Front Burner - Israel’s Netanyahu flinched, will he retreat?

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets and union strikes disrupted everything from flights to hospitals in Israel this week, as nearly three months of demonstrations reached a new intensity. The protests began in January, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced plans for a judicial overhaul that would curtail the Supreme Court’s powers. Netanyahu agreed to pause the legislation on Monday. But does that mean he’s looking for consensus, or just waiting for the fervour to die down? Today, Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg returns to explain how Israel reached this democratic crossroads, and the paths that remain out of it. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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. This is the sound of the largest protest movement ever by Israelis. Demonstrators flooded streets across the country on Sunday night after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his own minister

just for asking to pause controversial changes to the Supreme Court. We are here for the democracy. We feel that we have no other way. This prime minister is not qualified anymore. Protests have been weekly since January. That's when this government unveiled a plan to overhaul the court, which would give the ruling government the power to appoint most judges and override the court's decisions. After this weekend, unions also went on strike, disrupting everything from flights to hospitals.

Flights taking off from the international airport were stopped because staff walked out. Major shopping malls closed their doors and McDonald's shut their restaurants nationwide. Israel's embassies around the world shut as diplomatic staff stayed at home. Netanyahu agreed on Monday to delay the judicial overhaul but not to shelve it. So some observers have said Israel's democracy is at a crossroads. Why? And where do these paths lead? To explain, I'm joined once again by Yair Rosenberg. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic and author of its Diepstädel newsletter.

Hi, Yair. Thank you so much for coming back into FrontBurner. It's a pleasure. Good to be here. So to understand what happened this week, let's start on Saturday. So after almost three months of protests against this government's proposed changes to the Supreme Court, what did the defense minister have to say? It's a good question. So on Saturday night, Yoav Galant, who is the defense minister of Israel, that is an incredibly important position. that is an incredibly important position. It oversees the national security of a state that has fought many, many wars for its existence,

gets up and makes a speech in which he says that the government's proposed changes to the Israeli judiciary are threatening national cohesion and pose a threat to the security of the state. And therefore, the legislation should be paused so that people can negotiate and create a threat to the security of the state. And therefore, the legislation should be paused so that people can negotiate and create a compromise proposal that would satisfy all parties.

For his trouble, the next day... Some breaking news out of Israel, and that is that the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fired his defense minister. The defense minister, Yoav Gallant, broke ranks yesterday. This precipitated an outpouring of hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets. Hordes of protesters continued to fill the streets in the early hours of the morning. Demonstrations have been going on in Israel for months, but these protests were spontaneous as people surged into action. This would be the equivalent of, you know, millions of Americans

who rolled out of bed, right, after, you know, after hours, after midnight, and just took over highways across the country, and then, as you said, exploded into cascading strikes across Israel that effectively shut down the country. Universities, banks, places of business, and also Israeli embassies around the world closed their doors. Planes stopped flying out of the airports. And all of this culminated in 100,000 protesters converging on the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, which was set to vote on this controversial legislation. What do you fear is happening? A war.

A war for democracy? Yes. It might be a turning point. Why? The things that happened in the past few days, they've never happened before. And at that moment, Netanyahu finally comes out and says, OK, I will pause it.

After firing his defense minister, of course, for asking for that previously. There is one minority that is willing to tear this country to pieces. It behaves with violence, ignites fires, threatens to hurt politicians and inflame civil war. When there's an opportunity to avoid civil war through dialogue, I, as prime minister, am taking time out for dialogue. Do you think that the ferocity of the protests that followed surprised Netanyahu? I think the entire protest movement has surprised Netanyahu. And to understand why, I think you do have to understand what's really going on with

judicial reform in Israel. It's not exactly an argument over whether or not Israel's judiciary needs to be reformed. It's actually an argument, and actually we discussed this the last time I was on the podcast. It's an argument over how to reform the judiciary. There's long been an expert in political consensus in Israel and outside Israel that Israel's Supreme Court is sort of hyperpowered. In a way, it appoints its own members with less political input than most countries. It is able to pick up cases that many other courts can't pick up. And it exercises outsized authority compared to the other branches of government. And so that this does need to happen? But the thing is, the judicial reform that was produced by his very extreme government was less a careful recalibration of a branch of government than it was its decimation.

