Judicial reform in Israel. External and internal factors of the crisis
Internal factor
At the end of last year, the government in Israel was replaced once again (the third in a short time), and the well-known long-liver Israeli politician B. Netanyahu again took the post of prime minister. Since January, waves of protests have been sweeping through Israel, the latest of which is more like a “ninth wave” - the Israeli state has not known such a political and social crisis for many years. Everyone is on strike - the army, air traffic, doctors.
It came to events that seemed impossible in principle, when the famous Israeli Air Force announced a strike in kind. The number of protesters, starting with twenty thousand, today already exceeds six hundred and fifty.
What are so many people protesting against, including part of the country's armed forces? Formally, we are talking about judicial reform, which was started by B. Netanyahu. Some observers see in this protest echoes of the US strategy towards Iran and Ukraine, while the other part focuses on the so-called. "corruption case" of the new old Israeli prime minister.
All these factors take place both together and separately, however, in general, these are rather stereotyped and straightforward assessments. It seems that the situation has much deeper and even conceptual roots, and the foreign policy agenda, for all its traditional importance for Israel, is still secondary.
Disputes about the need to reform the judicial system in Israel have been going on for a long time, and it was no secret that B. Netanyahu would try to move this stone. The problem is that it is not just about the control of an elected government over an almost caste-based corps of the highest judicial power in the country, but about a system of views on the development of the Jewish state or, as we now say, the image of the future.
The Israeli judicial system does indeed have a number of unique features. First, there is no constitution as such in the Jewish state. There are a number of legislative acts that have the status of "basic" and on which, in theory, a future constitution can be built. This is somewhat reminiscent of domestic federal constitutional laws, which are higher in status than ordinary law, with the difference that there is no constitution itself. In our most basic document, it is laid down that the legislator, by certain acts (according to the list), discloses constitutional norms. In Israel, a pool similar to our FKZ has been formed, only the constitution itself should already be based on them.
Already from the very methodology of constructing legislation it is clear that it can have the quality of "necessary", but without a formal constitution it will not have the quality of "sufficiency". Accordingly, and quite logically, there has gradually developed a practice of the judicial system, where the Supreme Court is not only concerned with appeals, appointments, evaluating statutes and decisions against existing basic laws, but also evaluating what, in theory, can correspond to a general model of legislation.
As a result, from the beginning of the 90s, the role of the court as an appraiser of the actions of the government as a whole arose, and gradually increased. One of the functions of the Supreme Court was the so-called Court of Justice (High Court), where, if desired, one could appeal against almost any decision. It is clear that in the presence of the "good will" of the judiciary itself. And this will often depends on the starting point - that very image of the future.
We, as foreign observers, have, for quite understandable reasons, a certain bias in assessing the processes taking place there as derivatives of foreign policy challenges. This has its own logic, since foreign policy concerns relations, including with Russia. But it should be noted that in terms of the image of the future, Israel has a different priority, and it is based on four “pillars”: attitude towards the state of Palestine, attitude towards the issue of settlements, attitude towards repatriation issues, attitude towards the influence of religious, orthodox communities.
This does not mean that there are no other internal acute issues, they are, and there are a lot of them, but if you start to understand, then each of them in one way or another rests on the above basic ones. Hence the specific division of society into "conditionally left" and "conditionally right". Each of these wings of public discourse has its own radicals and its marginals.
For example, Israel is perhaps one of the few public entities where part of the political spectrum generally openly advocates the abolition of the state itself in principle. Moreover, the ultra-left for ideological reasons, and representatives of some ultra-right religious sects - according to their special specifics of understanding religious norms.
Here the Supreme Court is a representative of the left spectrum, and B. Netanyahu and his coalition are of the right. The left as a whole stands for the coexistence in some adequate form of two systems: Israeli and Palestinian. The right no longer sees much point in this, since it is enough to look at the famous dynamic map of Israel and compare the scale of Palestinian and Israeli territory in the 1940s and today.
External factor
The debate over what exactly is meant by the coexistence of the two systems has been going on for decades, and American, European and Arab political and financial circles are involved in one way or another. There was a long cycle associated with the so-called. The "Geneva Initiative" or Beilin-Rabbot Plan was Trump's Palestine Plan ("Deal of the Century") and other initiatives.
In this regard, the rightists quite reasonably hint that since the Palestinian administration itself has abandoned even Trump’s initiatives, demanding the obviously impossible (the 1967 borders), then let everything go naturally through the assimilation of these territories. Here it is necessary to make a remark that Trump's plan could become a realistic platform in the moment, if he did not include a radical clause on the status of Jerusalem.
