Early on Monday evening, a few hours after the Knesset passed the bill that goes part of the way towards abolishing the Supreme Court’s power to reverse government decisions if it considers them unreasonable, I happened to speak to a well-connected friend and foreign policy expert who lives in Jerusalem.
We’d discussed the Netanyahu judicial reform package several times in the past, and I knew he broadly supported it, so I imagined I’d find him jubilant.
Instead, he sounded aghast. He hadn’t changed his mind about the need for reform.
But in his view, the collapse of President Isaac Herzog’s efforts to find some form of compromise to heal Israel’s ever-deepening divisions were exposing the country to real peril.
“To our enemies, we look weaker and less determined than we have ever been before,” he told me. “And they will exploit this.” Several writers in this week’s JC make similar points.
Our correspondent Anshel Pfeffer quotes a former general who makes the case that the anti-reform reservists now threatening to refuse to serve in huge numbers represent the “true backbone” of Israel’s security. The air force looks especially vulnerable, he writes, with the risk that if just a dozen or so officers were to discontinue their reserve service, this could paralyse an entire unit.
Columnist Lahav Harkov cites a trenchant message from Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, which said that with Iran on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, Hezbollah preparing for war and Iran-backed terror groups wreaking havoc from bases in the West Bank, the country must “prioritise”.
Similarly, the veteran lawyer Alan Dershowitz urges all those who love Israel to pull back from extreme measures, and to follow Herzog’s lead.
The calls for compromise have been equally loud in Britain. The Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies issued a joint statement, saying they were “deeply disappointed” that Herzog’s efforts had foundered.
Like my friend in Jerusalem, it suggested that the chasm now visible in Israel’s body politic really might represent an existential threat.
The establishment of a Jewish democratic state “remains the greatest achievement of the Jewish people in modern times”, the statement said, “and its preservation and development should be the priority of Jews worldwide”.
PM Rishi Sunak has been voicing his own concern about the crisis since Netanyahu visited him in London in March, and he repeated it this week, urging the Israeli government to “maintain a system of checks and balances” and “build consensus and avoid division”.
Yet as Harkov writes, in most places in Israel and at most times, normal life continues: “My husband takes our kids to camp in the morning and goes to his high-tech job almost entirely unimpeded by protests, despite getting off the train in central Tel Aviv. I got to appointments, pick up the kids in the afternoon, make them dinner and read them bedtime stories – on the same day as reading and writing about it being a day of disruption.”
So is this sense of a looming apocalypse hyperbole? Are the fears being expressed for Israel’s future overblown?
I wish I could be confident that they are. The threats listed by Dubowitz are not illusory, and there can be no doubt that Israel’s enemies really do see the crisis as their opportunity. Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrullah has crowed about it repeatedly, claiming on Monday that Israel was on “a path of collapse and fragmentation”.
The issue was discussed last week at a three-hour meeting between a commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force and representatives from the terror group Hamas, with a Hamas source telling reporters afterwards that they had “discussed ways to upgrade the work of resistance”.
The historical record suggests that life across Europe felt pretty normal in July 1914. In Britain, there were the usual garden parties, picnics, concerts and visits to the seaside, even as the countries about to sucked into the vortex of World War One issued threatening ultimata in the wake of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and began to mobilise their armies. On August 2, the apocalypse began.
Harkov suggests that a Hezbollah attack on Israel’s northern border would remind Israelis of the importance of unity – and indeed, it is almost inconceivable that in such circumstances, more than a handful of reservists would refuse active duty.
But the mere fact that one has to consider this possibility shows how dangerous this situation has become, and how great the need is to resolve it.
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