s t h i s t h e e n d o f B i b i ?

thodox who have always known that he followed the rules of fidelity and kashruth with equal attention Netanyahu s cynicism, deceptions, and ethical gymnastics are no more shocking to his Israeli supporters than Trump’s similar qualities are to his immense base He won so long as he could deliver for his constituents expanded the religious party’s authority Other than their traditional control over marriage divorce and rites of passage such as bar mitzvahs circumcisions and burials they now want complete a prohibition of El Al fights on Shabbat, and to prevent the courts from intervening in cases of human rights violations, which adversely impact LGBTQ persons, Arabs, and other minorities And on top of that they refuse to enlist their children to serve in the army while demanding and receiving full subsidies from the government This is not a democracy; this is a theocracy and a blatant breach of the separation between religion and state When demagogues and criminals including Netanyahu who is indicted for bribery fraud and breach of trust Ben-Gvir who was sanctioned for his bigotry and extreme views, and Smotrich who wants to burn down every Palestinian village control the levers of power only to further their interests and to hell with the country they make a mockery of Israel s democracy Indeed, a true democracy is a system of governance that puts the well-being and safety of the people first but this government is all about power grabs that do nothing but undermine Israel s reputation abroad and destroy its social fabric at home

When a country is an occupying power and applies two sets of laws one for Israeli Jews living in the West

Bank and one for the Palestinians that regularly violate the Palestinians’ human rights and subject them to a harsh and ruthless occupation it cannot be a democracy But then leave it to this wicked government to manipulate public opinion, leading them to believe that the Palestinians pose a real and present danger to Israel s national security, and must be dealt with firmly with an iron fist The occupation has been eroding Israel’s democracy from day one and as long as this authoritarian government remains in power and gets its way by subjugating the judiciary to its whims it will move to annex much of the West Bank and bury what s left of Israel s democracy

It is appalling and shameful that the reasonableness legislation has just passed But this disastrous, wanton act should become the catalyst for continuing the battle against this government and preventing it from passing further legislation that will completely cripple the Supreme Court and the appointment of judges who will be beholden to the ideology of a dangerous messianic cult

This government must be toppled by the people not only to prevent it from destroying the last vestiges of Israel’s democracy, but to save Israel from self-destruction Every demonstrator who held the Israeli flag so high must not allow history to repeat itself and bring about the destruction of the third temple because of internal disputes disunity rivalries and a morally bankrupt and irredeemable government

Beware, Netanyahu The real battle for Israel s soul has just begun, and you will be remembered as the despicable pharaoh who brought Israel to the brink of disaster

Dr Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Centre for Global Affairs at NYU He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies alon@alonben-meir com

BE N J A M I N Netanyahu has been Prime Minister of Israel longer than anyone in the history of the state, longer than F D R was President of the United States And yet for all his electoral success he has always been a known quantity Twenty-five years ago during Netanyahu s first term I spoke with his predecessor and fellow Likud member Yitzhak Shamir Bibi? Shamir said He is not a very trustworthy man ” He added, “I don’t believe he believes in anything He has a huge ego People don’t like such people I don t like him Not long after I spoke with Shimon Peres the Labor Party leader who had lost to Netanyahu in 1996 Peres was furious with Netanyahu s determination to undermine the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians His general assessment of Netanyahu’s amoralism and cynicism was much like

Shamir s Netanyahu s only consideration is his own coalition Peres said He s always worried about losing power that is always his first priority

On the same reporting trip to Jerusalem, I discovered that the cliché is true: No man is a hero to his director of communications and policy planning David Bar-Illan a former concert pianist and editor of the Jerusalem Post was without illusions about Netanyahu even as he pledged abiding loyalty to him When I asked Bar-Illan how Netanyahu won the ultra-Orthodox vote despite his rigorously secular life style, Bar-Illan said, “Finessing his being secular was nothing compared to other things like adultery One thing is to have an affair with a shiksa but a married woman! With a shiksa even the rebbes do it But a married woman!