It was sort of a wishlist of right-wing priorities produced by conservative think tanks without any input from the political opposition, without any effort to build a national consensus. And you have to remember that Netanyahu's coalition only got 48.4% of the vote in the last Israeli election. So they don't even have a majority of voter support behind them. And they're putting forward this fundamental change to the democratic order of Israel. And this freaks a ton of people out. And why do you have so many people? Because many of the people are protesting here are people who have never been to a protest in their lives. It sort of activated a large number of people who previously thought of themselves as apolitical or, you know, I vote, but sometimes I lose and then I just go back about my business. But this, they saw, was not business as usual. Just because we are children, it doesn't mean we can't understand how a country becomes a dictatorship.

I'm hunger striking since Sunday morning, along with a group of people, people who are in favor of the reform and who are against the reform, who all see that we are at a moment of crisis. We are at a moment where it could rip apart. And you've called this judicial overhaul by this government, its signature legislation.

So maybe just for clarity, what vision for Israel's future do these changes seem to be part of that is part of what has freaked out so many Israelis on the streets right now? Right. So supporters of the judicial reform will tell you that what they're doing by reforming the Supreme Court is simply rebalancing Israel's democracy so that politicians and elected officials have more power relative to unelected judges who have significant power in appointing themselves. That was, of course, the original idea behind a judicial reform in Israel. But in practice, the actual list of things that the judicial reform does goes much, much farther. It basically ensures that the ruling government appoints all

the judges. It has a veto over all the judges. It decides who populates the courts. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government introduced new legislation that would limit the court's power to strike down laws. Earlier on Thursday, a law was ratified limiting the circumstances in which a prime minister can be removed. So if the handpicked judges of the Supreme Court don't happen to rule the way the government likes, the government can just throw the ruling out. So in effect, it removes judicial review from the Israeli system of checks and balances in its democracy. Given that the Supreme Court in many cases is the recourse of people who are fighting government power, fighting government overreach, trying to protect individual or

minority rights, obviously this is very, very disturbing to many, many Israelis. And of course, on the other side of it, the people supporting this reform feel that a lot of these minority groups have exercised outside power through what they call a democratic institution. And they want to be able to use politics to tell those people what they can and can't do and not have the court tell them that they can't pass such laws. You can see how this could easily cascade into sorts of very conservative legislation that might be religious or more extreme. And this is this sort of fear scenario that people have. But some people who are protesting in the streets, you don't get hundreds of thousands of people in the streets without a diversity of views. There are people who are more left-wing. There are also people who are

more right-wing. You had the family of Menachem Begin, the first Likud prime minister in Israel's history, conservative. And his son, Benny Begin, was a longtime Likud lawmaker, conservative. He was protesting with his grandson. These are people who have conservative views, but they think that a healthy democracy needs to have a court that checks the political echelon and that makes sure that the politicians don't run roughshod over minority sentiment. 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. I also noticed that there were counter protesters in the crowd. And do you have a sense of how big a group they are and what they were doing there?

So starting in the first week of January, every week, starting with tens of thousands in Tel Aviv and then growing to hundreds of thousands across the country, there have been protesters against the judicial reform. After Netanyahu halted the legislation temporarily on Monday, the right organized a counter demonstration in favor of judicial reform. They insist they're not the ones trying to derail democracy. We got the majority of the votes, and we have 64 of 56 in the Knesset. This practically gives us the right to make laws, right, as we see fit. right? As we see fit. It feels like the conservative way of thinking and the way of life has not been taken care of by the elite. And this too got tens of thousands of people. It wasn't

