Isaac Herzog was desperate.
After two months of trying to build a series of ladders which would allow the two sides of the deepening political divide to climb down, he was finally launching his detailed proposals for constitutional change, in the knowledge that the government had already turned it down.
As he addressed the nation on Wednesday night, the third time since the crisis began, he warned: “I’m about to say words I’ve never said before.
"If anyone thinks that a real civil war, including bloodshed, is a line that we will never cross, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
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The Knesset (Photo: Getty Images)
As the speech ended, his proposal went online.
It gave the coalition quite a bit: more control over the appointment of new judges, more limits on the Supreme Court’s powers to intervene in government policy and set a bar of two-thirds of the bench when disqualifying the Knesset’s legislation.
Herzog gave up weeks ago trying to convince the opposition of his intentions.
The different centre-left parties are suspicious of each other reaching a deal behind their backs and have so far stuck to a joint line that they won’t enter talks until the government publicly suspends the legislation. And that’s just the official opposition.
The real opposition now is the protest movement on the streets and their position is that “we won’t compromise on democracy”.
The president’s next step was to focus on the coalition instead.
He had a breakthrough when he managed to get a group of constitutional experts from the liberal mainstream of Israeli academia to sit down with members of the Kohelet Policy Forum, the conservative think-tank which hatched large parts of the government’s “legal reform”, to sit down and work on a compromise which formed the basis of Wednesday’s proposal.
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Yariv Levin (Photo: Flash 90)
For a few hours on Wednesday afternoon it looked as if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was leaning towards accepting the plan.
But then Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who is sitting shiva for his father, called and said that he wasn’t about to give up on full control of appointments and the leaders of the Haredi parties insisted on an “override clause” for all legislation passed by a majority of 61 Knesset members.
The president’s despair deepened on Wednesday as he realised that the coalition is just as divided as the opposition.
Netanyahu is almost as anxious as Herzog to find a compromise that will reduce the volume of the protest which has overshadowed his return to power, shutting out all his other new initiative.
But it has become clear that he does not control his justice minister, who refuses any formula which doesn’t give him control of the Judicial Appointments Committee, and that his coalition partners, particularly the ultra-Orthodox, are not going to allow him any room to manouevre when it comes to guaranteeing the passage of the laws dear to them.
As far as they’re concerned, the president’s plan is dead on arrival.
Which is why he called his proposal “the People’s Path”. He knows the politicians are not going to climb down the ladder he built them, unless, perhaps, there’s serious pressure from the people.
MEGIDDO MYSTERY
The belated acknowledgement from the IDF on Wednesday evening that the bombing at Megiddo Junction on Monday morning which severely wounded a lorry-driver had been carried out by an unidentified attacker who was killed later that day near the Lebanese border, put an end to the wild speculation on social media, but left more questions than it answered.
Benjamin Netanyahu
Benjamin Netanyahu
For a start, who was the dead man? And more importantly, which organisation sent him?
The security services’ assumption is that it was Hezbollah. The relative sophistication of the explosive device and the bomber’s infiltration indicate serious capabilities. But it’s far from certain. Why would Hezbollah risk a serious escalation when Lebanon’s economic and political situation is so parlous? Could it be another group?
But if it was a Palestinian organisation, acting to avenge the deaths of terrorists in the West Bank in recent weeks, surely they would have taken responsibility and exulted in their successful incursion.
And most worrying, how did he get through one of the closest-guarded borders in the world? Hezbollah dug cross-border tunnels for years but the IDF believe it located and destroyed all of them four years ago. Did they miss one? Is there a glider or microlight hidden in the bushes somewhere in the Galilee which the attacker used to fly under the radar? Or a dinghy buried in the sand on one of the northern beaches?
Israel is a small and crowded country and you would have expected the evidence to have been found by now. Until the bomber’s route is found, there will be the nagging worry that further incursions are around the corner.
One last lingering question over Monday’s events, which connects them to the previous section: why did Israelis have to wait until Wednesday evening to get the full details?
Everyone knew there had been a bombing attack at Megiddo Junction, followed by road closures throughout the day up north. The roads were then opened and a video clip showing a suspect being apprehended circulated on social media.
The media already knew the full story, but were forced to keep quiet by military censorship.
The rest of the public, especially residents in the north, were left with increasingly wild rumours.
The security chiefs were fine with releasing the information on Tuesday. But the decision to keep the event under wraps for another day and a half was the prime minister’s.
Was Netanyahu looking for the right moment to remove the embargo as a way to obscure other even less convenient news, such as a rift in his coalition over the presidential compromise?
For now at least, he has bowed to his coalition, so there’s no need to continue with the censorship.
