Late last year, the right-wing Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu He surprised the world by returning to power despite the corruption trial he has been facing since 2020.
(Read here: The keys to understanding the new wave of violence between Israelis and Palestinians).
Supported by his party, the Likud, and thanks to a pact with the extreme right and more radical political-religious groups to achieve majorities in the ParliamentNetanyahu returned to the post of prime minister on December 29 and, since then, has triggered violence in Gaza and the West Bankhas launched an offensive against Justice and has compromised the international image of his country.
73 years old, Netanyahu he was first elected in 1996, when he had just turned 47. The one he has just started is his third term as prime minister, but he also held the position from 96 to 99, and then from 2009 to 2021, a sum of 15 years which make him the leader with the longest time in charge of the Executive since the creation of the State in 1948. Even more than the founder of Israel, David Ben Gurionwho completed just over 13 years.
In just nine weeks, Netanyahu and the vast majority that supports him in the Knesset (Parliament) have activated an aggressive populist right-wing policy, which makes him similar – with the differences of the case – to some of the fashionable authoritarian leaders of this century, a range that goes from Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin.
His endorsement of more than 700,000 Israeli settlers who have established their residential neighborhoods on territories that international agreements granted to the Palestinians threatens to distance Netanyahu from Washington and the European Union.
Many citizens of Israeli society, many people who even voted for the government coalition, fear for national unity.
Criticism has been especially harsh because such support includes armed settler groups that have acted with singular violence against Palestinians who claim the areas assigned to them in the treaties.
In this tense environment, violence has not been long in coming with the same cycle of terrorist actions repeated so many times. Hamas and factions of the Islamic State. This is in addition to the Tel Aviv government’s response with incursions and punitive bombings of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank which, in turn, unleash more violent actions by Palestinian groups.
So far this year, 62 Palestinians – including several minors, as is often the case – have been killed by israe military attacksl, as well as by shots from extremist settlers. During 2022, more than 200 Palestinians died for these actions in Gaza, the West Bank and on Israeli territory. That the first two months of 2023 add up to close to a third of the tragic balance of 2022 – which was already one of the highest in the century – indicates that violence is on the rise. The victims on the Israeli side are also growing. There were 31 in 2022, and so far in 2023 there are seven, close to a quarter in just eight of the 52 weeks of the year.
divided society
Apart from the violence, February and the first days of March have been marked by massive demonstrations against the legislative reform that Netanyahu is promoting in Parliament and which, according to the opposition, deals a devastating blow to the separation of powers characteristic of the States of law and the balance between powers Executive, Legislative and Judicial.
The proposal implies a reform of the institutions, but the most critical point is the so-called “annulment clause” that gives Parliament the power to overturn decisions of the Supreme Court by a simple majority vote of the members of the Knesset. It is as if in Colombia, when the Constitutional court strikes down a law on the grounds that it violates the charter, Congress, by a simple majority of its members, could overturn the ruling.
To oppose it, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets this year. In the ninth consecutive weekend of protests, 150,000 people marched last Saturday in Tel Aviv and 250,000 more in other cities in which the opposition leaders baptized as “the day of resistance for democracy.” Thousands blocked the Ayalon highway, the important highway that runs through Tel Aviv and connects it with its metropolitan environment.
Police on horseback and tanks with powerful water hoses were used to disperse the protesters at the end of the day. The images of the demonstrations and the repression of the road blockade went around the world and projected the idea of a deeply divided country, just two months and a week after Netanyahu came to power.
The president of Israel, Isaac Herzog – head of state, but not of the government – warned a few days ago that “many citizens of Israeli society, many people who even voted for the government coalition, fear for national unity”, before call Netanyahu to talk with the opposition. “We are – explained Herzog – before a deep disagreement that is destroying our nation”.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid urged pro-Netanyahu lawmakers to hold back reform progress “if they care about Israel at all.” Other opposition deputies have been harsher: Ram Ben Barak compared the legislation promoted by the Government with that imposed by the Nazis in Germany when Adolfo Hitler came to power.
restless sectors
In Washington, the government of President Joe Biden seems very concerned about Netanyahu’s authoritarian drift. The White House sees in this a high risk for the democratic guarantees that have prevailed in Israel’s political system.
In a podcast this weekend, the ambassador of United States in IsraelHe, Tom Nides, said that the Netanyahu government “must stop” the approval of the controversial legislative change and seek consensus.
For Biden, it would be terrible if Israel, his great ally in middle east and almost the only country in the region that exhibits a solid democratic system, lose that condition. As a document circulated last week by the European foreign ministries, which are also very concerned, warned, “if democracy in Israel is limited and becomes something similar to the authoritarian regimes of Turkey or Hungary, it will be very difficult to have their government as an ally of the West and continue to support them when there are attacks from their neighbors”.
Two other sectors, generally associated with right-wing thought, have expressed their unease: the military and businessmen. Several former heads of the Israeli Air Force – which for decades has been key in defending the country since 70 years ago when its Arab neighbors challenged Israel militarily – sent the prime minister a public letter expressing “their deep concern for the processes that take place in the state of Israel”.
The former commanders warned that the division caused by the reform that Netanyahu promotes may “represent a tangible and serious danger” to the country’s security. The alarm of the former military chiefs is not limited to the process of institutional reform, but rather includes the situation of the Air Force, where several reserve combat pilots, from the most respected and decorated squadrons in the country, announced that they would suspend their participation in some maneuvers this week as a form of protest against the reform.
For them, if the health of Israeli democracy becomes questionable at the international level, and especially if the independence of the judiciary is in question, in the future many of the military actions of fighter pilots, as well as other uniformed, They could end up in the hands of international courts because, they fear, Israel’s judges would lose their credibility if Netanyahu’s reform passes.
The country’s business leaders also oppose the reform. They fear that the lack of guarantees that, for the business world, results from the loss of independence of Justice, will harm one of the great engines of the economy: foreign investment.
In the three years that have just passed, investors from abroad injected more than 53,000 million dollars into the country’s economy, especially in the high-tech sector. Dozens of presidents of technology companies have come out openly to participate in the protests and have encouraged their workers to join, as the French magazine Marianne reported a few days ago.
In one of the demonstrations in Tel Aviv, the businessmen of this sector carried a huge banner that said: ‘No high-tech without democracy’.
Along the same lines, several risk rating firms, such as Standard and Poor’s, have already spoken of the “negative consequences” that the change in rules would bring
constitutional. As Jacob Frenkel, former governor of the Bank of Israel (the country’s central bank), said recently, “we are playing with fire.”
But the head of government and his allies in Parliament continue to be determined to carry out the reform, something after which there may be a dirty game due to the trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust that Justice follows Netanyahu. “If you are tried for corruption and you are prime minister, this puts you in a conflict of interest,” Adam Shinar, a law professor at Israel’s Reichman University, had warned the Efe agency weeks ago.
Much more if the legislation that that prime minister promotes weakens Justice. It is impossible not to see in such a questionable reform, in addition to the concentration of greater power in the hands of the Executive, a revenge by Netanyahu against the Judiciary that continues with the trial against him. But that vendetta could cost Israel the world to stop considering it a democracy.
MAURICIO VARGAS
FOR THE TIME
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