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Israel in the past six months has felt like a madhouse, a political protest the size of New Jersey, an unending traffic jam, a lab for bad ideas, a glimpse of the future of Western democracy in the social-media age. It has also been a classroom, even for those of us who think we’re experts. I’ve lived and written here for nearly 30 years. But as I stood among thousands of other protesters outside the Knesset on Monday, the midday heat so strong that I almost longed for relief from the police water cannon, I realized that I was learning to see the country with new eyes.

Inside the Knesset, the most extreme government in Israel’s history was legislating the first stage of its plan to move power from the courts and into its own hands, changing the rules of the democratic game. The law passed. The protest couldn’t stop it. One opposition lawmaker described it as the hardest day of his life, and he used to be the No. 2 man in the Mossad. Like many people here, I’ve been at a demonstration almost every week since the beginning of the year. This one had the same chanting and flag-waving, but it seemed desperate, with an undercurrent less of defiance than of fear. A chapter in Israeli history was ending. We don’t know what comes next.

[Yair Rosenberg: Israel has already lost]

The Israeli breakdown of 2023 has thrown into sharp relief the country’s submerged assumptions and blind spots, as well as my own.

The state of Israel was declared in a rush on May 14, 1948, amid an attack by the combined forces of the Arab world. The declaration of independence in Tel Aviv that day promised a constitution “no later than the 1st of October,” but we never got around to it. Instead, we’ve relied on stop-gap measures, political deals that seemed logical at the time, and an unwritten idea of the way things are done. Israel was held together less by law than by custom. Like many Israelis, I sensed this without grasping the risk. These customs were almost invisible when they were in effect. They’re possible to see clearly now because they’re gone.

It was customary, for example, for a prime minister to resign if facing prosecution. It was customary not to put criminals in charge of law enforcement. It was customary to respect civil servants, to listen to the soldiers and spies who keep Israelis safe in a dangerous region, and never to politicize the judiciary.

The last norm, discarded along with the rest by the current government, is at the heart of our troubles. In the Israeli system, a simple majority had no official limit on its power. So the Supreme Court evolved into a check on the state, protecting civil rights and fighting corruption with legal tools that themselves had an ad hoc air. But early this year, having secured less than 49 percent of the popular vote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government announced a “legal reform” that would neuter the court and thus remove the only institutional check on government power. Netanyahu hadn’t presented this plan before the election. The press conference had the tone of a declaration of war. Without judicial review, the government can delay elections, outlaw opposition parties, expand the power of clerics, and appoint officials convicted of corruption. (All of these ideas have been suggested by members of his coalition.)

The truth was always that a majority in the Knesset could free itself from all restraints merely by voting to do so. The only barrier, it turns out, was the customary deference to norms. These existed only as long as we all believed in them, and the void left by their absence is now filled by suspicion and protest.

Last weekend, tens of thousands of people marched with Israeli flags up the highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As I write, a park near the Knesset is full of tents housing protesters. When I was at the encampment, volunteer teams were making food and distributing water bottles. Groups with flags were walking uphill to the protest zone outside the Knesset while others descended, red-faced and hoarse, to rest in the shade. Those looking for inspiration in this dark year have found it in this extraordinary mobilization, manifested not on Facebook but on the street, every single week since January. No one, least of all the government, saw it coming. This raises the question of where everyone has been until now. After all, Netanyahu and the right have been in power, with only a brief break, since 2009.

The short answer is, in tech and on vacation. After Palestinian suicide bombings and rockets destroyed Israel’s political left in the late ’90s and early aughts, and amid an economic boom, liberal Israelis of the middle class pursued prosperity, often found it, and fell into a political slumber. Meanwhile the settler movement and its sympathizers were hard at work gaining power in state institutions and gluing together an alliance with Likud and the ultra-Orthodox parties, using the language of Jewish tradition and of hostility toward the liberal state dreamed up by Israel’s founders.

