Front Burner - Israel's government moves to the far-right

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Over the past month, Israelis have taken to the streets in massive demonstrations. They're opposed to Prime Minister Netanyahu's new plan to limit the power of the Supreme Court and worry about what that means for minority rights and Israeli democracy. Today, we will talk about the make-up of Netanyahu's new coalition government and why that has protestors so concerned. We'll talk about Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir who has been convicted of incitement to racism and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich who has described himself as a homophobe. Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer for The Atlantic and he'll explain what's behind the government's shift rightward, what it means for democracy, and how it moves Israelis and Palestinians even further from a two-state solution.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. On Saturday, tens of thousands of people hit the streets in Tel Aviv. This is now the fourth weekend in a row that demonstrators have rallied to protest a dangerous shift they believe is happening in Israel's government. A government that is the most right-wing in the country's history. In particular, they're furious about a change that could give Israel's parliament,

the Knesset, the power to overturn Supreme Court decisions. But big picture, they're worried about the future of Israel's democracy. They are trying to destroy the democratic structure of the Israeli state. I'm concerned that the so-called reform that they're trying to pass is undermining the checks and balances of Israel. So what's behind Israel's shift to the right? And how big a threat is this to the overall health of Israeli democracy? What does it mean for Palestinians? Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer for The Atlantic, and he's watching it all very closely.

Yair, hello. Thank you so much for doing this today. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Yair, hello. Thank you so much for doing this today. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. To understand this, I wonder if we could go back in time to 2015. And you wrote about a wedding that year that had some people in attendance who are now actually key players in the extreme right. And one of them is actually now elected and serving in the new Israeli government. What do we know about that wedding?

Yeah. So to understand, I think, the Israeli government of 2023, you've got to go back to 2015 and sort of see the shift in Israeli society. So at that time, you know, some 70 years ago, the Israeli security services were investigating Jewish extremism. And they came across this wedding video from a far-right wedding, where you have these revelers who are captured in the footage celebrating the affair by stabbing a picture of a Palestinian baby who'd been murdered recently at a firebombing in the West Bank, which had been perpetrated by a settler extremist. So you can imagine that when this video came out, it wasn't particularly well received. And in fact, several of the participants were later, including the groom at the wedding, were later convicted of incitement to violence and terror by the Israeli courts. Now, one of the attendees at this wedding was a man

named Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was a lawyer that was heavily involved in the Israeli far right and often defended members of the Israeli far right in court. So this wedding was called the Wedding of Hate. It was condemned across Israel's political spectrum. And this included the Israeli right. So you had this up-and-coming settler politician named Bitzal El-Smotrich who had this very pointed reaction. He said, the demonic dance with the picture of the murdered baby represents a dangerous ideology and the loss of humanity. And then, of course, the prime minister of the time was Benjamin Netanyahu. And he said, the shocking images broadcast tonight, because it was on Israel's news, show the true face of a group that constitutes a threat to Israeli society and Israel's security. We will not accept people who violate the state's laws and do not see themselves as bound by them. Yeah, very clear denouncement, right? Yeah. Yeah, very clear. Now, fast forward to 2022, and now 2023, and Itamar Ben-Gvir and Batsalos Motric, the politician who condemned the wedding that he was at, ran on the same part of the same far-right party alliance,

and they're now ministers in the country's new government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Yeah. So you can see right there, this shift from what was the extreme into the mainstream. And, you know, there's a much more complicated story, obviously, to that, but that gives you a sense of what has happened. I know that is quite a complicated story, but can you take me through a little bit of how that did happen? Yeah. So Israel has had a whole bunch of elections in the last few years, election after election after election of pretty much inconclusive results. And you have a country that is basically split down the middle between two blocks. One block wants Netanyahu to continue as Israel's prime minister. And the other half thinks that he should, under no circumstances, continue as prime minister.

He's under indictment for corruption and breach of trust. He's on trial. And not only that, he has attempted to raise legislation that would immunize himself from prosecution while in office. And so this has created this kind of unbreachable gap in the Israeli electorate. So you have election after election, which is split down the middle, and nobody can get a real majority. So you had this previous Israeli government that managed to oust Netanyahu for the first time in many, many, many years. And they did it by putting together this Frankensteinian group of leftist parties, right-wing parties, settlers, Arabs, right, all together in one coalition. And their basic unifying principle was Benjamin Netanyahu should not be prime minister. That lasted a year and change. Right. People who generally would have almost nothing else in common. Is that fair?