quite, it wasn't as big as the pro side, but it was substantial. It doesn't command a majority in Israeli society, right? Polls show that most Israelis oppose this version of the reforms, while they support a compromise to come to a reform that has a consensus behind it. But also the counter protesters in general tended to come from the most extreme flanks of Netanyahu's coalition, not even from his only good party, but from the far right alliance of parties that make up like 10 percent of the Israeli parliament. of the Israeli parliament, those are the people who were really, really angry that Netanyahu paused the legislation. Those are the people he had to mollify in order to pause the legislation. And then they protested and said, no, we want this to happen. And then it's worth diving into what we saw from that counter-protest. The Israeli police have already arrested somebody for assaulting an Arab cab driver from that

protest, whereas the judicial reform protesters include the leaderships of the two Arab parties in the Israeli parliament. There's obviously a very different vision of minority rights in Israel being telegraphed by these two different protest movements. You mentioned he had to or had to attempt to mollify the hard right elements of his coalition. What did he do? hard right elements of his coalition? Like, what did he do? Yeah, so part of the challenge for Netanyahu in this government is that it contains some extreme elements that we discussed in the last podcast.

These are people, some of whom have more theocratic notions of what Israel should be, people who have actively anti-Palestinian views, certain types of views that were once considered beyond the pale in Israeli politics, but Netanyahu brought into his coalition in order to form it. And now those people, they get votes, and he needs them in order to stay in power. And they want this reform to happen, right? They see the court as one of the

big obstacles to enacting their vision of what Israel should be. And so for Netanyahu to say, I'm going to pause it, and they say, wait a second, no, you won't have our votes, we'll leave the coalition. And so he has to make promises, some of which are made public, some of which are not. I think the promises you worry about if you're opposed to Netanyahu are not the ones that get boasted about, but the ones that you don't hear about. What did he guarantee to some of these people in exchange for them allowing him to pause this and not be too troublesome about it? There was an announcement by Itamar Ben-Gavir, the far-right national security minister, that he had been promised that he could form a sort of national guard in Israel. The far-right security minister has agreed this pause in enacting the

legislation only if he can form a new national guard, the purpose of which remains unclear, but which would come under his ministry's control. Right-wing parties, including those representing Jewish settlers on occupied Palestinian land, had threatened to leave the coalition if Prime Minister Netanyahu didn't agree. But he has been saying that he will have such a body and been promised this multiple times with different names for several months now. The problem is, is that he hasn't been able to recruit people or actually staff it. So it remains to be seen if this is a thing that's actually going to happen. But Netanyahu did say, I will let you do this thing. I will increase your powers,

your authority. And of course, you can see why that would be troubling for many people in Israel as well. I think it might be worth hitting some of the behavior of some of these figures in his government, particularly in recent months. So the defense minister got fired, but what have some of the other members of his government done in recent weeks that they have not been fired for in a Netanyahu government? So most notoriously, Bitzalel Smotrich called to wipe out a Palestinian village after a terrorist from that village killed two people

in the West Bank. Those were his words, not mine, wipe out the village. And then he claimed the media was misquoting him out of context, but that was not the case. And then eventually he was compelled to apologize. These comments were irresponsible. They were repugnant. They were disgusting. We call on Prime Minister Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials to publicly and clearly reject and disavow these comments. things that they believe. And then you have less severe things, but things that did not draw any reprimand publicly from Netanyahu. One of his ministers, she insulted the United Arab Emirates. She said, I visited. I didn't like it very much. I don't think I'll go back. Now, this is a partner to Israel on the Aram Accords, and it's just a tremendous diplomatic faux pas. She had to try to weirdly apologize afterwards. You had multiple ministers who went to a holiday party with a member of an organized crime family who had served multiple prison terms, but has attempted to become a political activist. questioning the pace of the judicial reform, whether or not it would be wise to pause the legislation, Yoav Galant, the defense minister, the most important national security

figure in Israel, was fired. And that is, I think, actually very important to understand, because when Israelis saw that, they said, we are a country that relies tremendously on security. And the person that was put in charge of our security said that this is a problem. And the response was not to listen, but to get rid of him, and to get rid of him at a time of high tension. Because of course, right now it's Ramadan in Israel. It is soon to be Passover. The convergence of these holidays has often led to clashes between Israelis and Palestinians. These are things that Israelis are deeply concerned about. And to be firing the firefighters exactly at that time seems like a very troubling move, especially to preserve legislation that so many Israelis are troubled about themselves.

