Yossi Verter in Haaretz: Counting Down the Minutes to the Next Iran War, Netanyahu Turns His Attention to Disarming Israel’s Democracy
Counting Down the Minutes to the Next Iran War, Netanyahu Turns His Attention to Disarming Israel’s Democracy
The government’s efforts to undermine and destroy everything it can and to turn Israel into an authoritarian state bordering on a dictatorship, have not ceased for a single moment ■ The High Court of Justice’s decision to allow Ben-Gvir to remain in his position will have a domino effect
April 10th, 06AM
The bitterness that many Israelis were feeling with the sudden end of the war with Iran, just as we were about to see the death of a complete civilization, is by now familiar. We’ve been there before.
Thus ends another campaign with extraordinary military-tactical achievements and strategic-political failure. Just like in the Gaza Strip. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wanted to fight endlessly, conquer Gaza City, establish a military government and let 20 hostages die in the tunnels. In October, U.S. President Donald Trump forced him to end it immediately. In June, Netanyahu wanted to keep bombing Iran till the last ayatollah, but Trump told him to abort the mission.
And now a third time, the pleas and tense phone calls between Jerusalem, Washington and Florida didn’t help. The president has learned from experience. He waved Netanyahu away without sharing with him the terms of the negotiations that were conducted to reach a cease-fire. When will Trump also realize that the prime minister is a con artist?
As was the case many times during the Gaza war, when Hamas (or Egypt) announced a cease-fire, Israelis again were informed that the fighting was over by foreign sources – the Pakistan’s prime minister and Trump. The local ruler disguised himself as someone who observes the holidays and remained silent. When there are no hostages released in a heroic operation, he chooses to observe the holiness of the day.
Netanyahu’s contempt for Israelis, whom he sees as mere cannon fodder for the realization of his imperial delusions (“We are changing the face of the Middle East!”) and his personal schemes (the cancellation of the criminal trial), was revealed again this week given the 18 hours it took for him to acknowledge that the cease-fire had been declared.
He acknowledged it in a laconic statement in English in the name of “the Prime Minister’s Office.” Why not in Hebrew? Oh, the sanctity of the last day of Passover. At 8:15 P.M., the prime minister released a video, of course, with recycled text. Eight months after he had removed the existential threat for generations to come, he promised another round to come. “The finger is on the trigger,” he warned, his eyes shining strangely. He offered not a single word of hope. Only more wars, blood, destruction and suffering. Take his war away, and what’s left? An empty suit. An aging ruler with health problems, a record of failure and corruption, a liar and an inciter loathed by most of the public. A wannabe autocrat.
The ruler has been revealed for the umpteenth time in the last 30 months as a sycophant and warmonger. Now, even senior White House officials know it. A New York Times investigation reported on the dismissive reactions to the presentation given by Netanyahu, Mossad chief David Barnea and the Israel Defense Forces chiefs on the eve of the attack. “Crazy,” “bullshit” and “farcical” – Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Dan Caine gave short shrift to the rosy predictions of the war’s outcome presented by Israeli leaders (and the report only covered the wide forum). Vice President JD Vance thought it was a bad idea. Later, he would accuse Netanyahu of misrepresentation.
The Times investigation reported that Netanyahu showed them a video of post-regime change Iran led by the son of the last shah, Reza Pahlavi. It sounds like something that AI created for Science Minister Gila Gamliel. The optimistic predictions he and his people made in the Situation Room discussion – that the Strait of Hormuz would not be closed, the Kurds would invade, the street protests would resume, the likelihood of Iran attacking its neighbors was low, the missile program would be destroyed within a few weeks and the chance of the regime being overthrown was high – all turned out to be mere illusions.
There’s a good that either Vance or Rubio will succeed Trump in the White House in two-and-a-half years. If they do – or if a Democrat is elected – what can only imagine what kind of reception Netanyahu (if he is still in office!) will get.