Liberal Israelis held to their old assumption about the settlements, which is that they’re temporary and external to the state of Israel, and the settlers are fringe eccentrics. They assumed that Netanyahu’s basic aim was to achieve peace and prosperity for citizens – the same goal as theirs, that is, even if he pursued it in ways they didn’t like.

These assumptions have been shattered by the people now in power. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister in charge of the police, and Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, who also controls part of the defense ministry, come from the messianic settler movement, which has an entirely different goal: Jewish domination of the entire land of Israel and a state governed by some form of religious law. This is the ideology that drove the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and the mass murderer of Muslim worshipers in Hebron in 1994, Baruch Goldstein, whose photo Ben-Gvir kept on his living-room wall until recently.

For this extreme element, war is not a horror to be avoided at all costs but a trial that would be justified to further God’s plan, or an event that might even be desirable when the time is ripe. As cabinet ministers, they’ve been given the potential power to help start a war, whether with an expulsion of Palestinian residents in Jerusalem, for example, or a provocation at the Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount. For level-headed Israelis in uniform, and for parents whose teenagers face the draft, this is the stuff of nightmares.

The protests erupted when Israelis were forced to realize that not only are the settlers not going anywhere in the West Bank; they’ve assumed central functions of government in Israel proper and are moving fast to knock out the only remaining brake on their power. With the Supreme Court out of the way, a transformation of the state will be possible. These are the stakes, and they help explain the surge of anger and dread we’ve seen, and particularly the extraordinary announcement from thousands of military reservists, including pilots and command personnel, that they’ll refuse to report for duty. This is less a calculated pressure tactic than a howl of distress. Had I not aged out of the infantry reserves six years ago, I’d consider doing the same.

Another unpleasant reality on display in the recent upheaval is the fault line that runs between Israeli Jews with roots in Europe (known as Ashkenazim) and those with roots in the Islamic world (Mizrahim, in our local shorthand). We expend great effort to pretend that our debates are only about policy, not identity, but that isn’t true. The grievance felt by many families whose roots are in places like Casablanca and Algiers, and who were sidelined by the country’s Eastern European founders and the official narratives, has not faded—on the contrary, it seems to have grown.

Anyone at the demonstrations understands that the protesters are mostly middle-class Ashkenazim. The cops guarding and occasionally manhandling us are mainly working-class Mizrahim, as are the traditional Likud rank and file. Most people in fighter squadrons, commando companies, and intelligence outfits are Ashkenazi and liberal. The academy and the tech boardrooms are much the same. This sociological fact says nothing good about our society. At least half of the Jewish population here is Mizrahi, but we’ve never had a Mizrahi prime minister, and the Supreme Court has a woeful lack of ethnic diversity.

Good leadership could address the divide. But for politicians like Netanyahu, divisions aren’t problems—they’re weapons. He hoped to use the fury of this electorate as political jet fuel, gambling that it would propel him upward and not blow us all to pieces. Likud’s grievance coalition with settlers and the ultra-Orthodox now openly derides the Supreme Court as a hostile Ashkenazi elite, the civil service as a “deep state,” air-force pilots as privileged brats, and army officers as traitors.  

[Natan Sachs: Israel on the brink]

Netanyahu’s reputation, even among opponents, was that of a political grand master. This reputation joins many other assumptions on the trash heap of 2023. Netanyahu is a shell who’s lost everything but his old baritone. The forces he released have escaped his control and now others are in charge, people who see politics not as a mechanism for solving problems but as an arena for spoils, confrontation, and revenge.

Never in all my years here have I heard so much talk of emigration. Israelis once thought our internal problems and external conflicts could be resolved, so sticking it out made sense. Today the opposite is true; we do not seem on our way to a happy resolution.

When I moved to Israel in 1995, finding Nikes or Levis was difficult and travel was a luxury. In 2023, the protesters are in the same Zara tank tops and Garmins you see in Berlin or Palo Alto. Middle-class Israelis speak English. They watch Succession. They have other options. If this government is not an aberration but the new normal, many will leave.

