Is Israeli society collapsing, or just growing up?

One week ago, Israel’s parliament passed the first pillar of its judicial reform package. This, despite 30 weeks of massive protests against the reforms. Calling these mass protests understates it. Hundreds of thousands of people turning out each week, culminating last week in a historic protest march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

We have received a lot of questions and comments from listeners to this podcast about the current situation in Israel. Haviv Rettig Gur joins us for the first time, to help us make sense of events. Haviv is the political analyst at The Times of Israel. He was a long time reporter for the Times of Israel. He’s also working on a book.

Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF where he served in the reserves until he was 40 years old.

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Transcript

DISCLAIMER: THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CREATED USING AI TECHNOLOGY AND MAY NOT REFLECT 100% ACCURACY.

[00:00:00] I think that what just happened was good. I think what just happened was healthy. This country has carried a lot of questions unanswered. There are many other questions unanswered that we continue to carry. The big one being obviously the Palestinian question, but there are a lot of domestic internal questions that we have been carrying and they have been tearing us apart quietly from the inside and a couple of them because of the foolishness of some ideologues.

Was forced onto the public agenda and is exploding in our faces. And I don't think that's a bad thing. This is not Israel collapsing. This is Israel growing up. I think we're going into a good period of reckoning. It will be painful. It'll get worse before it gets better. We have a leadership. Uh, that is foolish and unserious and not up to this task unless it makes the decision to, to face this moment with what it needs as a constitutional moment of thinking and communicating and dealing seriously with our problems.

And if that does happen, everything will turn out great. If that doesn't happen, it'll turn out great. It'll just take a little [00:01:00] longer.

One week ago today, Israel's parliament passed the first pillar of its package of reforms. of Israel's judiciary. Maybe the only pillar they passed relative to how they started, but nonetheless they did pass something. And this is despite 30 weeks of massive protests against these reforms. Now to call these just mass protests actually understates it.

We're talking about hundreds of thousands of Israelis turning out Every Saturday night after Shabbat since January for approximately 30 weeks to protest the government's judicial reform package. And this all culminated last week in a historic protest march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. For those of you who have not visited Israel, just the distance between Tel Aviv and [00:02:00] Jerusalem is about 60 kilometers or 40 miles.

So imagine Tens of thousands of people spontaneously joining a march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in the burning hot Israel summer sun, leading up to Shabbat, to participate in this march through the weekend at Israel's Knesset in Jerusalem. The images were quite powerful. In addition, Israel's 150 largest companies across the tech, finance, and retail sectors staged a strike.

And they actually encouraged their employees to participate in the protests during their working hours. I can go on and on and on. There were threats from army reservists that they would no longer serve in the reserves. I mean, across so many walks of Israeli life, you saw people stepping back and stepping in to protest.

Now, whether you agreed with these protests Or disagreed with them. It was quite an impressive demonstration of [00:03:00] political organizing. Now we've received a lot of questions from listeners and comments, and even suggestions about the current situation in Israel and all the questions, whether it's about the judicial reforms impact on Israel's economy or on Israel security with the threats of reservists, no longer showing up to their training or, or the threats to Israel's social cohesion.

All the questions could be boiled down basically to one question. Is Israeli society unraveling before our eyes? The short answer is no, I don't think so. It's a topic I'm gonna unpack and explore in the next few weeks on this podcast But one thing I am sure of Israeli politics are under tremendous stress Which will inevitably have some cascading effects and it will for some time So like I said, we'll have a series of conversations here on and off returning to this topic to get us started Today is Haviv Retikur who joins us for the first time He's a friend and a very smart, [00:04:00] thoughtful writer on all matters related to Israel.

He's the political analyst at the Times of Israel, and he was a longtime reporter for the Times of Israel. He's also working on a book. Haviv was also a combat medic in the IDF, where he served in the reserves until he was 40. He's also spent meaningful time In the United States. Is Israel becoming unglued?

This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast my friend, Haviv Retigur from the Times of Israel. Political analyst of the Times of Israel. Times of Israel is an incredible Resource on all things Israel in the Middle East not only since January during the judicial reform crisis, but in general and Haviv is a reliable Sort of voice in my ear In terms of I read everything he writes and he joins me today from Jerusalem Haviv.

Thanks for [00:05:00] thanks for coming on Thanks so much for having me Dan boy. There's a lot Uh, we need to cover. So I guess to just sort of set things up, I'd like to start with you just explaining where we were in January of this year, before the 30 weeks of protest kicked into high gear, where we were in January relative to where we were one week from now, in terms of something One pillar, at least, of the judicial reform package passing in the Knesset.

Sure. Sort of the history of this whole event. Um, The, so, you know, you have to have a little bit of basic background about the institutions of the Israeli state for any of it to make sense. But really, as the Talmud says, standing on one foot version, right? Yeah. Right, keeping the thing to a short, uh, story as possible, Israel has this immensely powerful Supreme Court.

The Israeli [00:06:00] political right is absolutely correct about it, and it has been, uh, about that argument, and it has been, uh, really for 30 years, one of the major arguments that the right has been making, that this court is too powerful, it needs to be reined in, we need a better balance between the different branches of government.

Uh, in January, uh, of this year. Um, just before, before, before you, before you move to January. So when you say for 30 years, this is a very important point. So between 1948 and basically 30 years ago, so for the first call it, you know, 40 to 50 years, uh, of Israel's history, the Supreme Court wasn't so powerful.

It's complicated. The short answer is that it was always extraordinarily powerful. We have an electoral system that ensures that the parliament and government are essentially de facto, in practice, in act, how it actually functions day to day, a single [00:07:00] institution. And the reason for that is we are, first of all, a parliamentary system.

So Americans might not know a lot about how that works, but this is how it works in Canada and Canada. Britain and Austria and Latvia and many other countries, um, basically, uh, the people elect a parliament and the parliament from within itself elects the executive branch, elects a prime minister, sometimes the prime minister appoints cabinet members, sometimes the parliament actually elects those cabinet members as well.

Um, we have that parliamentary system. The people elect the Knesset and the Knesset elects the government, but we have a difference from most of the parliamentary systems in that people don't, there's no local election. There's no direct election of members of parliament. Um, Israelis only vote for the political party.

