The Diplomat in Spain

Mario Sznajder

Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The political crisis that Israel is experiencing these days has its origins in the structure of the political system of this country, institutionalized since the 1920s, in British Palestine, through the installation of an electoral system adopted first by the authorities of the Jewish community, which was growing with immigration, and then by the State of Israel since its establishment in 1948. It was a parliamentary proportional representative system, with a single national list, with an entry band to Parliament that varied from 1% of the votes to the current 3.25%. This system functioned regularly while the major parties of the time – Labor and Likud (liberal nationalist) – received a large percentage of votes that allowed them to elect junior partners for the coalition government and in parallel were led by politicians who possessed high levels of legitimacy for their foundational roles for Israel, such as Ben Gurion and Begin.

Towards the 80’s of the last century, an electoral parity between the possible government coalitions led by both parties began to take place, and this situation resulted in national unity governments led by Shamir and Peres. Later on, the major parties lost electoral support and the government coalitions became weaker and weaker. This is because the leader of the party that obtains the first electoral majority wins only a little more than a quarter of the votes, while in order to achieve a coalition that includes more than 50% of the parliamentary seats, he must pay high ‘prices’ to the small parties and is increasingly dependent on them in order not to lose the government. This is the current case of the Netanyahu government.

The attempt at electoral reform in the 1990s, which separated the election of the prime minister from the parliamentary election – of the coalition supporting the government – failed, as it strengthened both ideologically and electorally the small parties and ended up returning, at the beginning of this century, to the previous system with an increase in the percentage of the vote to gain entry to Parliament.

At the same time, Israel does not have a written Constitution and instead a series of basic laws were legislated that design the structure of the State and ensure the rights of citizens and minorities. In the 1990s, the Israeli constitutional vacuum was repaired through the judicial activism of the Supreme Court, which carried out, in a sense, a process of judicialization of politics and applied its authority to limit government actions and legislation that it perceived as contrary to the existing legal state. This was seen by some politicians as an attempt at supremacy on the part of the Supreme Court, which curtailed the will of the people, expressed through parliamentary elections.

Meanwhile, the weakness of the major political parties and the personalist and populist tendencies – which were accelerated during the years in which the electoral reform led to the separation of the election of the prime minister from that of the Parliament (Knesset) – led to five national elections between 2019 and 2022, in which the major parties found it very difficult to generate stable governing coalitions. The last election, on November 1, 2022, granted the first majority to Likud, and its leader, Netanyahu, has formed a coalition government that they themselves described as “totally right-wing”. The coalition includes, outside Likud, three ultra-Orthodox parties and two religious nationalist parties. One of its problems is that it contains quite a few ideological contradictions among its members and also generates serious disputes over the leadership of each of the sectors. An additional problem is that it includes a party -the Jewish Power party, led by Ben Gvir- which is avowedly anti-Arab, in racist terms.

Among the electoral proposals of this bloc of parties, which make up the current Government, stood out that of judicial reform, whose central content was to take away from the Supreme Court of Israel its role and authority with respect to the review of legislation, as well as over the actions of the Government and its power to stop anything it considered undemocratic and in opposition to the existing basic legislation. This would be done through a series of laws that would change the commission for the election of judges, taking away the Supreme Court’s right to veto appointments of judges and introducing a majority representative of the government coalition in this commission. Another proposed law would give Parliament, with a 61-vote majority, the power to override any political decision of the Supreme Court. Beyond these, it is proposed to weaken the Attorney General’s Office’s oversight authority over government appointments and actions, and a series of measures that would virtually eliminate the political powers of the Judiciary within Israel’s current system of checks and balances (checks and balances designed to prevent any one branch of government from gaining supremacy over the other two).

The argument of Netanyahu and his coalition allies is that they have the power to carry out this judicial reform or revolution, because the people wanted it and expressed it through the vote in the last election. Apart from this, Netanyahu and his allies use arguments of “identity politics”, which argue that Israel, although governed by Likud-led coalitions, is still in the hands of the old Ashkenazi elites originating from historical Laborism; and this means the discrimination of Eastern Jews from the institutions of power, such as the Supreme Court and the judicial system, the academic elite, the financial elite, the high-tech elite and even certain military elites.

The speed with which Netanyahu and the government coalition attempted to legislate this reform provoked a reaction of unexpected popular protest from within civil society, without a clear political leadership, since the parliamentary opposition was practically swept away by the popular protest. To all this, it must be added that the protest is focused not only on reform but on the personal interest of Netanyahu, who faces three court cases for corruption and the judicial disqualification of Deri, the leader of Shas, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic party to serve as minister in the present coalition.

The massive protests and the strong international criticism, especially from the US and the European Union, added to a climate of instability that weakens the value of the national currency -Shekel-, the withdrawal of capital and the threats in the area of internal and international security, have strengthened the protests and created coalitions between sectors that seemed irreconcilable before these last events. Thus, reservists in elite units have stated that they will not continue to serve in their military roles under a Netanyahu dictatorship, since, if everything depends on a parliamentary majority without a balance of powers, the majority that forms the government coalition would delegate its parliamentary authority to Netanyahu and the government would be in the hands of the Prime Minister, whom the protest activists consider a future dictator. In view of this, mass protests have included blocking central roads and paralyzing activities.

Added to all this is the fact that the Minister of Security (Defense), Galant, demanded Netanyahu to stop the legislation of the reforms because the security situation – facing Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza – in this month of Ramadan is perceived as dangerous and it is a bad period to add to the lack of internal stability. Netanyahu prevented Galant from making a public statement explaining all this, although Galant did so taking advantage of the fact that Netanyahu was on an official visit to London. Netanyahu reacted by declaring that Galant would not continue to head the Ministry of Security (Defense), but did not send him a letter of dismissal. At the moment Netanyahu fired Galant, last Sunday night, a large crowd took to the streets throughout the country to protest against this measure and the following morning, in a special meeting, the Histadrut (Confederation of Labor), in coordination with the associations of industrialists, merchants and bank managers, declared a general strike that paralyzed Ben Gurion airport and large sectors of the entire country.

As a result of all this and after a day of intense negotiations within the government coalition – in the face of the religious nationalist parties, who, because of past problems and settlement problems in the West Bank, were the ones who most demanded the reform, and together with Justice Minister, Levin, who is the author of the reform plan, Netanyahu declared that reform is on hold for the next month to make way for a conciliatory negotiation that will produce an agreed reform of the Israeli legal system, in negotiations to be guided by President Herzog.

It is clear that legislating a constitution at this time, with the multiple fractures in Israeli society aligning into two polarized blocs, is a pipe dream. It must also be understood that behind the attempt at judicial reform-revolution, there is an inoperative political system that must be reformed and updated in order to face Israel’s multiple challenges in the 21st century, which are very different from those of a century ago when this system began to be institutionalized.

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