The rectangular bulk of the Knesset sits in a tidy section of Jerusalem, across from the Israel Museum and down the street from the Supreme Court, among fences and flowerbeds. I pass by often on my daily errands, and it always seems orderly and permanent. But on Monday the same road was closed, a turbulence of police trucks and blue-and-white flags. Inside the building, the forces of disintegration were at work.  Everything seemed to be moving fast, faster than we could grasp. The edifices of state felt as tenuous as holograms, as if I could pass my hand through them. The pink flowers planted in rows on the median disappeared under the sneakers of protesters, and then under the hoofs of the horses pushing us back. I looked down again. The irrigation pipes had been ripped out and the flower bed was mud.

Israel’s democracy is still intact, but the country has already lost something essential.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Fatigue can shatter a person. “I saw the movie ‘they’ don't want you to see.” American family life should not be this volatile.

Utter Collapse

As Israel nears the end of a week of turmoil, its democracy remains intact. On Monday, the country’s Benjamin Netanyahu–led ruling coalition—the most hard-right government in Israel’s history—passed one component of its planned judicial overhaul. The proposed legislation has inspired months of outcry from Israelis, many of whom believe, with good reason, that these changes would swiftly erode the country’s democracy. This past spring, my colleague Yair Rosenberg explained some of the most concerning aspects of the overhaul:

The radical wish list produced by Netanyahu’s coalition seeks not to reform the court but to neuter it, and would essentially allow the ruling government to appoint all judges and override their decisions. This plan was composed in the halls of conservative think tanks, with no input from opposition parties and no attempt to broker a national consensus. What’s more, this effort to fundamentally revise Israel’s democratic order came from a government that received less than half the vote in the last election.

As Yair noted today, the piece of legislation passed on Monday was actually the least significant of the proposed list. “Contrary to the far right’s pledge, the government did not enact its plan to subordinate the appointment of Supreme Court judges to politicians. Nor did it grant the coalition the ability to override judicial decisions,” Yair writes. But even so, Israel has already lost something that could be impossible to regain: basic trust among its citizens.

“Polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israel’s citizens oppose the ruling coalition’s unilateral overhaul of the judiciary,” Yair explains, because “most Israelis simply do not trust the intentions of their own government. They do not believe that Netanyahu, let alone the extremist allies he depends upon to maintain his power, will be more reasonable than the unelected Supreme Court. And they do not believe that the coalition will stop with this small salvo against the judiciary when it has already announced its intentions to deconstruct the entire edifice.”

This lack of trust goes both ways, and it extends far beyond Israel’s standard partisan politics, Yair writes:

Rather than attempting to calm the waters and reestablish civic trust, Netanyahu’s far-right ministers have rubbed their recent victory in the opposition’s face and promised more of the same. “The salad bar is open,” crowed [Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben-Gvir on Saturday night, framing the impending reasonableness reform as merely the appetizer for a much more forbidding buffet … He and his allies have cast the hundreds of thousands of anti-overhaul street protesters as “privileged anarchists” and foreign-funded enemies, rather than fellow citizens expressing genuine concern. Something has gone terribly wrong in a country where this is how leaders speak about those they are supposed to shepherd.

Israel’s “utter collapse of shared solidarity” is unprecedented in its 75-year-history, Yair notes. The country’s Supreme Court is set to rule on the legality of the new legislation this coming fall. But however it decides, Israel has “already lost a core component of any functioning democracy—the sense of collective concern among citizens.”

Natan Sachs, the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, points out how the erosion of Israel’s democracy threatens its citizens:

If Israel is not fully democratic, then the state—which holds together a remarkably diverse Jewish population—can come undone. For Israel’s Arab citizens, the struggle to find their place in Israeli society has been all the more difficult, but their economic, social, and political gains in recent years are also threatened as judicial limits to the rule of a political majority that usually excludes them are removed.

