Pollak: The Military Intervenes in Israel — and the USA

What happened this week in Israel is best understood as a partial military coup, backed by the U.S. government.

The Israeli opposition used protests to shut down the country — and used mass military desertion to force the democratically-elected government to suspend judicial reforms to make the courts more accountable to the legislature.

For all President Joe Biden’s bluster about “democracy,” he backed the opposition, and the coup attempt.

That stance was extraordinary — and hypocritical, given that judicial reform is also a hot topic in the U.S. Biden himself has considered “packing” the Supreme Court to counter its conservative majority with liberal justices.

In some ways, what the Israeli government is trying to do is what the U.S. did in the Jacksonian era, at about the same stage of American democracy — 75 years in — that Israel has reached today. Back then, a growing, changing society saw demands from the frontier to share in the political power previously monopolized by New England brahmins and Virginia planters.

But in Israel, the elites are not yet willing to compromise.

Former left-wing Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently explained the strategy of the Israeli opposition in a candid lecture at Chatham House, a highbrow think tank on international affairs.

He acknowledged that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms — which he called “regime change” — were actually legal and democratic. However, he explained, the Israeli opposition could stage a “counter-revolution” in the streets:

Observers have compared this strategy to the “color revolutions” in former Soviet republics in recent decades (e.g. Ukraine). Clearly, Israel’s opposition knew it was going outside the rules of the democratic game.

Friends of Israel are trying to put a brave face on what happened. My friend and mentor, Alan Dershowitz, called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to pause the judicial reforms “just the latest example of Israel’s raucous democracy at work.”

In contrast, consider the Wall Street Journal headline from Wednesday: “Soldiers Forced Netanyahu’s Hand.” The fact that the soldiers were largely reservists barely softens the blow.

It is no use pretending that what happened this week was democratic. The question is whether it is legitimate.

And that is a real question: after all, we quietly accept, in principle, the idea that some military coups may be necessary.

When the Egyptian military overthrew the country’s first elected leader, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, the world accepted it — not just because of anti-Morsi protests in the streets, but because Morsi was an Islamist.

The lesson of the Iraq War, and the Arab Spring, was that democracy is not the same as, nor as important as, liberty. And liberty requires a foundation of order, based on common principles that give the state legitimacy.

There are some countries, such as Turkey, in which the world has generally been willing to accept military intervention when it is done to preserve the secular or liberal character of the state.

The question is whether Israel is now just another Turkey, where military intervention is acceptable to prevent certain parties from governing, even if they win an election.

And given our recent history, the question is relevant to the U.S. as well.

But first, to Israel.

Israel’s military made clear, through the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff, and through an unauthorized speech by Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant while Netanyahu was abroad, that it would not allow the right-wing legislature to weaken the left-wing judiciary.

One reason was that the left was threatening civil war, which the military sought to prevent. Another reason was that the generals themselves oppose Netanyahu.

Likewise in the U.S., where senior law enforcement and intelligence officials undermined President Donald Trump after 2016. Later, national security officials, active and retired, opposed his efforts to restore order during the 2020 riots, and sought to prevent his reelection.

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis sided with the mob; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley apologized for standing with Trump; and we all know about the Hunter Biden laptop.

In both countries, the defense establishment has been captured by the left — both through the indoctrination of the officer corps, and through a growing cultural divide between the elites and the bulk of the population.

In Israel, the opposition justified military pressure against Netanyahu’s government by claiming that he was the one attempting a coup. Netanyahu still faces petty criminal charges in the Israeli courts, after all; to allow him to reduce the power of the courts and the attorney general would be to place himself above the law. (All of that presumes that the charges against Netanyahu are legitimate, and not also an effort to force him from power.)

Likewise, in the U.S., the military justified its opposition to Trump by claiming, as Mattis did, that Trump himself was the threat to the U.S. Constitution. The nature of that “threat” evolved, over time: first Trump was supposedly a Russian agent, then he supposedly used troops to attack protesters in a park.

(All of those claims fell apart, until the events of January 6 gave Trump’s enemies the justification they needed, and will use again.)