They vote for a list of names that a political party puts forward ahead of the election. And that list gets in. Now, how do you get on the list? You get on the list in almost every case, in almost every party. There are different mechanisms. Some have primaries, some don't. But in practice, in almost every party, you get on the list through the party leader.

And so in [00:08:00] Israel, we have a situation in which if you take all of that together and sort of say it simply, The people elect a parliament, the parliament elects a government, who is actually sitting in the government, who is the prime minister, defense minister, finance minister, the heads of the very parties that are the majority in the parliament.

By which I mean the people who appointed most of the parliamentary majority are the people sitting in the executive branch. And so it's a little bit like if you had a White House and a cabinet that actually appointed whoever the majority happens to be in Congress. And so our system, those are de facto the same institution and the court has over time, over many many years, In piecemeal judicial rulings and often at the request of other branches of government.

In other words, cases would come before the court and, and members of the Knesset would sue other parties or other parts of the government and go to this court. And slowly the power of this court has built out. Because we never sat down and wrote a constitution, so [00:09:00] we, we don't have a clear, we have the highest per capita number of lawyers in the world, uh, and somehow no constitution.

Maybe there's a connection there. Um, but so because we have this very informal, maybe among, and maybe the simplest electoral governance system in the, in the free world, um, we have this immensely powerful court that is the main check. And many have argued. I have argued, uh, and, and, and I have learned it from, you know, my bettors that, um, that that's unhealthy.

The court is ultimately not elected. The court should be there and it should balance the other system, the other branches, but the court can't be the great check and balance. What we need is a weaker court and other checks, new checks introduced into the system. So, so I think the, the point you're zooming in on is in most systems, most democratic systems, the court can be.

Independent and the court can be somewhat of a check on the on the government, but the court and the people who run the [00:10:00] court have to be chosen by the politicians that elected politicians actually have a role in the selection of who populates the court, but but what I want, what a reason I said that the court is stronger over the last And Several decades than it was in the first 40 to 50 years.

I take your point. It was always strong but there was this period that really Torques the right in Israel because beginning around in sometime in the 1990s You had this chief justice of the Supreme Court that started to somewhat argue over interpret Certain, uh, the base, some of these basic laws as a kind of quasi constitution and arrogate enormous power, even more than it already had to the Supreme Court.

So the Supreme Court's ability to govern, some would say even legislate really kicked into high gear kind of sometime in the nineties up through. Now. So back in, I would say, February, maybe it was March, I published an essay, a long essay, apologies to readers, um, about this [00:11:00] decision, uh, that Aharon Barak, he wasn't yet chief justice.

He was a regular justice, gave, um, back in 1994. Um, on whether the prime minister could appoint a minister to the government. We wanted to appoint, he had a coalition agreement with this other party, but this, this minister was going to be indicted on corruption charges. Um, and the attorney general, uh, said that you can't appoint him.

But the law said you can until the indictment is actually not actually think it's much more than the indictment I think at the time the law was that he had to have a conviction or the trial had to begin But there was no question that it was legal to appoint him until there was at least a formal indictment file this minister Also, his name is Aria Derry.

He's today also the Subject of a court decision recently on a new corruption charge. 30 years, this man has been, uh, in and out of, of, of these sort of corruption scandals. Um, but at the time, uh, the rabbi, Yitzhak rabbi and the prime minister wanted to appoint this minister. Nobody doubted that it was legal, but [00:12:00] the attorney general said it would cause a crisis of confidence in government.

And therefore it is extremely unreasonable and because it is extremely unreasonable to appoint him, it is therefore in the attorney general's judgment. illegal. That came before Justice Aharon Barak, and Aharon Barak not only ruled that Rabin was wrong to do this thing that all agreed was legal, not only ruled that he could decide that it wasn't legal because it was extremely unreasonable in his opinion with no legal basis for doing so, he actually went much, much farther than that.

And this is classic Aharon Barak. It's hard to find an example of a judge. Anywhere in the, in the West, in the Anglo Saxon systems, in the continental systems, where, where judges are much weaker, but much more independent. They're not appointed in many countries by, uh, politicians, but they also don't have the right to sit on judicial review over legislation and things like that, um, in all the systems, you will have a hard time finding a someone like our own Barack in terms of the expansiveness of what he thought a judge was able to do, he actually ruled in that decision that the attorney general's view was the [00:13:00] view of the government.

And when the prime minister said, I'd like to come to court to present my opinion, because the attorney general who represents the government in the court doesn't agree with me and I'm the prime minister, Barack ruled that he can't. The attorney general's opinion is the only opinion that can come to court.

And that led a left wing professor named Ruth Gavizon. You don't have to remember the names, but sometimes. Coming into the weeds is important because you come out and see something. But, um, she wrote this just vicious op ed the next day saying, what, what about, what about just the, the right to come before the court?

What about the prime minister of the state? This judge decides that the prime minister of the state can't appear before him because somehow the attorney general is now infallible. What is that? Where, where does that come from? What law, what standard, what? precedent nowhere. And there are a series of decisions surrounding a Haron Barak.

Haron Barak would say openly, um, I don't want someone appointed to the Supreme Court, even if the political system does want them. And he would just say that [00:14:00] openly and then use, there's a, a, in judicial appointments, the court has some power in Israel. Uh, he would use that power to prevent that person from being appointed.

And he oversaw a court. That was not diverse, not representative, and was making decisions that were beyond, I mean, it's just And when you say not diverse, not diverse ideologically, and not diverse in terms of ethnically representing all Ethnically, religiously, ideologically, yeah. And just literally, it was almost impossible for elected politicians, even over a long period, to really have people who they think represent their own voters appointed to this court.

Uh, and, and it was egregious. In other words, you know, until this crisis, when this question became a question of political identity, there was quite a bit of agreement in Israel, um, different polls put it at different numbers, but maybe 70 percent of Israelis that wanted judicial reform. That, that is where the country was in January of 2023.

Okay, so, [00:15:00] uh, just, just staying on this, uh, because again, I think lots of, many of our listeners who I've had conversation, some of whom I've had conversations with over the last six, seven months, I don't think a lot of people appreciate how loosey goose, so Israel's, Israel's is a democracy, as we're seeing right now, which will, you know, which we can talk about, it's a vibrant democracy, but the system and structures are pretty loosey goose, meaning there is no formal constitution, right?