They had many strong disagreements on very profound issues. And they set them aside to do this. And they were able to continue doing that for about a year and then eventually just fell apart. They couldn't keep it going. And so then Israel goes to another election. That's the one that Netanyahu wins. He doesn't win by changing the math. But because of the Israeli electoral threshold for getting into parliament, several of the opposition's smaller parties fell beneath that threshold, and therefore didn't make it into parliament at all. This is something that confuses my American audiences, but Canadians will understand better. We will, it's true. And so that's how you end up with a rather significant Netanyahu majority in the parliament in terms of seats. He has 64 out of 120. And one of the key components of that party is this far-right alliance, which has Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who we've met. And Netanyahu absolutely needs them.

In the past, he has said, oh, I would never let someone like Ito and Ben-Gvir be a minister in my government. minister in my government, right? But then what he needed then, right, to be able to get his majority to start pushing through certain Supreme Court and legal reforms that might also help insulate himself from prosecution, suddenly those rules went out the window. And so take me through now some of what these guys are trying to do here, Ben-Gavir and Smotrich in particular. What have we seen? I mean, it's a fairly new government, right? But what have we seen so far?

Yeah, and that's something to really understand about it, that if we've noticed, Israeli governments don't seem to last very long anymore. And so there are big plans and big bombings by this government, but there's also this general assumption and concern, both within the government and assumption outside of it, that it may not last more than one or two years, because it just seems like it's so rickety, right? And Israeli politics is so fractious that no one could seem to keep it together. But they had big plans, and the first big plan that they've put forward is a reform of the judiciary in Israel. Back in power, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

is proposing sweeping judicial reform. His government wants to reduce the power of the Supreme Court and hand more over to the legislature. Israel has an incredibly powerful Supreme Court, one of the most powerful Supreme Courts in the world, maybe the most powerful Supreme Court in the world. And there are a lot of academics at EPS which will tell you that it's in need of reform because you have this Supreme Court that basically can choose to pick up any law in any case, regardless of whether anyone expressed any issues with it.

That's a bit above your normal judicial review where someone has an issue with the law and it goes up the court system and it ends up for final appeal at the Supreme Court. But there's a difference between reforming the courts and what is happening here, which is that the Netanyahu government's proposal, their opening proposal for reforming the judiciary is basically to eliminate judicial review altogether in practice. What I mean by that is that they want to pass something called an override clause, which will allow the, as I said, the legislature to override the Supreme Court's decisions. Now, Canada has such a clause. Yes.

Right. Other countries do as well. And this is what these are the points to. But in those cases, you need a significant majority of lawmakers, and often a super majority, in order to override the Supreme Court. You can't just do it really easily. But the version that the right wing is where the government is pushing right now would allow them to do it with a one seat majority. So basically, if you can pass a law, you already have the votes to override the Supreme Court, which means the Supreme Court can't override you in the first place. That is why people are protesting. I'm very worried about the future for my grandchildren. It's going to make a lot of trouble, and also internally.

Fortunately, this government wanted to promote legislation which will demolish the Israeli democracy. Over the recent weekends, for a couple weekends in a row, you had 100,000 Israelis in the streets, which is something like the equivalent of 5 million Americans. Extraordinary numbers. Business leaders, tech leaders, people who normally don't speak out against covert policies, people who worked, for example, in the finance side of Israel, the central bank and other stuff like that. These are bureaucrats. They're not politicians. They're people who worked for

Netanyahu. They've come and met with him and said, you can't do this. It will unsettle the markets. The Supreme Court also keeps certain protections in place and other things that give people confidence to invest in Israel. If Israel's status as democracy appears to be eroded, right, this will hurt the Israeli economy, all of these things. Netanyahu for now is standing strong. The U.S. Secretary of State is currently in Israel. And he has spoken out against this, right? In diplomat's speech, he's addressed this. He sort of said,

we have seen the expression of a vibrant Israeli democracy in recent weeks. The vibrancy of Israel's civil society has been on full display of late. The commitment of people in both our countries to make their voices heard, to defend their rights, is one of the unique strengths of our democracies.

