The United States and Israel have always had one special thing in common: democracy. Both have treasured the democracies they built.
But we have something else in common today that overshadows that positive mutual interest: division. In America we are angrily divided by different beliefs about the best course for our nation. In Israel citizens now are angrily divided— maybe more than they’ve ever been before— about their democracy itself. The issue is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign to weaken the ability of his nation’s Supreme Court to be a check and balance on government.
Israel’s president Isaac Herzog sounded an alarm several months ago. “Israel,” Herzog said, “is at the edge of an abyss.” He told Israelis who think that Israel would never will cross the line into civil war that they “have no idea.”
Today they do. Today they can see the abyss, even if they haven’t reached the edge. With yesterday’s passage of Netanyahu’s law, hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets in the nation of more than nine million people. A coalition of more than 150 key Israeli companies went on strike. Labor unions are threatening a nationwide strike. Thousands from the military say they’ll stop serving.
They all are angry because they think Netanyahu and the Knesset, the parliament he controls, have weakened their nation’s system of checks and balances. They think the law’s passage has diminished democracy. I throw my lot in with them, because that’s exactly what has happened.
In Israel— as in most parliamentary systems— the legislature elects the nation’s leader, so the legislative and executive branches go hand in hand. That leaves the Supreme Court as the only institution with the power to check government. Since Israel has no formal constitution, its Supreme Court is the closest thing. When it deems a new law “unreasonable,” it can strike it down. That’s why weakening the court weakens the democracy. There is no one to tell the prime minister and the parliament, “You can’t do that.”
Of course Netanyahu says it’s the other way around. He says since his parliamentary majority supported the new law, the majority’s will is the essence of democracy. That makes sense in principle, but a few things shade Netanyahu’s conclusion. First, his claim of a majority is compromised by the fact that even his defense minister, a member of the prime minister’s own political party, did not support the judicial overhaul.
Second, his coalition is woven together mainly from small far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties that joined to have a voice in government and share the power rather than be completely shut out. In a parliamentary system, that doesn’t always equate with a majority. In fact when the dispute about Netanyahu’s plans began to gain steam earlier this year, the non-partisan Israel Democracy Institute polled the population and reported that two-thirds of Israelis believe their Supreme Court should have the power to strike down unreasonable laws.
The third thing is, there is more to democracy than majority will. There is government answering to its people. The way it does that is through a system of checks and balances. Netanyahu’s new law turns that into a sham. If you need a stark comparison, think of two nations where autocracy is obvious. Russia’s President Putin doesn’t have to answer to his people because he has no constraints on his behavior from checks and balances. China’s President Xi doesn’t have to answer to his people either. The parallels aren’t perfect and maybe not even fair but in at least this one way, Netanyahu is moving his nation in the same direction.
There’s a fourth factor at play here too: Netanyahu’s own freedom. He says this new law is for the better interests of his nation but his detractors say he’s as transparent as Saran Wrap. Almost four years ago Netanyahu was indicted for accepting bribes, fraud, and breach of trust. Part of the new law would allow the prime minister to pack the Supreme Court with loyalists, who then might be expected to absolve him of those crimes if he is convicted.
There certainly have been times since Donald Trump (and Mitch McConnell) stacked the United States Supreme Court that I’ve wished we could pull back its reins. But we should never do that. Although the lifetime tenure of justices means that turnover is uncommon, eventually the pendulum does swing and a Court completely out of alignment with my goals for the nation will one day became a Court consistent again with my ideological beliefs.
I heard a former American ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, yesterday call the vote in the Israeli parliament “a dark day.” That’s all that need be said. Although sometimes Israel makes it hard, I have always been supportive for several reasons but one of them always has been, it is the only democracy in the Middle East. It is less of one now.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Agree—sad day
Qualifying for a seat in the Knesset only requires a vote of 3.25 percent of the electorate. (It was 1% before 1992, 1.5% in 1992–2003 and 2% 2003–2014)As a result, you get all these little extremist fringe parties that have veto power over a coalition. In many other parliamentary democracies, the threshold is 5 percent so the governments are more stable and less beholden to the tiny fringes.