Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to London this week has got to be one of the most secretive made by an Israeli prime minister to Britain. At the time of writing, no details of his schedule had been released beyond his meeting with Rishi Sunak.
Netanyahu is expected to see Suella Braverman, though why a foreign prime minister would be meeting with the British Home Secretary is unclear. Nor is it clear whether he will doing any interviews with the British media or meeting representatives of the Jewish community.
One official involved in the planning explained that Netanyahu is anxious not to have to explain his government’s plans to weaken the Supreme Court. He had enough of that earlier in the week in his phone call with President Biden.
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Eli Cohen
The constitutional issues can be avoided in interviews or in meetings with British-Jewish leaders, who have expressed concern over them.
As it is, he will be greeted by what is expected to be the largest-ever demonstration by Israelis currently living in Britain, who have been planning to express their dismay from the moment the visit was mooted.
Foreign Minister Eli Cohen was in London on Tuesday. Ostensibly he was there to sign the grandly-named “2030 Roadmap for UK-Israeli Bilateral Relations” with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly. But he was also there to test the waters before Netanyahu’s arrival on Thursday night.
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UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly (Photo: Getty Images)
After three less than successful foreign trips in recent weeks, to Paris, Berlin and Rome, Netanyahu is hoping to receive some advance information.
Cohen, who in the previous Netanyahu government was business minister and is thought to be angling for a move to the finance ministry if, as many expect, Bezalel Smotrich resigns at some point, enraged the business community last month with in an ill-thought-out tweet that seemed to suggest limiting the Bank of Israel’s independence to set interest rates. As if they didn’t have enough problems already.
A large Israeli investors’ conference took place in Bishopsgate, in the City of London, on Tuesday. I asked one of the organisers why they hadn’t invited the foreign minister, despite his being in London.
Most of the words he used in the answer were unprintable. In short, any government minister was unwelcome at the conference right now.
“As far as we concerned, he’s a nonentity,” was one of the milder things a senior Israeli business figure had to say about him.
Cohen isn’t directly involved with the legal changes and in private he has been less than enthusiastic about them.
But that doesn’t change the fact that he represents the government pushing the legislation — which was the main issue in the hallways of the conference.
“There’s plenty of interest from British investors in meeting us,” said an entrepreneur who had arrived representing a portfolio of start-up companies.
“Everyone still thinks very highly of Israeli tech, but when it comes to actually investing, all we’re hearing is ‘wait-and-see.’
It’s not just the political situation in Israel. This isn’t a great investment climate with the banking crisis, but the uncertainty about Israeli stability right now certainly isn’t helping.”
“For many years Israel had a ‘country risk’ that made investors wary of Israeli companies,” said an executive at an Israeli investment fund. “The risk was of wars and terror attacks which everyone associated with Israel.
But at some point, foreign investors realised that, despite the wars and rocket attacks and Intifadas, Israeli tech companies were still going strong and had learned to be impervious. The investors understood that headlines about terror and violence don’t affect Israel’s economy.
What this government is doing is returning the ‘country risk’ to the Israeli economy for an entirely different, and self-inflicted reason.”
Now or never?
The coming week will be the most critical for the government since it came to office nearly four months ago. It’s the last week of the Knesset’s winter session.
At this point it’s clear that the government is — at most — going to pass only one of the original proposals of its “legal reform” plan — and even that has been somewhat “softened” with changes to the makeup of the Judicial Appointments Committee which will allow the government to appoint new judges to the Supreme Court, as well as its president.
At the same time, the protests are expected to reach a climax. Both sides believe that this a make or break moment.
If the government falters, it will have to wait until after Pesach and Independence Day are over, for the short summer session — and by then they will have lost nearly all momentum.
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Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Shas party leader Aryeh Deri, who the Supreme Court ruled could not be a cabinet minister (Getty Images)
If however the legislation passes, the opposition and the protest movement will have to decide how to sustain their campaign and whether to go all the way and disrupt Israel’s 75th anniversary. There will be no going back for either side.
“Netanyahu has seen how much damage the judicial upheaval has already caused Israel’s economy and society,” says a former aide to the prime minister. “At this point he’s asking himself whether it’s been worth it and does he want to go all the way, when he may have no way back.”
“It’s a question of who will break first in the coalition, Galant or Deri?” said a member of one of the coalition parties.
Defence Minister Yoav Galant has leaked to the media that he threatened to resign if the legislation isn’t at least toned down.
He said to Netanyahu that he can’t guarantee the IDF’s operational readiness with thousands of reservists threatening not to turn up for duty in such a case. He would dearly love the government to abandon its plans but knows that to say so out in the open could spell the end of his Likud career.
But Shas leader Aryeh Deri is also having second thoughts. He and his strictly Orthodox colleagues are fully aware that, though they are not at the forefront of the legislation like Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Knesset Law Committee chair Simcha Rothman, they are being blamed by most centrist Israelis for pushing it.
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Israeli President Isaac Herzog (SAUL LOEB / AFP)
President Isaac Herzog’s “People’s Framework” — a compromise proposal for constitutional reform which he presented last week — was immediately rejected by the coalition but it remains on the table.
It included two major concessions to the Charedim, especially to Shas — first, introducing a “Supreme Court proof” law exempting yeshivah students from military service, and second, limiting the court’s power to intervene in ministerial appointments, thereby allowing the return to cabinet of Deri, whose previous appointment was spiked by the court due to his recent conviction for tax fraud.
Throughout the week, senior Charedi politicians, first in private and then in public, admitted that if those concessions are passed into law, there don’t have to be any other constitutional changes.
Galant and Deri could play a decisive role this week in determining whether the law on judicial appointments is brought to a vote before the end of the session. Either way, it will determine the fate of the government as well.