Now Bibi ll go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, maybe he s gone to the Western Wall, or he’ll say the phrase ‘With God’s help ’ But he’s not fooling anyone ” When Bar-Illan s remarks were published in The New Yorker and then in the Israeli press Netanyahu was incensed He barred his spinmeister from his plane and his next trip to Washington Bar-Illan, who died in 2003, panicked and not only denied that he’d said those things to me but he also told Israeli television that he had never even met me (This forced me to go on Israeli TV to display the copy of his book Eye on the Media which he had inscribed, To David from David, With admiration and best wishes ) The point is, Netanyahu has never really fooled anyone He didn’t fool his fellowpoliticians or various American Presidents who knew him to be a liar and an opportunist

He was not fooling the Mizrahim who obviously knew that he came from an Ashkenazic background Nor has he fooled the ultra-Or-

And now this generation-long drama the Netanyahu era, has reached its dispiriting resolution Netanyahu has pursued his aim to cling to power at all costs Facing criminal charges he has made common cause with a cabinet of messianic authoritarians and bigots who are righteously determined to hack away at judicial independence freedom of the press minority rights, protest and opposition politics, and democracy itself Next week, the Knesset is poised to get rid of the so-called reasonableness clause, a stricture borrowed from British tradition which allows the Supreme Court to strike down actions of the legislature Such a move in a state with no constitution would undermine what modest balance of powers exists in Israeli political life Avichai Mandelblit, a former Attorney General, warned recently that, if Netanyahu fails to restrain his coalition, Israel is in the process of turning into a “borderline dictatorial state For years left-leaning parties and constituencies in Israel have been dispirited and weak The settlers of the West Bank have not only increased in their numbers and led the resistance to their territorial dominion but they have also helped shape the political rhetoric and character of the state The Palestinian issue is rarely spoken of as if the people of Gaza and the West Bank will somehow do Israel the favor of disappearing and Arab citizens of Israel are too often regarded, by the right wing, as less than citizens

But, as grim as the outlook has been, the defeatism among those who oppose the rightwing coalition government in Israel has come to an end There is a Kulturkampf in Israel but it is hardly a rout a settled matter For the past twenty-eight weeks, infuriated by the coalition government s judicial overhaul, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have marched at one dramatic protest after another It is a sustained act of resistance an inspiring reassertion of democratic values These demonstrations have taken place in cities both secular and religious The protests draw from all occupations and have immobilized city centers and highways Protesters fearing that the judicial reform will strip women of civil rights sometimes dress in the red robes of The Handmaid s Tale Arnon Bar-David the head of the Histadrut the national labor union, has suggested the possibility of a general strike, saying, If the situation reaches an extreme, we will intervene and employ our strength ” The Israel Medical Association, which represents nearly all of the country’s doctors voted to employ all available means if necessary to head off the judicial reform Leading figures in the tech industry have threatened to leave the country Most dramatic, perhaps, hundreds of Air Force reserve pilots signed on to a petition of protest, and there is now a question of whether they will serve if ordered Netanyahu knows that if he dares to fore- his leading Israeli journalist and the author of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, told me that no Prime Minister in the history of Israel has ever been in a weaker situation “In seventy-five years, there has never been a question of the military’s loyalty or any kind of mass disobedience Smaller things but not this he said We ve gone from the idea of Bibi being the longest-serving Prime Minister to the weakest P M ever! And, for him, it just doesn t compute He can t grasp what’s happening to him For him, it is like those nightmares that you are driving a car but when you press the brakes or turn the wheel nothing happens The car doesn t respond Netanyahu lives in a bubble and thinks How can they not be listening to me?, Pfeffer went on He has this crazy, mistaken idea that the tech miracle was his doing And he thinks, I made these guys rich! Before, we only sold oranges He thinks How could they join the protests or move abroad?

Netanyahu has criticized members of the armed forces who have broken with the government, but some leading reservists have insisted publicly they have the right to stop their voluntary service as a protest against a danger to the state According to the Times Brigadier General Ofer Lapidot a reservist who was among those who stepped down told Channel 11 What is worse? The destruction of the country? Or the strengthening of an army that will be serving an illegitimate government legal but not legitimate that is bringing us all to a dictatorship and will soon give us illegal orders?”

Some signs at the weekly protests read President Biden Help Us Please For his part, Biden spent much of this week sending Netanyahu clear signals that the Prime Minister is endangering the stability of his own country and his future relations with the United States Aluf Benn the editor of the liberal daily Haaretz wrote that those signals can be summed up as a demand to replace the coalition to dump fanatics like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and replace them with Benny Gantz, a retired general and alternate Prime Minister from 2020 to 2021 Leading Israeli politicians say that Biden is a longtime friend of Israel and they worry that younger Democratic politicians don t share that affection Biden has made it clear that his Administration wants to see a series of serious policy changes, including a halt to the judicial legislation until there is a broader national consensus on its details; a freeze on construction in the settlements; the strengthening of the Palestinian Authority; and total coördination of military activity regarding Iran

