Netanyahu’s War on Israeli Institutions

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waging a war on many fronts.  He has ended the tense ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza in spectacularly bloody fashion and resumed bombing of Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon.  Missiles fired at Israel from the Houthi rebels in Yemen also risk seeing a further widening of hostilities.

Domestically, he has been conducting a bruising, even thuggish campaign against Israeli institutions and their representatives, an effort that is impossible to divorce from his ongoing trial for corruption.  He has, for instance, busied himself with removing the attorney journal, Gali Baharav-Miara, a process that will be lengthy considering the necessary role of a special appointments committee.  On May 23, the cabinet passed a no-confidence motion against her, prompting a sharp letter from the attorney general that the Netanyahu government had ventured to place itself “above the law, to act without checks and balances, and even at the most sensitive of times”.

High up on the Netanyahu hit list is the intelligence official Ronen Bar, the Shin Bet chief he explicitly accuses of having foreknowledge of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.  “This is a fact and not a conspiracy,” a statement from the prime minister’s office bluntly asserted.  At 4.30am that morning “it was already clear to the outgoing Shin Bet head that an invasion of the State of Israel was likely.”

The PMO failed to mention Netanyahu’s self-interest in targeting Bar, given that Shin Bet is investigating the office for connections with the Qatari government allegedly involving cash disbursements to promote Doha’s interests.

While Bar has been formally sacked, a measure never undertaken by any government of the Israeli state, the Israeli High Court has extended a freeze on his removal while permitting Netanyahu to consider replacement candidates.

It is the judiciary, however, that has commanded much attention, pre-dating the October 7 attacks.  Much of 2023 was given over to attempting to compromise the Supreme Court of its influence and independence.  Some legislation to seek that process had been passed in July 2023 but the Supreme Court subsequently struck down that law in January 2024 in an 8-7 decision. The relevant law removed the Court’s means to check executive power through invalidating government decisions deemed “unreasonable”.  In the view of former Chief Justice Esther Hayut, the law was “extreme and irregular”, marking a departure “from the foundational authorities of the Knesset, and therefore it must be struck down.”

Even in wartime, the Netanyahu government’s appetite to clip the wings of an active judiciary remained strong.  In January 2025, it made a second attempt, with a new, modified proposal jointly authored by Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar.  The law, passed by the Knesset in its third and final reading on March 27, alters the committee responsible for appointing judges.  The previous nine-member judicial selection committee had been composed of three judges, two independent lawyers and four politicians, equally divided between government and opposition.  Now, the relevant lawyers will be government and opposition appointees, intended to take effect after the next elections.

The convulsions in Israeli politics have been evident from various efforts to stall, if not abandon the legislation altogether.  The law changing the judicial appointments committee had received 71,023 filed objections.  While it passed 67-1, it only did so with the opposition boycotting the vote.  Benny Gantz, the chair of National Unity, wrote to Netanyahu ahead of the readings pleading for its abandonment.  “I’m appealing to you as someone who bears responsibility for acting on behalf of all citizens of this country.”  He reminded the PM that Israeli society was “wounded and bleeding, divided in a way we have not seen since October 6 [2023].  Fifty-nine of our brothers and sisters are still captive in Gaza, and our soldiers, from all political factions, are fighting on multiple fronts.”

The warning eventually came.  To operate in such a manner, permitting a parliamentary majority to “unilaterally approve legislation opposed by the people, will harm the ability to create broad reform that appeals to the whole, will lead to polarization and will increase distrust in both the legislative and executive branches.”

Before lawmakers in a final effort to convince, Gantz, citing former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, issued a reminder that “democracies fall or die slowly when they suffer from a malignant disease called the disease of the majority”.  Such a disease advanced gradually till “the curtain of darkness slowly [descended] on society.”

Gantz also tried to press Levin to abandon the legislation ahead of the two Knesset plenum readings.  In a report from Channel 12, he called it a “mistake” to bring the legislation forward.  The response from Levin was that the legislation was a suitable compromise that both he and Sa’ar had introduced as a dilution on the previous proposal that would have vested total control in the government over judicial appointments.  The revision was “intended to heal the rift of the nation”.

Healing for Netanyahu is a hard concept to envisage.  His authoritarian politics is that of the supreme survivalist with lashings of expedient populism.  Sundering the social compact with damaging attacks on various sacred cows, from intelligence officials to judges, is the sacrifice he is willing to make.  That this will result in a distrust in Israeli institutions seems to worry him less than any sparing from accountability and posterity’s questionable rewards.

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