So can you just explain that? Yeah. Um, we, well, first of all, you know, there's, there's the British system, uh, the British system, which ruled here, uh, from World War I, uh, until 1948, um, and installed the court system. Some of them were inherited from the previous Ottoman rulers, et cetera, but it's, it's a little complicated, but we inherited a great deal of the British system.

And the British system is a lot of precedent, a lot of what they call customary law, um, where They have 700 or 800, you know, centuries of, of, uh, precedent to work with Israel and established principles and doing [00:16:00] things. But in principle, the British state officially on paper is a theocratic dictatorship.

Uh, and it exists as a liberal democracy because of all this other stuff that was built up since the Magna Carta, all these other institutions and ways of doing things and everybody, this is right. We have in the middle East, quite a few, uh, We have quite a few dictatorships pretending to be liberal democracies.

In Britain, we have a democracy pretending to be a dictatorship, right? Um, and, and the reason is all of that rich background, rich culture of rich institution building that's informal, that's customary. The American founders wanted something much more firm and established, and they were building the first real modern democracy, and so they needed everything to be constitutional.

But, but in Britain, that wasn't true, and in the Commonwealth, generally, that wasn't always true. Canada only got a Bill of Rights in the last What three decades ago, something like that. Um, and so Israel comes from that tradition where you didn't have a constitution, but Israel also has its own way of thinking about a constitution.

Uh, prime minister, David Ben Gurion, the founder of Israel, uh, had this [00:17:00] opinion back in the forties and fifties when he was asked. You know, we're supposed to write a constitution. The declaration of independence calls to write a constitution. Uh, and he actually argued we shouldn't write a constitution because he was a good socialist.

Um, he, he was a pro American socialist. So because of him, Israel never fell into the Soviet camp, but he was a deep. ideological socialist. Um, and, uh, and he gave his talk in the Knesset where he said, you know, the future, I'm paraphrasing badly, I apologize. It was actually quite a beautiful argument. Um, but he said the future is progressive and he viewed constitutions and courts and all of these slow moving institutions and checks as, as places where reactionary elites Take over in order to hold back progress.

And he said, well, why would we want that? Why don't we want progress, the progressive, you know, younger generations to take over and lead us to the places they want to go. And so he actually refused and didn't want to, and tried to prevent and succeeded in preventing the writing of a formal constitution with checks and balances and [00:18:00] clear institutions and all of that.

So. Consequently, you have now, you know, some, you know, you're saying that the Supreme Court in some ways possibly overreached back in the 90s, and now we have a Knesset, a government that many, including the hundreds of thousands of people protesting, believe that is overreaching and trying to curb the powers of the Supreme Court, but undergirding all of it is, there is an element of kind of, Everyone in all these institutions sort of making it up as they go along because, because there is no, because, because there is no constitution that, that delineates, you know, who's in charge of what and who has which powers.

So, so in January, the new government, the new Netanyahu led government gets into power and they unveil, Um, a very ambitious agenda to address some of these problems you're talking about through a range of judicial reforms that multiple pillars, you know, you're Reeve Levine, who's the justice [00:19:00] minister, you know, talked about in terms of like a shock and awe, they were going to move quickly.

They were gonna, they had a 64 seat majority in the Knesset. First time you had a real functioning government in Israel. Uh, other than the brief, uh, uh, Bennett Lapid led government, but really for the last number of years, there hasn't been function functioning government in Israel. Now they had a government, they believed they had a mandate and they were going to pass this thing quickly.

What was it that they said they were going to pass? And why didn't it pass quickly? Right. What they presented, it's important to understand that the people who drafted what was presented back in January. And then the people who have led the legislative push in the Knesset uh, have been people deeply deeply committed and devoted to it.

Ideologues even. Um, people like the Knesset Law Committee Chairman Simcha Rothman people like Yariv Levine the Justice Minister. These are people who for two decades uh, have been talking about this issue, writing about this issue, feeling this issue [00:20:00] passionately as a central issue. It wasn't a central issue for voters.

We Have polls before the election what they think the election is about we have polls afterwards We have polls today. This was never the priority for any voter not on left not on the right The priority was the usual stuff economy public safety things like that But they thought that this was the great mission of this right wing government And, um, they presented it and what they presented was, you said, shock and awe.

Um, uh, some, uh, one of the, the minister of finance, but Salah's smoke rage from the religious Zionism party called it pulling off a bandaid, you know, you don't do it slow, you do it fast. And that, and then it's over faster. Right. Um, what they presented was essentially a dismantling of the Supreme court as we know it.

And really of the last. Certainly, this is the experience of the opposition, but I've had a hard time figuring out, finding an argument that they're wrong. A dismantling of the court's capacity to check the executive legislative [00:21:00] branches or that unitary executive legislature that we have, um, almost entirely.

We, we used to have a situation, we still do because it didn't actually pass, but we, we have a court that is an outlier in the world. There's usually a negative correlation between a court's power and how much power politicians have. to appoint the court, right? So a very powerful court like the American court, which, right, on Roe v.

Wade, you saw the American court's power, um, on many, many other issues on Obamacare and all these other things, you saw the American court's power. And because it is such a powerful court relative to other democracies, politicians, elected politicians appoint the judges as a check on that court, right? You have places where the courts are much weaker, for example, Britain, where there's much less power of judicial review.

And there, the courts also are much more self appointing, or the appointments are much more professional and less political. Um, every system is different, but there's generally that correlation. The more powerful a court, the more political, um, influence there is in appointments. In Israel, we had [00:22:00] maybe the most powerful court in the free world, and almost entirely an independent court.

In other words, it literally had a veto on appointments to itself because the part of the judicial nomination process had to get the votes of the justices themselves. And what Yariv Levine proposed was an, an extreme outlier as well, but in the opposite direction, a court that was almost entirely gutted of any power of judicial review.

a court that was almost entirely, was entirely, not almost, uh, he gave the coalition, just the ruling coalition in the single parliament we have with no vetoes, no checks, um, you know, effectively he gave the government the sole power to appoint judges. Uh, he took away from the court, um, almost all of its powers.

There was even a, what they called a 61 override clause, which was handing the Knesset A 61 majority in a 120 member Knesset is the minimal majority you have to have to have the coalition in in the first place, right? By [00:23:00] definition, the government has a Knesset majority, or it isn't the government in a parliamentary system.

