The Israeli Political Moment, Part 2: The Israeli Resistance to Populism
by Paul Gross
Part 1 of this essay appears here.
One does not have to be a close follower of Israeli politics to know that Benjamin Netanyahu has dominated the political scene in Israel for many years. He is in fact Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, all told. His first term was just three years, 1996–1999. But he returned in 2009, and he has been in office ever since—except for an eighteen-month interregnum during the period 2021–2022.
It was during that brief respite that I first thought of Israel as offering some kind of political model for other countries. It’s counterintuitive. Israel’s political system was notoriously dysfunctional even before the chaos of 2019–2021, which saw four elections held in a two-year period. Three failed to produce a clear winner, but the fourth led to Israel’s strangest ever coalition. A collection of right, left, and center parties, including the first ever Arab-Israeli party to be part of a governing coalition. They were united by two beliefs: that the endless cycle of inconclusive elections had to end; and that Netanyahu and his refusal to bow out of politics despite facing three criminal corruption charges were to blame for this.
And this was where I thought Israel was offering a solution to a widespread political problem. Israel’s political opposition had unseated a populist leader pursuing an increasingly illiberal agenda—which I described in part 1 of this two-part essay. Also at this time, two countries where illiberal populists were firmly ensconced in power were facing elections: Turkey and Hungary. As I wrote in an essay published at the time, entitled “Israel’s Change Coalition Is a Template to Fight Populism”:
Erdoğan and Orbán have been far more successful than Netanyahu ever was in dismantling the checks and balances on executive power. Parties who disagree on much can nevertheless unite over the patriotic mission of rescuing liberal democracy. Like Israel’s Change Coalition, they can place ideology to one side and pursue ruthless pragmatism and a no-frills agenda of good governance in the national interest.
As it turned out, I was wrong and I was right.
I was wrong about Turkey and Hungary. The two incumbents won their elections—Erdoğan narrowly, Orbán handily. But I was right that other countries could follow Israel’s lead; one year later, a coalition of three diverse parties in Poland united to bring down the Orbán-inspired Law & Justice Party. Divided on many specific policy agendas, they were united by a desire to undo the damage done to the rule of law in Poland by the outgoing regime.
By this point Israel’s historic “Change Coalition” had collapsed and Netanyahu was back in the prime minister’s residence, this time with his first entirely right-wing government. A coalition in which his Likud party was partnered with two religious-nationalist parties—one of them explicitly influenced by Meir Kahane, the first Israeli politician to be banned from running for office because of his supremacist views and anti-Arab racism—and with two ultra-Orthodox parties, primarily concerned with the specific needs of their own self-ghettoized constituency. What all the parties had in common was a desire to neuter the Supreme Court, the only real check on executive power in Israel’s underdeveloped system of government. The Court’s commitment to uphold the right to “human dignity and liberty,” set out in Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, was a threat both to the religious-nationalists’ plans to annex the West Bank and to the ultra-Orthodox insistence on an exemption from mandatory military service. Most importantly, though, the incoming justice minister from the Likud, Yariv Levin, had long sought to degrade Israel’s liberal democratic system into something resembling Hungary’s “illiberal democracy.” Ironically, given the way Poland’s opposition parties would follow Israel’s model in deposing their illiberal government, Levin and his colleagues consulted that illiberal government about how to “overhaul the judicial system.” As I discussed in part 1 of my essay, the Netanyahu of even five years prior to this government—that is, before being charged with corruption—had been a defender of the Supreme Court’s historic role of preventing a “tyranny of the majority.”
The response of Israelis to this unprecedented threat was itself unprecedented. In no other country where liberal democracy was on the line from a populist government had the public risen in protest in such numbers, with so much determination, and with so much national pride. This was a liberal-national, or “liberal patriotic,” revolt against an il-liberal regime.
But before I get to the specifics of that, a little history.
Notwithstanding the highly successful demonization campaign against Zionism, which has its origins in a deliberate, orchestrated policy of the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, the principal founding ideologues of the Zionist movement sought to establish a Jewish and democratic state.
