The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - How to Stop a Dictator: Upholding Israel's Judiciary || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

If you want to become a dictator one day, be sure to listen. The week's big news is that the judicial reforms being pushed by Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have been put on hold. This was recorded just outside Manapouri in New Zealand.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/how-to-stop-a-dictator-upholding-israels-judiciary

Hey, everyone, Peter Zion here coming to you from just outside of the southern New Zealand town of Manipuri. The big news that has happened in Israel today, or earlier this week, is that the judicial reforms that Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has been trying to push through for a few weeks now, have been at least temporarily halted. Now, let's say that you're the leader of a country in the free world, and you decide you want to be in the not-so-free world, so that you can rule pretty much forever. regardless of what your motivation is.

The first, the most important thing that you need to do if you want to hang on to power is to break the independence of the judiciary. Now, you already control the executive branch, at least in part, and the legislative branch, that can ebb and flow based on public opinion and elections. But the judicial branch is always the block that prevents authoritarian from rising to power. And if you can break that, then you can rule forever. in the case of a number of situations throughout recent history, especially in Latin America, the 19s, in the 70s, and 1980s, local would be dictators, would be authoritarian, breaking the

judicial branch was always the first thing to do. And in more recent times, folks like Erdogan in Turkey, that was the first thing you after. Victor Orban and Hungary, that was the first thing he went after. The Kaczynski twins in Poland, that was the first thing that they went after. And in doing so, they've basically ensconced themselves as the only power that matters. because once you break the judiciary, it's just a matter of having some sort of break in public opinion or an election, and then the broken judiciary will interpret things your way. In the case of Netanyahu, he was under a series of corruption investigations. You can say that they were politically charged.

You can say that they were real. Doesn't really matter. With the judiciary intact, those investigations will ultimately go forward, and the only way he can retain immunity is to continue as being prime minister. But as you might have noticed, Israel is a bit of a national security state. And the judicial reforms that Netanyahu was trying to do were so damaging to the fabric of the political system that his own defense minister, defense in Israel is a big thing, stood up and said that this has to stop. Netanyahu fired the dude earlier this week,

which meant that the coalition that allows Netanyahu to even be prime minister, minister in the first place was suddenly in danger. And so he's had to back down at least for now. Now there are other countries that are kind of in play with the same sort of factors. The two that are the most important are Brazil and the United States. In those cases, you've got Gér Bolsonaro of Brazil and Donald Trump of the United States who have both attempted to subvert the electoral process in order to retain in power. But neither of them were capable or competent or whatever the word is you want to use to come up with the idea of breaking the judiciary. first. So in every instance where some ally of Trump or Bolsonaro brought a legal case to court

to attempt to challenge the electoral system, those cases were laughed out of court by none other than the judges. In many cases, the judges appointed by these two men in the first place. So for those of you who are concerned about democracy in the United States and Brazil, I don't need to suggest it's a non-issue. But as long as the courts hold firm, and to this point they seem fine. Even the, even the courts whose judges were appointed by Donald Trump have stand firmly to a man against every single case that has been brought forward to challenge the last general election, we're okay. And for those of you who are Trump supporters, think of it this way. We survived eight years of Obama, and we're fine.

We can certainly survive four years of Donald Trump not being the president. All right, that's it for me. See you guys later.