So guaranteed that any Supreme Court decision could be overturned by the government. Overturned, right. But also complete power of appointment without reaching across the aisle. Without any kind of veto in America, you have a Senate and a president, and they have to agree on a nomination, right? And sometimes it's the same party, sometimes it's not.

But there's always a debate. You also have senators who are relatively independent because they're not appointed by the president. You have the Joe Manchin effect, so to speak. We have none of those things. And so this was to essentially Strip the court of all power of review of any kind over legislation and government actions, uh, taking away various tasks.

Now, Yariv Levine himself then refused after presenting this thing and it began this blitz through the Knesset, just this incredibly fast work legislating it. Um, it set Israel's streets on fire. We had protests, uh, by February, March that we had never seen before. Um, and consistent week after week after week, [00:24:00] um, by, I think it was April, we had polls showing that even though at any given time, there were only 150, 200, 000 people in the streets, which is quite remarkable, but, um, For a country, a country of 9 million people proportionately, it's, it's massive, especially on such a consistent basis.

Right. It's massive. But we discovered that actually it was much more than that because many people went once a month. Many people went and then didn't go. People told us something like one in four Israelis has actually been at a protest. That is, that is astonishing. And when that was all happening, when Israel was just literally being set on fire, Yariv Levine for about three months wouldn't give a single interview.

And people were asking hard questions. Simple, direct, I was asking hard, simple, direct questions. Every journalist I know and they, and they just wouldn't talk. There weren't any explanations. And by the time the serious debate began and the serious questions that came up were, look, you want to weaken the court?

You started this process with 70 percent support for weakening the court. By March, April, we had polls showing 30 percent [00:25:00] support for this government weakening the court. And it's because people were asking, well, what are you going to replace it with? We need other checks. It's not just about weakening the court.

It's about creating a serious system of checks and balances. Where's that discussion? Where's the Federalist Papers, which of course began as op eds, right? Where's the public debate? Where is you telling me my rights will be secure if I find myself in the minority when there's no court, and the Knesset and government are all essentially majoritarian institutions like in any parliamentary system, but slightly more so in our system.

Where is that process? And they couldn't supply it. I would tell my friends of mine around Prime Minister Netanyahu, I was like, did you, Was this a They said, well, we have a mandate to do this. I'd say, was this a real issue in the campaign? Like, was this really, like, did voters go to the polls knowing that this is what they were going to vote, vote on?

Did you, did the prime minister talk about it on, on election night in his victory speech? Well, Barry didn't, you know, he had talked about five things and Barry didn't won. There was, you know, the point is it was, it was a shock to the system [00:26:00] and it didn't appear that most, most Israelis were, were ready for it so fast.

And then there's. Then there's the protests, as you laid out, uh, then the government pulls back last spring, basically on the eve of Pesach, and pauses, the Prime Minister pauses, uh, the reforms, and says there'll be negotiations, and, and they'll participate in President Herzog's process, and then fast forward to and, Yes.

A week ago, there's one tiny sliver of the reform called the reasonableness clause. Um, the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that certain government decisions, uh, pieces of legislation over the years were extremely unreasonable. Ruling that something is extremely unreasonable, especially in government action and executive action, is a classic ancient, um, power of the courts in the Anglo Saxon tradition, right, you have reasonable search and seizure, right, that's a thing in Anglo Saxon law, um, and, um, and it comes up [00:27:00] endlessly about your, just basic civil rights, eminent domain, the country wants to, the state wants to take your house to build a highway, who decides if it's reasonable or unreasonable, you go to a court, right, when a, um, Cop wants to search your home, who decides if it's reasonable and reasonable, who gives the warrant that says this is reasonable, the judge, right?

Um, so that bill to limit that when it comes to government actions, when it comes to appointments to the cabinet, um, things that some left wing scholars have supported in the past, um, but which no longer had the support of almost anyone in the legal academy, uh, essentially because it wasn't really this one and just.

The news headline is, um, they passed the reasonableness law. It was changed a bit. It was this, it was that. There was negotiations. It's very complex. I'm, by the way, no legal scholar. I'm a political analyst. So I don't want to, you know, pretend to know exactly which thing was, uh, you know, despite reading about it massively, sometimes you read a lot about something and know less.

But, um, but they passed this. [00:28:00] tiny fraction, this one twelfth of Yariv Levine's original thing, the right was said, got up and said, openly, publicly, also to itself, look, we buried eleven twelfths of the reform and now one twelfth is passing, and it's still drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters. This isn't about the fact that the reform may have been extreme back in the day, which even Yariv Levine now has admitted.

Um, this is about, you know, them not liking the results of the last election. The center left, the opposition, Saw this passing and said this isn't about this tiny little question of reasonableness. I went to protests I went to the protest against I went to just a couple of protests the right managed to put together for and I have never Met a protester who had the faintest idea how the extreme unreasonable test was ever used by any Israeli court What they were always talking about those protests and that doesn't mean the People are stupid.

The people are never stupid, even if they don't know the details of the debate. What the people were saying in the protest themselves was always about trust. The [00:29:00] right wingers were saying, I trust this government. I, I think that the court represents people who aren't me, doesn't represent me, and I want this government to make it represent me.

And what the left was saying, or what the center left was saying was, I, this is what they call the salami method. They couldn't pass it all by shoving it down our throats together in one big thing. So they're going to pass it piecemeal. And so I'm going to oppose this tiny thing as if it's the whole thing, because it's how they're planning to pass the whole thing.

And that was last week. The center left is shocked that it passed, the right is bitterly angry that so little passed, nothing was healed, every, everything is at a fever pitch. Yeah, as you wrote, as you wrote in the Times of Israel, everybody lost. Everybody. Everybody lost. Yeah. Because the right isn't satisfied and, and, and because it was so, as you said, it's a, it's a thin fraction.

of what they initially, uh, envisioned and the left feels, or the center left, or however you want to call the opposition to these reforms, um, [00:30:00] they, they're, they're shocked given all the blowback that progress was made. I will say though, I, I was at, I was in Israel in last April, I guess I was dropping my son off for a school trip he was doing, uh, and um, And he and I went to one of the protests just to see what it was like.