Writing from Israel earlier this week, the author Daniel Gordis painted a picture of a country falling apart—as he puts it, “a country of broken hearts.” Gordis described one particular example of the fracturing of Israeli society: Military reservists, who play a crucial role in the preparedness of the Israel Defense Forces (and who are generally seen as an apolitical group, given the country’s near-universal conscription laws), have pledged to drop out of voluntary service “by the thousands,” breaking with one of Israeli society’s core social contracts in protest over their government’s actions. As Gordis writes, “The tacit agreements that have held Israel together for 75 years are unraveling at an unimaginable pace.”

Related:

Israel has already lost. “The country’s already been destroyed.”

Today’s News

Economic growth in the U.S. exceeded expectations in the second quarter, reducing recession concerns. Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers reportedly met with officials in the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith, indicating that federal prosecutors may be getting close to bringing an indictment against Trump in connection with his 2020-election-interference efforts. On Wednesday evening, soldiers in Niger declared a coup against President Mohamed Bazoum, who was elected in 2021 in the country’s first democratic transfer of power since it achieved independence.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

No One Deserves to Go to Harvard

By Jerusalem Demsas

No one deserves a seat at Harvard, but only some people are supposed to feel bad about the one they get.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action violated the equal-protection clause, spurring a news cycle about the admissions advantages conferred on certain people of color. The preferential admissions treatment that racial minorities received is just one bonus among many, however. A new study from the economic research group Opportunity Insights quantifies the advantages of wealth in higher education: The ultra rich are much likelier to gain admission to elite colleges than anyone else, even when controlling for academic success.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Knesset’s passage of legislation yesterday to curtail the authority of Israel’s Supreme Court marks a new era for the state of Israel. The disjuncture comes not because of the legal implications alone, although they are substantial. Nor because of the economic, diplomatic, and security damage wrought in the short time since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office, although it is considerable. Rather, the new era begins because of the damage that proceeding with the bill has done to Israeli society itself.

In March, the governing coalition led by Netanyahu paused in its effort to overhaul judicial review. Instead, it turned to administrative review—the Court’s authority to overturn actions taken by the executive branch—limiting the ability of the Court to set aside acts it deems “unreasonable.”

[Yossi Klein Halevi: Netanyahu’s betrayal of a democracy is a betrayal of Israel]

The reasonableness doctrine, as Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shani of the Israel Democracy Institute explained in Lawfare, provided grounds for striking down a decision where the Court found a conflict of interest, a procedural impropriety, or an act that exceeded the government’s legal authority. The Court could also rule on substantive grounds, finding that the government had acted in a discriminatory manner, taken into account irrelevant considerations, or adopted “patently unreasonable” decisions.

Both judicial and administrative review are powers broadly shared by courts in most democracies, but the reasonableness doctrine can be interpreted expansively. Many in Israel’s political opposition would have been open to a good-faith, consensus-based approach to constitutional reform, including the reasonableness doctrine. But that does not describe the Netanyahu coalition’s effort. The legislation passed yesterday was openly touted as just the first element in a sweeping plan to curtail nearly all checks on government power in Israel, which is already expansive.

Netanyahu, usually a cautious leader, has done more to fracture Israeli society in seven months than any prime minister before him, widening and exposing the deep gulf between his supporters and his opponents. The result has been an unprecedented political drama playing out in Israeli streets, as leaders of business and industry, academia, the medical establishment, labor unions, etc. protest his agenda.

Most notably, large numbers of military reservists have announced their intention to stop volunteering—which is not the same as refusing orders to serve, something no one has suggested. The volunteers include hundreds of servicemen in the air force, which relies on the reserves. As my Brookings Institution colleague Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz, the potential damage to military readiness is serious, and the Lebanese Hezbollah, among others, sees an opportunity.

Although there is no threat of the military disobeying civilian orders, or even a call for it to do so, individual military service has long been seen as an apolitical act in a country with ostensibly universal conscription, and a military with widely diverse political opinions. The government’s supporters view the protest of the reservists as a betrayal of the common Israeli code; its opponents view it as a sign that the Netanyahu government is tearing apart that code. Refusing to defend the state is a doomsday weapon, but a large segment of Israeli society believes it faces a democratic doomsday.

