Bibi opens his heart about legal reforms during Musk love-in

Benjamin Netanyahu and his Wife Sara Tour Tesla Motors Plant with Tesla with Elon Musk Credit GPO (4)

Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk test-driveTesla’s new Cybertruck during a tour of the carmaker’s factory in Fremont, California (Photo: GPO)

It wasn’t simple to deal with, he answered, and X is considering “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of its platform. “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” he explained.

To pay for Twitter? The very idea scandalised social media and emerged as the main headline from the Musk-Netanyahu summit. But in Israel, one of the prime minister’s comments caused even more fuss.

Musk interestingly chose to bring up the Netanyahu government’s “legal reform”. Even in California, he couldn’t escape it and the answer was intriguing.

“I came in [to office] and there was a proposal put in which I thought was bad,” Netanyahu responded.

He expanded that the proposal would “reject one imbalance by creating another imbalance.

If the court can rule against any decision made by the government or the parliament, then let’s not correct it by having the parliament reject any decision, with a simple majority, that the court makes. I thought that was a mistake.”

Since when was Netanyahu convinced that the reform was bad? Why has he waited eight and a half months since Justice Minister Yariv Levin presented it to say so? Does the rest of his coalition know that’s what he thinks?

Back in the Knesset in Jerusalem, Levin was speaking at a gathering for the new year of a group of like-minded right-wing activists. He hadn’t got the memo: “Even if we don’t reach agreements [with the opposition], I have no intention of cancelling the reform.”

He admitted, however, that he wasn’t certain he had the backing of the coalition any more.

“If all 64 Knesset members [of the coalition] were like [Likud stalwarts] Simcha Rothman and Avihai Boaron, I would be confident.” The message was clear: Levin is blaming other members of the government in backtracking on the constitutional changes.

But surely he didn’t mean the prime minister. Or did he?

There were dark mutterings of a “Levin camp” emerging within Likud (“camps” within Likud is a by-word for rebellion against the party leader) as the prime minister’s aides rushed to explain that there was no rift between the two and that they were in constant contact.

After all, hadn’t Netanyahu appointed Levin as caretaker prime minister during his absence?

Benjamin Netanyahu and his Wife Sara Tour Tesla Motors Plant with Tesla with Elon Musk Credit GPO (8)

Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara tour the Tesla Motors plant with Elon Musk (Photo: GPO)

Likud put out a statement: “In no way did the prime minister disapprove of the legal reform. His words referred only to the override clause. The leaders of the coalition agreed months ago that a balance with the court can be achieved in other ways.”

Which is also news to many in the coalition, especially in the strictly Orthodox parties, who still demand the override clause to ensure that the law on exempting yeshivah students from military service cannot be overturned by the Supreme Court.

“Netanyahu slipped up with Musk and said what he really thinks. There’s no doubt that he now thinks that the reform is bad for him,” says a former senior aide. “He liked it originally when Levin presented it because he returned to office furious with the legal system, which he believed forced him out of office by indicting him.

“But now he’s realised that he can’t get anything done because of the fight over the reform and it’s simply not worth it. But he’s stuck with Levin and the other elements in the coalition who won’t give up on the reform.”

All this overshadowed quite a few interesting things said in the meeting on the original topic: Artificial Intelligence. But the controversy over the government’s constitutional changes is actually connected to the prospects of Israel becoming a global AI hub.

Israel already has the highest number of AI start-ups per capita of any country (the US is second and Britain third) but the scale of the AI industry is expected to balloon in the next few years, and to keep its position Israel will need more qualified personnel and computing power.

“AI is a field for which you need a lot of people with deep experience and PhD-level knowledge,” says a senior figure in the Israeli tech industry. “And you need the infrastructure of super-computers and advanced chips [processing units].

"For Israel to lead on this, the government needs to invest in both, and we’re not seeing that happen right now.”

In other words, if Netanyahu wants Israel to become an AI power, he needs to start spending money on the very people who are now in the streets opposing him and his policies.