My mother goes to the protests every Saturday night. She lives in Jerusalem. She hasn't missed one, uh, since, uh, since they began. We, a few of my family members went and, you know, I saw the chants, but you see democrazia, democracy, democracy, democracy. It's all about democracy on the one hand. And I've commented on this podcast and others.

I was, I've been moved by the protest movement and I've been impressed by it. Uh, particularly the first and kind of mid. Waves of the protest movement in terms of how they contrast the protest movements in other countries, especially protest movements against government in the United States. On the other hand, it's not clear to me that this was a crisis of democracy.

I was just struck by the democracia, democracy, them chanting. It wasn't, I [00:31:00] mean Was it a crisis of democracy? Here's what I saw. Okay, if you now know if you remove the personalities and I agree I I can see that some of the personalities involved in this government are, you know at best complicated controversial at worst sort of really toxic and and polarizing if you remove the personalities as you and I know them and just look at the facts from a distance the facts from a distance are You had a government Get elected to power with a clear mandate, 64 seats, you know, clear mandate to govern.

Uh, they, they, and even though they didn't campaign on this, uh, proposal, they certainly was well within the rights to, to introduce it and try to pass it. And then they overreached, and there was a backlash, and there was a backlash in the best possible way. Which is people peacefully protesting, and really, um, you know, challenging, challenging the government over, didn't die down, didn't lose energy, didn't wither, [00:32:00] like, stuck to it week after week after week after week, and the government had to pull back.

And it was, the government didn't have to pull back in response to violence, the government had to Pull back in the face of real protest, but real peaceful protest. And the government pulled back and they paused things. And then it came back to the Knesset, came back to the parliament and it introduced, as you said, like a, like a tiny fraction, a one 12th of the, of the full dozen, if you will, a tiny little piece of it and said, okay, we're not going to do the whole thing.

We'll do this tiny little bit. And, and then we'll see, and we'll negotiate and we'll keep talking, but we're just going to pass this thing now. Now, to me, that's. Democracy working. Now, I'm not defending the, the, the substance of the original package, and I agree with you, some of it was so over the top, particularly the override clause, um, but I, I just think this notion that, that many of the protesters are talking in terms as though Israel is like, run by like an Erdogan type [00:33:00] figure, or a bond in Hungary, or, that is not what was, what is happening in those countries.

The big debate, um, as I see it, um, in, In general, I agree with you. I don't think this was about a threat to Israeli democracy. I think democracy is, is a, is a way we are talking. We're using essentially the terminology of foreigners to talk about something a little bit different. It's about solidarity.

It's about, um, some of the deeper questions about our future, about our character. A lot of unanswered questions. This constitutional lacuna at the heart of our system, um, has led to a lot, a lot of problems, a lot of inequalities, a lot of, um, you know, complicated sort of bubbles within our society, the ultra Orthodox world that exists on a massive transfer of wealth month after month from [00:34:00] Secular Israel to ultra Orthodox Israel, and has created tremendous anger, anger that, you know, if, if our conservatives were genuine conservatives on the American model, like they like to claim, would understand, you can't have this massive targeted welfares without.

A lot of these inequalities and problems of minorities and not just the ultra orthodox Arab minorities and others, a lot of that, um, is coming to the fore and is being yelled next to the word democracy. And what they really mean is there's also, you know, we've been subject to this incredibly polarizing politics, these campaigns, some of which I'm sorry to say to an American audience.

But Israeli campaigns, political campaigns, have been drawing American experts, uh, for the last 25 years, really. And they've always come in and recommended the same thing. You guys need to hammer home the, you know, the polarization, the us versus them. That mobilizes. That brings people out. You had people doing that for Netanyahu's campaigns in the 90s, you had people doing that for the left.

Um, and so we've sort [00:35:00] of adopted this depolarizing, Very manipulative form of politics because it works and it wins campaigns. And now we have almost, we're paying the tab on that, right? Because people feel like this government, the opposition voters and more, and an uncomfortable number of coalition voters for Nitsanyahu, right?

More than Nitsanyahu would like there to be, feel that this government is at. at war with them, and that this isn't really about the reasonableness clause or the specifics. Imagine for a moment being a voter for the Israeli opposition, right? And you mentioned, you know, you said, let's divorce it from the individuals.

It's about the individuals. It's not about the substance and, and it's not about the substance for the government either because if it was about the substance, several times Netanyahu said, you can trust us to do this. How do I know you can trust us to do this? We're going to pass a bill of rights. Part of our not having a constitution is that we have no bill of rights.

We have this amorphous basic law system, which nobody respects. The court hasn't respected and the Knesset hasn't respected. The [00:36:00] Knesset has changed our basic laws. 23 times in five years. Nobody treats it as a constitution. It's not rigid. You can change it by a simple majority in the Knesset. So we have no bill of rights, nowhere in Israeli law.

And this reasonableness clause, by the way, could be, be changed with 61 votes. Yes. At the next government, they've achieved nothing, right? And yet they've managed to convince half the country. They're at war with them. But what Netanyahu has promised multiple times is I'm passing a bill of rights. It's like Canada did.

I'm passing a right to free speech. You can't shut up Israelis, but they don't have a technical legal right anywhere in Israeli law to free speech or equality or freedom of religion or freedom of assembly and petition or freedom of anything. There's almost nothing written down. And Netanyahu said, guys, just so you understand what we're intending here, we're going to pass that with this legislation.

That disappeared. He said it multiple times on national television. Where is it? Where is our Bill of Rights, right? Um, and, and, and while Netanyahu is making empty promises about his intentions, you have right now literally [00:37:00] the, the, the cabinet's legislation committee, uh, delayed for another week, but it's, it's constantly delaying week after week because it's always a bad political timing.

A bill being advanced by our minister of public security who comes from the most extreme party in Israeli politics. You can't go more right wing than him because there isn't anybody to the right of him. Itamar Ben Gvir, who is proposing, Yeah, he's pushing a bill to allow him to arrest people without warrants.

You have a bill presented by Shas. It's briefly presented, Likud got very angry and therefore it was pulled, but it was presented on the Knesset docket for women dressed immodestly, according to the ultra Orthodox, immodestly at the Western Wall to face felony charges with a prison sentence. You had a bill, uh, that just passed, uh, earlier this month and it passed into law.

