Large crowds of protestors have taken to the streets of Tel Aviv over the past week to protest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s plans to overhaul Israel’s judicial system. Trade unions, along with university students and professors, called for a general strike. Reservists in the Israel Defense Forces pledged to withdraw their service if the prime minister persisted in his plans. Israel’s national symphony orchestra took to the streets to perform Israel’s national anthem as an expression of opposition. Netanyahu fired his defense minister Saturday evening when he called to stop the reforms. Many warned that the demonstrations could devolve into a national civil war if Netanyahu did not change course. Earlier this week, the prime minister did indeed call for a pause.
The prime minister, along with his allies in the right-of-center Likud party, claim that the Israeli Supreme Court is “elitist,” undemocratic, and out of touch with the views of the wider Israeli electorate. The Court leans to the left, as our own U.S. Supreme Court now leans to the right, and is thus in opposition to many Likud policies—especially in regard to proposed Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and the rights of Palestinians living in those areas. Netanyahu’s conservative government has proposed to limit the Court’s exercise of judicial review by giving the legislature authority to override its decisions, and by giving the elected government greater power to appoint new justices to the Court. Those proposals are contested by left-wing parties and voters, who claim they will eliminate all checks on elected Israeli governments.
Netanyahu’s judicial plans are not so extreme as to justify a national—indeed, international—outpouring of protest from left-wing and liberal quarters. Many progressive Americans, including President Joe Biden, have weighed in against Netanyahu’s proposals, though many have ironically lodged nearly identical criticisms against our own Supreme Court. Indeed, the current protests look much like previous nationwide demonstrations in 2020 and 2021 against Netanyahu, which took place amid accusations of corruption and in protest of his programs. The new demonstrations, along with the earlier ones, indicate that political opposition in Israel has erupted outside the traditional boundaries of electoral politics.
The opposition politics in Israel brings to mind similar recent developments in the United States. We thus see unfolding an “Americanization” of Israeli politics, through which political differences are fought in the streets just as much as they are at the ballot box. That trend has been developing in the United States for at least a decade.
Several years ago, for example, Democrats
and allied groups in Wisconsin descended upon the state capitol in
Madison to stop then-Republican Governor Scott Walker’s proposals to
rein in public employee unions. It was a raucous episode in the history
of that state: Demonstrators took over the capitol building to prevent
the legislature from meeting, while Democratic legislators fled the
state to prevent a quorum. In the end, they did not succeed, but it was a
sign of things to come.
Following the surprise outcome of the 2016 presidential election, progressives and Democrats took to the streets across the country in protest against Donald Trump and the voters who put him into office. They continued those protests both outside and inside the corridors of government during his presidential tenure. Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 touched off new protests by Democrats, who cited alleged misconduct by Kavanaugh while a high school student 35 years earlier. Left-wing protestors picketed the homes of Supreme Court justices following the leak of the Dobbs abortion decision in 2022, with some even calling for violence against those whose votes decided the outcome.
Left-wing demonstrators took to the streets again in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, toppling historical statues and monuments and surrounding the White House, once again in opposition to Trump and in protest of the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis. They occupied the downtown areas of several large cities, including Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, trashing storefronts, attacking police stations, and preventing normal operations in those urban centers. Not to be outdone, some right-wing supporters of President Trump descended upon Washington in early 2021 to oppose the certification of the new president. In all of these cases, protests were accompanied by a fair degree of violence. More recently, Democratic prosecutors have searched for a legal rationale to indict the former president in a quixotic attempt to stop his 2024 presidential candidacy.
This is the “new” politics of the United States, in which the political parties no longer regard one another as legitimate and increasingly seek to resolve their differences by protest, demonstrations, and threats of violence. Americans have conflicting views of what their country is supposed to do and stand for, and many are increasingly disaffected from their government. They dislike members of the opposing party, and view many institutions, from the universities to the FBI, with suspicion or antagonism. It is hard to know how, or where, this will end.
A similar type of politics is now in play in Israel, and for similar reasons: The major political parties disagree profoundly as to what their country should do and stand for, and who is entitled to represent it. The parties once disagreed over narrower policies; now, they disagree about almost everything. The left-wing parties claim that the right-wing parties are a threat to democracy, while the right-wing parties say the left-wing parties threaten national survival. Those differences are effectively impossible to negotiate via the normal political process.
The United States is an increasingly dysfunctional nation-state, though one still sufficiently powerful and geographically distant from its adversaries to work through its unstable politics. This is not true of Israel, which is a small country, surrounded by enemies who do not wish it well, pressured by putative allies, and distrusted by powerful international bodies. Israel has proven many times in its past that it can withstand great challenges. But can it withstand the Americanization of its politics?
