Israelis’ defiance of Netanyahu holds a lesson for anyone who cares about democracy | Jonathan Freedland
Israelis’ defiance of Netanyahu holds a lesson for anyone who cares about democracy | Jonathan Freedland
Mass protests against the man who was Trumpian before Trump are part of a worldwide struggle, says the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland
Hardly. Israel has been running an apartheid system for decades now, but only now that Netanyahu is going to influence the courts to negatively affect Israelis and not just Palestinians, suddenly Israelis are up in arms.
Netanyahu’s plans are bad and will worsen everything, but the system was already undemocratic to begin with. Courts already denied rights to Palestinians and held minors without access to lawyers, detaining some Palestinians for years to decades without trial. The courts upheld demolition of Palestinian families homes without due process and then when Palestinians petitioned for the same punishment for Israeli terrorists the courts declined to intervene.
Edit: also this judicial change opens Israel up to even more charges of crimes against humanity, as judicial checks and balances are eliminated it means the government is more strictly responsible for human rights abuses.
Yep, that's the lesson.
Pick one:
- apartheid authoritarianism
- liberal democracy
Can't have both.
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It's not clear what the lesson is supposed to be, because right now it looks like Netanyahu's government will pocket a win.
What’s happening in Israel is very interesting though- what happens when a unified extremist slight-minority votes at 100% while the majority votes at 70%? Democracy fails when democracy votes for fascism.
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Interesting, thanks for sharing. But the angst is pretty easy to understand: Likud and its supporters are glumly realising that they're not calling the shots anymore. It's the far-right that's on the ascendant and setting the agenda. But what are Likud and Netanyahu gonna do? Once they've gotten on the tiger, they're obliged to ride wherever the tiger wants to go.
If you hold your ear to the Israeli media, the situation is more complicated than that. No one really understands the situation on the ground any more, and the maybe natural conclusion that “Netanyahu just got a win, and this is a sign for what’s coming next” is just one among many, many competing narratives, and not even a particularly popular one. I’d say about 75% of conservative pundits who you’d usually expect to cheer this on, instead have a certain doomerist edge to their op-eds, a tenor that basically goes “whoa, fuck, this ‘winning’ cannot continue in this manner, either we find a better way to win or we stop all this winning, or else the entire Zionist project crashes and burns”. Just these past few days about 6 or 7 Likud MKs “independently” declared that they resent being strong-armed by party loyalty to vote for the unilateral piece of legislation (that is: cancellation of the pretext of unreasonability) and that this was the definitely last time; the labor union head honcho expressed a similar sentiment. The most read newspaper in the state, Israel Hayom which is traditionally very pro-govt, published a poll following the vote where the govt conduct has basically destroyed it in the court of public opinion. Clearly a constellation of forces inside Likud leadership has elected to project a peculiar certain message, something like “crap, what a Pyrrhic victory, absolutely not worth the consequences, let’s not do that again”. A lot of anti-‘reform’ voices are calling this a feint, for all sorts of reasons; but right now one way or the other the tone across a lot of the conservative political system, including political media, is very far – even astoundingly, weirdly far – from “fuck yeah we scored”. I don’t know what this implies for the future of these ‘reforms’, if anything, but I wanted to lay this out so as to show the situation is not so simple.
i want to believe this, but it sounds completely anecdotal; are/is there some independent article or source that can give us another perspective online?
Clearly having the far right ultra-nationalist, racist and militarist nutters governing the country was only fine as long as the only victims were from a different ethnic group as the majority.
Interesting fact: Israel does not have a formal written constitution. Instead, they have a series of Basic Laws which is like rolling out a chapter at a time. Very interesting reading here.
By the way, the UK constitution also isn't a single document.
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