Allowing the government to appoint mayors after firing elected mayors. And it's a bill that would give that power to the interior. And that power has existed in the past, but with tremendous amounts of limits, like if a city is collapsing and going bankrupt, [00:38:00] the interior minister can appoint a mayor instead.

To balance it. But that person is not allowed to run in the next election. Well, guess what? As of, I think, June 5th, July 5th, uh, of this month, um, that person can now run in the next election. In other words, the interior minister of Israel is literally now able to simply cancel local election, appoint the mayor he wants, promise vast national funds from the national government to a city and have that guy then run in an election, you have a government that.

is doing everything it can. There are dozens of examples. I mean, somebody compiled a list of 140 of these unbelievable bills. And Netanyahu keeps saying, I have both hands on the wheel. Ignore that stuff. He's interviewed in American, you know, newspapers. But he doesn't seem to. I had him on this podcast. He said the same thing.

He said, I'm in charge here. Ignore all those people. I'm in charge. But without Ben Gvir's five seats, he doesn't have a coalition. And he, he has behaved as if, if he does want, I [00:39:00] believe personally that he, there are two theories of Netanyahu. First theory is that he's leading all of this and therefore what is he trying to accomplish?

And the second theory is that he is being led because he simply doesn't have the numbers. He's incredibly. And so this is Smotrich of the Religious Zionism Party, it's Ben Gvir, it's Yariv Levine, it's almost everyone except Netanyahu who's running the show and, and therefore there's this chaos. Um, that's my view.

I think Netanyahu desperately wants normalization with the Saudis. I think Netanyahu desperately wants to mobilize a global coalition against Iran again. I think Netanyahu thinks his legacy is in those issues and not in this issue and he's being led. If he's running all of this Then he's prioritizing it over all those issues because the government has done nothing in six months except this judicial reform during this.

So I, so I, I agree with you that this is more than just about clearly than, than this, you know, I take your point. All these bills are, you know, that are being discussed in these different legislative initiatives are, [00:40:00] are, are scary to huge swath of Israelis. But, but I think even more than that, they're, they're looking at who's in charge and they're looking at a future.

of Israel that is scary to many of the people who are turning out and protesting and that's, that's a lot of what they're reacting to rather than the particulars of, of the reform package. But I, I want to ask you about one particular form of the protest, which I find that we can go through every, you know, there's all these ways that the protests have expressed themselves and the, and the threats the protestive movement has made.

I don't want to go through all of them, but there's one I want to focus on because it's the one I find the most unnerving, which is the Uh, some number, we don't know how many, uh, some number of reservists, of army reservists who are saying they're done, that they, they have a contract with the government of Israel, and if the government of Israel is chipping away at its own democracy, [00:41:00] and again, we can, you and I I think agree that it's, it's less about democracy, but it's about these other issues.

So however you want to, whatever word you want to substitute for democracy, it's chipping away at their ideal for what, how Israeli society is supposed to function, and, and If that contract is broken, they're out. They're not going to serve. And so I guess my question for you is, one, why is that the doomsday threat for Israel?

How, how dependent is Israeli, Israel on its reservists for its security? That's my first question. My second question is, how real do you think the threat is? Is it, is, is this actually going to materialize? Uh, that's a great question. Um, much, much more than one Israeli I have talked to has said they really wish a war would just come along and remind us that we're all, we're all in this together.

Or a pandemic. Pandemic didn't do it. No, we need a good. You need an enemy. Who's the pandemic? Who's [00:42:00] the enemy? But, um, but the, so two, two, I think there are two different layers to this. The first layer is the sort of tactical is, can the army handle this? Will it be widespread? What's the sociology of it?

But the layer that I think is more interesting is what they are actually saying. Um, right. The very fact that you had an issue that eight months ago, nobody knew about. And six months ago, the whole country was on fire over tells us that the issue is not about itself. It is a vocabulary for talking about other things.

And what I think. It is a vocabulary for talking about is our, our shared lives together. In other words, this Supreme court is, has been a mediator. Israel is a very, very fractured society divided into very, very, um, distinct cultural and religious and ethnic tribes. Uh, that's true among the Jews. It's true among the Arabs.

This is a country that. And some of those most basic assumptions of how people live and people's identities, [00:43:00] um, is very Middle Eastern. You know, half the Jews come from the Middle East. All the Arabs come from the Middle East. Most Israelis are Middle Eastern. And some of their basic assumptions about life follow these very tribal ways of thinking.

Um. And there has always been among the Jews of Israel, because of the refugee experience, because of the fact that this country was built almost entirely by refugees, there are extremely few, uh, immigrants to this country who were not actually fleeing something. There is an ethos embedded deep in our DNA of a shared.

Solidarity, shared fate. The Israeli high schoolers learn about the three or four times in Israeli history when Jews turned on Jews and killed Jews um, more than they learn about our great wars with the Arab states. This, the, there's a taboo. Against violence among Jews, um, a lot of our democracy, a lot of that informal democracy is this is, is a flows from this idea that we are in it [00:44:00] together.

There's solidarity, there's shared fate. One of the really fascinating things that the Israeli political right that really cut to, I think it. It believed its own propaganda a little too much. It fell a little too much into these very divisive campaigns. There was this hegemony of left wingers controlling us from the court.

A lot of this discourse was a very, was a very warlike, you know, polarizing discourse. And then the, uh, left wingers that were the target of this discourse are now coming out and saying, whoa, hey, hold on. If this isn't it, if this is Israel, if Israel is at war with me, if this is an Israel where Itamar Ben Gvir gets to decide if there's gay marriage, if this is an Israel where Uh, you know, but Salah Smotrich gets to decide if I, if I'm allowed to, uh, behave in public in ways that Orthodox religiosity doesn't let me.

If that's the message, and unfortunately from these political parties, that has been the message. If that's the message, um, then this is not an Israel where we're all in it together, where we respect each other, where your tribe is over there, my tribe is over here, but we're, we have a shared fate and a shared solidarity and [00:45:00] we're in it together.

We have discovered with this. Um, reservist protest, um, that the vast majority of the army's most important units are manned by left wingers. We, we had, um, we had a draft numbers for cities, the secular cities like Ra'ananak, Farsaba, if anybody here knows Israel, you'd know those cities. They're secular cities.

