Leonie Fleischmann, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, City St George's, University of London
The Israel Defense Forces has launched a further major ground assault in Gaza – this time with the intention of taking and holding significant amounts of territory as a “security buffer”. This appears unlikely to endear the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to many of the families of the remaining 59 Hamas hostages, who may well fear the worst for their loved ones.
It’s a high-risk strategy on Netanyahu’s part. But the prime minister is already walking a political tightrope as he simultaneously attempts to bend his country’s legal system to his will.
Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to protest the prime minister’s recent attempts to bring the country’s supreme court under government control. The saga started when he sacked the country’s most important spy chief, the head of Shin Bet, Ronen Bar, in mid-March.
This was the first time a government had dismissed a serving head of Shin Bet, and the supreme court stepped in to freeze the order until it had the chance to hear opposition objections.
The attorney-general, Gali Baharav-Miara, a vocal critic of Netanyahu, accused the prime minister of ignoring the law. This led the government to pass a no-confidence motion in her as well.
Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, subsequently passed a law which would give the government the power to appoint new members of the supreme court.
The move was criticised by the Israel Democracy Institute, which described the new law as a “broader shift toward subordinating legal and security institutions to political authority” in Israel. It certainly has the potential to undermine the country’s system of checks and balances which – as in many western democracies – rests largely on the separation of powers.
Israel does not have a single written constitution. What it has is a set of “Basic Laws” which provide the rules of governance. Within these are checks and balances, which aim to prevent any one institution or individual from exercising untrammelled control. Putting the make-up of the supreme court into the hands of the government would threaten this basic democratic principle on which Israel has always operated.
On March 19, Netanyahu posted on X from the prime ministerial account: “In America and Israel, when a strong right-wing leader wins, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will. They won’t win in either place!” He later removed the post and reposted the same thing from his personal account.
The post linked his efforts to control the judiciary with the Trump administration’s loudly voiced campaign against state barriers to its power.
But anyone who has followed Netanyahu’s decision-making in recent years will discern a pattern. Since being charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in 2019 (which he denies) he has done anything he can to try to gain control of the country’s judiciary – for his own political preservation.
Netanyahu’s motivations
At the same time, many critics believe Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in Gaza had been with one eye to prolonging hostilities to delay proceedings in his own trials. Now it appears that the Israeli prime minister is attempting a frontal assault on Israel’s judiciary.
His decision to sack Bar came as the Shin Bet chief was supervising an investigation into allegations concerning, as he put it in a letter to the cabinet before his sacking: “Qatar’s involvement at the highest levels of Israeli decision-making, including the Prime Minister’s Office.”
Equally questionable is the attempted ousting of Attorney-General Baharav-Miara, who is overseeing the criminal case against him. Replacing them with more compliant and loyal individuals would help ensure that Netanyahu and the policies of his government are protected.
All of this drew a strong response from the former consul general of Israel in New York, Alon Pinkas. Writing in the opposition paper Haaretz on March 21, Pinkas argued that Israeli “democracy’s guardrails” are being brought “crashing down fast and furious by Netanyahu’s design”.
He concluded that the only two remaining checks on Netanyahu’s power are “the supreme court and the Israeli public” – adding that the court can only act when it is permitted. “So the Israeli public becomes the only potentially effective check.”
An active civil society is an important marker of democracy and my research shows that Israel has a strong history of protest and extra-parliamentary action across a range of social, economic and political issues.
There has been a continuous stream of anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel since the “black flag protests” in 2020 in opposition to Netanyahu’s continuing in power despite facing serious criminal charges. The protests grew ever stronger, despite COVID safeguarding regulations.
When the government attempted wide-ranging reforms which many critics feared would fundamentally weaken the independence of the judiciary, hundreds of thousands took to the streets weekend after weekend, forcing the government eventually to shelve its plans.
Read more: Israel protests: Netanyahu delays judicial reforms over fears of 'civil war' – but deep fault-lines threaten future of democracy
Since the start of the war in Gaza, the political focus of protests shifted to broad consensus in calling the government to do everything in its power to ensure the release of the October 7 hostages. Now the protests will focus more centrally back on the considerable public discontent with the prime minister himself.
It remains to be seen, now, whether Alon Pinkas is right and whether the Israeli public can be an effective check against a leader who appears now to be governing solely in his own interests.
Leonie Fleischmann does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
