The State of Israel, the world’s Start-Up Nation, the 20th century’s eighth wonder of the world is spinning incredibly fast on a roulette wheel. For those living in Israel, the giddiness feels like losing control. Whether it’s deliberate or by chance, this feeling of losing of control has wrought despair, confusion and ultimately – fear.
At this time, all signs point to the end of this giddiness leading Israel fast into a contemporary black hole of history – to a suffocating era of post-democracy. There is much to fear.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his coalition partners, began turning the roulette wheel immediately upon returning to power. But their plans started long before.
For the first time since Netanyahu entered politics, following the November 2022 elections (the fifth in four years), the stars aligned for Israel’s right-wing camp - which been preparing itself for decades for this moment. The prime minister’s trial at the district court, compounded by the real fear that he would be found guilty of at least one of the charges against him, sat well with the revolutionary and regime fantasies, intensely nurtured for years by conservatives – the idea that Israel must backtrack her attitude to Liberalism, the Separation of Powers, the Supremacy of Law and the Rule of Law.
Unlike the divided left-wing camp, the conservatives knew that to be successful in their mission, they had to put in the work. They needed to invest enormous efforts and a great deal of money. With the generosity of conservative American billionaires, they set up a research institute, a think tank, publishing house, a lecture machine, a mission statement lab and a plethora of other things. All these products had customers – among the general public searching for something in era of post-ideology or ambitious politicians, looking for material to support their agenda.
Away from the limelight Israel’s right-wing camp was wiped out. The camp that for decades had lived with the “Peace Now vs. All of the Land of Israel” dichotomy was gone. On it’s ruins were built the right-wing camp dreaming of annexation, but not necessarily of West Bank’s Area C, but more of the corridors of the Supreme Court in the Giv’at Ram neighborhood of Jerusalem.
The argument about the expected outcome of the judicial reforms proposal is hollow. No democracy that has passed the plans that Netanyahu and his partners are advancing, has remained a democracy. Hungary, Poland and Turkey are living proof that you can be elected democratically and still destroy the democracy that brought you to power – never to depart from it.
The experiment is being conducted on the lives of Israelis. But this is an experiment with only one, known result: Less democracy, less personal freedom, more corruption, more rotten government, less freedom of expression, less supervision of the unlimited power conservative politicians are demanding for themselves.
To paraphrase Albert Einstein: no matter how many times they conduct this experiment in the West, no matter how much they promise citizens that nothing will change – the results will be the same. And they clearly indicate that Israel will cease being a liberal democracy and will be turn into yet one more mutation enveloped in a network of disinformation that will try convincing its citizens that they can just carry on with their lives. They can fly overseas, eat in restaurants, but not touch politics. Apart from that, citizens will be told that everything’s okay.
But nothing will really be okay. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And when corruption becomes part of the political equation, political leadership which spawned that corruption cannot allow democracy to continue.
Because when you have government corruption, the last thing the government wants is a free press, freedom of expression, inspection or investigations. So, beyond the very definition of democracy and beyond the exact word that might describe the dramatic change in the structure of government in our country - Israel will be less Israel.
Modern dictatorships, or “democtatorships” don’t look like Nicolae Ceaușescu’s tyrannical Romania. Secret police won’t be roaming around and tanks with armed personnel won’t set up checkpoints in and out of Tel Aviv. At least not at this stage. And to be honest, these days, you don’t need a tank when you have Pegasus [ed.-Israel-made spyware].
In short: if the new regime wants to know anything about its citizens, it’ll find ways to do it without disturbing traffic in Jerusalem’s main streets. So, without disturbing traffic, the glorious Start-Up Nation will become yet one more wild bet on power-hungry politicians’ roulette wheel.
Attila Somfalvi is the lead anchor of Ynet Studios, a political commentator, and commentator on the Jewish world