Here the High Court of Justice often torpedoes the development of new settlements, which causes outright hatred on the right. On the other hand, in the same Supreme Court, a significant part of society sees support against Netanyahu's initiatives in terms of tightening the conditions for repatriation. The tightening of conditions is also a connection with the American and European diasporas, investors, trade and financial flows, even just issues of freedom of marriage.
Leftists in Israel have always focused on the closest ties with the American and European financial elites. They also focused on the specifics of the left-liberal Western agenda, because it was the Supreme Court that introduced elements of juvenile justice, etc.
On the right side, the issue is a bit more complicated.
The fact is that Israel is a small state, but a very serious factor in the Middle East policy. Although it is often customary for us to absolutize the influence of the Jewish diasporas and Israel on world politics, in fact, in Israel there is a certain tiredness from the fact that any changes in the political concepts of the United States primarily affect them. But for quite a decent time, the same United States simply lacks a clear concept and strategy in the Middle East.
The right and Netanyahu operate within the framework of the priority of greater independence under the banner of “conservatism”, even the prime minister’s relations with Trump were cautious, since Trump himself represented that layer of the industrial elite, which traditionally was not the backbone of Tel Aviv. His task was to rally the Middle East against Iran and automatically solve the problem of military contracts. For Israel, the benefits were also obvious, but Trump's own political base was not pro-Israeli.
Israeli policy in its basic issues-whales has always relied on one or another global project, bargaining for itself "shares" there. These big concept projects never fully satisfied Israeli society, but they were a wall to build on. Today, this wall does not exist, and the state, whose elites many conspiracy theorists considered almost the world planner, naturally shook.
Israel today is a mirror of the crisis of Western conceptualism, only a mirror in miniature. On the one hand, the “collective West”, of which Israel was one way or another in the Middle East, demands unconditional consolidation from all its parts, but for the Israeli society it is not yet very clear what exactly they need to unite around.
The crisis is aggravated by the fact that today Israel accepts the judicial reform in full, which means the appointment of some judges through the Knesset, the impossibility of blocking legislative initiatives under a simplified procedure, and the withdrawal of Netanyahu from the anti-corruption press (cementing his cabinet and program) , and it will be difficult to turn back already.
Karma
The Israeli protest is somewhat reminiscent of history with Turkey, when in 2016 the officer corps turned out to be the most liberal. It is rather difficult to assume that something like Turkish protests will happen in Israel, but various forms of army sabotage are already evident if the pilots are on strike and disrupt Netanyahu's visit to London. Defense Minister I. Galant resigned "for criticism." Members of the diplomatic corps are resigning.
Some observers are trying to see an American hand behind these protests, saying that Netanyahu is not actively supporting Ukraine. Netanyahu's son writes on social networks that the State Department is funding the protests to push his father to "agreements with Iran", allegedly the leftists receive funding from USAID (as if discovering who else they should give grants to).
In fact, judging by a variety of official statements, not only directly from the White House, but also from representatives of various Israeli lobby groups in the United States, they do not have not only a long-term concept, but a plan in general - a reaction to such a crisis. Everyone is asking the parties in Israel "for a compromise." But the trouble is that, as we discussed above, this compromise previously always relied on the same strategy.
Most likely, Netanyahu will listen to the voice of reason, the wishes of President I. Herzog, as well as J. Biden and representatives of the diaspora lobby abroad to cancel or postpone the reform and further "inclusive" discussion. The Israeli society turned out to be simply not ready yet to go with an independent project, its own conservative model. Moreover, it is unlikely that the current prime minister, after sitting in the chair for three months, is ready to please his rival Y. Lapid if the protests take on an even larger scale.
It is possible to talk about which of them is preferable in the Big West only within the framework of the struggle that is going on there between the sectarian, ultra-liberal and the past globalist. For the latter, both prime ministers are the same, for the former, J. Lapid will always be a priority, since ultra-liberals are fundamentally anti-religious. But exactly for the same reason, ultra-liberals will never be able to offer any adequate model of Israel's interaction with the Middle East, and therefore help in resolving whale issues.
The only thing is that Netanyahu, remaining in his chair, is unlikely to help Kyiv more than in the form of some symbolic steps. Lapid can also send something "defensive", although not on the scale that Kyiv is counting on. I think there is no point in talking about “war with Iran if Netanyahu remains”, outside the general strategy of the Big West in the region, which is determined neither by Israel with Netanyahu, nor by Israel without Netanyahu.
In any case, no existential crisis is foreseen for Israel, but Israeli society cannot count on any change in basic issues. We will have to wait until some kind of, at least medium-term, program for the region as a whole is adopted overseas.
In general, there is something karmic in everything that is happening, they did, they did protests in Iran, the pipes swayed, but it backfired not somewhere far away, but at home.
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