But what about us? Readers of this paper will have absorbed thousands of words, and had perhaps dozens of conversations, about Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul plan — his opponents call it a “judicial coup” — and what it will mean for Israel and its future.
They will have watched the Israeli prime minister’s determined bid to weaken the judiciary, the one meaningful brake on executive power in that country — motivated in part by his desire to escape a jail sentence in his ongoing trial on multiple corruption charges — and the massive convulsions it has triggered in Israeli society.
But they may not have given too much thought to the impact all this will have on us, the Jews of the diaspora.
Imagine for a moment Netanyahu gets his way, and passes into law not just the first element of his judicial “reform” package — which the Knesset approved late last month — but the whole thing. What then?
I suspect some in our community will swiftly find reasons to play down the scale of what will have just happened. They will say that the claims made by many of Israel’s most respected figures, that this marks the end of Israeli democracy, are so much hysteria. When faced with the uncanny similarities between Israel’s newly altered political system— in which the prime minister of the day can wield unchecked power — and Orban’s Hungary or Erdogan’s Turkey, they will point out that those two men are not all bad. And, besides, what about Israel’s neighbours, the likes of Syria or Egypt: they’re even worse, so why doesn’t the BBC talk about them?
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Protest at the Ben Gurion international airport near Tel Aviv (Photo by Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)
There will be others who will weep that Israel had broken, again, from its founding ideals and could no longer be counted as a genuine democracy.
But they will vow to remain engaged, to stand with those inside Israel who have been on the streets in their hundreds of thousands since January — protests, incidentally, whose scale and duration has been described by one academic as “almost unprecedented in the scholarship of anti-authoritarian movements”. They will vow to stay and fight.
Perhaps the largest response will be the quietest. It will consist of those diaspora Jews, especially the young, who simply turn away — who cease to see themselves reflected in Israel, or to feel bound up with its fate or even to be interested in it. That trend is already visible, especially in the US. But if Netanyahu and his coalition of ultra-nationalists, religious fundamentalists and bigots get their way, it will accelerate.
It will mirror a phenomenon that diaspora Jews may not have considered but should brace for. If the Israeli government stays on its current course, many of those now on the streets will leave the country. It will be what one writer calls an “emigration of despair”, and it will draw heavily from those credited with some of contemporary Israel’s greatest achievements: it will be the young, educated, mostly secular women and men of the Start Up Nation. Already sick of paying taxes to subsidise those who don’t, and doing army service to protect those who won’t, they will simply walk away.
You don’t need to imagine it, because it’s happening right now. Within days of that fateful Knesset vote, thousands of Israeli doctors had signed up to a group for those considering moving abroad. The Start Up Nation will become the Get Out Nation.
A long time ago, old-school Zionist ideologues would argue that Jews had to move to Israel because it was in Israel that the future of the Jewish people was being decided. I’ve thought of that grand claim again recently, because it’s true that something very big indeed is being thrashed out in the country. It is something larger even than the nature of Israel’s political system or democratic arrangements.
The best account of what’s at stake that I’ve read is a magisterial essay in the Times of Israel by Yossi Klein Halevi, an American-born Israeli, religious Zionist and former follower of the late, fascistic Rabbi Meir Kahane. Klein Halevi has long since taken a different path. (It was he who warned of that “emigration of despair”.)
He now argues that we are witnessing an historic crisis for Jews and Judaism. He cites the case of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who acts in the name of religious Judaism, and yet calls for a Palestinian village to be “wiped out” and demands that Israeli maternity wards be separated so that Arab and Jewish newborns may be kept apart. What does religious Judaism mean, if such a man can count himself a devotee?
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Israeli minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich (Photo: Flash 90)
Klein Halevi notes the frequent eruptions of settler violence — most notably in Huwara, an event branded a “pogrom” by the IDF commander on the ground — and the silence with which those horrors were greeted by most religious Jews.
He sets out the long-held grievances that have erupted in this moment. The Charedi resentment of the secular democratic institutions of the state of Israel — the Supreme Court most of all — for daring to supplant the rabbis after centuries as the Jews’ lead authority. The settler bitterness at the 2005 pull-out from Gaza which remains an unhealed wound. And the perennial Mizrachi anger at the contempt shown their parents and grandparents by the Ashkenazi founders of the state, an anger that has led several leading Mizrachi figures in Likud to say things that, spoken by anyone else, would instantly be branded as crude and vicious antisemitism. “I wish another six million would be burned,” shouted the prominent Likudnik Itzik Zarka at anti-government protesters. “Go back to the gas chambers!” were the words chosen by leading Likud activist, Rami Ben-Yehuda. I wish those were the only examples.
It’s not clear how any of this gets resolved now or the day after Netanyahu either prevails or is defeated.
It’s not even clear how much longer Israel can hold together as a single society, given the depth and width of the rifts that have been exposed in recent months.
The point is, these are the critical, central issues that now confront the entire Jewish people — and they are being decided in Israel. There is a paradox here for us diaspora Jews: the very things that are driving millions to turn away from Israel in despair, if not disgust, simultaneously demand we involve ourselves in the country more vigorously than ever.
Because it is our fate, and our future, that is being decided too.
Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian
