THIS IS NOT ABOUT DEMOCRACY

 It’s not about democracy

(JNS) What’s happening in Israel is not what it seems. The left, in all its component parts, is not fighting against an effort by the government and the Knesset to destroy Israel’s democacy

We know this for three reasons.

[skipping past the 3 reasons which can be read at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/367292] 

In sum, we know the fight isn’t about judicial reform because leading members of the camp now insisting the reform will destroy democracy spoke on behalf of it in the past; because they oppose all discussion and reject all compromise on the legal reform package; and because their entire fight is based on slogans recycled from their previous campaigns that have nothing to do with the reforms on the table.

So if it isn’t judicial reforms they oppose, what is driving leading members of Israel society to call for civil war, threaten to murder Netanyahu and his ministers, threaten to pull their money out of the country and destroy its economy, lobby foreign governments to adopt policies hostile to Israel, and announce and organize insurrections, general strikes and violence?

A good way to understand what is actually moving the left is to ask what the judicial reform package has in common with not giving in to PLO/U.S. demands for territorial withdrawals, harvesting natural gas, passing the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, and permitting Ariel University to be a university.

The answer is twofold. First, the policies in question are not leftist policies. From this we can conclude that the left is unwilling to accept that when the right wins elections it has a right to implement its policies. The left isn’t worried about democracy. It doesn’t like democracy. It likes its oligarchy.

The current hysteria and threats of violence are driven by the central role the Supreme Court plays in preserving leftist power and privilege. Through a self-perpetuating selection process which Levin’s reform will correct, the Supreme Court today is dominated by ideologically rigid and radical justices. Legislating and dictating policies from the bench, the justices cancel the policies of right-wing governments and compel them to implement leftist policies.

By removing the left’s chokehold on policymaking and legislation, the government’s judicial reform plan will—like many previous right-wing initiatives the left ran political and lawfare campaigns to scuttle endeavored to—facilitate the expansion of Israel’s economic and strategic power and independence.

And this brings us to the Biden administration and to the left’s open lobbying of the administration and other foreign governments to oppose the reforms.

For the Biden administration, like the Obama administration before it, Netanyahu is a threat primarily because he opposes the administration’s anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian and pro-Iran policies. And even worse for the White House, by advancing policies that increase Israel’s strategic and economic independence, Netanyahu’s government reduces Israel’s dependence on the U.S. and the administration’s power to force Israel to toe its line.

Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “We’ve reached a point where foreign policy is domestic policy, and domestic policy is foreign policy.” This is true for the Israeli left as well.

The Israeli left cultivates relations with foreign powers not on the basis of how those relations advance Israel’s national interests, but on how they serve the left’s interests against the right. In the Lapid-Bennett government’s willingness to give the U.S. veto power over Israel’s Iran policy and in its agreement to cede Israel’s natural gas deposit near Lebanon to the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government, it showed how the left is willing to concede Israel’s economic and strategic interests and independence in exchange for U.S. political support.

The similarity between the Democrats’ castigation of Republicans as a threat to democracy and the Israeli left’s current assault on the legitimacy of the government underlines their cooperation.

n Thursday night, leftist protesters burned tires and blocked major traffic arteries in Jerusalem. Former Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit said that violence is inevitable. Parents used their children to block a major traffic artery Thursday morning in Tel Aviv. And leftist reservists and retired generals from the IDF Armored Corps held a march to Jerusalem. The main effort of the protests is to bring the economy to a stop on Monday and hold a pitched riot outside Knesset as the votes begin on the judicial reform package. The leftist Movement for Quality Government has petitioned the Supreme Court asking that the justices force Netanyahu from office by ruling that he is unfit to lead. And with each hour, more and more calls for violence are heard from leftists.

How this will end is still unknowable. But if the reforms do not go through, the biggest loser will be Israel’s democracy.

Caroline Glick is an award-winning columnist and author of The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.