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‘The gun is on the table’: Both sides of Israel’s debate say that a constitutional crisis is coming
(JTA) — In a country that is deeply divided, where attending anti-government protests has become a weekly ritual for many, at least one idea still unites the right and left: Israel appears to be hurtling toward a constitutional crisis.
The crisis — which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu termed a “governmental breakdown” during a recent visit to Germany — would flow from legislation Netanyahu is pushing that would overhaul Israel’s judiciary. The proposal — which critics say threatens Israel’s democratic character — would increase the coalition’s control over the appointment of Supreme Court judges, and would enable Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to override court decisions with a simple majority.
A constitutional crisis occurs when a country faces an unsolvable dispute between competing branches of government. Countries have recovered from constitutional crises in the past — the United States has had several over the centuries, including multiple ones related to the leadup to the Civil War and its aftermath — but the process can be difficult, and mistrust long-lasting.
In Israel’s case, what happens if the Knesset passes the judicial legislation, the Supreme Court strikes it down, and the Knesset doesn’t abide by that decision? Does the court or Knesset hold final authority?
However that question is answered, just getting to that point would represent a dramatic breakdown in a 75-year-old democracy. “The very idea that the government might not comply, might ignore the Supreme Court’s decision, would be an unprecedented crisis,” said Michal Saliternik, a law professor at Netanya Academic College.
In that dangerous moment, some Israelis see opportunity. In a perhaps ironic twist, Israel is on the precipice of a constitutional crisis but doesn’t actually have a constitution. It’s a risky bet, but a battle between the court and the coalition, said international law scholar Tamar Megiddo, might just force Israel into the long and arduous process of writing a governing document and figuring out how to balance the country’s competing authorities.
“The entire constitutional system here is held together by duct tape,” said Megiddo, who teaches at the College of Law and Business outside Tel Aviv. “It’s ridiculous. We have no protection of our constitutional regime, no protection of our separation of powers, no protection of checks and balances and no protection of human rights. The only reason this functioned for the past 75 years is because there was good faith.”
She added, “I think a lot of people view the current constitutional moment, or the realistically likely constitutional crisis, as also an opportunity for fixing everything that’s broken in the system.”
When asked how a clash between the government and courts could come to a head, those scholars and others all individually sketched out versions of the same scenario: The government passes a law giving itself control over judicial appointments, the court strikes down the law — and the government appoints new judges anyway. When those judges arrive for their first day of work, should the security guards let them in? Who should the guards obey — the government that appointed the judges, or the courts that declared their appointment illegal?
While that question is being debated, the courts may not be able to hear cases at all.
“At the end of the day, the state needs to function,” Saliternik said. “The courts have work to do. If the judges can’t enter their chambers, it will definitely impact everyone. It’ll be like a third world country in which institutions don’t function.”
The law on judicial appointments may be passed next week, and for rank-and-file Israelis, both Saliternik and Megiddo said, this question would hardly be theoretical. If Israel’s system of government descends into crisis, it could lead to a downgrade in the country’s credit rating and an economic downturn that ordinary citizens feel in their pockets. And given how invested Israelis have become in the face of the judicial reform — protesting in the streets by the hundreds of thousands — it’s unlikely they’ll ignore what ensues if and when it passes. Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who has a reputation for congeniality, gave a pained speech last week warning of the potential for civil war.
“If the court issues a ruling and the government does not comply, then the Israeli public will say, ‘This is the ultimate proof that this is not a democracy anymore,’” Saliternik said. “I say this with trepidation, but if there’s an open battle between the Supreme Court and the Knesset, it could result in street violence.”
Megiddo said that even the possibility of such a crisis has normalized tactics that were once on the fringe, such as refusal to perform military service, a duty seen as sacrosanct across much of Jewish Israeli society. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly warned that the possibility of mass refusal to serve could cause him to leave his post. On Tuesday, a group of military reservists said they plan to recruit tens of thousands more who will pledge to shirk reserve duty if the legislation goes through.
“People who refuse service were considered, in the Israeli public, to be a very extreme minority, and now it’s mainstream to say that people won’t serve the military for a dictatorship,” Megiddo said. “It’s unbelievable how mainstream saying that at the moment is, and that has long-term impact.”
