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‘Two Israels’: What’s really behind the judicial reform protests
(JTA) — When Benjamin Netanyahu put his controversial calls for judicial reform on pause two weeks ago, many thought the protesters in Israel and abroad might declare victory and take a break. And yet a week ago Saturday some 200,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv, and pro-democracy protests continued among Diaspora Jews and Israeli expats, including those who gather each Sunday in New York’s Washington Square Park.
On its face, the weeks of protest have been about proposed legislation that critics said would sap power from the Israeli Supreme Court and give legislators — in this case, led by Netanyahu’s recently elected far-right coalition — unchecked and unprecedented power. Protesters said that, in the absence of an Israeli constitution establishing basic rights and norms, they were fighting for democracy. The government too says the changes are about democracy, claiming under the current system unelected judges too often overrule elected lawmakers and the will of Israel’s diverse electorate.
But the political dynamics in Israel are complex, and the proposals and the backlash are also about deeper cracks in Israeli society. Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, recently said in a podcast that the crisis in Israel represents “six linked but separate stories unfolding at the same time.” Beyond the judicial reform itself, these stories include the Palestinians and the occupation, a resurgent patriotism among the center and the left, chaos within Netanyahu’s camp, a Diaspora emboldened to weigh in on the future of Zionism and the rejection on the part of the public of a reform that failed the “reasonableness test.”
“If these protests are effective in the long run, it will be, I think, because they will have succeeded at reorganizing and mobilizing the Israeli electorate to think and behave differently than before,” said Kurtzer.
I recently asked observers, here and in Israel, what they feel is really mobilizing the electorate, and what kind of Israel will emerge as a result of the showdown. The respondents included organizers of the protests, supporters of their aims and those skeptical of the protesters’ motivations. They discussed a slew of issues just below the surface of the protest, including the simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict, divisions over the increasing strength of Israel’s haredi Orthodox sector, and a lingering divide between Ashkenazi Jews with roots in Europe and Mizrahi Jews whose ancestry is Middle Eastern and North African.
Conservatives, meanwhile, insist that Israeli “elites” — the highly educated, the tech sector, the military leadership, for starters — don’t respect the will of the majority who brought Netanyahu and his coalition partners to power.
Here are the emerging themes of weeks of protest:
Defending democracy
Whatever their long-term concerns about Israel’s future, the protests are being held under the banner of “democracy.”
For Alon-Lee Green, one of the organizers of the protests, the issues are equality and fairness. “People in Israel,” said Green, national co-director of Standing Together, a grassroots movement in Israel, “hundreds of thousands of them, are going out to the streets for months now not only because of the judicial reform, but also — and mainly — because of the fundamental question of what is the society we want to live in: Will we keep living in a society that is unequal, unfair and that is moving away from our basic needs and desires, or will it be an equal society for everyone who lives in our land?”
Shany Granot-Lubaton, who has been organizing pro-democracy rallies among Israelis living in New York City, says Netanyahu, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the coalition’s haredi Orthodox parties “are waging a war against democracy and the freedoms of citizens.”
“They seek to exert control over the Knesset and the judicial system, appoint judges in their favor and legalize corruption,” she said. “If this legal coup is allowed to proceed, minorities will be in serious danger, and democracy itself will be threatened.”
Two researchers at the Institute for Liberty and Responsibility at Herzliya’s Reichman University, psychology student Benjamin Amram and research associate Keren L.G. Snider, said Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reform “undermines the integrity of Israel’s democracy by consolidating power.”
“How can citizens trust a government that ultimately has no limitations set upon them?” they asked in a joint email. “At a time when political trust and political representation are at the lowest points, this legislation can only create instability and call into question the intentions of the current ruling party. When one coalition holds all the power, laws and policies can be swiftly overturned, causing instability and volatility.”
A struggle between two Israels
Other commentators said the protests revealed fractures within Israeli society that long predated the conflict over judicial reform. “The split is between those that believe Israel should be a more religious country, with less democracy, and see democracy as only a system of elections and not a set of values, and those who want Israel to remain a Jewish and democratic state,” Tzipi Livni, who served in the cabinets of right-wing prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert before tacking to the center in recent years, recently told Haaretz.
