Attempting to cool protests, Netanyahu makes himself a hostage of his own government
Tom Rogan
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Attempting to cool protests and strikes that have ground Israel to a halt, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has delayed highly controversial judicial reforms. But to win the support of his coalition partners for that delay, Netanyahu has made himself a hostage of the far Right. It’s a risky gambit.
For a start, the ballooning protest movement provoked by Netanyahu’s judicial reform legislation smells the prime minister’s political blood in the water. It perhaps needn’t have been this way.
While Netanyahu’s reform program significantly weakened the Israeli Supreme Court’s judicial review powers, its ultimate tenet would have been to replicate the political-judicial framework applied in parliamentary democracies that also lack written constitutions, such as the United Kingdom. As in the U.K., Netanyahu wants a majority vote in parliament to be able to overturn a Supreme Court ruling. This might or might not be a good constitutional framework, but it cannot be considered extremist per se.
The problem for Netanyahu is that in attempting to rush through associated reforms that were seen to boost executive power and in avoiding compromise with the opposition, he has made his reforms an existential political battle of wills. Firing his defense minister over the weekend for calling for the reforms to be suspended, Netanyahu has enabled the protest movement to present him as a malevolent dictator in waiting rather than as a bungling political strategist.
In the mass strikes and protests on Monday, it’s clear that the protesters have the initiative. At this point, they may not settle for anything less than the collapse of Netanyahu’s coalition.
That brings us to Netanyahu’s second problem: the price he had to pay in order to get this compromise.
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The price is that Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the right-wing Otzma Yehudit party, will get the formation of a new national guard unit. Made up of volunteers, that guard would fall under Ben-Gvir’s control as national security minister. The new national guard would be employed in border security operations along and in the increasingly restive West Bank. But while the idea of this unit is not terribly controversial in and of itself, it does underline Ben-Gvir’s confidence that he can extract evermore concessions from a weakening prime minister. Ben-Gvir’s key leverage is that he could collapse Netanyahu’s government were he to withdraw from the coalition. More importantly, Ben-Gvir knows that Netanyahu knows he’s willing to do it.
In turn, even as Netanyahu moves to moderate his governing position, he has left himself open to what are likely to be increasingly aggressive and ambitious demands from far-right partners such as Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. As tensions rise with Iran, Israel needs a strong prime minister who can command national unity. Netanyahu instead appears a hostage both to public fury and to the most extreme elements of his own government.