VOICE OF THE JEWISH NEWS: How much more is Netanyahu willing to risk?

Last week, this newspaper said Israel was fast approaching its moment of reckoning. It’s fair to say that it arrived.

Vanishingly few weeks in a nation’s history can accurately be described as ‘seminal’, yet that is exactly what we have just witnessed.

Hundreds of thousands of patriotic Israelis were already on the streets crying ‘Shame’ at Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition for stubbornly pursuing what most felt was a lurch into autocracy. When one of his ministers finally advised that they pause, he was sacked. For millions, it was the final straw.

Those who remember 9/11 will recall watching the TV with their mouths open in stony silence for what felt like hours, numbed by the images and information coming through, struggling to fully comprehend the enormity of what had just happened.

Young and old, these were no subversives being pummelled and knocked off their feet by powerful police water cannon.

This week felt a little like that, albeit to a far lesser extent. It had the same dropped-jaw can’t-look-away horror to it, left you in the same semi-numbed silence, took a similarly long period for it to sink in.

What we and everyone else around the world saw was Israel toying with the entire post-war project to tear itself apart, in public, over a far-right political plan to hobble Israel’s judges, so a bonfire could be lit under equal rights in the country (otherwise known as ‘the Kahanist dream’).

The sacking of Yoav Galant, which opposition leader Yair Lapid said “crossed a red line”, proved to be the spark. Within hours, millions of frustrated Israelis ground the country to a halt, after Israel’s main trade union called an immediate general strike.

Hospitals, universities, schools, Ben-Gurion Airport, councils, nurseries, the civil service, and much of the country’s tech industry all came to a shuddering stop. Thousands blocked the main motorways, as Israeli diplomats around the world resigned. Others laid low in embassies as protesters gathered outside.

It was sudden, global, impressive, and unprecedented. Readers will struggle to compare it. Netanyahu, who had been in the UK just hours earlier, looked unusually rattled. Of course, he took to the TV to blame “extremists” for the protests.

Yet that’s the rub: these certainly were not extremists. They were the (normally) silent majority, the moderates, many having never protested anything in their lives, but who felt moved to do so here. Young and old, these were no subversives being pummelled and knocked off their feet by powerful police water cannon.

Simcha Rothman, one of two right-wing politicians pushing the legal reform, seemed to channel Donald Trump when he urged their supporters to take to the streets and “not give up on the people’s choice”. As he did, the clouds darkened.

Of more concern is that Netanyahu’s capitulation was only ‘allowed’ by his far-right coalition partners after he agreed in return to set up a new armed ‘national guard’ under the control of crackpot security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

It was too late. Netanyahu caved. He had to. He acknowledged what many protesters had long warned of: that he would tear the country in two if he persisted. Did he take responsibility for holding Israel to ransom? No. Did he resign? Of course not.

We British Jews have long held Israel’s democracy aloft in the face of hatred and diminishment, proud of its robustness in a region of tinpot dictators.

That is why Jews both within and outside Israel abhor the current Israeli government’s power grab at the expense of the justice system, which should be independent.

To say it undermines Israeli democracy is an understatement.

Tzipi Livni, an iconic 21st century Israeli politician, told Jewish News last week that Israelis had “woken up”. This week, they rose up – and the government blinked. A cheer, then, but this is a battle, not the war. Plans are ‘paused’, not scrapped.

Of more concern is that Netanyahu’s capitulation was only ‘allowed’ by his far-right coalition partners after he agreed in return to set up a new armed ‘national guard’ under the control of crackpot security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Ben-Gvir, remember, was once convicted of supporting terrorist group Kach, which espouses the ideology of Meir Kahane, who sought to establish a Jewish theocratic state where non-Jews who are not turfed out of Israel entirely live with no voting rights because they are “the enemy of Israel and of Jews”.

In Ben-Gvir’s living room once hung a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, a religious mass-murderer who killed 29 Palestinians (including children) and injured 125 more in Hebron in 1994. Promising Ben-Gvir his own personal armed militia is like giving the nuclear codes to the guy on the bus.

Moreover, Netanyahu’s plans to knee-cap the judiciary – the same one that indicted him on corruption charges – have not been binned.

The battle for Israel’s soul, alas, is far from over.