Author and translator David Hazony called this “a struggle between two Israels” — one that sees Israel’s founding vision as a European-style, rights-based democracy, and the other that sees that vision as the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland.
“Those on the first side believe that the judiciary has always been Israel’s protector of rights and therefore of democracy, against the rapaciousness and lawlessness of politicians in general and especially those on the right. Therefore an assault on its supremacy is an assault on democracy itself. They accuse the other side of being barbaric, antidemocratic and violent,” said Hazony, editor of the forthcoming anthology “Jewish Priorities.”
As for the other side, he said, they see an activist judiciary as an attempt by Ashkenazi elites to force their minority view on the majority. Supporters of the government think it is entirely unreasonable “for judges to think they can choose their successors, strike down constitutional legislation and rule according to ‘that which is reasonable in the eyes of the enlightened community in Israel,’” said Hazony, quoting Aharon Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel and bane of Israel’s right.
(Naveh Dromi, a right-wing columnist for Yediot Achronot, puts this more bluntly: “The problem,” she writes, “lies in the fact that the left has no faith in its chance to win an election, so it relies on the high court to represent it.”)
Daniel Tauber, an attorney and Likud Central Committee member, agrees that those who voted for Netanyahu and his coalition have their own concerns about a democracy — one dominated by “elites,” which in the Israeli context means old-guard Ashkenazi Jews, powerful labor unions and highly educated secular Jews. “The more this process is subject to veto by non-democratic institutions, whether it be the Court chosen as it is, elite military units, the Histadrut [labor union], or others, the more people will lose faith in democracy,” said Tauber.
Green also said there is “a war waging now between two elites in Israel” — the “old and more established liberal elite, who consist of the financial, high-tech army and industry people,” and the “new emerging elite of the settlers and the political far-right parties.”
Israelis protest against the government’s planned judicial overhaul, outside the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, March 27, 2023. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
And yet, he said, “I think we will lose if one of these elites wins. The real victory of this historic political moment in Israel will be if we achieve true equality, both to the people who are not represented by the Jewish supremacists, such as the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to the people who are not represented by the ‘old Israel,’ such as the haredi and Mizrahi people on the peripheries.”
The crises behind the crisis
Although the protests were ignited by Netanyahu’s calls for judicial reform, they also represented pushback against the most right-wing government in Israeli history — which means at some level the protests were also about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the role of religion in Israeli society. “The unspoken motivation driving the architects and supporters of the [judicial] ‘reform,’ as well as the protest leaders, is umbilically connected to the occupation,” writes Carolina Landsmann, a Haaretz columnist. If Netanyahu has his way, she writes, “There will be no more two-state solution, and there will be no territorial compromises. The new diplomatic horizon will be a single state, with the Palestinians as subjects deprived of citizenship.”
Nimrod Novik, the Israel Fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, said that “once awakened, the simmering resentment of those liberal Israelis about other issues was brought to the surface.” The Palestinian issue, for example, is at an “explosive moment,” said Novik: The Palestinian Authority is weakened and ineffective, Palestinian youth lack hope for a better future, and Israeli settlers feel emboldened by supporters in the ruling coalition. “The Israeli security establishment took this all into account when warning the government to change course before it is too late,” said Novik.
Kurtzer too noted that the Palestinians “also stand to be extremely victimized following the passage of judicial reform, both in Israel and in the West Bank.” And yet, he said, most Israelis aren’t ready to upend the current status quo between Israelis and Palestinians. “It can also be true that the Israeli public can only build the kind of coalition that it’s building right now because it is patently not a referendum on the issue of Palestinian rights,” he said.
Religion and state
Novik spoke about another barely subterranean theme of the protests: the growing power of the haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, parties. Secular Israelis especially resent that the haredim disproportionately seek exemption from military service and that non-haredi Israelis contribute some 90% of all taxes collected. One fear of those opposing the judicial reform legislation is that the religious parties will “forever secure state funding to the haredi Orthodox school system while exempting it from teaching the subjects required for ever joining the workforce. It is to secure for them an exemption from any military or other national service. And it is to expand the imposition of their lifestyle on non-Orthodox Israelis.”
