Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the British Consevative Party
You know that feeling? The one when the coffee machine or alarm clock or washing machine dosen’t do what its supposed to. When it starts hissing, or scalding you – or shrinking your jumpers so they just about squeeze onto the cat?
That must be what’s going on in Balfour Street, where the Israeli Prime Minister lives. He followed all the rules for keeping up a democratic facade while ruling as he pleases. He got friendly media to demonise his opponents. Purged his party of rivals. Drummed up fear of minorities (though he tried to go into government with their representatives when that gave him the numbers of seats he needed). Attacked the judiciary as part of an out of touch elite.
This was his plan to remove checks and balances from Israeli politics by having a parliamentary majority appoint judges. He expected the usual elite to take to the streets of Tel Aviv and criticise him in the comment sections of the Ha’aretz website: people largely educated at the country’s best universities, who live in Tel Aviv and other secular cities, marry and hang out with each other, take jobs in the creative sector, wield great cultural power, are naive about peace with the Palestinians and have surnames like Epstein and Goldberg instead of Peretz and Malka (or indeed Mizrahi).
He didn’t expect protests from air force reservists and ground combat veterans, junior officials of the Mossad and Shin Bet security services, aged mainstream radio crooners, some of the last surviving veterans of the Palmach elite Zionist militia from the 1930s and ‘40s, members of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit in which his brother killed rescuing hostages at Entebbe, the high tech sector, the currency markets (but of course the left-wing establishment controls the banks), the Attorney General he had appointed during one of his previous governments, the Likudnik chief of the Histadrut trade union federation who called a general strike, the employers’ organisation that supported the walkout or the President of the United States.
What went wrong? Hadn’t he followed the “Authoritarian Playbook” for turning a vibrant democracy into an elective dictatorship (a Polish minister even tried to claim credit for advising Netanhyahu this time). Didn’t he have a 64-56 majority in the Knesset (solid by Israeli standards). Weren’t the people on his side?
A look at Israel’s 1996 election provides a clue. That year, in which Netanyahu also beat Shimon Peres by a whisker in a direct election for Prime Minister, Likud won 32 seats in the parliamentary elections, ultra-orthodox parties won 23, and the left, which in Israel at the time was also associated with the security establishment, won 45. Last year, Likud won 32, ultra-orthodox parties won 18, and secular centrists, very much associated with the security establishment, 36.
Throughout his career, Netanyahu himself found it difficult to win more than 32-35 seats, but became extremely good at corralling allies. As long as the main dividing line was attitudes to the Palestinians, this served him well. Centre-right rivals often preferred to go into coalition with him than be seen to be soft on security, and so he managed to assemble solid majorities with them to the left, and some less moderate right wingers on the other side.
When politics evolved into a referendum on Netanyahu and his personal probity, he still managed to fight to a draw — that’s why Israel had five elections between 2019 and 2022 but, each time, he lost allies through his personal duplicity and the stench of corruption that hung around him.
Those that remain come from a dark fringe of Israeli society, the extreme end of the “religious zionist” movement. This is a strain of Israeli Judaism that, unlike the ultra-orthodox, believes in the Jewish state, but holds that they’re entitled to it by God, not a declaration by Arthur Balfour.
They were against the Oslo Accords and support the settlement of the West Bank. They are religious conservatives but, unlike the ultra-orthodox, operate in society, serve in the Army and take part in ordinary economic activity. Their extreme end has a history of terrorism and wants to expel the Palestinians (and probably Israeli Arabs too).
It is this extreme end that, under a coalition itself called “Religious Zionism,” has taken control of the sector’s political representation: it won 14 seats in the Knesset and props up Netanyahu’s government. Its leaders, including Belazel Smotrich and the National Security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, share his desire to make the Supreme Court toothless, so they can ban Arab parties and make Israel submit to their radical national-religious politics. They would turn Israel into the apartheid state its detractors already accuse it of being. They terrify the rest of Israeli society – including the army, the police and the security services who had previously investigated them for terrorist offences.
Though Netanyahu, the ultra-orthodox and the Religious Zionist leaders managed to win a Knesset majority, they haven’t carried their voters with them. The latest polls show Likud losing seven seats and Religious Zionism a further two. This demolishes Netanyahu’s last argument – that he has the people on his side. It strengthens the Supreme Court’s hand because, under Israel’s uncodified constitution, it could simply strike down laws threatening its independence (indeed, a former Attorney General appointed by Netanyahu has called for it to do so) and popular support would stiffen its spine and leave no doubt in the minds of the police or army over whose orders they should obey.
Netanyahu has only suspended his judicial coup. The legislation is ready and can be rushed through if the opposition lefts down his guard. Ben-Gvir has extracted a sinister promise from the Prime Minister in order not to tear the coalition down – that he, Ben-Gvir, would get to establish a “national guard”: a domestic militia outside the control of the normal police. A praetorian guard, whether Viktor Yankovich’s Berkut or Donald Trump’s prison officers let loose on the streets of DC, is the next page of the authoritarian playbook, but it will prove to be an empty threat. The courts will rule against this attempt to make Israel a dictatorship. The army and police, but most of all the people, will follow them.
The state of Israel was founded to ensure the physical survival of the Jewish people, not the political survival of one man. Netanyahu forgot the difference and will pay the price.