing protests are a response to Netanyahu’s
weaponising of the law for his own personal
benefit: to stop his corruption trial and keep
himself in power.
But though that may be his primary
motivation, it is not the main reason his
far-right coalition partners are so keen to help
him get the legislation passed. They want the
judicial overhaul as badly as he does.
This is really the culmination of a
long-festering culture war that is in danger of
tipping into a civil war on two related but
separate fronts. One concerns who has ultimate
authority to manage the occupation and control
the terms of the Palestinians’ dispossession.
The second relates to who or what a Jewish
society should answer to: infallible divine
laws or all-too-human laws.
There is a reason the streets are awash with
Israeli flags, wielded equally fervently whether
by Netanayhu’s opponents or his supporters. Each
side is fighting over who represents Israel.
It is about which set of Jews get to play
tyrant: law by the generals, or law by religious
street thugs.
For decades, Israel’s military-security
establishment, backed by a deferential secular
judiciary, has set the brutal agenda in the
occupied territories. This old guard is only too
well-versed in how to sell its crimes as
“national security” to the international
community.
Now, however, a young pretender is vying for
the crown. A burgeoning theocratic, settler
community believes it finally has enough muscle
to displace the institutionalised power of the
military-security elite. But it needs the
Supreme Court out of the way to achieve its
goal.
First, it views the security-judicial
establishment as too weak, too decadent and too
dependent on western favour to finish the job of
ethnic cleansing the Palestinians - both in the
occupied territories and inside Israel - begun
by an earlier generation.
Second, the Supreme Court is certain to block
the right’s efforts to
ban a handful of “Arab parties” that run for
the Knesset. It is only their participation in
general elections that prevents a combination of
the far-right and religious right from holding
permanent power.
Unfinished business
Israel’s political tectonic plates have been
grinding noisily together for decades. This is
why the latest turmoil has echoes of events in
the mid-1990s. That was when a minority
government, led by a veteran military commander
of the 1948 war, Yitzhak Rabin, was trying to
drive through legislation supporting
the Oslo accords.
The sales pitch was that the accords were a
“peace process”. There was an implication -
though no more - that the Palestinians might one
day, if they behaved, get a tiny, demilitarised,
divided state whose borders, airspace and
electromagnetic spectrum were controlled by
Israel. Not even that materialised in the end.
The current upheaval in Israel can be
understood as unfinished business from that
era.
The Oslo crisis was not about peace, any more
than this week’s protests are about democracy.
On each occasion, these moral posturings served
to obscure the real power play.
The violent culture war unleashed by the Oslo
accords ultimately led to Rabin’s
murder. Notably, Netanyahu was the principal
player then, as he is now - though 30 years ago
he was on the other side of the barricades, as
opposition leader.
He and the right were the ones claiming to be
victims of an authoritarian Rabin. Placards at
the right’s demonstrations even showed the prime
minister
in a Nazi SS uniform.
The political tailwind blew strongly enough
in the religious right’s favour even then that
Rabin’s murder weakened not the opponents of
Oslo but its supporters. Netanyahu soon came to
power and
eviscerated the accords of their already
limited ambitions.
But if the secular security establishment got
a bloodied nose during the Oslo skirmish, the
upstart religious right could not quite deliver
a knockout blow either. A decade later, in 2005,
they would be forced by Ariel Sharon, a general
they viewed as an ally, to
withdraw from Gaza.
They have been mounting a fightback ever
since.
Biding time
During the Palestinian uprising through much
of the 2000s, following Oslo’s failure, the
military-security establishment once again
asserted its primacy. So long as Palestinians
were a “security threat”, and so long as the
Israeli military was saving the day, the rule of
the generals could not be seriously challenged.
The religious right had to bide its time.
But today’s circumstances are different. In
power for most of the past 14 years, Netanyahu
had an incentive to avoid inflaming the culture
war too much: its suppression served his
personal interests.
His governments were an uncomfortable mix:
representatives from the secular establishment -
such as ex-generals Ehud Barak and Moshe Yaalon
- sat alongside the zealots of the settler
right. Netanyahu was the glue that held the mess
together.
But too long in power, and now too tainted by
corruption, Netanyahu has come unstuck.
With no one in the security establishment
willing to serve with him in government - now
not even Gallant, it seems - Netanyahu can count
only on the theocratic settler right as reliable
allies, figures such as Ben-Gvir and Bezalel
Smotrich.
Netanyahu has already given both
unprecedented leeway to challenge the security
establishment’s traditional management of the
occupation.
As police minister, Ben-Gvir runs the Border
Police, a paramilitary unit deployed in the
occupied territories. This week he can start
building his “National Guard” militias against
the large Palestinian minority living inside
Israel - as well as the “pro-democracy”
demonstrators. No doubt he will make sure to
recruit the most violent settler thugs to both.
Meanwhile, Smotrich has hands-on control of
the so-called Civil Administration, the military
government that enforces apartheid privileges
for Jewish settlers over native Palestinians. He
also funds the settlements through his role as
finance minister.
Both want settlement expansion pursued more
aggressively and unapologetically. And they
regard the military establishment as too craven,
too deferential towards diplomatic concerns to
be capable of acting with enough zeal.
Neither Ben-Gvir nor Smotrich will be
satisfied till they have cleared the only
significant obstacle to a new era of
unrestrained tyranny from the religious
settlers: the Supreme Court.
Theocratic rule
Were Palestinians - even Palestinian citizens
of Israel - likely to be the only victims of the
“judicial overhaul”, there would barely be a
protest movement. Demonstrators currently
enraged at Netanyahu’s “brutality” and his
assault on democracy would have mostly stayed
home.
The difficulty was that to advance his
personal interests - staying in power -
Netanyahu also had to advance the religious
right’s wider agenda against the Supreme Court.
That relates not just to the occupied
territories, or even to the banning of Arab
parties in Israel, but to Israel’s most fraught
internal Jewish social questions too.
The Supreme Court may not be much of a
bulwark against the abuse of Palestinians, but
it has been an effective limit on a religious
tyranny taking over Israeli life as varieties of
religious dogmatism grow ever more mainstream.
Netanyahu’s mistake in seeking to weaken the
court was to drive too many powerful Jewish
actors at once into open defiance: the military,
the hi-tech community, the business sector,
academia and the middle classes.
But the power of Jewish religious extremism
is not going away - and neither is the battle
over the Supreme Court. The religious right will
now regroup waiting for a more favourable moment
to strike.
Netanyahu’s fate is another matter. He must
find a way to revive the judicial overhaul
promptly if his young government is not to
collapse.
If he cannot succeed, his only other recourse
is to seek an accommodation with the generals
once again, appealing to their sense of national
responsibility and the need for unity to avert
civil war.
Either way, democracy will not be the victor.
Jonathan Cook
is a Nazareth- based journalist
and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize
for Journalism. No one pays him to write
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