https://lnkd.in/eFdHHT8B
At Israel’s creation, in May 48', its founders envisioned a country defined by humanist values and one that upheld international law. The Declaration of Independence, Israel’s founding document, insisted that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, or sex” and [..] would “be faithful to the principles of the UN's Charter.” But from the very beginning, this vision was never fulfilled—after all, for nearly two decades after the signing of the declaration, Palestinians in Israel lived under martial law. Israeli society has never been able to resolve the contradiction between the universalist appeal of the declaration’s ideals and the narrower urgency of the founding of Israel as a Jewish state to protect the Jewish people[..]
But now the war in Gaza and the judicial crisis that preceded it have made it harder than ever to go on this way, pushing Israel to a breaking point.
The country is on an increasingly illiberal, violent, and destructive path. Unless it changes course, the humanist ideals of its founding will disappear altogether as Israel careens into a darker future, one in which illiberal values define both state and society. Israel is on track to become increasingly authoritarian in its treatment not just of Palestinians but of its own citizens. It could fast lose many of the friends it still has and become a pariah. And isolated from the world, it could be consumed by turmoil at home as widening fissures threaten to break up the country itself. Such is the perilous state of affairs in Israel that these futures are not at all outlandish—but neither are they inevitable. Israel still has the capacity to pull itself back from the brink. The cost of not doing so may be too great to bear[..]
Hamas’s bloody Oct. 7 attack hit Israel at a time when it was already facing tremendous domestic instability. The country’s electoral system, which relies on proportional representation, had in recent decades allowed the entry of ever more fringe and extreme political parties into the Knesset, the Israeli parliament[..]
In 2023, Netanyahu and his far-right allies then pushed for a judicial reform bill that sought to substantially reduce the SC’s oversight at the proposed reform would protect him from an ongoing criminal case against him. His ultra-Orthodox allies wanted the reform to prevent the drafting of thousands of yeshiva students, who have long been exempt from military service. And the religious Zionists designed the reform to block the SC’s ability to limit the construction of settlements.
Israel is on an increasingly illiberal, violent, and destructive path.
The proposed judicial reform sparked massive protests across the country, revealing a society deeply fractured between those who wanted Israel to remain a democracy with an independent judiciary and those who wanted a government that could do more or less whatever it pleased[..]