Ironically, the best explanation of the current situation came from Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right minister of finance and member of the security cabinet. Back in March, in response to a terrorist attack against an Israeli settlement, violent youth from those settlements rampaged through the Palestinian town of Huwara—an outburst that the Israeli general in charge called a pogrom. Smotrich condemned the vigilante violence in an interview, but said that the Palestinian town should be “wiped out” by the state instead.

[Read: From this hill, you can see the next Intifada]

During the ensuing uproar, Smotrich was approached by a friend, an Israeli-air-force pilot, who, Smotrich said, enlightened him about the damage his words had done. In an apology of sorts, Smotrich expressed his shock that he had been understood to have meant precisely what he indeed said. He did, however, spell out what had horrified so many in the military. Once a fringe far-right activist, Smotrich had become a senior cabinet minister, in a country where the cabinet is the collective commander in chief of the military. Pilots and others in the military are handed immense firepower, Smotrich’s friend explained, and they rely on the political leadership and state institutions to issue only morally defensible orders. Given the extreme positions taken by members of the Netanyahu cabinet, and its energetic efforts to limit all checks on its authority, military personnel were left to guess whether a senior cabinet minister was actually planning to order them to commit a war crime. That situation, for many, became untenable.

More broadly, many in Israel sense a breakdown of the social contract. If Israel is not fully democratic, then the state—which holds together a remarkably diverse Jewish population—can come undone. For Israel’s Arab citizens, the struggle to find their place in Israeli society has been all the more difficult, but their economic, social, and political gains in recent years are also threatened as judicial limits to the rule of a political majority that usually excludes them are removed.

Netanyahu supporters also sense a crisis. They see the breadth and strength of the protests against the reforms, and the refusal of reservists to volunteer, as efforts to subvert majority rule. They won the last election, they feel, and now the opposition is using extra-electoral means to prevent their preferred policies from being enacted. At their own protests, they have embraced the slogan “Second-class citizen,” a complaint that their votes count for less and their electoral mandates are regarded as illegitimate. Netanyahu supporters, on average, come from lower socioeconomic strata of society, and feel that established elites are fighting to retain their hold on the country in the face of demographic trends that favor Netanyahu’s coalition.

Ignoring the views of the large minority that supports the government would be a mistake, yet there are two major flaws in its narrative. The first is that Netanyahu’s government is not just pursuing a set of controversial policies but seeking to implement constitutional change. Securing a slender majority in an election should not suffice to make sweeping changes to a country's constitution. Israeli law grants a small or temporary majority the same constitutional power as a broad coalition, and allows swift constitutional changes, but it should still seek consensus and exercise self-restraint, not just as a matter of fairness but to safeguard the integrity of the polity.

Second, Netanyahu and many of his supporters have confused majoritarianism with democracy. These are not the same thing. As I wrote in February, democracy is the rule of the people, the demos, all of it, including the minority. Democracy is not a license for the majority to do as it wishes, with no guardrails.

Netanyahu supporters often claim that they have no tyrannical intentions. In private and in public, they greet any suggestion that they might abuse human or civil rights indignantly. Israel, however, also happens to control much of the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, for whom this argument rings hollow. They have seen otherwise. And although the current checks on executive action have had only a limited effect within the West Bank, there is a reason the ideological elements of the settler movement are so keen on the judicial overhaul. Without any checks, things could be far worse.

Moreover, good intentions are not enough in constitutional arrangements. Institutions, constraints, and the rule of law are also essential. Israel doesn’t need good intentions; it requires the messiness of real democracy.

The RSF and Arab militias are accused of killing lawyers, human rights monitors, doctors and non-Arab tribal leaders.

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Bill comes as Arab governments move to rekindle relations with al-Assad government after years of diplomatic isolation.