American Jews have generally sidestepped Israel’s politics and avoided criticism of its government. The same applies for other friends of Israel, like most U.S. administrations. But Israel is under withering attack from within and at risk of mutating into an authoritarian theocracy armed with nuclear weapons. Defenders of the country as it has been for its first 75 years are fighting a desperate rear-guard action, and they need a little help from their friends.
That basically means the U.S. political establishment and American Jews. Jews make perhaps a third of all political donations in the United States—spread across both the Republican and Democratic parties—despite making up only 2 percent of the country’s population. And neither the government nor Jewish private citizens are much inclined to get publicly involved.
That’s the way it has always been. On a personal level and in domestic politics we may meddle in each other’s affairs and fuss about every nonsense—but when it comes to diplomacy, the feeling is strong that a country’s internal setup is its own business. There are other priorities, and this is known as realpolitik.
So, while America talks a big idealistic game, its foreign policy has always been utilitarian, driven by national security and business. Thus the alliances with horrible dictatorships like Augusto Pinochet’s in Chile and the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos. These days, Poland has eviscerated its own democracy, but we look the other way because it’s a good NATO ally and useful conduit of weapons to Ukraine.
As for U.S. Jews, who have given the world so much—from Jerry Seinfeld to Jonas Salk—they’re generally scared of their own shadows. They fear that getting too involved with Israeli politics will draw charges of dual loyalties at home and stir the antisemites; and they’re concerned that attacking Israel’s government, however odious it may be, will be misconstrued as abandoning Zionism and thus might tempt Israel’s enemies to attack. These are legitimate concerns in normal times.
But times are not normal, as we shall see. It’s safe to assume that most readers do not fully grasp what’s at stake in relations with this smallish country of 10 million. Israel is one of the world’s great centers of technological innovation, a major military and nuclear power, and a considerable trade partner of the U.S., the European Union, and increasingly China and India.
The lion’s share of the world’s attention has focused on efforts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to grant the government the ability to both appoint judges and overrule them. This is a tragedy for civil society. It’s also a boon to Netanyahu and various cronies who either face corruption and tax charges or have been convicted of them. So brazen was this gambit that there’s been little energy left over to look at the other aspects of the right-wing government’s „reforms.”
In fact, there is an engorged pipeline of 225 laws that have entered the legislative process. If passed, they would turn a once vibrant (if fractious) Israel into an authoritarian theocracy with pretend elections. There is a little something for every right-wing extremist, and a lot for the supremely (fanatically) religious, or Haredim.
On offer is a reduction of judicial independence; undermining human, civil, and minority rights; enabling religious coercion; undermining gatekeepers in the media, civil service, academia, and civil society; and changing election rules to enable manipulations.
Specific bills would:
- Enable legislators—meaning the current coalition—to eliminate other parties from running without the possibility of judicial review (the Supreme Court has in the past prevented attempts to ban Arab parties);
- Forbid investigations of the prime minister (such as the one that ensnared Netanyahu) and eliminate from the books two of the three charges he is currently facing in court;
- Cancel the independence of the media, handing indirect control of news channels to the government;
- Transfer powers from the regular courts to rabbinical ones bound only by Jewish law, giving supremacy to men over women and easing the path to gender segregation in public;
- Enable the National Security minister (the current one has been convicted of support for terrorism) to make arbitrary „administrative” arrests—and shut down protests of any size if there is even one Palestinian flag in the crowd;
- Automatically add 12 seats—10 percent of the Knesset—to the coalition, almost eliminating the possibility of its collapse. It would also remove barriers to the appointment of unqualified cronies to central positions in the civil service;
- Allow the Shin Bet (internal security service) to monitor teachers to suppress education that could lead to critical thinking and insurrection.
In a move that seems calculated to drive its opponents insane, there is also a law planned to grant the multitudes of ultra-Orthodox Jewish seminary students—already widely reviled for their systematic draft evasion—formal and permanent clearance from the draft and financial benefits equivalent to those of soldiers. The cherry on top is a law to criminalize criticism of the Haredim, for example, for their draft evasion—on the absurd basis of „racism.”
Some of these measures may amount to wishful thinking by extremists and may not ultimately pass. Indeed, that is what the massive protest movement that has arisen in Israel is all about. But these plans offer a clear and genuinely shocking picture of what the core of ultra-religious and far-right Israelis—perhaps a quarter of the population—desires for the country. And it is not the „tweak” that Netanyahu is selling his hapless foreign TV interviewers/enablers.
Should any significant part of it come about, there will be conflict and it will not be pretty. Previously inconceivable outcomes, from a civil war to a partition into radically different Jewish states, become plausible. If the overhaul should somehow irreversibly prevail, you can say goodbye to the current version of Israel: the millions who will abandon the country will include almost all the people who account for the current industry, prosperity, innovation, and security—not to mention the military.
This is the key point. Talk to Israel’s modern people, its liberals and democrats, who probably account for 80 percent of the GDP that has made it a rich country, and you will find that not one of them—not one—expects their children to build their future in such a country.
You know what will stay in place? One of the world’s most potent nuclear arsenals.
In such a scenario, the rump Israel will be dominated by religious radicals and nationalists, and the low socioeconomic strata that will lack the resources to flee. That is not a country that will compete economically, maintain close ties with U.S. Jews (other than the ultra-Orthodox minority), or defend itself against enemy onslaught; not, at least, without resorting to those nuclear weapons. It is a recipe for catastrophe, and it is a security problem for the region and the world.
Clearly, the vast majority of the roughly 6 million to 7 million U.S. Jews—75 percent of whom are liberal, non-Orthodox, and Democratic Party supporters—do not desire this outcome. It is also clear that the U.S. administration and the vast array of Israel’s friends in the American ecosystem do not desire this outcome.
They must pay heed to alarms being sounded in Israel.
A clear message from the United States (which also provides Israel with substantial military assistance) should help compel the moderate wing of Netanyahu’s coalition to join the opposition and bring down the government. In the elections that will follow, polls suggest there will be clarity at last, and the right-religious alliance will be crushed.
Israel is a test case, being watched closely by authoritarians elsewhere. If it should fall, they’ll come for you as well, wherever you may be.
This article was originally published in Newsweek.
