Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Is Israeli society collapsing, or just growing up?

Episode Date: July 31, 2023

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. Haviv Rettig Gur on Twitter: twitter.com/havivrettiggur?s=20

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 that is foolish and unserious and not up to this task unless it makes the decision 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. 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 an historic protest march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. For those of you who have not visited Israel, just the distance between Tel Aviv and 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, because 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 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 reform's impact on Israel's economy or on Israel's security with the threats of reservists no longer showing up to their training 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. At least, I don't think so.

But it's a topic I'm going to 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 Retegur, who joins us for the first time. He's a friend and a very smart, 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, a political analyst at the Times of Israel. The 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 coming on. Thanks so much for having me, Dan. Boy, there's a lot 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. 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? Keeping the thing to a short story as possible. Israel has this immensely powerful Supreme Court. The Israeli political right is absolutely correct about it.

And it has been about that argument. And it has been 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. In January of this year, 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 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 how it actually functions day to day, a single 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 Britain and Austria and Latvia and many other countries. Basically, 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. 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 there's no local election, there's no direct election of members of parliament. 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 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 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 we don't have a clear. We have the highest per capita number of lawyers in the world, and somehow no constitution. Maybe there's a connection there. But so because we have this very informal, maybe among and maybe the simplest electoral governance system in the free world, we have this immensely powerful court that is the main check. And many have argued, I have argued, and I have learned it

from my betters, that that's unhealthy. The court is ultimately not elected. The court should be there and it should balance 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 I think the point you're zeroing 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 government, but the court and the people who run the court have to be chosen by the politicians, that elected politicians actually have a role in the selection of who populates the court. But the reason I said that the court is stronger over the last

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 sometime in the 1990s, you had this chief justice of the Supreme Court that started to, some would argue, over-interpret 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 sometime in the 90s up through now. Right.

So back in, I would say, February, maybe it was March, I published an essay, a long essay, apologies to readers, about this decision that Aharon Barak, he wasn't yet Chief Justice, he was a regular justice, gave back in 1994 on whether the prime minister could appoint a minister to the government who he wanted to appoint. He had a coalition agreement with this other party. But this minister was going to be indicted on corruption charges. And the attorney general said that you can't appoint him. But the law said you can until the indictment is actually, I actually think it's much more than the indictment. I think at the time the subject of a court decision recently on a new corruption charge. 30 years this man has been in and out of these sort of corruption scandals. But at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister, wanted to appoint this minister.

Nobody doubted that it was legal, but 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 Aaron Barak, and Aaron 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 West, in the Anglo-Saxon systems, in the continental systems where judges are much weaker but much more independent. They're not appointed in many countries by politicians, but they also don't have the right to sit on judicial review over legislation and things like that. In all the systems, you will have a hard time finding someone like Arun Barak 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 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 Gavison. You don't have to remember the names, but sometimes coming into the weeds is important because you come out and see something. But she wrote this just vicious op-ed the next day saying, what about just 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 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, I don't want someone appointed to the Supreme Court, even if the political system does want them. And he would just say that openly and then use, there's judicial appointments, the court has some power in Israel. 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. And it was egregious. In other words, until this crisis, when this question became a question of political identity, there was quite a bit of agreement in Israel. Different polls put it at different numbers, but maybe 70% of Israelis that wanted many of our listeners who I've had conversations, 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 is a democracy, as we're seeing right now, which we can talk about. It is 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. Well, first of all, there's the British system, the British system which ruled here from World War I until 1948 and installed the court system. Some of them were inherited from the previous Ottoman rulers, et cetera, but 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, where they have seven or 800 centuries of precedent to work with Israel. Right. And established principles and a way of doing things. But in principle, the British state officially on paper is a theocratic dictatorship. 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 liberal, we have quite a few dictatorships pretending to be liberal democracies. In Britain, we have a democracy pretending to be a dictatorship, right? 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 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. 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. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, had this opinion back in the 40s and 50s when he was asked, you know, we're supposed to write a constitution. The Declaration of Independence calls to write a constitution. And he actually argued we shouldn't write a constitution because he was a good socialist. He was a pro-American socialist. So because of him, Israel never fell into the Soviet camp, but he was a deep ideological socialist. And he gave this talk in the Knesset where he said, you know, the future, I'm paraphrasing