Another is a recognition that building consensus for new proposals is the most effective way to ensure they're embraced and that they endure. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix.

I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together.

To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Just to loop back to some of these players in this new far-right government and the baggage that they come with, take me through some of the views that they have that have people really concerned, especially considering this is a government that is moving to consolidate power. Yeah. So Itamar Vendrier, who is officially now the so-called

Minister of National Security, which is an entitled, but oversees, for example, the police in theory. So he was a lawyer basically for far- far-right criminals, more accused criminals, who were accused of extremism and anti-Arab crimes. And in his own personal life, he, for many, many, many years, until very recently, used to have a photo on his wall of a man named Baruch Goldstein, who was the terrorist, a Jewish terrorist, who murdered many Muslim worshippers in Hamrod, the notorious anti-Arab, anti-Muslim massacre in Israel's history. He was famous for being rejected by

the Israeli defense forces, which has a universal draft, but they did not want him to serve because they thought he was an extremist and they did not trust him. And more recently, since he's been in parliament, this has happened a couple of times, he will pull out a pistol at nearby Arabs that he gets into arguments with. This is a real thing that happened. You can watch it on video. This was him in occupied East Jerusalem, urging police to shoot Palestinian protesters, throwing stones. And so he's quite theatrical, right? And this is the sort of thing, I hope he was provoked

and this thing had happened. He always has an explanation and a reason, right? But it's the sort of person who seems very clearly to have, well, I'll put it this way. He ran on the slogan of, we will show people who are the landlords here. Right?

In other words, this land is ours and it doesn't belong to anybody else. And that includes Arabs. You have no claims here. You have no national claims. You're here by our suffrage, essentially. It's about time that we go back

to be the owners of this country. We mentioned another person who doesn't get as much attention because he's not nearly as theatrical, but he's quite competent, and his name is Bitsamel Smotrich. And he is a much more experienced politician, and he's been working towards the authority he has now that he's Israel's finance minister. But he also has authority in the West Bank, which previously people in the finance ministry didn't have, but he

demanded certain powers. His goal was to expand settlements, not just in places where Israel already has settlements, but to create new ones, including in places where Israel, including the Supreme Court, has ruled it's illegal for Israel to build settlements. And that's another reason why these groups don't like the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court often is the one who says, you need to pull settlers out of this place, or Israel can't build here, or we need to protect minority rights there. It's the bulwark of those sorts of things. And if you have objections with how those are applied, then you want the Supreme Court's power reduced. moved at all yet to expand these settlements, which I'll just say that, you know, Canada's position is that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, an obstacle to achieving peace. The United Nations says

settlements are illegal and an obstacle to peace. Like, have they moved at all on this? So this is a really good question to ask, actually, because people pay a lot of attention to the things that bombast, the things that people ran on. The question is, what do they do once they're in power? And the record so far is actually very mixed and very interesting. So I'll start with one incident with Ben-Gavir that happened this past week, which is there has been a rise in violence in Israel and in the West Bank. And one of those incidents was a horrific massacre at a

Jerusalem area synagogue on Friday night around Shabbat services, where, you know, seven Israelis were murdered, including an elderly man and a 14-year-old kid. And you have like this, you know, whole cauldron going on. And during this time, Hamas, a few days ago, fired some rockets into Israel. And in response, the far-right agitators decided that they were going to go and march in Jerusalem up at Damascus Gate. Now, those who understand Jerusalem topography know that Damascus Gate is a place where Palestinians tend to congregate. It's a locus of Muslim and Palestinian life. If you want to cause a confrontation, that is where you go. And the Israeli security services

and the Israeli police and the army all said, this is a terrible idea, right? Tensions are really high. We have absolutely no reason to be stoking them unnecessarily. We should not let these demonstrators go. And they stopped them. And the interesting thing is

that when Israeli police come in and they stop these demonstrators and it was caught on video what happened, which is that the demonstrators start chanting, Ben Kvir Halash al haf Hamas. Which rhymes in Hebrew very nicely. In English, it is simply, Ben Kvir is weak on Hamas.

