Reuters

Lisa Van Dusen

March 27, 2023

In 1999, while working on the desk at United Press International in Washington, I received a phone call one January morning from an employee at a prominent Democratic polling firm with the unsolicited scoop that a break-in had happened overnight at their office. The call came on my private line, which was odd considering that I was an editor, not a byline reporter, and other than filling in occasionally for Helen Thomas at the White House when she was on a book tour, kept a fairly low profile.

The only valuables reported missing were the polling files from the Israeli election campaign then underway between the hawkish Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the dovish Labor leader, Ehud Barak, the firm’s client.

Polls showed a neck-and-neck race between the two leaders at a time when the Middle East Peace Process had taken on considerable urgency for a US president in the wake of his impeachment the previous month.

When reports of the break-in hit the Israeli election campaign, predictable Watergate comparisons ensued, accompanied by accusations and counter-accusations of dirty tricks. My line of questioning on the story earned me a pointed warning about the potential precariousness of my green card, and a week after the first break-in, there was a second, corroborating break-in, which infused the proceedings with an air of preposterousness to which we’ve since become accustomed in our political narratives but which back then was fairly distinctive. Netanyahu denied any involvement, calling it “theatre of the absurd”. Barak won the election, a result that, in the end, made little material difference to the fate of the peace process, which collapsed at Camp David II the following year and has never really recovered.

I recall this little story now because, based on recent Israeli political history and, in particular, the massive backlash against Netanyahu’s “enfeebling” — per Haaretz — of the country’s Supreme Court as a textbook autocratic power consolidation gambit, it may well be that Bibi overlearned all the wrong lessons from that teachable 1999 moment.

At this writing, after months of Israelis protesting in unprecedented numbers and an escalation in that backlash following the firing of Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for speaking out against the so-called judicial overhaul (he was reinstated on April 10), Netanyahu has announced that he’ll be delaying further legislation on the judicial plan to “attempt to achieve a broad consensus”, blaming the national crisis on an “extremist minority” that is “tearing Israel apart”. There is opposition scepticism at that bit of misdirectional projection and Netanyahu’s stated wish “to give time for a real chance for a real debate” on the assumption they telegraph a likely intention to solidify the government’s position by using time to shift the narrative. Quite possibly — per the tactical specs of the ACME illiberal democracy backlash tide-turning kit — by amplifying anecdotal evidence of support for the government’s position while discrediting and degrading the opposition, including in ways that appear self-inflicted.

As Tolstoy might have observed about the systematic global war on democracy of the past two decades, “All democracies are alike; each besieged democracy is besieged in its own way.” Israel’s siege has been defined by Netanyahu’s quadrupling down on autocratic creep in the form of a Groundhog Day extravaganza of serial elections and six terms in office — minus the 18-month propriety interlude of 2021-2022’s Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid tag team — as if enough victory speeches will somehow exorcise the demon of the one that got away.

From Haiti to India to Lebanon to Myanmar to Sri Lanka to Venezuela to Zimbabwe, the United States and beyond, democracies are, each in their own ways, under siege by customized chaos based on which institutions are most susceptible to strategic corruption, which constitutional guarantees are most vulnerable, which pre-existing divisions most amplifiable and which actors most easily weaponized against their own countries and the interests of their fellow citizens, among other common themes. This isn’t a tectonic ideological shift or a classic great power competition for dominance. It is a massive transfer of power out of the hands of citizens and into the hands of autocratic leaders willing to trade principle for that power, and an ignominious monument to what happens when intelligence tactics, including narrative warfare and psy-ops propaganda, are mainstreamed and scaled up to produce hugely consequential outcomes at a time of unprecedented change.

As Tolstoy might have observed about the systematic global war on democracy of the past two decades, ‘All democracies are alike; each besieged democracy is besieged in its own way.’

