Israel was on the brink, but stepped away from the cliff’s edge at the last moment. Though this development is welcome, the nation’s spate of problems have only been put on hold and could well resurface.
The nation was effectively shuttered when hundreds of thousands of protesters responded to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s firing of his defense minister, who had warned against Netanyahu’s judicial plans. The path forward was anything but certain.
Finally, Netanyahu blinked. The prime minister hit the pause button, providing a bit of time for things to cool down.
News accounts said the problems arose because of a disagreement over the prime minister’s proposed judicial reforms. This is euphemistic in the extreme. It would be akin to suggesting that someone who took a sledgehammer to a new art installation was engaging in debate about the work’s merits.
Netanyahu isn’t looking to reform the Jewish state’s judiciary; he is trying to gut it, working to see that his governing party supersedes the courts.
He’s been behaving more like a despot than the head of a democracy. And he cannot be allowed to go forward with his antidemocratic plan.
A bit more than a week before Netanyahu made his most recent moves to consolidate power, he spoke on the phone with U.S.President Joe Biden, who urged him to calm things down. Fat lot of good that did.
The Israeli leader would do well to remember who his friends are. Israel is the Mideast’s lone democracy. It’s also our longstanding ally, though you’d not know this from watching Netanyahu in action in recent weeks.
Finally, on Monday, he put forward an offer to compromise on his radical plans.
Among the reforms in the proposed legislation: new limits to the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, and allowing judicial decisions to be overruled by a simple majority vote of the legislature.
Though Netanyahu’s decision to suspend his judicial plan was welcome, there is no good reason to believe the problems won’t resurface. Israel’s parliament will begin its spring recess at week’s end, but will reconvene at the end of April.
What we are seeing could be only a break in the action.
— Tribune News Service