badly, I apologize. It was actually quite a beautiful argument. But he said, the future is progressive. And he viewed constitutions and courts and all of these slow moving institutions and checks 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 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 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 there is no constitution that delineates who's in charge of what and who has which powers. So in January, the new government, the new Netanyahu-led government gets into power, and they unveil a very ambitious agenda to address some of these problems you're talking about through a range of judicial reforms. They had multiple pillars. You know, Yariv Levine, who's the justice minister, you know, talked about it in terms of like a shock and awe. They were going to move quickly. They had a 64-seat majority in the Knesset.

First time you had a real functioning government in Israel, other than the brief Bennett-Lapid-led government. But really, for the last number of years, there hasn't been 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 have been people deeply, deeply committed and devoted to it, ideologues even. People like the Knesset Law Committee Chairman Simcha Rothman, people like Yariv Levine, the Justice Minister. These are people who for two decades have been talking about this issue, writing about this issue, feeling this issue 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 the 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 they presented it. And what they presented was, you said, shock and awe. One of the, the Minister of Finance, Bitsalo Smotrich, from the Religious Zionism Party, called it pulling off a band-aid. You know, you don't do it slow, you do it fast, and then it's over faster, right? 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 finding an argument that they're wrong. A dismantling of the court's

capacity to check the executive legislative branches or that unitary executive legislator that we have almost entirely. We used to have a situation, we still do because it didn't actually pass, but 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 on Roe v. Wade, you saw American court's power, 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. Every system is different, but there's generally that correlation. The more powerful a court, the more political influence there is in appointments. In Israel, we had 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 part of the judicial nomination process had to get the votes of the justices themselves. And what Yariv Levine proposed

was 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 gutted of any power of judicial review, a court that was almost entirely, was entirely, not almost, he gave the coalition, just the ruling coalition in the single parliament we have with no vetoes, no checks, effectively he gave the government the sole power to appoint judges. He took away from the court almost all of its powers. There was even what they called a 61 override clause, which was handing the Knesset a 61 majority in 120 member Knesset is the minimal majority you have to have to have the coalition in in the first place,

right? By definition, the government has a Knesset majority or it isn't the government in a parliamentary system So guarantee any Supreme Court decision could be overturned by 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, taking away various tests. 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. It set Israel's streets on fire. We had protests by February, March that we had never seen before, and consistent week after week after week. 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 country a country of nine 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, simple, direct, I was asking hard, simple, direct questions, every journalist I know, 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% support for weakening the court. By March, April, we had polls showing 30% 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? I couldn't supply it. I would tell my friends of mine around Prime Minister Netanyahu, I was like, did you, was this, 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 on? Did you, did the prime minister talk about it 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 and it didn't appear that most, most Israelis were, were ready for it. So fast. And for it. And then there's the protests, as you laid out. Then the government pulls back last spring, basically on the eve of Pesach, and pauses. The prime minister pauses the reforms and says there'll be negotiations and they'll participate in President Herzog's process. And then fast forward to a week ago.

Yes. A week ago, there's one tiny sliver of the reform called the Reasonableness Clause. The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that certain government decisions, 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 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. And it comes up 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 and reasonable? You go to a court, right? When a 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? So that bill to limit that when

it comes to government actions, when it comes to appointments to the cabinet, things that some left-wing scholars have supported in the past but which no longer had the support of almost anyone in the legal academy, essentially because it wasn't really this one. And just the news headline is 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 pretend to know exactly which thing was, despite reading about it massively. Sometimes you read a lot about something and know less. But they passed this tiny fraction, this one twelfth of Yariv Levin's original thing. The right was said, got up and said openly, publicly, also to itself, look, we buried 11-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. This is about 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 protests against. I went to just a couple of protests the right managed to put together for, and I had 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 right-wingers were saying, I trust this government. 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 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 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 it was so, as you said, it's a thin fraction of what they initially envisioned, and the left feels, or the center left, or however you want to call the opposition to these reforms, 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 uh 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, which you see, democracia, democracy, democracy, democracy. It's all about democracy. On the one hand, and I've commented on this podcast and others, I've been moved by the protest movement, and I've been impressed by it,