In fact, the movement was unusually democratic from the outset. Delegates at the pre-state Zionist congresses, beginning right at the end of the nineteenth century, were democratically elected to participate, primarily from countries that were not themselves democracies, like Tsarist Russia. What’s more, women had full equality as voters and representatives at a time when women in the vast majority of the democratic states did not yet have the vote. The first Zionist Congress was in 1897. The United States did not adopt the Nineteenth Amendment to its Constitution, mandating equal voting rights for women at the state and federal level, until 1920. In Britain, it wasn’t until 1928 that women had the same full voting rights as men.
And we don’t need to guess what the founder of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl, had in mind for the Jewish state that he hoped to build, because he told us. In 1902 he wrote a novel, Altneuland, his utopian depiction of the Jewish state that the Zionist movement would create. The plotline includes an election. The Jewish state of Herzl’s imagination was a democracy, and all its citizens had the vote regardless of gender, race, or religion. In this fictional state—as in the real Israel—there is a substantial Arab minority who are citizens. Here, Herzl introduces a villain: not an Arab but a recently arrived Jewish immigrant—a Rabbi, no less—who has established a new political party calling for the disenfranchisement of its non-Jewish inhabitants. He maintains that citizenship and voting rights should be restricted to Jews in a Jewish state. If Meir Kahane—also a Rabbi, and also an immigrant—ever read Altneuland, he might have been impressed to find Herzl predicting him so directly.
In Herzl’s novel the election campaign becomes a battle for the soul of the country: Herzl’s liberal nationalism against the illiberal nationalism of this Kahanist, eighty years before Kahane. There are dramatic accounts of election rallies, in which the opposition to this racist party fights back. Eventually, the new party is beaten, the liberal nationalists win the election, and the defeated candidate is reported to be leaving the country in disgrace.
And what of Herzl’s successors in the Zionist movement? Well, they were a diverse bunch, but the two most consequential, in that they would shape the contours of the politics of the future State of Israel, were the socialist David Ben-Gurion and the classical liberal Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky. Ben-Gurion was the principal drafter of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which combined the Zionist raison d’être of a nation-state for the Jewish people in their historic homeland with a commitment to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, certainly had an authoritarian streak, but when challenged by the Supreme Court, most famously in 1953 when he tried to close down the communist newspaper Kol Ha’am, he deferred to the liberal principles of the rule of law and the separation of powers.
In the case of Jabotinsky, the father of what would become the Israeli right, the commitment to liberal democracy was unequivocal. An admirer of America’s founding fathers and the system of checks and balances they established, he wrote of democracy that it “means freedom”:
Even a government of majority rule can negate freedom….These contradictors will have to be prevented. The Jewish State will have to be such, ensuring that the minority will not be rendered defenseless.
Jabotinsky’s most consequential disciple, future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, took this even further. As early as 1951, he advocated not just for the “rule of law” but for the “Supremacy of the Law”:
We have learned that an elected parliamentary majority can be an instrument in the hands of a group of rulers and can act as a camouflage for their tyranny. Therefore, the nation which elects representatives must also determine its rights…in order that the majority…should not negate these rights. It is possible to achieve this only through “the Supremacy of Law,” which is to say, establishing civil liberties as a “Basic Law” or “Supreme Law,” and granting authority to a panel of judges to invalidate a law which contradicts the Basic Law by contradicting civil liberties.
If Herzl prophesied Kahane and the racist far-right in Israeli politics, Begin fully predicted the danger of this incumbent government pursuing unlimited majority power.
And what was so notable about the mass protests that broke out across the country following the government’s announcement of its judicial “reform” proposals was that they were explicitly and proudly informed not by “universal” or revolutionary or postmodern values, but rather by the founding values of the state. It was not (only) that the government was offending their liberal consciences; it was abandoning the liberal standards set by the Zionist movement and the Declaration of Independence.
