Israelis agree to fight terrorists while fighting each other
Joel Gehrke
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A major Israeli Defense Forces raid against Palestinian terrorists provided a rare point of concord between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his domestic opponents, following months of turmoil over a proposed overhaul of Israel’s judiciary.
“Our children are being slaughtered, and Israel has every right on earth to defend itself, and we from the opposition support the Israeli defense forces and the Israeli government on this matter,” Israeli opposition leader and former foreign minister Yair Lapid said Monday, after invoking “the 28 Israelis who were killed in the last few months in terror attacks, including three sets of brothers and sisters.”
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Yet the support for Netanyahu’s security policies offers the prime minister little respite from the acrimony over the judicial reform bill, which Netanayahu’s opponents regard as a plan to break the power of the Israeli judiciary. Instead, the moment of comity suggests that Israeli policymakers can agree on fighting terrorism and each other at the same time.
“Instead of dealing with the dismantling of democracy and a unilateral coup, Netanyahu should stop, deal with the big challenges, and quit surrendering to petty politics,” said Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz, who held the defense minister’s post in the coalition government that interrupted Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister. “He must act with the responsibility that comes along with being prime minister.”
Gantz emerged as one of Netanyahu’s most powerful political opponents after a military career that saw him rise to the top of the Israeli Defense Forces. The former army chief of staff’s security credentials made him a potent threat to Netanyahu, whom he denounced as “bad and corrupt” through a series of inconclusive Israeli elections in recent years, prior to the formation of a fragile anti-Netanyahu coalition that held power June of 2021 to June of 2022.
“Netanyahu is clearly struggling with the political environment that he has forged or inherited, depending on your view,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior vice president Jonathan Schanzer told the Washington Examiner. His bona fides come from being a security hawk that has kept Israel out of quagmires. and the fact that he has conducted a limited operation with broad support from the security establishment plays to his brand, but he is still not out of the woods in terms of the political challenges that he faces in Israel.”
The timing of the assault in Jenin — the largest Israeli military operation in the West Bank since 2006 — allowed Netanyahu to sound a note of resolve against terrorism from the U.S. Embassy, which hosted the prime minister for an early Independence Day celebration.
“America has provided Israel with moral and political backing against those who would wipe us out, the only Jewish state,” Netanyahu said Monday. “Security cooperation has never been better; intelligence sharing has never been deeper.”
Yet the number of Israeli lawmakers at the embassy was smaller than expected, because official business required their presence at the Knesset — not for anything to do with the ongoing military operation.
“A long list of [legislators] and ministers were unable to attend a U.S. Independence Day party at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem due to the coalition and opposition’s inability to reach agreements in their weekly negotiations over the opposition’s agreement to drop planned filibusters in exchange for the coalition’s agreement to remove certain items from the Knesset plenum’s agenda,” as the Jerusalem Post noted.
And as the Jenin operation unfolds, Israeli police found themselves confronted with a security issue of a different kind at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, where a reported 15,000 people staged protests against the judicial bill.
“This government gives us, every week, a reason to leave the house (to protest),” protester Matan Lulian told Ynetnews on Monday. “We don’t let them pass anything they want, and that’s how it will continue. This is the way to do it.”
Lapid welcomed the grassroots reinforcements. “What should have happened today is for the government to stop the legislation,” he said. “Then there would be room to end the demonstration at Ben Gurion. This is what the protest organizers said, too.”
Netanyahu’s allies maintain that they need to proceed with the legislation in order to curtail a court that they regard as abusing its prerogatives to review the “reasonableness” of political decisions.
“I wish we had a court that shouldn’t be restricted because it uses unreasonableness only when it’s extreme, but that’s not the case,” said far-right Israeli lawmaker Simcha Rothman, who chairs the Knesset’s constitution, law, and justice committee.
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That debate unfolded as Israeli military leaders emphasized that the Jenin raid “isn’t a limited engagement” but rather part of “a series of operations” against Iran-backed militants. “Despite the unity, there is still a real focus on the divisive political situation inside Israel,” Schanzer said. “So it’s not gone.”