Editor’s Note: At the author’s request, their name has been removed from the byline.
The State of Israel is in its seventh month of large-scale protests.
The government, led by disgraced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s militarist, expansionist, neoliberal Likud, in a coalition with other far-right parties, has unleashed its police on the crowds.
In January, “Justice” Minister Yariv Levin of Likud drafted a sweeping judicial reform proposal, aimed at severely curbing the power exercised by the country’s Supreme Court over the Knesset (parliament).
The draft sparked outrage in Israel’s middle-classes — particularly academics, urban labor aristocrats, and, naturally, lawyers — who skew “liberal” and secular. It also drew criticism from pro-Palestinian NGOs, which view the Supreme Court as a stopgap, tending to rule against merging the State with religious institutions and entrenching Israel’s settlement and military occupation of the West Bank.
One of the government’s proposals is to limit the court’s application of so-called “reasonableness” standards — a vague concept in various European and westernized legal systems. The Supreme Court currently has the power to annul laws passed by the Knesset it deems “unreasonable,” and often does so.
A bill to curb such rulings passed the Knesset, 64–0, on Monday, July 24. All 56 opposition MKs abstained in protest.
In the following days, Israel’s major cities have been rocked by renewed demonstrations, some featuring violent confrontations between protestors and police.
The “liberal” opposition decries the judicial reforms as “anti-democratic,” and frames itself as “pro-democratic.” This framing has been uncritically accepted not only by liberal activists, journalists, politicians, but also by some Marxists. However, it is entirely false.
Israel’s Supreme Court is unelected. Judges are appointed by panels consisting of Knesset members and ministers, currently sitting judges, and Israeli Bar Association officials; of these, only the MKs are elected by the public. The court is, in fact, a self-selecting, self-perpetuating bureau, appointed by Israel’s elite lawyers. This is not a democratic institution! It is arguably even less democratic than the comparable U.S. Supreme Court.
The truth is that neither the government nor the opposition is “pro-democratic.” Israeli reactionaries and “liberals” alike wish to maintain the colonialist status quo, whereby millions of Palestinian and Syrian Arabs in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights suffer military occupation, settler terror, dispossession, artificial poverty, and political disenfranchisement — a system internationally condemned as apartheid.
Nevertheless, this confusion presents an opportunity for the Israeli left and for Communists within Israel. Major elements of the occupation government have joined this revolt, including its military and its chief scientists. Should a Communist resistance still exist within Israel in anything but name, it must now rise to the defense of Palestinian independence and demonstrate for the end of the Israeli state. The news agency Al Jazeera has taken up the line that Communists should already have been trumpeting! This is the time to expose the Israeli state in the eyes of its own people, when the Israeli settler-population is at its most receptive.
The only “democratic” reforms are those that weaken the State of Israel, empower the Palestinian masses, and force the Israeli workers to confront “their” government and military. If Israeli workers and middle-class liberals fear repression, if they abhor their country’s militarism, racism, and neoliberalism, if they desire a “democratic” state, then their only path to lasting redress is to forsake their privileges, betray “their” state, and ally themselves with the Palestinian liberation struggle — for the right of return and a single pluralistic, secular, democratic republic in Palestine, from the river to the sea.
