Thread by @AviWoolf

So, I've tried to avoid talking about the fight over Israeli judicial reform (no, it's not a "coup") because it's the sort of thing that's led to emotions as extreme as when Trump was just elected in 2016. But I was asked to explain what's going on by a friendly follow, so...

I am doing it under two conditions, which are non-negotiable:

1) Please take the time to read the entire thread to the end. It will be long, but it should be worth it.

2) If you have snarky, combative, trollish, &c things to say - keep it to yourself. Otherwise, it's a block.

Our story begins in 1953 (no, this is not a typo). The country is run by a majoritarian center-left coalition of the old national type. The Justice Minister doesn't like this very much, especially the way the party dominated the govt.

So he drafted a law on how the Knesset appoints judges which is fundamentally anti-democratic and intentionally so, effectively giving the courts a veto and sometimes a majority (with the lawyers' guild) as to who gets in.

At the time, the courts were the weakest link in the Israeli chain, so the center-left govt was happy to oblige. Besides, the judges of the first generation were steeped in the idea of the court staying out of politics and being as impartial as reasonably practical.

That doesn't mean the court didn't protect the little guy against government abuses. It did, even commies bashing the government for wanting to send troops to help Truman in Korea. But it did so only when there was a clear violation of the law as written or core principles.

As a general rule, the court and even the Supreme Court did what it could to let the Knesset make the decisions or even not make a decision. Everyone no matter their views understood their legitimacy was based on acting like, well, a court.

All this began to change in 1977, when for the first time a rightwing, more religiously minded government replaced the long reigning center left. A wave of ongoing, metastasizing panic washed over the (still) very secular and increasingly cosmopolitan professional elite.

What's more, unlike before 1977, the two political sides were often deadlocked on a lot of core issues. A rising second generation of Israeli jurists, led by people such as Aharon Barak, a fan of Ronald Dworkin and Earl Warren, spotted opportunity.

Here was a chance to take the once very restrained court and turn it into a sort of super-tribunal that checked the now seemingly unstable and dangerous rising tide of populist democracy (yes, even then), based on the values of the "enlightened" Israeli PMC.

The process was gradual. Barak was first AG, then a justice, then President of the Court. Through careful rhetoric, cajoling, and playing on the fears of secular legal Israelis that the public could not be trusted to govern itself, he expanded the court's power more and more.

Rarely did Barak actually have a legal leg to stand on. Nor do his successors. Even many a secular jurist pointed this out at various levels. But in the end, the desire for the preservation of a secularist Israel against a coming Iran or other nightmare tended to silence them.

One of Barak's most powerful tools was the aforementioned committee. Once designed to ensure the majoritarian Israel didn't stack the court with party members, he used it to ensure only people who agreed with him and his views got on the court at all levels.

Thus, instead of the general give and take you had and still have in the US and most democratic countries regarding the shape and character of the court, we ended up with a system where, every step of the way, the court was immune from any oversight. Even with appointments.

Many on the right and even on the center-left were increasingly uncomfortable with this and the growing tendency of the court to give the AG and State Attorney the power to veto legislation or government decisions simply because they didn't like it.

A massive democratic deficit was opening up, one which remains today. The fact that the court and legal academia now operate in a closed shop where they keep radicalizing and think the court should effectively be able to do whatever it wants has only made things worse.

That's one side of the ledger. The other side of the ledger is the Israeli right's evolution on the subject. You may often hear of how the first rightwing Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, was a big fan of the court and judicial independence. This is a half-truth.

Like the aforementioned Justice Minister in the beginning of our story, Begin wanted the court to be as independent as possible to be a bulwark against corrupting leftwing party rule. His views need to be understood as supportive of that first generation of impartial jurists.

But the second, third, and fourth generations are a different story. These increasingly became less amenable to Zionism or even moderate national identity and increasingly considered themselves Anywhere cosmopolitans, defending "liberal democracy" in the same vein as the US PMC.

It took people in RW parties time to realize the change. Many had grown up fighting the left's politicization of institutions and liked the idea of independent and impartial spaces above politics. A decade and a half passed before they realized the court was now ideological.

Which brings us to Bibi. To read something like 95% of English language commentary, you'd think Bibi was an Erdogan or Putin in training, a man who was chomping at the bit to gut critical democratic institutions. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Until the formation of the current government, Bibi went out of his way to avoid pushing needed reform, either of the committee or other distortions. From 2009 to 2019, he made a point of giving at least one part of his coalition veto power over any radical or major change.

Indeed, he often bragged about being friendly with Aharon Barak, the man the right has increasingly come to hate as an arrogant, condescending dictator who thinks the law is whatever he feels like.

Even as he got tied up in all sorts of criminal problems (not going to comment on whether they have any basis; for another time), getting Bibi to push for reform was harder than pulling teeth without anasthetic.