That’s the immediate context that has framed the Israel narrative of the past eight years, since Netanyahu self-identified as anti-democracy-amenable by violating the mainstream national norm of treating Arab-Israeli citizens (as opposed to Palestinian non-citizens) as equal participants in Israeli democracy when he issued the election-day warning in 2015 that “Arab voters are coming out in droves.” An election that, according to polls, was headed toward a victory by Labor Leader Isaac Herzog (then running as head of a joint list with the Kadima and Hatnua parties, now the country’s president) with a four Knesset-seat lead was won by Netanyahu with a six-seat lead, an overnight shift of ten seats that, perhaps unfairly at the time, was blamed on pollsters.

The less immediate, more sweeping context is that Israel, a country founded as a post-Holocaust sanctuary, a moral rebuke to the most barbaric genocide in history and a Jewish democratic ideal, is now at risk of jeopardizing that identity — not from terrorists or neighbours who deny its right to exist and not from its own people, who’ve been coming out in droves to protest — but from its own prime minister, a fact more tragic than ironic.

The Supreme Court of Israel, or Beit HaMishpat HaElyon, is unique among the democratic institutions established by the new state of Israel in 1948. Over decades of progress, war, widely decried occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the perpetual struggle of reconciling the imperatives of its security with the principles of its democracy, Israel’s Supreme Court was regularly rated the only public institution trusted by a majority of both Jewish and Arab-Israeli citizens based on its record of favouring human rights over politics or ideology. As countries around the world have eroded longstanding human rights protections — many of them with the help of Israel-exported technology — the Supreme Court has been a reputational casualty of Israel’s own serious slide in democracy. In Israel, targeting the Supreme Court is shorthand for targeting human rights.

The campaign to discredit and politicize it has been part of a “long-term, multipronged assault on the legitimacy of Israel’s judiciary,” per The New Republic’s detailed 2021 piece Why Did Israel’s Judiciary Become an Enemy of the People? by Dahlia Scheindlin. “Some believe the assault on the court is so heated that it risks eroding a main pillar of Israel’s democracy,” wrote Joshua Mitnick in the Christian Science Monitor’s 2015 piece, Why Israel’s Right Wing is Gunning for Nation’s Supreme Court. More recently, that delegitimization effort got a serious boost from Netanyahu’s desire to stay out of jail based on the bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges he faces in an ongoing corruption trial. In February, Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara warned Netanyahu that his role in the judicial overhaul amounts to a conflict of interest.

Netanyahu’s targeting of the court’s power includes “reforms” to the judicial appointments process that would give the government a majority on the selection committee. It would curtail which laws the Supreme Court has jurisdiction over. It would give the Knesset power to overturn Supreme Court decisions — a measure Netanyahu has compared to Canada’s notwithstanding clause. Former Attorney General of Canada, internationally respected human rights lawyer and Policy contributor Irwin Cotler, who has argued cases before the Israeli Supreme Court, addressed the “clear and significant differences between the notwithstanding clause and the proposed override” in the recent Globe and Mail op-ed, Israel needs to learn the right lessons from Canada’s legal reforms.

In the years since his first, millennial turn as prime minister, Netanyahu has adopted an approach to politics and power most ludicrously represented by Donald Trump as the ultimate weaponized anti-democracy actor, one that has taken the worst tactics of old-school corrupt political machines and scaled them up into a globalized club of state thuggery. In more positive news, the annual Freedom House report on the state of democracy recently reported that the pace of attacks on democracy, rights and freedoms has slowed, and may have hit a turning point.

When he was sacked, Israeli Defence Minister Gallant tweeted, “The security of the state of Israel always was and will always remain my life mission.” For reasons that may be obvious to Netanyahu but not to his fellow Israelis, he apparently believes that the security of the state of Israel no longer hinges on the soft power of its moral authority — with or without the Occupation.

In a world order being measured for new drapes by anti-democracy interests bent on debasing the status quo to more easily replace it, Benjamin Netanyahu has, evidently, taken a side. Whether he allows that choice to define not only his place in history but that of his country will become clear in the weeks to come.

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington. She also served as director of communications for the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building.