Israel: Impunity comes home to roost
Protesters hold up a large Israeli flag at a demonstration following a parliament vote on a contested bill that limits Supreme Court powers to void some government decisions, in Jerusalem on July 24, 2023
Mouin Rabbani writes in Al Jazeera 5 Aug 2023
The contention that the roots of Israel’s current political crisis are to be found in its policies towards the Palestinian people is gaining currency. According to this perspective, the authoritarian legislative agenda of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and the methods deployed to achieve it, represent the inevitable and inescapable culmination of Israel’s 75 years of oppression and repression of the Palestinian people, and particularly its systematic eradication of the rule of law in the Arab territories it has occupied since 1967.
Some additionally suggest that Netanyahu and his far-right allies’ primary motivation for promoting the legislative programme is to acquire powers with which to more intensively dispossess the Palestinian people.
It is an admittedly appealing argument, especially for those making the point that Israel’s claim to be a “Jewish and democratic state” is in fact a confession of ethnocracy and for those seeking to promote the inclusion of Palestinian rights within the agenda of the movement protesting the government’s reform plan.
The idea that Israel is experiencing a blowback in its domestic politics from its policies towards the Palestinians does have some basis in reality. To state the obvious, a Jewish supremacist regime necessarily empowers Jewish supremacists.
This, coupled with expansionist policies which require systematic violence and the permanent subjugation and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, has over time elevated the most extremist and messianic leaders to the pinnacle of power.
As in similar situations throughout history, such forces tend to view any obstacle to their objectives, including established institutions and dissenting members of their own community, as disloyal elements that need to be neutralised.
The above notwithstanding, to interpret Israel’s current crisis as an organic product of its policies towards the Palestinians, or as a domestic replication of Israeli methods of rule vis-à-vis the Palestinians, is to fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of this crisis and the Palestinian reality.
Clearly, mass demonstrations carried out by Israelis at regular intervals throughout the country have not been criminalised, and those participating have, when confronted, encountered police forces using batons and water cannon rather than military units with snipers who shoot to maim and kill. Whatever one may think of Netanyahu and his plans for the Israeli judiciary, his government was constituted on the basis of an election and his agenda is being adopted by a parliament that the overwhelming majority of Israeli citizens embrace as the legitimate if not exclusive representation of their collective political will.
All this is a rather far cry from the Palestinian reality of being ruled by a foreign military government under a colonial regime imposing extraterritorial legislation by force.
The assertion that this crisis could have been averted if Israel had adopted a constitution may well be mistaken since constitutions, like judiciaries, can be revised and indeed replaced altogether.
More clearly nonsensical is the claim that Israel refrained from adopting one because it would otherwise have to declare its borders, and either enshrine equality for all its citizens or formally proclaim ethnocracy.
Constitutions do not delineate borders. And it is a matter of record that Israel’s 1948 declaration of statehood promised equality to those it was in the process of ethnically cleansing from their homeland, and that in 2018, the Knesset adopted a Basic Law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people rather than of the citizens of the state.
Israel’s failure to adopt a constitution primarily reflects its founders’ unwillingness to take a position on the vexed question of religion and state, thus avoiding polarisation between the rabbinical establishment and secular elites. These two sides have clashed over the definition of Jewishness, but have displayed remarkable consensus on denying Palestinians their rights.
Similarly, the current crisis is first and foremost an internal dispute within Israel’s Jewish population and elites about the governance of their ethnocracy and the role of its institutions.