For all his bluster and sometimes demagoguery, Bibi has always been a centrist triangulator at heart, in most rhetoric and in policy. He's better at stand-firm Toryism than the kind of bulldozing people like Ariel Sharon engaged in with the Disengagement.

None of this mattered or matters to the commentariat and the PMC, who consider him to be guilty of whatever he's accused of and who think that he's a great danger to the country ever since he returned to power in 2009.

It is only very recently that he agreed to a reform, and perhaps the worst mistake the current AG did was declare him unable to comment publicly on the efforts due to his ongoing trial - denying everyone someone who'd been a calming and compromising voice on the issue.

The third element of this saga is what I would call the emergence of rightwing think tanks in Israel, a slow and halting process after largely leftwing academia and its associated institutions absolutely dominated all public discourse.

Contrary, again, to most public rhetoric and discourse, the intellectual inspiration of these institutions is the Federalist Society, the US constitution, people like Antonin Scalia. Not Orban or Erdogan or whatever boogeyman you want to name.

They wanted not to destroy the courts or put in yes-men, but to create a truly conservative legal elite and institutions which would go back to that first generation of giants who enjoyed everyone's respect - right, left, or center. Religious or secular. &c.

Whether or not the current reform package dies or not, they will, God willing, continue to do so - to the country's benefit, IMHO.

So far, the source of ideas for much of the current reform efforts. But what about the politicians themselves? The coalition and its often overbearing and even scary behavior?

A lot of people will say this is typical of the Israeli right as such. I think that's bullshit. They've unfortunately behaved the same way any coalition with seemingly unstoppable voting power would behave. It's the RW version of Emmanuel Rahm: "Fuck 'em, we have the votes."

Thus, instead of restraining themselves and calmly advancing reform step by step, and in dialogue at least with more moderate elements of the opposition, every MK acted like it's Hannukah and now's the time to push everything they want forward.

Thus, law after law with no chance of passing got headlines and rightly terrified lots of center and left Israelis that the coming nightmare of an undemocratic theocracy was just around the corner. They made Barak's argument that he was the only thing preventing this for him.

It's not true of everyone. People like @rothmar, the committee chair working on the reforms, made real and sincere efforts to negotiate, to ally fears, to explain things, and even to make one-sided concessions. But he was drowned out by the cocky radicals.

Which brings us to the Israeli PMC - in hitech, business, law, media, academia, and pretty much all the professions. Including medical. @darelmass

I don't think I've seen anything like what happened in the past few months since Trump's election. From a generally liberal but still somewhat ecumenical bunch, the entirety of the Israeli professional middle class started to speak with one voice against any reform.

Gone were the very real debates and genuine concerns of overreach in the justice system. Gone, too, was any pretense of allowing dissent or even disagreement. Instead, masses of petitions all moving in lockstep, threats of taking every step necessary to stop legislation.

Instead, a massive moral panic that catastrophized everything the government did, no matter how completely routine or legal. Every quote that could be distorted was. Every action that could be maliciously understood was. It was their time for choosing, and they chose.

What swept through every single professional institution swept up hundreds of thousands of ordinary and concerned Israelis, many of whom supported (and still support) reform themselves. Hence, the many scenes of protest around the country.

Added to this was a particularly obscene form of class warfare rhetoric, whereby the PMC, themselves often descended from the people who founded the country or fought for its establishment and defense, whereby they really own it while others are simply the tolerated masses.

Thus, actions like blocking major roads for hours, refusing to present for reserve duty, threatening to boycott the country economically - stuff that was legitimately considered beyond the pale and a violation of the social contract - became permissible for the Elect.

Again - it's not like the existing coalition didn't engage in really obnoxious behavior. "We have the votes, FU!" and things like trying to pass laws to allow convicted felons to serve as ministers were and are middle fingers to the broad middle of the country.

But as in war, so in political conflict, escalation has its own logic. It feeds on itself, creating ever more radical and dehumanizing rhetoric towards both sides. Which led us to the impasse Israel is in.

I don't think the current announced stoppage of the reform is going to do much. The left's blood is up and they smell blood, and responsible parliamentary leaders are letting themselves being led by the most extreme of the protest leaders.

Meanwhile, to describe what the right feels is something between anger and despair. It feels it lives in a country with a tiered system of citizenship, where winning elections is meaningless because the other side can break the rules whenever it wants while the right can't.

A lot of stuff careful observers noted but many people drowned out or preferred not to notice is now all out in the open and in everyone's face. Repairing the damage done, if anyone even wants to compromise and repair, is going to take a long time.

I don't know what comes next. I do know that Israel's problem is not a lack of democracy or people who want to kill its democracy. Its problem is a particularly dangerous misalignment between the country and its elites in terms of what they want the country to be and look like.

If all this leads to figuring out how to put the pieces back together again and maybe forging a new or renewed social compact, then maybe it will be worth it. But meantime, things are bad. Just not for the reasons you think. Fin.