If you had read certain pro-government journalists, you’d have heard that the protest movement was a vehicle for unaccountable, unelected “elites” and technocrats. This found a particularly credulous audience in the United States among some conservatives, who felt that these same elites were the problem in their country. But Israel is not America. And these conservatives, like most partisans of both sides, tended to stay in their echo chamber and only read “explainers” of Israel written by government loyalists. Both in my personal interactions with conservative American friends and in reading pro-Israel conservative American publications, I would typically hear that Israel’s fifteen-strong Supreme Court is populated entirely by left-wing justices; that judicial review is wielded as a dictatorial tool to squash right-wing policies; and that the appointment system for justices is controlled by the judiciary itself. Not one of these claims is factually correct.
Today’s Supreme Court bench, currently fourteen justices, with the justice minister stalling on his constitutional duty to appoint a new chief justice, contains at least six, arguably seven, justices who would be considered right-wing by any definition that makes sense in the Israeli context—except by the new definition introduced by the government: “right-wing” means supporting Netanyahu.
Judicial review is actually exercised sparingly, far less often than in the United States for example, nor has Supreme Court intervention only been used against right-wing governments. One of the most controversial interventions was in the early nineties, when Labor prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was forced by the Court to fire his interior minister who had been charged with corruption. This dealt a huge blow to the stability of Rabin’s fragile coalition at a time when he was pursuing peace with the Palestinians.
And the appointment system is in fact designed to ensure that neither the judiciary nor elected politicians can ignore the opinions of the other. Compromise is always required. Previous right-wing justice ministers have successfully used the existing system to appoint conservative judges.
And, unlike in the United States, Israeli protestors were not bashing the founding values of the country: they were celebrating them. Neither were they drawn from a particular ideological group or supporters of a particular party. They included leftists, centrists, and liberal-rightists. It is certainly the case that “elites” were prominent (the academy loudly condemned the government’s plans), but multiple sectors of Israeli society were active in campaigning to stop the judicial “reforms.”
The same people who were leading the protest movement up to October 6, 2023, were leading the civil society effort to help the survivors and internal refugees of the Hamas pogrom after October 7. The government was shell-shocked and hopelessly inept in those first days after the atrocities. Ordinary Israelis stepped up and stepped in, organizing food, childcare, counseling, and other services. And the most active organizations were those that had been coordinating the weekly anti-government protests. They pivoted, and they utilized the resources and organizational know-how they’d developed that year for a different challenge. They made a mockery of the populists’ claim to be speaking for “the people.” They were the people. And they were there for their stricken countrymen while the prime minister was still trying to work out how he could avoid taking responsibility for the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust occurring on his watch.
In the United States it can seem that the only alternative being offered to right-wing populism is liberal or, worse, “progressive” technocracy. In Israel, that is far from the case. The alternative is liberal nationalism—or liberal patriotism: combining the fundamentals of individual rights and freedoms with a strong sense of national solidarity and responsibility; a respect for pluralism with a reverence for the tradition and history that binds the Jewish people together.
As I write this, Israel is still at war. During the judicial protests, the most controversial anti-government step was taken by military reservists, especially pilots and special forces, the crème de la crème. They declared that they would not serve if they felt that the government ordering them into battle was no longer a government that upheld the founding values of the state—essentially saying that they were not prepared to risk their lives on the say-so of an illiberal regime. They were called traitors and worse by some members of the government. These “traitors” have been among the greatest Israeli heroes of the past fourteen months.
And that speaks to another difference between Israel’s liberals and so many liberals and progressives in the United States. In Israel there is close to a national consensus on the importance of military strength, and the willingness to use it. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has called Israel “a villa in the jungle.” An undiplomatic metaphor, for sure, but one that speaks to Barak’s point: Israel is not exactly surrounded by friends that it needs to, or indeed can, placate. When the only way to appease an enemy is to commit suicide—very much the case with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran—the situation requires sticks, not carrots. Barak was Israel’s last prime minister from the left. Today he is a particularly vocal and uncompromising opponent of Netanyahu and his government. But he’s no dove.
In 2023 I interviewed two legal scholars, from Hungary and Poland, respectively, who had recently visited Israel and attended the protests. Gabor Halmai told me that Israeli protesters served as “a model for Hungary. Nothing similar to this happened in my country.” Tomasz Koncewicz said that “[t]he Israelis made this intuitive assertion that following now the path blazed by Poland or Hungary of dismantling the justice system would deprive them of their rights, and undermine the very essence of their democracy….You may not have a constitution, but people feel loyal, committed, to the constitutional idea.”