They have 90 percent rates of military draft among young people. Guys, the Israeli left is the American conservative fantasy. These are, this is the Israeli left, the secular Israeli left has the highest per woman number of births in the developed world. The Israeli secular left has tremendous rates of social solidarity, military service, patriotism.

The Israeli left went out into the streets and the symbol for their protest is the Israeli flag, right? That's the left you have in this country and it showed itself and this is how it is speaking. What are those reservists, I think, actually saying? They're not actually saying, I'm [00:46:00] not going to serve. I would be very surprised.

I spent 20 years in the reserves. My midlife crisis began not when I turned 40, but when my battalion called me and said, no offense, but you're old. We got 20 year olds. We don't need you go away. Um, that was the moment where I had to buy a guitar, right? Um, I would never give up that experience. That's one of the, one of the deepest.

Things I did, I, you know, I spent my life talking and then I, there's this one thing I did in the real world and that was that, and I would not give that up and the people who are saying I'm not going to serve, they're way beyond me, those pilots that are saying I'm not volunteering, what does volunteering mean?

It means that for the last 15 years, they gave a single day every single week to go to the air force and fly so that that one day, 12 years down the road where they have to bomb something strategic and critical for the nation's survival. They know how to do it. Those are the people saying, I don't want to do this anymore because this, you, because this is a country at war with me or because this country is going places where I [00:47:00] can't fight for it.

Now that is a, an Israeli language. That is Israelis coming to the right and saying, I don't know if you understand what you're doing, but you're doing something bigger than you imagine. This isn't about your little internal right wing dialogue with yourself, um, where, you know, your ideologues manage to convince.

You want to weaken the court, weaken the court, but with massive support from the other side. Give us a constitutional moment. If you can't give us a constitutional moment. You're just fighting a war against the country. And I won't support a war against the country, even if it's the government. It's a way for Israelis to say deep, big things.

And that's, I think what's happening. And therefore I believe the vast majority of them are going to go. They're going to actually serve a friend of mine is a battalion commander in the reserves with paratroopers. And, uh, he, I don't think I can give numbers. I don't know if it matters if I know it. It's not a secret, but still several hundred soldiers in his battalion.

He's had to put four on trial, um, little army court martial thing, uh, for [00:48:00] refusing for political reasons. I don't think the phenomenon is going to spread in any massive serious way. I do think the government has to treat it that way and has to listen that way because that's, there's, these Israelis are saying something very big is breaking.

But even, even if they. Don't follow through in meaningful numbers. It is an escalation. It's a new precedent. And the implications, I mean, it's basically saying Military service now is another branch of government, as I'm paraphrasing Mika Goodman here, but that basically if a government wants to make controversial decisions, the precedent is being set that not only do you need the support of your party and the coalition and you may even need the support of the Supreme Court, but now you also need The support of the army reservists because it's so controversial.

So, so the analogy that was given is, is the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, where there were many right of center national [00:49:00] religious Jews serving in the IDF who were commanded to order to go into Gaza and uproot. Residents of Gaza, settler Jewish residents of Gaza, uproot them, uproot them from their homes, forcibly remove them.

It was, it was gut wrenching for some of these soldiers to have to do this. They completely opposed the policy. If that had to happen today, or a year from now, or ten years from now, some version of that, sort of a newer version of that, could those soldiers say This is completely at odds with the Israel that I have lived in and I've built and, and developed, and it's completely at odds with my contract with, with the state.

I'm out. I'm not serving. Suddenly, Prime Ministers have to factor these decisions in and every policy, or at least every controversial policy that they want to implement. First of all, I think a, a, a, an ideological minority. which is what the supporters of this specific reform are. Supporters of judicial reform writ large is a [00:50:00] majority.

This specific is a minority. An ideological minority had better take that into consideration when it tries to shove something down everybody's throat, and I think that's true on the left as well. That's first of all. Second of all, um, We're not talking about standing army enlisted people. We're not talking about people violating their orders.

Well, this is a key. We're talking almost entirely about civilians who are volunteering essentially, and there's no way to force them. And except you, but you yourself said, especially as it relates to the air force, Israel security is very dependent on these reservists. It is dependent on them. Therefore, So they have outsize, they have outsize influence.

They have tremendous influence. And if you, um, if you do the service they do, maybe you should. Maybe the people who work should have more of a say in economic policy. Maybe people who, yes, and by the way, I think that's also true on the Left. We have a system in this, uh, excuse me, on the, on the right, we have a system in this country where we give tremendous outsize [00:51:00] influence to minorities.

Why do it's that? Why does it happen that way? Why do the ultra Orthodox have so much power in politics? Because they're the deciding vote in the Knesset, not because they're a majority. The people who work, the people who are the massively productive part of the economy and work many, many more hours, the people who serve in the military have spent decades hearing that they are the problem and that other people who don't work.

Get to take their safety that they provide them and sit and study Torah. I love sitting and studying Torah. Some of my best friends sit and study Torah. But you, if you do it in a way that disrespects people who serve in the military, then your Torah is, is a desecration of God's name and your Torah becomes something dirty.

And, and that is the culture that has developed in the Haredi Yeshiva. And that is something that they're responding to. So no, I, I do think that, uh, you know, absolutely the military should never have Say in politics ever in any way, shape, or form. Should citizens not be able to walk away? If they are [00:52:00] volunteers, the country depends on them, well then listen to them or make the country not depend on them.

Have a massive draft of people, let all the left wingers out of the army and enjoy and have fun. But if, but one of the strange things that's happened is, I want to say just two quick points and then really stop talking. But one of the fascinating, one of the fascinating things that's happened here was right wingers discovering how many left wingers are in the army.

It doesn't fit their, what they've been saying about left wingers for 20 years. Wow! First of all, wow, right? Well done, you, right? The second thing that's happened, um, and this I think is really important to understand, is that in that disengagement in 2005, there's nothing really new here. In that disengagement in 2005, there were actually very, very few.

Religious Zionist soldiers. The army gave an informal sort of go home for the weekend for about two weeks or, you know, assigned to some other part of the country to something like 15, 000 religious Zionist soldiers. Yeah, IDF is different today than it was. That's my point, that there's more of these national [00:53:00] religious Uh, serving in the army.

