Howard Epstein: ISRAEL: DEATH SPIRAL, CIVIL WAR – OR DELIVERANCE
As Israel (as David Horowitz, editor of the Times of Israel, warns) careens down its death spiral, and (as President Herzog warns) teeters on the “edge of the abyss” and risks a second civil war (following that of June 1948 when 19 Jewish soldiers were shot and killed by other Jewish soldiers, as I warned), even the genuinely great and good can lose their way.
It has been argued in these pages by others that Israel’s judicial reforms were not that unusual, that in common law countries, the fundamental constitutional requirements are that Parliament is supreme and that its courts follow precedent (and not left‑leaning judges’ whims). Yet those are only, in both senses, partial explanations of the current situation.
I wrote similarly some weeks ago, but I did not whitewash the 25th Knesset’s real ambition to emasculate the Court’s ability to revise egregiously self-serving statutes calculated to upturn the rule of law.
What else is it when laws are passed to kosher up, both retrospectively and prospectively, the receipt of goodies by ministers, which is regarded as illegal in the US, the UK, and every other recognisable democracy? What is it, also, when an MK with a criminal record is handed a pass by the government to take ministerial office otherwise off-limits to him? And what is it when a Prime Minister on trial in the criminal courts is handed a legislated get-out-of-jail-free card? These are certainly not component parts of a liberal democracy.
Israel needs independent courts, able to blow the whistle on a hechsher applied to wrong-doing, and free to reject capricious self-serving legislation.
Israel more than other democratic states needs its courts to be independent of parliament: there is no revising chamber in the Knesset – no House of Lords, as in London – no Congress to limit the excesses of the administration, as in Washington DC – and no Senate or National Assembly, as in Paris, across town from the President’s Elysée Palace.
In Israel, the defenders of the rule of law are embodied by the courts and the attorney general, free to indict for wrongdoing. In the past few days, Israel’s attorney-general has accused PM Netanyahu of breaking an agreement not to be involved in legislation in which he has a conflict of interest. He alleges that is tantamount to political assassination when it is actually the application of the law to just another Israeli citizen. Should the PM be elevated beyond the reach of the law?
How would the British react if Rishi Sunak, with his massive working majority, were to contrive to pass into law the prohibition of any investigation into or criticism of his family’s finances, or of gifts they receive, or restrictive of the court’s ability to judge indictments against cabinet ministers for alleged wrongdoing.
If that were to occur in London, you might think the time had come to leave – or that the time had come for the PM to leave. And if you thought that, you might be joined by hundreds of thousands of others, revolted by such self-serving legislation, in street demonstrations. Your protests might be embraced by some of the most eminent members of society, industry, hi-tech, commerce, the central bank, and academia; and by the former high-ranking military, secret service, and other security leaders. And you might be supported by all the trade unions (which is what the Histadrut represents).
That is what we see in Israel today: countrywide revulsion at the sight of self-serving politicians, feathering their own nests in the destruction of the rule of law and of the quintessential separation of powers that underpins democracy. (You might also take pride in the decorousness of the Israeli demonstrators who make their French contemporaries look like … well, like the Paris mob.)
King Bibi, the Canute of Balfour Street, has one last chance to salvage a thread of his former fine reputation: announce that in his most recent, and fifth, attempt in four years to form a stable government, he has created instability in Israel, on the cusp of its 75th birthday celebrations – for which no one now has any appetite – that threatens to destroy the state. Israel’s enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah are salivating.
Instead of the abandonment of his divisive policies, Netanyahu applies the bromide of a “pause”. Rather, he should immediately announce (1) he recognises the will of the people for the clock to be wound back to where it was last December, (2) his retirement from politics and (3) his readiness to clear his name in the court of law in which he is being tried on charges of corruption.
As the Jewish world starts to embrace Pesach and its story of the deliverance of the Jewish people, may we experience such an outcome in our time.