More so than the short-lived “Change Government” that I had ballyhooed, it was the anti-government protests that were a model of how to confront an illiberal populist government. Populist leaders claim to represent “the people” against “the elites,” yet these terms are themselves rigged. Leaders seek to shape what is held to be “the truth,” what is “fake news,” and the identity of “the elites,” as a political strategy to achieve power. Likewise, “the people” they claim to represent is never all of the people: those who don’t support the leader are “them,” not “us.” As we’ve seen in Turkey and Hungary, this can descend into something closer to out-and-out autocracy. The purveyors of “fake news” are the enemy and so must be closed down, independent bodies like courts and cultural institutions are perverting “the popular will” and so must be brought to heel and follow the dictates of the leader. This was the fear of a huge and diverse mass of Israelis. They responded magnificently.
What could Americans take from the Israeli example of anti-populist liberal nationalism? Let’s first acknowledge that the two countries are vastly different in size, political structure, culture, and much else. Nevertheless, there are fundamentals that can be universally applied. National pride, for example—expressed not just in patriotic support for the country’s military, but in reverence for the country’s past achievements.
Donald Trump’s victory will test his political opponents these next four years. They can continue to call him a fascist—tarring as supporters of fascism all those Americans whose votes they need to win back—or they can acknowledge that vast numbers of their countrymen voted for him despite his demagoguery and disdain for liberal democratic norms, not because of them. And maybe that will lead them to ask what was so off-putting about their campaign.
The dead end of identity politics perhaps? Israelis could tell them there’s no need to dissolve the bonds of national identity to achieve equality and justice. On the contrary, liberalism works best when citizens feel a sense of kinship with one another. That’s why liberalism and nation-states arose in tandem.
Israelis relish the ethnic diversity of their country, with immigrants from every continent, but they also cherish the shared traditions and customs. Immigration was perhaps the issue of the U.S. election. But rather than asking who is for or against diversity, and labeling the latter as bigots, Democrats should consider thinking in terms of how much diversity, and in what numbers. Diversity can be a bonus for a society, but social cohesion and solidarity are critical.
And when they protest Trump’s polices, as they undoubtedly will, they should follow Israel’s model of patriotic protest. Fly the American flag. Cite the Declaration of Independence. Laud the far-sighted brilliance of the founding fathers and the majesty of the American idea; don’t fixate on their flaws and the ways in which that idea has not been lived up to. Go back sixty years to Martin Luther King, or one-hundred years to Frederick Douglass, and find American values invoked as the solution to the problem of racism, not as their root cause à la Ibram X. Kendi. More than do it: believe it.
As I write this, Israel’s justice minister is threatening to revive the judicial reform, effectively blocked for ten months by the protest movement and then frozen since October 7, 2023. His cabinet colleague, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, recently said the quiet part out loud in leaked remarks, starkly declaring the government’s majoritarian philosophy: “We are elected by the public; we can change the regime if we want to.” Elected, yes. But the coalition’s approval ratings dropped within weeks of the judicial reform being announced, and since October 7, even accounting for a burst of popular enthusiasm after the dramatically successful strikes against Hezbollah, they have been nowhere near a majority in the polls.
If the government does indeed renew its legislative assault on liberal democracy, it will be a declaration of war on a population that has largely rejected it. And the Israeli population has shown that it is ready, like no other, for a liberal and patriotic fight against populism.
Topics: Israel Initiative
Paul Gross is a Senior Fellow at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, but he is writing here in a personal capacity. Previously, Gross served as speechwriter for Israel’s Ambassador to the UK. He holds an MA in Middle East Politics from the University of London, and lectures widely on Israeli history and politics. His numerous published research articles and op-eds have appeared in a variety of media outlets in Israel, the UK, the US and Canada, including the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Fathom, The American Interest, and Persuasion. He was an active participant in the protest movement against judicial reform in Israel from December 2022 to October 2023. Gross appeared on the TPPI Podcast with Gabriel Noah Brahm last year.