Another thing I wanted to ask you about is where the Palestinians fit into this larger movement in the protests that we've been seeing. And I realize that they're not a monolithic block, but I know the Supreme Court in Israel has been unpopular with the right, in part because of some of its decisions about bills aimed at expanding Israeli settlements and the occupied West Bank is unconstitutional. But there has been a lot of criticism from Palestinians of the Supreme Court as well. So is there a sense of how they feel about these demonstrations? Yeah. So obviously those questions best answered perhaps by, you know, elected representatives,

you know, of Palestinian and Arab citizens in Israel. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And in the West Bank. But as a reporter, so I can say, you know, what we've seen, which is both Ayman Oda, who's the head of the Hadash Tal party in Israel's parliament, that's one of the predominantly Arab parties in Israel's parliament, and then Mansour Abbas, who is the head of RAM, which is the Islamist religious party, Arab party in Israel's parliament. He was in the last Israeli government, you might remember. Both of them have supported the protests. Ayman Odeh went out after Gallant was fired and protested in the streets. You can go and look at his Twitter feed

and you can see the video of him giving a fire-breathing address there. It's not because they think the Supreme Court is perfect. As much as they might disagree with this or that ruling, they recognize that unshackling the most right-wing anti-Palestinian government in Israeli history from the check of the Israeli Supreme Court would be utterly disastrous for Palestinians, for Arab citizens in Israel, for Palestinians outside Israel. And so the elected leadership of the Arab community in Israel is out there supporting the protests alongside, bizarrely, right, you know, even people like, you know, the descendants of Menachem Begin, we could activist. And so there's just, you know, this, this widespread alliance of unlikely people. And what about Netanyahu? I mean, I guess we don't really know what the movement is going to do. But, you know, he's put this on pause for now. Do you have a sense that he's going to pick it back up again? You know, maybe feeling like the steam has been taken out of the protests and he'll try to jam it through in a couple months?

Yeah, if I knew what Benjamin Netanyahu was thinking, I would be so much better at my job. And I think there's a lot of people wondering what the answer to that is, but there are different directions it could go, right? Netanyahu could be taking this time out to negotiate in good faith to create a consensus reform that enough people in Israeli society could support that you can actually solve this problem. That would require him somehow

getting around the most extreme members of his coalition and getting them on board with it, which seems difficult to imagine. The other side of it is he can just be playing for time. He is the king of tactical maneuvers. He is the king of kicking the can down the road. He is an incredibly dexterous politician. And he may be deciding that now we're about to enter the Passover holiday in Israel, right? Everyone's going to go home, right? The anger will dissipate. And then I can pick this back up again, and they're just not going to be able to repeat what they just did. And then I could eventually get what I want. And so it's hard to know which one. Right now, there are real efforts to actually engage in compromise negotiations.

They're being coordinated by the Israeli president who previously offered a compromise proposal that the right wing rejected out of hand, but the opposition was willing to negotiate on. Well, now they're trying it again. Will there be a different outcome? We will see. So I don't know. I think it does depend on a significant part about what Netanyahu actually wants to do, but also depends what he can get his extreme coalition members to do, because if he can't get them to go along, it really doesn't matter what he wants. And the question remains, and I think we discussed it before, who exactly is driving the car, right? Is Netanyahu the one with the hands on the steering wheel, as he said

many times in media interviews? Or are there other backseat drivers who are actually making the decisions? Right. Yair, thank you so much for this. It's always so great to listen to you on this. Thank you. Thank you for having me. All right. That is all for today.

I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.