Like the terrorist group that controls Gaza that fired the rockets. Because they were nominally protesting that. And they were being stopped by the Israeli police, which is supposedly controlled by Ben-Gurion. But this is an example of Israel doesn't simply run on like who the ministers are, who might be there in a year's time, a new government could be in power, right? These people are relatively transient. The people who really run a lot of this stuff are the army and the security services and the police, and they have their own systems and they have their own rules, right? And if you don't really understand how they work, right, it's very hard to make them work for you or turn that ship of state around. And it's pretty clear that Ben

Gray doesn't know how to do that yet. The question is whether he'll get enough time in government to be able to do that. By contrast, you had a totally sort of similar dispute that happened involving Smotrich, but it went a different way, which is the Israeli army, the defense ministry cleared an illegal Israeli outpost and the settlers who were there. And then Sotred said, wait a second, I was given certain authorities in the finance ministry to oversee West Bank settlement, and I was not consulted in clearing this illegal settlement. Now, in the past, he never would have been consulted. No one cares what the finance ministry thinks, but he demanded to be able to be involved in this stuff. The decision went down, and the place was cleared. And Netanyahu said, you know, the defense ministry gets to, you know, make that call. But then they had a meeting and he came out

from the meeting, at least as it was reported, that Smotrich had rested the concession that he will now be in the room for these sorts of decisions and have input. Right. And so this example, he's a more effective, he understands how politics works and he understands how to slowly move to bureaucracy in his direction. So he's making a little more progress. But it takes time, right? And the real question is, Will, and this is not just true in Israel, if you look, I cover American politics, for example, you watch a lot of presidents, it takes them like a year and a half, two years to actually get their policies rolling. Right? So this is an advantage Netanyahu certainly has over his more radical coalition partners, which is he has a vastly more political experience.

A big time advantage. And he's sort of relying on it. Yeah. He's sort of relying on it. He keeps doing these interviews in international media, which you can take or leave. I'm a little skeptical where he says, I am driving the car, right? They're joining me. I'm not joining them.

My values and my ideals are going to dictate this government. But to the extent that that can be taken seriously, and I think there are questions about it, it is the case that he has a lot more political experience. He understands how the machinery works in the ways that these neophytes do not. Right. And you're saying to the extent that it could change too over time. Yeah. The longer that this Israeli government is in power, the more likely you're going to see more extreme moves by some of these people as they learn how to actually make the government work for them. Especially the really savvy operators, as you've explained, like Smotrich. That's a real possibility.

Just coming back to the violence that we've seen in recent weeks, you mentioned the attack at the Jewish synagogue, also the deaths of Palestinians in Israeli raids, right? And so how has Netanyahu reacted to this violence and I guess his government more broadly? Yeah, so it's still very relatively recent that he's now responsible for responding to these things. When he ran in the election, he could just simply say, well, the other government, they're soft on terrorism, they can't stop it. And then of course, as soon as he assumes power,

it actually gets worse. Now, if you talk to government sources before Netanyahu got elected, they will tell you, they're like, yeah, this has nothing to do with us, right? And there's, you know, Netanyahu's now gonna inherit it and he's going to discover that he can't change it, but he already knows that he's a smart guy, right? It's just something, it's the way you run, like you always blame the other side for something.

But in actuality, what's going on here is not, you know, it's not something that Netanyahu can't control. What's happening, particularly in the Palestinian territories, in the West Bank in particular, has a lot more to do with internal Palestinian politics, which is that the Palestinian authority, and I was just in the West Bank a little over a month ago, and you can see this on the ground in different ways, the Palestinian Authority, which has held sway in terms of authority over the West Bank for, you know, a couple decades, is slowly but surely collapsing. Its influence is receding. It is no longer able to control the territory it once was. Its security forces are General Lelker, are challenged. And this is perceived as corrupt by many everyday Palestinians. The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, just turned 87, but has refused to relinquish power. He just entered the