Sure. But the precedent of the precedent of soldiers uncomfortable with a political act, with an act the army is ordered to do by politicians not doing it was set in 2005. It's the opposite precedent from what you suggested or what many also are talking about, right? What about in 2005? There was no mass.

Refusal, there was no mass refusal because the army ahead of time let them all off the hook and sent them away because it wanted this to pass quietly and it was very nervous about how it was going to go. And so in fact, almost entirely secular soldiers carried out the 2005 disengagement. So if we're, if, you know, this precedent has existed before.

It's scary when it's the air force, because a thousand people in the air force can decide the war. That's not true in the infantry where you have tens of thousands. And if you lose 150, it's not a terrible thing. It's scarier. First of all, great. Let everyone draft and have an air force. That's much more diverse until that day.

If you want to. They're not asking for much, by the way. The reservists, the demands, they're different groups and they're different activists, and some of them I think are quite extreme. Most of them are [00:54:00] very much in the political center. We have in Israel, roughly 25 percent who support this reform as is, and just want it shoved down everybody else's throat.

About 35 percent who want nothing from the reform to pass, no matter what, irrespective of arguments about the actual substance or the court, because they don't trust this government. And then you have this massive, I don't know exactly the number, different polls put it at different numbers, but roughly 40 percent in the middle who want to judicial reform.

with massive public support from all sides. That's where most of these reservists are at. They are not saying, you know, I, unless you do exactly what I say, and unless I get to write the legislation, I don't serve anymore. They're saying you cannot fundamentally change the constitutional order of the country without public agreement of some.

Kind you said they have a 64 seat mandate, right? But they don't have a 64 seat popular vote mandate They were elected because of certain ways that our system works with a tiny tiny bit less than the popular majority Yeah, which is [00:55:00] legitimate. That's how the elections work. That's happened to the left as well.

But yeah It's sort of like our electoral college popular debate here, right? But what if the trump, uh, what if the trump white house could change the constitution? What would that look like in American politics or in the military, in the American military? Let me ask you two questions before we wrap.

Quickly, one, August is a big draft class entering, uh, into the regular army. This is not the reservists. Do you have any concerns about young people who are beginning their army life in August? Um, we had this discussion at the newspaper, uh, this very morning and I think what's whatever happens is a headline, right?

If the draft numbers are the same headline, if the draft numbers are in any way slightly up or slightly down headline, uh, if because of all the talk of their lacking soldiers, there's suddenly more people are banging down the doors of the combat units to get in. Whatever is happening is a headline.

We're watching it very closely. I think I would be very [00:56:00] surprised. If it drops, I would be a lot of what I know about Israelis and their basic impulses would be by the way I would be very surprised if it drops in the secular left wing cities I suspect they'll still be at 90 percent and by far the highest draft rates of the country.

That's very encouraging last question And, and, and I won't hold you to this, which is why I'm making it a, a short question and answer. Where do you think things will be in November when the, when the Knesset, um, comes back into session and there's talk about revisiting some of these judicial, other judicial reform proposals?

Um, all of my colleagues I won't hold you to it. Yeah. Yeah. All, all of my colleagues in, in the journalistic profession, almost every single one is pessimistic. And I alone and the idiot who, uh, is holding out, uh, very up to, I think that what just happened was good. I think what just happened was healthy. I think that this [00:57:00] country has carried a lot of questions unanswered.

There are many other questions unanswered that we continue to carry, the big one being obviously the Palestinian question. But there are a lot of domestic internal questions that we have been carrying, and they have been tearing us apart quietly from the inside. And a couple of them because of the, I think, just foolishness, not malice, foolishness of some ideologues.

Was forced onto the public agenda and is exploding in our faces. And I don't think that's a bad thing. When were we going to face this very powerful court? As a problem that needs to be dealt, when were we going to face this polarizing politics? When were we going to deal with these consequences of ultra Orthodox economics and, and culture and their decisions that they make?

When was that, how was that going to look, right? That was only ever going to look like this. And so this is not to me, and again, everyone who's smarter than me disagrees with me. Uh, but in my view, this is, this is not Israel collapsing. This is Israel, um, [00:58:00] coming. Growing up, this is Israel facing problems. If you, if your children are, feel no pain as they grow up, they will still be children when they're grown up.

Um, and, and, and these are pain that we have to face as a society. Every Israeli is talking about reasonableness and judicial restraint and, and, and the other checks that we need. And why won't they write a bill of rights? That's something that ordinary people are trying to come to grips with. And they weren't.

Um, and, and the ultra Orthodox are starting to answer questions and deal with questions and be embarrassed at a political leadership that is willing to live off a welfare state. That is a debate that is active and loud in the ultra Orthodox press. Um, we have more criticism of their own leadership than we've ever seen before.

I have examples from Twitter from today from ultra Orthodox reporters, very popular ones. Um, we are facing a reckoning that is only healthy. The fact that Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and Khamenei of Iran are celebrating us tearing ourselves apart. [00:59:00] These are not people who recognize healthy societies from unhealthy ones.

That, that gives me a lot of optimism as well. If they judge this to be a bad thing for Israel, it's probably a good thing. I think we're going into a good period of reckoning. It will be painful. It'll get worse before it gets better. We have a leadership. Unfortunately, I think on all sides, but the leadership that matters is on the right at the moment, uh, that is foolish and unserious and not up to this task unless it makes the decision to, to face this moment with what it needs as a constitutional moment of thinking and communicating and dealing seriously with our problems.

And if that does happen, everything will turn out great. If that doesn't happen, it'll turn out great. It'll just take a little longer. That's my view. That is a perfect note to end on, very upbeat, especially turning the Nasrallah and Khamenei uh, uh, commentary about what's happening in Israel right now is a, a sign of strength.

So, uh, so that, that is, uh, that's great. Uh, Aviv, I, I, uh, I gotta say, this was [01:00:00] a tour de force. I hope you, uh, let me talk you into coming back again because, um, for better or for worse. Um, We're going to be talking about this topic for a while. Thanks so much for having me. It was a lot of fun. I'd be very delighted.

That's our show for today. To keep up with Haviv Retikgur, you can track him down on Twitter or on X at Haviv Retikgur. That's H A V I V R E T T I G G U R. We'll put that in the show notes too. And of course you can find his work, which I highly recommend. At timesofisrael. com, that's timesofisrael. com.

Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.[01:01:00]