What’s next
Predictions for the future range from warnings of a civil war (by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, among others) to an eventual compromise on Netanyahu’s part to the emergence of a new center electorate that will reject extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.
David E. Bernstein, a law professor at the George Mason University School of Law who writes frequently about Israel, imagines a future without extremists. “One can definitely easily imagine the business, academic and legal elite using their newfound political voice to insist that future governments not align with extremists, that haredi authority over national life be limited, and, perhaps most important, that Israel create a formal constitution that protects certain basic rights,” he said. “Perhaps there will also be demand to counter such long-festering problems as corruption, disproportionate influence over export markets by a few influential families, burgeoning lawlessness in the Arab sector and a massive shortage of affordable housing.”
Elie Bennett, director of International Strategy at the Israel Democracy Institute, also sees an opportunity in the crisis.
In the aftermath of the disastrous 1973 Yom Kippur war, he said, Israel “rebuilt its military and eventually laid the foundations for today’s ‘startup nation.’ In this current crisis, we do not need a call-up of our reserves forces, or a massive airlift of American weaponry to prevail. What we need is goodwill among fellow Israelis and a commitment to work together to strengthen our society and reach an agreed-upon constitutional framework. If we are able to achieve such an agreement, it will protect our rights, better define the relationships between the branches of government, and result in an Israel that is more stable and prosperous than ever as we celebrate 75 years of independence.”
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Meet Matt Turner, the only Jewish player on Team USA in the World Cup
(JTA) — When the U.S. squad suits up Friday night to face off against Paraguay in its opening contest in the 2026 World Cup, one Jewish player will be in the mix.
Goalkeeper Matt Turner is not only the lone Jew on the U.S. team but he could well be the only Jewish player in the entire tournament, which is being jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada starting on Thursday. It’s the first edition of the tournament to be hosted by three countries, and the first to feature 48 teams.
Israel did not qualify for the World Cup and hasn’t since 1970 — due, in part, to geopolitics that pushed its soccer federation to compete in the talented European body, not in Asia.
Jewish players DeAndre Yedlin and Daniel Edelman, who both play in the MLS and have previously played for the national team, are not on the roster this summer. Yedlin played with Turner in the ‘22 tournament in Qatar, where Turner, 31, was a star.
Turner, a New Jersey native, discovered his Jewish heritage by finding his paternal great-grandmother’s emigration papers that had allowed her to flee Lithuania during the Holocaust.
“Once I found the documents, I was certainly very, very excited,” Turner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2023. “America, in general, it’s a melting pot, and everybody has those roots elsewhere. So to understand your story, your history, a little bit is really nice.”
The revelation allowed him to obtain a Lithuanian passport, which made it easier for the goalie to pursue soccer opportunities in Europe. It also changed his relationship to his Jewish identity.
“The more my father and I dug, the more we learned, the more connected I felt to my Jewish side, the Jewish culture of my family,” Turner said at the time. “It really changed a lot of me.”
Turner, who now plays for the New England Revolution in MLS, started all four matches in 2022 for an American club that advanced to the Round of 16. He was the first American goalie with back-to-back shutouts in a World Cup since 1930.
Turner has 53 career appearances with the national team, with a 29-16-8 overall record, including 27 matches in which the opposing team did not score at all. He has also played in the Premier League and was the 2021 MLS Goalkeeper of the Year.
This time around, he is seen as less likely to start, following the ascent of a teammate to the top goalie slot. Still, he says he is moved to be part of the national team once more.
“I’ll probably cry when the national anthem goes,” he told FOX Sports. “It’s just such a huge honor — overwhelming honor — to be granted that responsibility to be on this team to do our best in those roles and ultimately, change soccer here forever.”
Although there are few Jews on the field during the 39-day tournament that ends July 19, one familiar Jewish face — or more accurately, voice — will return this year. Legendary Argentine broadcaster Andres Cantor, whose famous “Goooooooal” calls have helped popularize the sport in the United States, will be calling his 12th consecutive World Cup.
