Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party refused Sunday to accept Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer to negotiate on the government’s remaining judicial reform proposals unless the legislation is shelved for 18 months, into the year 2025.
By then, he clearly hopes, the right-wing coalition government will be forced to call new elections and the issue will be moot, meaning that there will be nothing at all to negotiate.
The right thing to do would be to accept Netanyahu’s invitation and to work with other opposition parties to shape compromises that will result in modest changes to the judiciary that will boost public confidence in its fairness and its independence. Perhaps the parties could even take the leap of preparing a written constitution for Israel, which it has done without for 75 years. The mere existence of talks would calm the markets and end talk of “civil war.”
But no. It is a sign of the immaturity of Israel’s political opposition that Lapid prefers a confrontation.
There are three things going on here. First, Lapid and fellow opposition leaders, with the help of the media, have whipped the left-wing protests into such a frenzy that, like Palestinian leaders unable to sign a peace deal with Israel for fear of assassination, they cannot bring a compromise to their own base and survive the ensuing internal backlash.
Second, the opposition is being encouraged by two external factors: one, the stance of the Biden administration, which foolishly believed that it could stop Netanyahu from passing the first (and mildest) of the reforms last week, and has encouraged the opposition protests; two, the influence of heavy spending on protests that has likely been committed by the well-heeled backers of the protest movement, just as wealthy donors fund radicalism in the U.S.
Third, even the more serious opposition voices have been at it so long that they seem to have lost their bearings. Listening to a podcast hosted by the Times of Israel, I was struck by the lack of self-awareness of the intellectuals lamenting Netanyahu’s audacity in passing a bill along party lines. While tough for the losing side, such tactics are common in the U.S. And there seemed to be no awareness of the judicial corruption that made reform necessary.
In Israel, as in the U.S., the law enforcement apparatus of the state — including the police, the prosecutors, and the judges — decided to target a populist political leader with flimsy charges. Netanyahu has been fighting an absurd legal battle over, essentially, a request for better media coverage. Trump faces indictments, state and federal, over “documents,” and will soon be indicted in Georgia for challenging election results — as Democrats do, routinely.
Both countries’ elites have convinced themselves that these efforts, while flawed, are legitimate because they are fighting a greater danger. In the U.S., those who have pursued Trump since the days of the Russia collusion hoax are convinced they are stopping what they have convinced themselves is fascism in America, which justifies every breach of the rules — including excusing the more serious and real corruption of President Joe Biden and his family.
In Israel, Netanyahu’s opponents are horrified that he might think himself to be above the law. But when the law itself has been twisted by politics, and when the police have to violate basic civil rights to take down their target, something is seriously wrong. While no one is above the law, no one is meant to be beneath it, either. It is hardly a test of the rule of law for a man wrongly accused to fight for innocence — and to fix a system that abuses its power.
A good question to ask in both countries is how it is possible that both societies have become so divided that the people who are destroying public faith in the legal system — the foundation of any stable democracy — have no idea that they are doing so. We have to ask questions about the effect of social media and its possible manipulation by bad actors, both foreign and domestic, to understand the blindness of our countrymen, and perhaps ourselves.
What is lacking in both Israel and America — especially on the left, which is better funded, more organized, and determined to push dramatic cultural changes onto both societies — is a sense of leadership. Lapid could play a heroic role; he could end the chaos and angst in Israel by setting an example of compromise. Instead, he wants the elected government to abandon its mandate in the name of “democracy.” It is pure immaturity, with a massive cost.
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 recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.