It s impossible to fulfill even a single item on this list with Netanyahu s present coalition, Benn wrote “The only person with the power to pull the emergency cord and stop the train of destruction being led by Netanyahu before it destroys the country is Benny Gantz The time has come for him to offer himself as the national savior the one who prevents the destruction of the army and the economy moments before a civil war Israel won t return to the imaginary ideal portrayed in the army entertainment troupe songs beloved by Gantz but the bleeding will be stanched ”

Israeli protest against the judicial coup has militaristic characteristics

It’s the generals who will stop the judicial coup

HAARETZ G d e o n l e v y

TH I S is (also) the story of an army that had a state Along came a government that acted to overturn the orders of the government in the army’s state whereupon the army rose in protest against the government

Even in the wake of the spectacul a r m a r c h t o J e r u s a l e m w h o s e l i k e s h a v e n e v e r b e e n s e e n h e r e b e f o r e , there is no mistaking the protest s militaristic character, which overshadows its civilian foundations This protest has taken on the bright khaki and overly blue hues of the Israel Air Force Its language is military most of its leaders are former service members Refusal to serve is its most effective weapon, and its ultimate goal is to keep the state as it was before A f t e r i t s e e m e d a s i f I s r a e l h a d m a t u r e d a n d w e a n e d i t s e l f f r o m i t s militarist childhood diseases its worship of generals and the cult of milit a r y s e r v i c e , a l o n g c a m e t h e p r o t e s t movement and demonstrated that militarism has not waned O n t h e c o n t r a r y i t h a s r e a c h e d new heights There is no better proof than this: When a democratic protest f i n a l l y e m e rg e d i t r e s t s o n m i l i t a r y u n d e r p i n n i n g s I t i s a m i l i t a r y z o n e , even if it s not a closed one There is n o c o n t r a s t g r e a t e r t h a n t h e o n e b et w e e n t h e m i l i t a r y – a p a t e n t l y n o nd e m o c r a t i c o rg a n i z a t i o n – a n d d e m o c r a c y T h a t i s n o t t o s a y t h a t there is no democracy with an army or that an army is necessarily anti-democ r a t i c A n d y e t , i s t h e a r m y d e m o cr a c y ’s g a t e k e e p e r ? A r e w e l i k e Turkey? Where exactly did our generals learn the rules of democracy in the army bases? In the casbah of Nablus? I n t h e m i l i t a r y t y r a n n y o v e r a n o t h e r people which has been its chief occupation for decades? Israel has gone even further Even the former heads of its secret services are the protectors of its democracy People whose vocation is abuse, whose routine consists of political detentions and killings, the cruel extortion and exploitation of the weaknesses of large numbers of people interrogations under torture as well as abductions without any judicial review are now the framers of the democratic protest Nadav Argaman, Yoram Cohen and Yuval Diskin now stand at the forefront of the struggle for democracy, after heading an organization that employs Stasi tactics in the territories; they are the ones who are explaining to us how precious democracy is L i s t e n t o t h e m i l i t a r y j a rg o n : t h e protest movement s front and headq u a r t e r s ” t h e “ c o a l i t i o n o f s h i r k e r s ” (of Benjamin Netanyahu)”; the protest of the pilots and the dramatic news conference Saturday evening of all the reservists organizations in the protest m o v e m e n t T h e r e s n o e s c a p i n g t h e career soldiers in its leadership: Ehud B a r a k a n d D a n H a l u t z , “ b r o t h e r s - i narms” in their brown shirts; other org a n i z a t i o n s w h o s e i d e n t i t y i s a function of its members military service as well as the associations and petitions of the veterans of units that are t h e i r m o s t i m p o r t a n t a n d i m p r e s s i v e markers of identity The entire protest is painted in military colors

Even the old-new savior who popped up over the weekend Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is a former general the commander of Operation Cast Lead and a right-winger Where did Gallant learn about democracy? In Gaza City’s Zeitoun district, where as head of the army’s Southern Command he was responsible for the killing of 23 members of the Samouni family and for the killing of four women and girls of the al-Aish family?

Perhaps Gallant has changed his spots and is now a democrat in his soul, the Israeli John Locke But his becoming the hope of the liberal camp tells the entire story It s fascinating that most of the protest s effectiveness stems from its militaristic character Let the physicians strike, let the business leaders convene, the university lecturers march, the high-tech entrepreneurs and employees threaten and the poets and authors sign petitions

In the end it s the generals who will stop the judicial coup If that doesn t illustrate the nature of Israeli society, what would? It is right to salute the protesters, especially after last weekend with its disturbing sights But one should remember that saluting is also a typical military act