Cantor was born in Buenos Aires to a Romania-born mother and a father whose family fled the Nazis in Poland. He moved to the United States as a teenager and has publicly embraced his Jewish identity.
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Their nickname is the Red Crosses, but these World Cup challengers practice at a Jewish day school
For years, San Diego Jewish Academy had been preparing for the World Cup. The school, serving students from pre-K through 12th grade, has one of the best soccer fields in California, and tournament organizer FIFA had approved the site to serve as a national team’s base camp — if any visiting countries were interested.
When the school looked at the World Cup’s qualifying nations, they wondered if their plans might be for naught.
“You have Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Iran — teams that wouldn’t necessarily choose the Jewish Academy,” said Adam Benmoise, SDJA’s director of auxiliary programs. “We were nervous.”
To their relief, the World Cup schedule delivered a stroke of luck. The four teams playing group-stage games on the West Coast did include Qatar. But one the others was a country famous for its neutrality. Switzerland began practicing at the Jewish day school June 2.
Both sides have found the arrangement a winning one. For Switzerland, San Diego Jewish Academy is more than just a practice field. It’s also a gym, a media center and an office space. (Or a synagogue, if they needed one.) And for SDJA, a pluralist school with about 500 students, the rental arrangement doesn’t just pay the bills: it also connects the local Jewish community to the world’s biggest sporting event.
The partnership is the culmination of four years of planning for Benmoise, a lifelong soccer fan whose job is to drum up outside revenue for the school. Recognizing the unusual quality of the SDJA field — real grass, not turf — he pitched the school’s CFO and athletic director on the idea of renting it out to pro teams with an eye on the 2026 World Cup.
His first move was to bring San Diego tourism officials for a site visit. They were shocked — and word got around about the 56-acre hillside campus.
“It’s a true gem,” Benmoise said. “It’s built properly, it’s manicured properly, it’s mowed properly, we have the proper irrigation. It has all of the footprints of a professional-grade soccer field, but was built for a school.”
The field was used for practices during the Gold Cup, a biennial international soccer tournament, then by Major League Soccer and touring European clubs, and finally by the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams — whose rave reviews of the campus put San Diego Jewish Academy on FIFA’s radar.
To be added to FIFA’s official site catalogue for the World Cup, though, the vetting was more rigorous. The international soccer governing body has strict pitch standards, and it employs a phalanx of inspectors and groundskeeping experts to ensure fields are up to par and consistent with one another. Benmoise also had to prove that SDJA’s facilities could accommodate the wide-ranging needs of a national team program.
In response, the school expanded the playing area by covering an unused softball diamond with 16,000 square feet of sod — a project funded by school donors. (SDJA hasn’t fielded a softball team for over a decade, Benmoise said.) The school also rented and installed a 4,500 square foot tent with tile flooring to set up a gym alongside the pitch — a temporary construction that will be paid for by the Swiss. Benmoise is hopeful the school will get to keep the workout equipment.
Sergio Affuso, a press officer for the team, said in an email that Switzerland was “very happy” with the base camp. “It is great to see how enthusiastic everyone is about hosting us here, included the kids of the school, and the facilities are very well prepared,” Affuso said.
Per FIFA rules, each of the 48 countries playing in the World Cup has to host a public community day at their base camp to locals during one of its first five days of practice. But because school was still in session those days, FIFA allowed SDJA to invite only the internal school community to the event.
That day — June 3 — the SDJA student body, faculty and a few dozen parents filled the bleachers to watch the “Red Crosses” practice. Then the team set up some mini games to play with the kids — shooting on the goalies, passing and dribbling drills, and the crowd-pleaser known as “three Swiss players against 45 fourth graders.”
A pair of journalism-interested SDJA students are getting another special perk: the Swiss federation hired them as media interns for the duration of their stay in San Diego.
Benmoise didn’t want to share how much FIFA is paying to use the field, but said the compensation is “very generous.”