For the Israeli public, it has been an exhausting 40 days. Millions are sleepy-eyed from not getting a good night’s rest. Children are wetting their beds at night, coping without school and friends. Businesses are struggling; their owners have not yet seen a shekel (the Haredi politicians, on the other hand, don’t know what to do with the money that has been showered on them). And the emergency situation remains north of the Haifa line. Twenty-seven Israelis were killed, 7,000 were wounded and 6,000 were displaced. Hundreds of homes and vehicles were destroyed. And, of course, no one should forget the damage of Moshe Gafni’s window shade, a national calamity.
Netanyahu is the same old Netanyahu, the lies and the hyperboles are the same old lies and hyperbole and the mouthpieces are the same old mouthpieces. He promised regime change, the end of the nuclear project and the elimination of the ballistic missile threat. So what is everyone so bitter about?
License to kill
Hezbollah will not be disarmed in the coming years, certainly not by Israel. Only the Lebanese government and army can do it. Netanyahu has given up on that, but the disarmament of Israeli democracy remains a top priority, the raison d’être for him and his coalition partners. The effort underway to undermine and destroy everything possible, on the way to transforming Israel into an authoritarian, soon-to-be dictatorial state, never ceases. They will be renewed with greater intensity on May 10, when the Knesset reconvenes for its summer session until it dissolves before the elections.
Next Wednesday, the High Court of Justice will hold a hearing with an expanded panel of nine justices to hear a petition seeking an order for the prime minister to remove National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from his post. The hearing and the ruling will mark a milestone in the history of the governmental coup.
What Ben-Gvir has done to the police in the three-plus years he has been in office (politicization, interference with top appointments and enforcement, backing corrupt cops and going behind the commissioner’s back) will in the future be required reading material in any class that examines Israel’s decline from a liberal democracy to a country where anti-government protests are violently suppressed while gatherings several times larger organized by coalition supporters are treated sympathetically. People who protest against the war or the assault on democracy are brought to the police station and stripped naked to humiliate them and deter them from protesting again. Violent thugs who harass journalists and public figures are embraced by ministers and Knesset members.
It’s not just the relevant ministers and their boss (who declared in advance that he wouldn’t respect a ruling that orders him to fire Ben-Gvir) who will be following the matter closely after the statements of the justices, especially those of Supreme Court President Isaac Amit and his deputy Noam Sohlberg, the heads of the court’s liberal and conservative wings. Many ministers, for whom the criminal thug is a role model, will also be listening to what the court has to say.
If the court grants some kind of legal permission for Ben-Gvir to continue holding office, it will have an immediate and devastating domino effect. Whatever restrictions he may have imposed on himself will disappear as soon as he gains immunity. The police leadership – headed by the cowardly Police Commissioner Danny Levy – which has been corrupted to the core (except for Boaz Balat, the head of the investigations and intelligence division) will fall into line very quickly.
We tend to divide the court along the lines of conservative and activist. The Bibi-ists will argue that the Deri-Pinhasi ruling, which prohibited the prime minister from appointing a minister who is an accused in a binding ruling, is far-reaching enough and should not be expanded. But this argument is narrow and misleading. Ben-Gvir’s case is a thousand times more serious. This is about equal rights, civil rights and equal enforcement of the law. This is the beating heart of the High Court. When civil rights are violated in plain sight, week after week, and when the law is clearly enforced unequally, the High Court must enter the picture.
The attorney general’s stand is not that Ben-Gvir is unfit to be a minister, but that he should not be given a ministry responsible for law enforcement. A justice, no matter how conservative, who does not treat the case before him or her as tantamount to protecting civil rights will dishonor their role. The result, as already noted, will be devastating.
For two and a half years, the liberal-democratic public, civil society groups, the media, the gatekeepers, headed by the attorney general, have been fighting tooth and nail against a lawless government that has lost all restraint. Someone has compared it to a soccer game between a strong and well-heeled team (the government) and a weaker team (the opponents of the assault on democracy). The latter holds on until the 85th minute, but then a goal is scored, and the team that is barely holding on breaks. Then it concedes another goal and another. By the 90th minute, the score is already 5:0.
The first goal in this story is a High Court ruling that puts into Ben-Gvir’s hands a license to kill what’s left of the police.
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