particularly the first and kind of mid-waves of the protest movement in terms of how they contrast to 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 that i was just struck by the democracia democracy them chanting it wasn't i mean was it a crisis democracy here's what i saw okay if you now if you remove the personalities, and 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 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. And even though they

didn't campaign on this proposal, they certainly was well within their rights 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 challenging the government. It didn't die down, didn't lose energy, didn't wither, like stuck to it week after week after week after week. And the government had to pull back. And the government didn't have to pull back in response to violence.

The government had to pull back in the face of real protests, but real peaceful protests. 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 twelfth of the of the full dozen if you will a tiny little piece of it 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. But I just think this notion that many of the protesters are talking in terms as though Israel is like, run by like an Erdogan type figure, or a bond in Hungary, or That is not what is happening in those countries. The big debate, as I see it, in general, I agree with you. I don't think this was about a threat to Israeli democracy. I think democracy 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

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 has led to a lot, a lot of problems, a lot of inequalities, a lot of, 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 secular Israel to ultra-Orthodox Israel, and has created tremendous anger. Anger that, you know, if our conservatives were genuine conservatives on the American model like they like to claim, would understand. You can't have this massive targeted welfare. A lot of these inequalities and problems of minorities and not just the ultra-Orthodox, Arab minorities and others,

a lot of that 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 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. And so we've sort of adopted this deep,

polarizing, very manipulative form of politics because it works and it wins campaigns. And now we have almost repaying the tab on that, right? Because people feel like this government, the opposition voters, and an uncomfortable number of coalition voters for Netanyahu, right, more than Netanyahu would like there to be, feel that this government is 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 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 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 changed with 61 votes too. 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, 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 Israel to allow 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. Well, that disappeared. He said it multiple times on national television. Where is it? Where is our Bill of Rights, right? And while Netanyahu is making empty promises about his intentions, you have right now, literally the cabinet's legislation committee delayed for another week, but 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, he's pushing a bill to allow him to arrest people without warrants. You have a bill presented by shas 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 that just passed 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. That power has existed in the past, but with tremendous amounts

of limits, like if a city is collapsing and going bankrupt, 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, July 5th of this month, that person cannot run in the next election. In other words, the interior minister of Israel is literally now able to simply cancel a 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 there's somebody compiled a list of 140 of these unbelievable bills and nathaniel keeps saying i have both hands on the wheel that ignore that stuff he's interviewed in american you know newspapers and

but he doesn't seem to i 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 has behaved as if he does want,

I believe personally, that 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 weak. 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 therefore there's this chaos. 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 agree with you that this is more than just about, clearly than this, you know, I take your point, all these bills that are being discussed and these different legislative initiatives are scary to a huge swath of Israelis, but I think even more than that, 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 protesting. And that's a lot of what they're reacting to, rather than the particulars of the reform package. But 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 threats the protest 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 some number, we don't know how many, some number of reservists, of army reservists, who are saying they're done, that they have a contract with the government of Israel, and if the government of Israel is chipping away at its own democracy, and again, we can, you and I, I think, agree that 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 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 dependent is 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 this actually going to materialize? That's a great question. 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 in this together.

Or a pandemic. enemy. But the, so two, I think there are two different layers to this. The first layer is the sort of tactical, 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, 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 vocabularyator. Israel is a very, very fractured society, divided into very, very distinct cultural and religious and ethnic tribes. That's true among the Jews.