Israel’s coup is not yet complete. The only force standing in the way is Netanyahu himself, who shocked the IDF and the political opposition by firing the defense minister, asserting civilian control of the military, in principle.

There will now be a negotiation process over the next few months to determine whether Israel’s opposition will accede to changes that will reduce the supremacy of the judiciary, through which the left has wielded power.

These changes are moderate, not radical. All of them have parallels in the U.S. Even the most controversial one, to allow the Knesset to overrule the Supreme Court, has an analogue in the U.S., though the threshold is much higher (three-fourths of the states to pass a constitutional amendment).

In the U.S., many state judges and local prosecutors are elected; Congress can even eliminate most of the federal judiciary by a simple majority vote.

The reason that does not happen is that it would be viewed as an abuse of power by the majority. There is still enough trust on both sides of the political aisle.

But that trust is quickly eroding — in both the U.S. and Israel.

The outcome in Israel is unclear.

On the one hand, Netanyahu would appear to have won a significant victory. By sitting down to negotiate, the opposition parties have accepted — in principle — the idea that there must be judicial reform in Israel, that the current system is so out of balance that half the country sees it as illegitimate. (A common complaint among Netanyahu’s supporters is that their votes are constantly nullified by the courts.)

On the other hand, the opposition is still in the streets, and the military brass are still waiting in the wings to take action.

Already, there is an effort to lobby Netanyahu to accept Gallant back as defense minister, despite the brazen power play he tried to execute.

The U.S. is siding openly with the opposition: President Joe Biden reneged on a promise by Ambassador Tom Nides to invite Netanyahu to the White House as a reward for negotiations.

The negotiations are being overseen by Israel’s ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, who bears as much blame for the crisis as anybody. Several weeks ago, as the protests were growing, Herzog suggested that he would offer a compromise plan.

At first, it seemed that Herzog, theoretically above politics, would tell his former left-wing allies that they had to accept some reform. But then he changed his mind: his plan sided with the opposition.

That accelerated the crisis, because there was no one left to adjudicate the clash between the legislature and the courts.

We saw a similar failure in the U.S. in 2012 when Chief Justice John Roberts, supposedly a conservative, saved Obamacare by essentially rewriting the law. Instead of rebuking President Barack Obama for making sweeping, one-sided changes to the country — the kind Biden tells Israel not to make — Roberts vindicated him.

Roberts acted to preserve the legitimacy of the courts after Obama made the bizarre, and threatening, claim that the Supreme Court had no power to review legislation.

Regardless, the Obamacare decision set forces in motion that led to America’s ongoing political impasse, where each side tries to use slim majorities to impose massive changes on the other. (Biden has learned nothing; he hailed the anniversary of Obamacare last week.)

In Israel, Herzog’s failure to exercise responsible leadership probably made some kind of military intervention inevitable.

Either the military was going to have to discipline the military deserters and clear the streets of protests, defending the democratically-elected government and restoring order by force; or it would have to emerge from the shadows and oppose Netanyahu more openly than it ever had before. It chose the latter.

Time will tell if that was the right choice.

In the best-case scenario, Israel’s leaders will realize how close they came to the brink, and will forge a compromise on judicial reform that inaugurates a new constitutional era. The worst-case scenario is too awful to consider.

Barak seems confident that the “counter-revolution” will win. It could — but at an incredibly heavy cost.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox population does not serve in the military, but many of the soldiers are religious, and have right-wing political views. Those soldiers obeyed orders during the pullout of settlers in the Gaza “disengagement” of 2005. They may not do so again, now that the left has legitimized desertion. Morale could take years to rebuild.

We have a similar problem in the U.S., where the “woke” military that is studying “white privilege” and holding “drag queen story hour” is struggling to recruit new soldiers from the demographic once most eager to serve.

The danger in both societies is an attrition from the military, and public life, that will leave us open to conquest by enemies who know what they want and are determined to take it. If we are not free, we will not survive.

It is time for elites — including senior command structures in the military — to make their peace with the aspirations of so-called the “deplorables” in our respective societies.

Let us hope for a good outcome in Israel. But let us not fool ourselves: this is not democracy at work. The military is involved. There, and here.

And we must be honest: it has been involved, and will be involved, in America, too.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.