When I was sixteen, chairing my high school’s Young Democrats of America chapter and struggling to cope with Donald Trump’s recent election victory, my equally traumatized aunt shared with me words of wisdom that I still cling to in moments of political turmoil. “The pendulum always swings back,” she said, as we huddled on her studio apartment floor wondering if our country was indeed the same one that raised us or if the rise of Trumpism signified the turning of a dark corner with consequences for decades to come. Fortunately for us, the American pendulum indeed “swung back” in 2018, 2020, and some may even say it remained to the left in 2022. When it came time to watch the Israeli election results this past November, the first Israeli election in which I participated, I remembered my aunt’s words and told myself that no matter how nauseating the result, like America, Israel was a vibrant democracy, and the pendulum would swing back to a reality I could stomach in due time.
Yet as we all know, the worst came to be. The left-wing Meretz party did not pass the Knesset’s electoral threshold, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party failed to chip away at Likud’s boastful numbers, and the splitting of the Arab Joint List all but handed a comfortable parliamentary majority to hard-right nationalists and religious fundamentalists. “The pendulum will swing back; the pendulum will swing back,” I have been muttering under my breath with every scandalous Jerusalem Post headline that taunts me from the computer screen. My quixotic mantra was working for a short while, that is until four new law proposals were put forth by the incoming Netanyahu government, four new laws which it will depend upon to first obtain and then to maintain power.
The first of these laws is what Israelis are calling the “Deri Law.” In simple terms, this law would reverse a previous Basic Law (part of a list of laws that serve as Israel’s de-facto constitution) that forbids convicted felons from holding a minister position in government. Aryeh Deri, the leader of the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party Shas, was convicted of bribery in 2000 when he served as Israel’s Interior Minister and was given a three-year prison sentence. In 2018, he was further indicted for fraud, breach of trust, money laundering and tax violations. In an early 2022 plea bargain, he resigned from the Knesset, only to be re-elected as Shas’ leader and thus a powerful figure in Netanyahu’s new government this autumn. However, in order to bestow upon Deri the title of minister, the Knesset must vote in favor of undoing the previous law, a move that many in the opposition this week have said would amount to “state-sanctioned corruption.”
The second of these laws is what has come to be known as the “Smotrich Law,” named after Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist list. The Religious Zionists came in third for total votes in the current Knesset, bringing newly amplified far-right voices on Israel’s West Bank policy into government. Smotrich, a character who has previously advocated for the separation of Arab mothers and Jewish mothers in Israeli maternity wards, is poised to become not only the new Minister of Finance, but also “a minister in the Defense Ministry” (rather than Defense Minister) with direct oversight of Jewish settlements and Palestinian construction in Area C of the West Bank, land where Israel exercises both civil and military control. Such a purview is ideal for Smotrich, who quite openly envisions a future where Jews in the West Bank have national and political rights and Palestinians do not. Legislation is needed to legitimize such a position in the defense department. By the time you are reading this, it is highly likely that both the Deri Law and the Smotrich Law will have been passed into Israel’s list of Basic Laws, as they are scheduled for a first reading on Monday, December 26.
The third of law of concern is what is known as the “Ben-Gvir Law,” and it is perhaps the most foreboding in Israeli left-wing circles. Should they get their way, the new government will bestow upon Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit party the never-before-seen title of “Minister of National Security,” which would grant Ben-Gvir authority over the Israeli Police, pulling higher rank than the commissioner. Ben-Gvir, a radical who has never missed a racist provocation in this country and advocates a Kahane-esque style of defense against Arabs, will be entrusted with overseeing police investigations and proceedings against those who may have broken the law. He is already causing chaos by accusing those who value the independence of the police, such as those in the opposition and Deputy Attorney General Amit Marari, of being traitorous leftists and even terrorist sympathizers. As a gift to the Religious Zionist list, the Ben-Gvir law will also transfer authority on Jewish settlement security from Israel’s military to Israel’s police, which opens a Pandora’s Box of human rights violations deserving of an entirely separate opinion column. As of now, the Ben-Gvir law is set to be partially passed before the swearing in of the new government in early January, while the rest of it is set to pass sometime after.
The final law has so far been discussed as the “judicial override law,” or the “legislative override law,” but I think it can be best characterized as the “Netanyahu law,” as it is the main priority for the leader of this conglomerate of controversies. Netanyahu wants to ram through the Knesset a law that would allow the parliament to override a Supreme Court decision by a simple majority of sixty-one votes. In other words, if the Ben-Gvir law threatens the autonomy of the police, the Netanyahu law threatens the autonomy of what Professor Alan Dershowitz calls “the jewel in the crown” of legal systems, the Israeli Supreme Court, and their power to review legislation that contradicts Israel’s Basic Laws. This law does more than just give the Knesset full autonomy in enacting legislation and therefore a green light to throw out whatever Basic Laws the majority finds inconvenient (the only other democracy that allows a legislative override to a constitution is Canada); but it is also a symbolic strike against a 1970s-era illusion of a powerful left-wing Ashkenazi elite in Israel, an illusion that Netanyahu’s base enjoys rallying against each election cycle.
Clearly, the introduction of these four laws and the probability that they will pass the Knesset with flying colors renders my mantra of “the pendulum will swing back” more fanciful. Will these laws, as alarmists on the Israeli left would like us to believe, give way to an upcoming apocalypse of national legitimacy? I try to make a habit of not listening to hysterics, yet there is no running from the fact that not only do these laws contradict how I would like to see Israel bend on policy, but also they threaten how millions of people with my beliefs view the State of Israel as a whole: a democracy that functions under the rule of law. These laws alter the foundation of the Israeli government’s system of checks and balances and open the floodgates to criminals and provocateurs deciding the future of the only Jewish civilization on earth.
These laws alter the foundation of the Israeli government’s system of checks and balances and open the floodgates to criminals and provocateurs deciding the future of the only Jewish civilization on earth.
In Tablet Magazine this week, author Matti Friedman penned brilliant advice on how those who value Israel’s status among the family of nations are meant to interpret this wave of depressing news. He first informs us that although things may look bleak, the vote breakdown between right-wing and center-left wing parties in Israel remains virtually the same, and that it is only the petty squabbling and revenge fantasies of our politicians that has skewed politics away from what most Israelis want. Nevertheless, he writes that the current crisis is still meant to be taken seriously, and that it will certainly make things more difficult for defenders of Israel in the Diaspora in differentiating between valid criticism of a state and masked antisemitism. “The way to do so is to ask if a critic is trying to make Israel better, or trying to make it disappear,” Friedman writes.
I can only end this article by heeding Friedman’s words, and by encouraging Zionists in Israel and in the Diaspora to stay true to their principles of Jewish self-determination, while simultaneously holding those who wish to advance a warped and deplorable version of our self-determination accountable.
Holding these two ideas in our heads at the same time, at this moment, is of paramount importance.
Blake Flayton is the New Media Director and columnist for the Jewish Journal.