It's true among the Arabs. This is a country that, in some of those most basic assumptions of how people live and people's identities, is very Middle Eastern. 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. 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 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 more than they learn about our great wars with the Arab states. There's a taboo against violence among Jews. A lot of our democracy, a lot of that informal democracy flows from this idea that we're in it 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 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 warlike,

polarizing discourse. And then the left-wingers that were the target of this discourse are now coming out and saying, whoa, hey, hold on. 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, you know, B'Tzala Smotrich gets to decide if I'm allowed to 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, 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 have a shared fate and a shared

solidarity and we're in it together. We have discovered with this reservist protest that the vast majority of the army's most important units are manned by left-wingers. We had draft numbers for cities. The secular cities like Ra'ananaq, Farsaba, if anybody here knows Israel, you'd know those cities. They're secular cities. They have 90% rates of military draft among young people. Guys, the Israeli left is the American conservative fantasy. 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 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. That was the moment where I had to buy a guitar, right? I would never give up that experience. That's one of the deepest things I did. I spent my life talking.

And then 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 is a country at war with me or because this country is going places where I can't fight for it. Now, that is an Israeli language of solidarity. 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, where 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 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 on a little army court marshal thing for 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 these Israelis are saying something very big is breaking. But 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 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. First of all— Because if it's so controversial—so the analogy that was given is the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, where there were many right-of-center, national religious Jews serving in the IDF who were commanded to, ordered to go into Gaza and uproot residents of Gaza, settler Jewish residents of Gaza, uproot them from their homes, forcibly remove

them. 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 10 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 developed, and it's completely at odds with my contract with the state? I'm out.

I'm not serving. Suddenly, prime ministers have to factor these decisions in, in every policy, or at least every controversial policy that they want to implement. First of all, I think an ideological minority, which is what the supporters of this specific reform are, supporters of judicial reform writ large is a 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, we're not talking about standing army enlisted people. We're not talking about people violating their orders. about civilians who are volunteering essentially and there's no way to force them and yeah 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 outsized they have outsized 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, excuse me, on the right, we have a system in this country where we give tremendous outsized influence to minorities. 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 if you do it in a way that disrespects people who serve in the military, then your Torah is a desecration of God's name and your Torah becomes something dirty. And that is the culture that has developed in the Haredi Yeshiva.

And that is something that they're responding to. So no, I do think that absolutely the military should never have a say in politics, ever in any way, shape or form. Should citizens not be able to walk away if they are 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 things that's happened here was

right-wingers discovering how many left-wingers are in the army. It doesn't fit there, what they've been saying about left-wingers for 20 years. So, wow. First of all, wow, right? Well done, you, right? The second thing that's happened, 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 assigned to some other part of the country to something like 15,000 religious Zionist soldiers. But the composition of the IDF is different today than it was. That's my point, that there's more of these national religious serving in the army.

Sure, but 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 1000 people in the Air Force can decide the war.

That's not true in the infantry where you have 10s of 1000s. 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 very much in the political center. We have in Israel, roughly 25% who support this reform as is and just want it shoved down everybody else's throat. About 35% 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% in the middle who want a judicial reform with massive public support from all sides. That's where most of these reservists are at. They are not saying, you know, 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, which is legitimate. That's how the elections work. That's happened to the left as well. But it's sort of like our electoral college popular debate here. Right. But what if the Trump White House could change the Constitution? Right. 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 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? We had this discussion at the newspaper this very morning. And I think 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. 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 surprised if it drops. 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%, by far the highest draft rates of the country.

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

Yeah, yeah. All of my colleagues in the journalistic profession, almost every single one, is pessimistic. And I alone am the idiot who is holding out very optimistically.answered 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 culture and their decisions that they make? 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, but in my view, this is not Israel collapsing. This is Israel growing up. This is Israel facing problems. If your children feel no pain as they grow up, they will still be children when they're grown up. And these are pain that we have to face as a society. Every Israeli is talking about reasonableness and judicial restraint 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 eight months ago, right? 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. 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. 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. These are not people who recognize healthy societies from unhealthy ones.

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 that is foolish and unserious and not up to this task unless it makes the decision 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 commentary about what's happening in Israel right now as a sign of strength.

So that is great. Aviv, I gotta say, this was a tour de force. I hope you let me talk you into coming back again because for better or for worse, 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 Retikur, you can track him down on Twitter or on X at Haviv Retikur. That's H-A-V-I-V-R-E-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. That's timesofisrael.com. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.