Thread by @HeTows

An atmosphere has been setting in Israel that expects the broad opposition to the coalition's judicial reform to succeed or force significant concessions. But I'm lost as to whether this assessment is correct, because I struggle to distinguish between reality and propaganda. /1

There is growing talk on the center-left that since the economic & military elite largely opposes the reforms, if the coalition passes it then the Supreme Court will strike it down - and the everyone who matters will side with the Supreme Court rather than the coalition. /2

Thus, there is growing expectation that the coalition will significantly water down the reform package in order to make it tolerable enough to the relevant elites and unelected institutions to prevent the Supreme Court from being entitled/compelled to do so. /3

Although this is far from the dominant discourse on the right, even some right-wing intellectuals and public personalities who support the government contemplate this scenario now, for example @Roy_Iddan and @Yonatan_Jaku. (I started taking such talk seriously when they did.) /4

Why do I nonetheless have grave doubts? Because I think the center-left engages in heavy-duty psychological warfare, which reminds me of how I felt about the never-ending stream of news in the first days and weeks of the Russia-Ukraine war. Reading news feels a lot like that. /5

The psychological warfare began with "warnings" by opposition politicians and ex-generals that the reform package could push Israel into civil war. The coalition interpreted these warnings as thinly veiled threats, and correctly so. Nobody spoke of civil war before that. /6

It continued with an economic gevalt campaign that "warned" of capital flight, emigration & divestment, especially in the high-tech sector. The coalition quickly dubbed this as "BDS", not entirely wrongly; as @ReinceNiebuhr summed up the warnings: "nice economy you got there". /7

@ReinceNiebuhr And now the prediction that the Supreme Court will strike down the laws and that there will be widespread non-cooperation with government policies based on the struck-down judicial reform. These "predictions" are also, obviously, encouragement: they aim to implant the idea. /8

@ReinceNiebuhr It also doesn't help that Israeli media isn't an impartial reporters of the reforms. Channel 14 is a right-wing channel, widely seen (rightly) as mostly just regurgitating government propaganda. The other TV channels are most subtle, but they aren't neutral either. A lot has /9

@ReinceNiebuhr been written about this, but there was no group minor enough for its opposition to the reforms to be left unreported (one highlight I remember was a protest by marzipan makers, if memory serves well). In some instances maps showing how to get to the protests were presented. /10

The significance of this is that it's somewhat hard to know how united and how determined opposition to the reform is in the unelected institutions that have the power to effectively choke it in the event of a constitutional crisis. The media certainly reports many dramatic /11

cases of wall-to-wall opposition, like that of the elite fighter pilots a few days ago. But a media that clearly took a side in this struggle is expected to report on every event that bodes ill for the reforms and stay quiet on events that point to a more complex picture. /12

Just as with the case of the "civil war" rhetoric and the "economic scare", a powerful narrative can create the reality. If everybody who matters thinks that everyone else who matters will side with the SC, then it will be likely that everyone will indeed side with the SC. /13

I mentioned my feelings over the first few days of the Ukraine war. But another helpful analogy may be military coups. When and how do military coups succeed? Why is it important for military coups to occupy major TV channels and read out dramatic announcements? Because it's /14

key to the success of military coups to rapidly create a feeling of inevitability: that no matter what happens, the coup will succeed, and that the prudent thing is therefore to not dare oppose it. This is an analogy; a constitutional crisis isn't the same thing as a coup. /15

But the logic of psychological warfare is the same. If the protests and the public reporting on them create a widespread feeling of inevitability, that eventually Levin's reforms (in their present formulation) are bound to fail, then it's much more likely they *will* fail. /16

That's why I sit on the fence about what's going to happen. I hope Levin's reforms will be moderated. But I can't determine if the people who are confident that this will happen have a good insight or are (often faultlessly) just caught up in the propaganda machine. /17-end