Israel, usually a beacon of democratic stability in a region blessed with precious little of either, is careening toward a constitutional crisis, as the establishment left and the populist right vie for control of the Jewish state.
To make a long story short, the country’s supreme court is gearing up to invalidate the actions of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), which recently voted to make the legislature sovereign and to pare back judicial authority. Israelis may soon face the dilemma, therefore, of obeying either the (conservative and elected) Knesset and prime minister, or the (progressive and unelected) judges of the high court, with both sides claiming to wield ultimate power over the Israeli state.
These days, most “responsible,” and therefore establishment-approved, voices insist that the conservative government of Israel should back down and let the judges have their way with Israeli “democracy.” At best, judicial and constitutional reform should be pursued with agonizing slowness, and with deference to judicial prerogatives.
That’s certainly the perspective of the Biden administration, which, shockingly, has sought to intervene directly in Israeli internal affairs, wagging its highly influential finger at the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. For some reason, American progressives, who are increasingly contemptuous of the U.S. Supreme Court, assailing its alleged corruption and tyranny, get awfully pious when discussing the powers and legitimacy of the Israeli high court, which regularly strikes down laws and appointments made by conservatives due to their “unreasonableness.” It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, from the leftists’ perspective, what makes a court, or any institution, legitimate in the first place is whether it does their bidding.
Be this as it may, what’s really at stake in the present battle is whether Israel will be a left-leaning, mostly secular social “democracy,” in which the people are subordinated to an all-knowing progressive elite and expert class, or whether it will be a right-leaning, mildly theocratic Jewish state, in which parliamentary elections choose governing coalitions with broad powers to, well, govern, even if they choose to do so in ways that make progressives groan.
Critically, it’s the right that currently holds most of the cards, democratically speaking, since it prevailed in Israel’s last parliamentary election. It thus has the ability to assemble a parliamentary majority in favor of fundamental reforms of the judicial system.
The left, accurately sensing the peril it is in, is doing its best to put its finger on the political scales to alter the outcome of a process over which it has lost democratic/parliamentary control. Establishment figures and progressives have agreed on a strategy that essentially holds the country hostage, by threatening that anything less than surrender on the part of Netanyahu and his conservative allies will produce political, economic and social chaos – which, since the leftists will be orchestrating and inflicting the chaos, is quite believable.
Among the tactics the left is already pursuing, or is actively considering, are: a general strike, global economic boycotts against Israel, street violence, blocking major highways and even the refusal of Israeli Defense Force reservists to fulfill their military obligations. The goal is to push the Israeli economy into recession, to make Israeli society increasingly fractious, to threaten Israeli citizens’ basic sense of security, to make ordinary commerce and daily life more challenging, to ruin Israel’s international reputation and to jeopardize Israel’s national security – all to prevent the elected government of the country from functioning as a normal government would.
The question of the hour is: Will Israel’s elected leaders submit to leftist/establishment intimidation, or will they press on?
There is another question, though, that we in America might want to ponder: Does Israel’s current predicament presage the unraveling of our own constitutional and democratic system, which both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, seem to expect, even though both sides assume that their partisan and ideological enemies will be ultimately responsible?
Consider that the left and the establishment have spent years trying to undermine, by legal, legislative, diplomatic, economic and cultural means, the decision of the British people in 2016 to pursue “Brexit,” i.e. an exit from the European Union. Not for the first time, progressives and establishment types interpreted “democracy” as necessitating the negation of the people’s freely expressed, democratic will. By some accounts, the establishment has succeeded in frustrating the process of Brexit and rendering Britain’s exit from the EU so “soft” and conciliatory that it accomplishes little in terms of reclaiming British sovereignty and independence.
Consider that, in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, progressives, Democrats and some RINOs worked feverishly to prevent Trump from taking office, to limit his powers once he assumed office, to delegitimize him in office and to evict him from office as soon as possible, and on the flimsiest of pretexts. The “will of the people” hardly entered into the equation.
Consider that, in 2020, establishment forces in the Democratic Party, government bureaucracies, the media, social media, corporations, the education system, nonprofits, the courts and other key institutions worked in concert to “protect” the 2020 presidential election from Trump and his alleged dirty tricks, meaning that the terms of the election, and the ways in which information was shared about it, were changed to guarantee one party – the Democrats – victory. What’s more, some of these forces jointly planned mass BLM-style unrest to force Donald Trump from office, if he proved hesitant to go.
When the U.S. faces its own inevitable “constitutional crisis,” therefore, perhaps in the wake of the 2024 election, or perhaps in the form of a Democratic Party effort to “pack” the Supreme Court with pliable leftist judges, what are the chances that we too will face similar tactics of intimidation, lawlessness and politically-engineered chaos designed to bully us into accepting permanent leftist hegemony?
Israel’s present crisis should, thus, be seen for what it is: a proxy war between the global, establishment left and the global, populist right. The left is, in essence, fine-tuning its menu of tactics and strategies to reverse, or render irrelevant, the outcome of democratic elections it deems unfavorable. If the establishment left succeeds in Israel, and if Netanyahu and his colleagues ultimately back down, you can bet that Democrats can and will adopt the Israeli opposition’s playbook here.
When the fateful hour arrives, we will see, at the very least, strikes, severe economic turbulence, international boycotts, civil disobedience, mass protests and (“righteous”) political violence. Given the recent actions of the Biden administration, we can safely assume that the Democrats’ game plan will also include arrests and selective, adversarial prosecutions, the imprisonment of dissidents, censorship of opposition figures, and direct collusion with a compliant media and social media. We may or may not be able to fight back effectively against such a ruthless, multifaceted program of anti-democratic actions by the establishment left, but we owe it to ourselves to see it coming and to do our best to prepare.
Democrats, progressives and their fellow travelers in the political, cultural and economic establishment tell us very frankly that their campaign of vilification against Donald Trump and his populist “ultra MAGA” movement are part of an “existential” battle for “democracy.” As we have seen, the “democracy” part is mere rhetoric. The “existential” part, however, is utterly sincere, and leftists and establishment figures worldwide are increasingly willing to do whatever it takes to protect their grip on power. The question now isn’t what will they do to beat conservatives into submission, but what won’t they do.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
SUPPORT TRUTHFUL JOURNALISM. MAKE A DONATION TO THE NONPROFIT WND NEWS CENTER. THANK YOU!
