The first reaction of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to the 10-1 ruling of the Israeli Supreme Court disqualifying the appointment of Shas leader Aryeh Deri as deputy prime minister and health and home affairs minister, was to issue an order to all of Likud’s Knesset members for an “interview curfew.” The last thing he needs at this point is for over-eager MKs to put him on the spot.

Members of other coalition parties were already calling upon him to “ignore” the ruling. Even with the relationship between his government and the judiciary in full-on crisis mode, Mr Netanyahu still doesn’t want to give the impression that he will become the first Israeli prime minister to defy the Supreme Court.

Not with all the world’s eyes on him — including the Biden administration’s National Security Advisor and a high-level US Senate delegation both currently in Israel.

His far-right coalition notwithstanding, more than anything else he wants to preserve his government’s international standing. A constitutional crisis doesn’t help that.

Which is why Likud’s first response to the ruling was a statement saying that “we will use all legal means and work without delay to fix the injustice caused to Aryeh Deri” — the operative term there being “legal means”.

Mr Netanyahu wanted to control the timing of the legislation for his new government’s judicial reforms and draw them out over long months ahead, while dangling the possibility of compromises and even coalition changes along the way.

But the Supreme Court ruling has taken matters out of his hands. He has to decide now whether to accept the judges’ decision, to double down on a more radical and rapid “reform” which may enable him to reappoint Mr Deri in the future, or to try once again to play for time.

But if Mr Netanyahu doesn’t respond forcefully to the court, his coalition may start to lose faith in him. One of the Religious Zionist MKs said this week: “We don’t really know what Bibi wants. He appointed Yariv Levin and has so far given backing to his plan, but that doesn’t mean he will continue backing it all the way. In the past Netanyahu has complained about the Supreme Court but done nothing concrete to curb its powers. I don’t know what he’ll do this time. We’ll have to be on guard.”

Mr Netanyahu’s first priority is to make sure his coalition doesn’t start to unravel just three weeks after returning to office. That is why he rushed over to the Deri residence in the Har Nof neighbourhood of Jerusalem immediately after the ruling. He’s anxious that Mr Deri doesn’t do anything hasty. For now, it looks as if Mr Deri is giving the PM time to fix this, but he has his limits.

Blast from the past
Among the estimated 80,000 people standing in the pouring rain crammed into Ha’Bimah Theatre Square and the adjoining streets, demonstrating against the Netanyahu government’s plans to change Israel’s legal and democratic structure, stood a couple in their late seventies.

Ehud Olmert GettyImages-84349324

Ehud Olmert (Photo: Getty Images)

The artist Aliza Olmert and her husband Ehud, the last Israeli prime minister (out of two, the first was Yitzhak Rabin) who agreed to resign after being accused of breaking the law. Also the first, and so far only one, to go to prison.

Mr Olmert had four police officers flanking him as protection but few people even realised who he was. It was too dark, crowded and wet. I hardly believed it was him as the tiny posse bumped into me. “Is this your first time at a left-wing rally?” I asked the man who until the last few years of his political career was deep in Likud’s nationalist wing. “This isn’t a left-wing rally”, he answered. “It’s of all Israelis.”

I wanted to ask whether he didn’t feel the irony of his taking part in a demonstration supporting the courts which had sent him to prison, but the shifting currents of the crowd pushed us apart before I had a chance.

But the irony of Mr Olmert’s presence at the demonstration against the Netanyahu government is the story of where Israeli political history is right now.

Historically, it was Menachem Begin’s Herut party, the forerunner of Likud which spent three decades in opposition, that supported the Supreme Court’s powers to rein in the elected government. Begin’s successors are now split.

Some, like Olmert’s generation and other younger politicians like Gideon Sa’ar and Zeev Elkin who have split with Likud, are resolutely opposed to the plans to weaken the court’s power.

But Justice Minister Yariv Levin and other followers of Mr Netanyahu who are now dominant in Likud have ditched his “there are judges in Jerusalem” ethos and instead resent that “the right is in office but the left remains in power.”

Twelve years ago Mr Olmert, who continued to claim his innocence, meekly accepted that he would have to resign once it became clear he would be indicted. He still believes he was wrongly accused and convicted of bribe-taking and fraud. But he didn’t try to rearrange Israel’s system of governance to remain in office.

For decades the left-right divide in Israel was over the preferred solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict and whether Israel can and should build in the occupied West Bank. Today’s political divide puts politicians like Sa’ar and Elkin, who are staunch supporters of the settlements but oppose the Netanyahu-Levin legal plans, firmly in the camp opposed to the right-wing coalition.

New broom at IDF
Minutes after getting back from visiting Mr Deri, the prime minister sat down for his first working meeting with the IDF’s new chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi.

In the official photograph of the meeting issued by Mr Netanyahu’s office, they were both smiling, but neither of them have forgotten that just a few months ago, in the twilight days of the previous government, then leader of the opposition Netanyahu had tried, and failed, to prevent General Halevi’s promotion.

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Benjamin Netanyahu with IDF chief of staff General Herzi Halevi (Photo: Twitter)

The reasons for this are unclear. Some in the IDF and the Knesset believe that Mr Netanyahu simply didn’t want the outgoing government to appoint the chief of staff, because he wanted the army’s top general to owe him his epaulettes.

And there are those who think that he specifically didn’t want to see General Halevi in the job -— that he feared he would be too independent.

He is the first IDF Chief of Staff to come from the religious (dati-leumi) community but he doesn’t wear a kippa. In private, he explains that he has a “transparent kippa” because he doesn’t want to be identified with a particular community.

Technically, he is also the first settler chief of staff, as the Kfar Ha’Oranim community he lives in is partly within the Green Line and mostly in the West Bank. But those who know him well say that he is not aligned with the new Netanyahu government’s policies.

“Herzi has a clear and strong set of values that won’t allow him to go along with any attempt to politicise the IDF,” says an old friend of the general.

“He won’t make any political statements but he won’t let Netanyahu or any of the ministers take advantage of the IDF.”

In his speech at the promotion ceremony on Monday there was a hint of that independence when the new chief of staff made it clear that he would preserve “one IDF, focused on its role, value-driven and professional, disregarding any consideration that is not Israel’s security”.

In today’s Israeli political climate, that sentence caused many at the ceremony to rise an eyebrow.