18th year of his four-year term. So you can imagine there's a lack of legitimacy there. And so as he gets older and the influence wanes, people start to say, this guy's going to be leaving pretty soon. And they start shuffling for position, you know, jockeying for position in a post-Habas world. And so you've seen the rise of new militias, and you've seen increased activities by old militias. And when you have that all going on, and all these people say, we're going to be the power

in the vacuum, right? And we're going to take over as this other power recedes. Israel can try and respond. And Israel has all of these counter-terrorism, which they try to use to stop this stuff. And also mostly just to stop it from getting into Israel. What you're seeing is a lot of these firefights happening in the West Bank. And Israel is unhappy about doing those. But they figure if they could keep it out of Israel proper, then that's a success. So if it's contained to soldiers fighting militants rather than terrorism that might end up in Israeli streets. But it's not going away anytime soon because it's driven by underlying Palestinian dynamics, underlying Palestinian rejection of the current situation, the current status quo, and the current powers in the area. And there's very little that Nisrael can do to absolutely stop any of that. Though, fair for me to say these raids are also highly criticized, right?

Like this recent one killed nine Palestinians, including an elderly woman, I believe, right? Yes, and there was one elderly woman who was killed. But I think it's important in that particular raid

to understand that it was with a cell from Islamic Jihad. It was a firefight, and there was one significant casualty in the firefight. But there have been other incidents in the course of his campaign. Of course, the killing of the journalist Shu'id Abu Akhla, right, who was not a commandant, right? I think that's a more clear example. You know, the more that you engage in these raids, the more likely you are,

right, to hit people who are not involved. And that, in turn, drives more discontent with Israel, right, and more outrage and more anger, right, and presumably more violence. And so it's sort of this, you know, sort of this mice. And it seems to be very unlikely, you know, you said, what is Netanyahu's response? He says things like, you know, we'll demolish the terrorists' homes and, you know, maybe we'll make it easier for trained Israeli civilians to get guns, all these sorts of things. But these are not really solutions to the fundamentals. This is what politicians say when they can't address the fundamentals. And just to loop back to the U.S. Secretary of State here in his visit this week. So,

of course, we talked about some of the comments that he made around the attempts to change the way that the Supreme Court functions. Anthony Blinken also said that he believed the creation of a Palestinian state beside Israel, a two-state solution, is the only path forward. This is Canada's position as well. As we advance Israel's integration, we can do so in ways that improve the daily lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. And that's crucial to moving toward our enduring goal of Palestinians and Israelis enjoying equal measures. President Biden remains fully committed to that goal. We continue to believe that the best way to achieve it is through preserving and then realizing the vision of two states. Given the context right now, given the makeup of the Knesset, is a two-state

solution even on the table right now? It seems to me like it's so far. When was the last time we were this far away? Maybe it's complicated. Yeah, this Israeli government, their official policy, whatever Netanyahu might say in English.

I also believe that expanding the circle of peace, working to close finally the file of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I think would also help us achieve a workable solution with our Palestinian neighbors. But if you listen to all the coalition partners that talk about this, then the people will actually give them the votes or not. And if you look at Netanyahu's track record of this, of late, they do not believe that Palestinians have national rights in any part of the land of Israel-Palestine.

Right? A two-state solution says both of these people have national rights and we have to find a way to divide it. And that is not something that Itamar Ben-Havir believes. That is not something that B'tal Smotrich believes. As long as people like that are in the government, you're not going to be able to ever have that conversation. In the previous government, you had people who did believe in

a two-state solution, and you had people who didn't. You had both. Because remember, there were these very strange bedfellows who had come together to ask. You had an Arab party for the first time in the last Israeli coalition, obviously supportive of a two-state solution. And so the rise of the right is partly a reaction to the integration of an Arab party in the previous government, the perception that maybe there was going to be some progress on some of these issues, whether or not it was a two-state solution, maybe not. But in terms of Israel integrating its Arab and Palestinian citizens better into its politics, other parts of its society, well, that is something that's anathema to Ben-Gurion, Smotrich, and their fellow travelers. And they rose on the discontent of seeing this. It was a backlash to what the last government did. You have this sort of push-pull going on in Israeli society

where you have one block of voters, right? It's 50-50 like we discussed. And one side is willing to partner and try to integrate the Arab population. The other side is not. Yair, thank you so much for this. This was really, really fascinating. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.