This July 24, under a scorching heat, thousands of demonstrators follow live the vote of the debates of the Knesset broadcast on giant screens installed in front of the Israeli parliament. Around 3:30 p.m., the deputies begin to vote for the suppression of the notion of “reasonableness”, one of the major aspects of a reform aimed at weakening the Supreme Court. The deputies of the opposition having boycotted the ballot, the text is adopted by 64 votes in favor (ie all the deputies of the majority). When the result was announced, the crowd screamed their anger and shouted at “Bibi” Netanyahu. “Rugly, dictator, you are destroying our state”, exclaims a sexagenarian with dark glasses. “We will continue to fight,” swears Inbal Orpaz, one of the figures of the protest. “The government has chosen the salami tactic by passing this reform in small pieces. It thinks we are falling asleep, but we will remain mobilized until the abandonment of this anti-democratic reform”.
In the meantime, the coalition has just won its first battle in the fratricidal struggle that has been tearing Israel apart for six months. “Winter losers are summer winners,” commented the pro-government daily. israel today, recalling that last March, Netanyahu had to back down under pressure from the street. But this victory is less his own than that of the boss of the right wing of the Likud, Yariv Levin, the Minister of Justice. This dry, grizzled man cultivates the self-effacement of a high official, but he has considerable influence and has managed to impose his hard line on Netanyahu. “I would like to address the real Prime Minister, the one who holds this government, Yariv Levin,” opposition leader Yair Lapid once said from the Knesset rostrum.
Conservatives on the move
“Levin has been preparing this reform for about ten years. He gave me the outline of it during an interview at the Knesset in 2012”, testifies Pierre Lurçat, a Franco-Israeli essayist close to the Israeli right. “The essential issue is to restore power to the Knesset and to the government in the face of the Supreme Court, which has established itself as the ‘first power’ since the 1990s. It is therefore, he says, a rebalancing essential to the proper functioning of Israeli democracy.”
In the Knesset, Levin can count on the energetic Simha Rothman. Author of a successful rant against the Supreme Court, this 43-year-old deputy wearing a yarmulke and elected on the list of the Zionist-religious party has managed to unite the coalition around a project that he considers essential for the country. Founder of the think tank Meshilout (governance), Rothman evolves at the heart of the new Israeli right. In May 2019, he participated in Jerusalem in an “Israeli conservatism conference” bringing together 700 Israeli and Anglo-Saxon neoconservative intellectuals, including Douglas Murray, the “English Zemmour”. The event also welcomed the “Forum Kohelet”, an influential think tank which delivered turnkey elements of language and articles of law for the reform of justice to Israeli parliamentarians…
Also present, the Tikva (Hope) foundation finances a series of projects intended to “strengthen the Jewish identity of the country”. In his elegant office in the center of Jerusalem, Johnny Green, his spokesman, denounces the hostility of the Supreme Court towards conservative and religious Israelis. “During the Easter holidays, observant Jews refrain from eating bread, he illustrates. And for many years, hospitals did not allow bread to be brought into buildings. We can agree or not, but it is a prerogative of the state and the citizens to decide on such a policy. However, recently, the supreme court said ‘no, you do not have the right to ban bread in the hospitals at Easter’. For us, this is an attack on democracy”.
The mother of battles
The theses of the Israeli neoconservatives find an echo above all in the deep country. About sixty kilometers south of Tel Aviv, in the immediate vicinity of the Gaza Strip, the town of Sderot votes 80% for the Israeli right. Social downgrading is often mixed with the resentment of the Sephardim, who are very much in the majority in the towns on the outskirts, towards the Ashkenazi elite. “When our parents arrived from Morocco, the Ashkenazim held the reins of the country. They confined us to dirty jobs and parked us in outlying towns like Sderot where there was nothing”, says Daniel Suissa, a grocer from the downtown. “At the Supreme Court, there is not a single Sephardic judge. Why? We would therefore be the fools and they, the intelligent people? This reform is not good, it will hinder them. That is why ‘they go out to demonstrate.
Carried by favorable demographic winds, the neoconservatives are making Supreme Court reform the mother of battles. The one that will remove the legal obstacles to the colonization of the West Bank. Shay Rosengarden, vice-president of Im Tirtzou, a student organization close to the Likud, acknowledges this frankly. “Opponents of the reform know it will promote claims to the Land of Israel, Hebron, Jerusalem, and all of Judea Samaria (West Bank). And since the Israeli left doesn’t want that to happen, it scares them very much “.