“Let’s just say we’re not charging FIFA the same that I would charge, like, a youth team,” he said.
SDJA isn’t the only Jewish school whose facilities rate professional use. A pair of Orthodox high schools in Los Angeles rent their basketball gyms to NBA players for off-season workouts. The all-star roster that uses those courts appreciate not only their quality, but also the schools’ privacy and security.
Benmoise said the Swiss team — which kicks off against Qatar on Saturday in San Francisco — was thus far too focused on game prep to explore the rest of the campus. But a social media post from the team’s Instagram account about their practice field did cause a stir back home.
The post was an overhead map of the practice facility, showing the dressing area, the play area, the goalkeeper area and — on the next slide of the carousel — the hills beyond the field, labeled “snake area.”
“Watch out for the snakes 🐍 👀,” the caption read.
An alarmed Swiss media published a number of stories about the threat of serpentine pitch invasions, forcing Affuso clarify that the post was an attempt at humor.
“People in Switzerland understood the joke,” he told The Athletic. “But maybe, abroad, they didn’t.” (Benmoise said snakes had “never been an issue” on the campus.)
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Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had planned to meet this week with Colombian President Gustavo Petro — who has compared Israel’s leaders to Nazis and recently defended his use of the phrase “Heil Hitler” on social media — during the South American leader’s visit to New York, a source familiar with the mayor’s schedule plans confirmed.
The meeting — set to be Mamdani’s first with a foreign leader — was reportedly canceled after the Trump administration intervened, directing Colombian officials to call it off, arguing that it would violate the terms of Petro’s entry into the United States for a United Nations Security Council session on Wednesday.
The State Department revoked Petro’s visa last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan, calling on U.S. soldiers to disobey presidential orders over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza and urging an armed response to counter Israel’s action against the Palestinians. Petro was granted a limited waiver this week to attend the U.N. meeting on the Middle East.
A former member of Colombia’s M-19 guerrilla movement and elected in 2022 as the country’s first socialist president in decades, Petro has repeatedly drawn condemnation from Jewish and Israeli leaders since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks for comparing Israel’s military actions to those of Nazi Germany. In 2024, he severed diplomatic ties with Israel, accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation Israel has strongly rejected.
This week, Petro came under fire after posting the phrase “Heil Hitler” on X in response to an op-ed supporting the right-wing presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, ahead of Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff. Petro defended the post, saying he was criticizing what he described as the author’s “fascist” rhetoric rather than endorsing the Nazi slogan itself. In his UN remarks, Petro again compared Israel to the Nazis.
A City Hall spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.
The mayor’s canceled sit-down with Petro is the latest flashpoint in his fraught alliances with inflammatory critics of Israel.
Mamdani has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country and called for divestments in Israel’s economy. Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade.
In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani has actively been campaigning for candidates who have made inflammatory statements on Israel, including challenging U.S. military aid to the country and accusing the Jewish state of genocide. In particular, Mamdani has thrown his support behind former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist Daraliza Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat with the incumbent’s support for Israel front and center. Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter, attended the Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, which was broadly condemned for celebrating the Hamas attacks on Israel. She has continued to defend her participation, saying that she showed up in anticipation of Israel’s “outsized reaction.”
Mamdani reignited tensions with many Jewish communities by posting a Nakba Day video produced by his City Hall media team commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948. That was followed by what was perceived as a delayed and ultimately supportive response to pro-Palestinian protesters who descended on a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood where a synagogue was hosting a real estate sale that included West Bank properties.
The head of Mamdani’s office of international affairs, tasked with interacting with the United Nations and handling diplomatic relations, is Ana Maria Archila, the past co-chair of the Working Families Party who led campaigns critical of Israel. On his first visit to the U.N. headquarters in March, Mamdani met with Secretary-General António Guterres, whom Israeli officials have criticized for his statements about the war in Gaza, accusing him of failing to sufficiently condemn Hamas. Israel recently cut ties with Guterres and barred him from entering the country following the blacklisting of Israeli authorities in a UN report regarding sexual violence in conflict zones.
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