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Division and fear were Netanyahus ’preferred political tools; and like America, split Israel
Tel Aviv: For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel is witnessing the biggest election fraud in the country’s history. For Donald Trump, defeat in November was the crime of the century. The languages of the two mens overlap, it seems, because their overwhelming sense of invincibility is confused by the democratic process.
Naftali Bennett, a right -wing nationalist, will take over as Israel’s prime minister on Sunday, if approved by Parliament, but Netanyahus who is rebelling against his likely successor shows no sign. He said there was a deep conspiracy in the state.
Netanyahu accused Bennett of carrying out a fire sale in the country. Israel is waiting for a capital after a stolen election, he said. As for the media, it tries to silence him through absolute fascism.
Although it appears that a peaceful democratic transition to Israel will take place, there is no certainty.
The Netanyahus Likud party’s attack on Bennetts small Yamina party has become so vicious that some Yamina politicians are in need of security details. Idit Silman, a Yamina representative in the Knesset, or parliament, said in an interview on Channel 13 TV that a demonstrator outside his house said he was hurt in his family’s path, but don’t worry, at first chance to take, well you kill.
The apotheosis of Netanyahus whatever the methods required left violence in the air. The events of Jan. 6 in the United States, when a budding Trump stormed the Capitol, are not far from Israel’s mind.
For a dozen years, Netanyahu has convinced himself that whoever leads Israel will create a presence of threat, said Dahlia Scheindlin, a political analyst. His strong -arm tactics present a direct challenge to a peaceful transfer of power.
Division and fear were Netanyahus ’preferred political tools; and like America, Israel split, to the point that the head of Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, warned a few days ago of extremely violent and insulting discourse. This is an unusual warning.
Police said they would not allow a national march scheduled on Thursday through predominantly Muslim areas in Jerusalems Old City, but sentiment about it ran among politicians right after the original Jerusalem Day march. last month was canceled due to Hamas rocket fire.
The Netanyahus security Cabinet decided on Tuesday to rewrite the march, on a route agreed with police, for next Tuesday, June 15. Netanyahu saw the march as an important symbol of Israeli sovereignty.
Handling the march is playing with fire, as demonstrated by the brief war with Hamas last month. The issue, it appears, will now fall to the Bennett government to resolve.
No evidence has been produced to back up claims that the prospective new Bennetts government is anything but the legitimate product of Israel’s free and fair elections in March, the fourth since 2019 as Netanyahu, accused of bribery and fraud charges, were sheared to maintain power.
Netanyahu called on Bennetts to form an eight-party coalition, from the Far-Right to the left-wing party, a dangerous leftist government. But it was not the Left who defeated the prime minister.
It was politicians on the Right like Bennet and Gideon Saar, the prospective justice minister, who became convinced that Netanyahu had become a threat to Israel’s democracy.
Among the mass suicides in Masada by Jews who refused to submit to the Roman yoke, Bennett said in a speech explaining his decision to head to an alternate government that Netanyahu wanted to include with him the entire national camp and the entire country. in his own private Masada.
This is an extraordinary image, especially from Netanyahus the former chief of staff, and has captured the growing impression among many Israelis that the prime minister is determined, at any price, to achieve political safety by stopping the criminal process against to him.
He should have quit when the lawsuit came out in 2019, said Yuval Shany, a law professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and former dean of its law school. Any rational politician would have come down. Instead, he joined the entire court against the judiciary. Ultimately it seems his main political ambition is to arrive at an immunity from organizing persecution.
In other words, personal stay out of prison has become paramount for Netanyahu. He is very ready to abolish the basic institutions of rule of law and democracy, such as the Supreme Court, an independent judiciary and an independent press. At this point, the explosion of the previous days has become a culmination rather than a departure.
He has become a politician who will last any length, without limits, Shany said.
He has a well -known company. Netanyahu, whose unpredictable election victory in 2015 gave him a new sense of omnipotence, developed close ties with Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, and with Trump. He went to leaders around the world who sought to consolidate power into new, illiberal models.
What Netanyahu needs, through all the elections in Israel, is a majority strong enough to change the Basic Law of Israel to make it impossible to prosecute a prime minister in office, and take from the Supreme Court the power to i strike such a law.
He didn’t get that much.
There is no doubt that he wants to narrow and minimize the Supreme Court’s judicial review authority on both Knesset legislation and decisions in government administrative bodies, said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute. But the checks and balances of our young democracy are intact.
Those checks and balances are likely to arrive in Israel on Sunday and a democratic change of government. But Israel, unlike the United States, is a parliamentary rather than a presidential democracy. Netanyahu will not be lost in a sunny retreat next to a golf course. As chairman of the Likud, he will have great power.
He will not leave, and he will not keep quiet, said Merav Michaeli, the leader of the Labor Party, a member of the new coalition. And it will take time to repair the damage.
The incoming government is reviewing legislation that would set a two-term limit for a prime minister and oblige anyone who has led the country for eight years to spend four years outside the Knesset. This signals how Israel’s democracy has been disrupted by Netanyahus ’total of 15 years in power.
Nir Orbach, one of the members of the Bennetts right-wing party who succumbed to the attack from Likud and was forced to change his mind about supporting the new coalition, posted an explanation of his thinking on Facebook:
It is not a simple decision, but it is obligated by the reality of life where we wake up every morning, over 700 days of government instability, in a civil crisis, in a violent discourse, in a sense of turmoil, in brink of civil war.
The post is as good as an expression of Israel’s exhaustion with Netanyahus contored against for survival like any.
Michaeli said: Netanyahu has been destroying Israeli democracy for a very long time. Aside from the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, he continued: Remember, we have a minister assassinated here. We are in an ongoing fight for the character and soul of Israel. But we will prevail.
The next few days will test that assertion. Bennett urged Netanyahu to let go and abandon his scorched land policy. But to expect a pleasant exit from the prime minister appears to be as far as expected from the American president who also claimed the defeat could be just theft.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Roger Cohenc.2021 The New York Times Company
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