Both supporters and opponents of the legislation in the Knesset are treating a constitutional crisis as a real possibility. The only thing they disagree about is who will be to blame — and both sides appear to be raising the stakes, vowing either to disobey government decisions, or disregard the court.
“The security situation is troubling,” said former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, an opponent of Netanyahu, in a speech last week referencing escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and urging Netanyahu to pause the court legislation. “Don’t drag us into an irresponsible constitutional crisis during a security crisis.”
Netanyahu’s allies, unsurprisingly, say it is the opponents of the reform — and the justices of the court themselves — who would be responsible for a constitutional crisis, should the court strike down the law.
Striking down the reform legislation would be a “doomsday weapon,” wrote Dror Eydar, a columnist for the pro-Netanyahu tabloid Israel Hayom, in a piece titled “Inviting a constitutional crisis.” “This striking down would constitute a coup d’etat.”
(Another column four days later in the same publication, however, urged a compromise on the judicial reform in order to avert a constitutional crisis. That piece was written by Miriam Adelson, whose husband Sheldon — the late billionaire philanthropist — founded and funded the paper.)
Netanyahu’s coalition members are still worried enough about the prospect of a constitutional crisis that they’ve agreed to what they refer to as a “softening” of one piece of the legislation. Instead of giving the coalition total control over Supreme Court appointments, the new text of the bill would let the coalition control its first two judicial appointments.
“There’s no doubt that the change we made prevents any real claim that can create a constitutional crisis,” said Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who is spearheading the legislation, on an Israeli news show on Monday.
A view of the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem. (Eddie Gerald via Getty Images)
But then he threw down the gauntlet: If the court still overturns the law, Levin said, “That would cross every red line. We definitely wouldn’t accept it.”
Responding to that claim, Yair Lapid, the leader of the parliamentary opposition, said that if the government disobeys the court, citizens should disobey the government.
“That’s it, the masks are off. The gun is on the table,” Lapid tweeted. “The real prime minister, Yariv Levin, is drawing us into total chaos and a constitutional crisis we won’t be able to come back from. If the justice minister is calling on the government not to obey the law, why should the citizens of Israel obey the government?”
Another Likud lawmaker, Economy Minister Nir Barkat, said he would respect the court’s ruling if it struck the law down. But in any case, the Likud bill doesn’t appear to be a promising avenue toward compromise. “This isn’t softening and compromise, this is Hungary and Poland on steroids,” Labor Party Chair Merav Michaeli said on a radio program on Monday, referring to countries where the government has increased its control over the court system. “From the start, I said we can’t negotiate with them.”
A predecessor of Michaeli’s in the Labor Party has also taken a hard line and — unlike the many voices who worry about a clash of government authorities — has suggested that he would prefer a constitutional crisis to compromise. Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister, said that a constitutional crisis would force senior Israeli military commanders to take sides — and expressed confidence that they would choose to obey the courts.
“It would be a severe constitutional crisis,” Barak said in a speech last month. “That’s when the test of the gatekeepers and defenders of sovereignty would arrive: The head of the Shin Bet, the police commissioner, the chief of staff and the head of the Mossad. I’m convinced that they understand that in a democracy, the only choice is to recognize the supremacy of law and the Supreme Court.”
The mounting threats by military reservists, and comments by former military commanders opposing the court reform, may indicate that the military will opt to follow the court. But Saliternik hopes that’s a choice Israeli forces won’t have to confront.
“This is something that has never happened in Israel,” she said. “It’s so very hard to think about. I very much hope that that government will get a hold of itself and act responsibly.”
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In ‘Waiting for Godot,’ the tragedy and comedy of the Jewish experience
Seventy years ago, in the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, of all places, the curtain opened on the American premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The theater had promoted the play as the “laugh sensation of two continents.” By intermission, half the audience had walked out. My guess is that few of them were laughing.
Of course, Beckett had the last laugh. His two-act play, one in which the critic Vivian Mercer famously quipped that nothing happens — twice — became arguably the most influential and iconic play of the 20th century.
Since the theatrical debacle in Coconut Grove in January 1956, the world has not only come to terms with the play, but it has literally become the play. Of course, this happens on an individual scale, where each of us, in countlessly different ways, finds there is no way forward. No less alarmingly, it unfolds on a global scale as well, one where the world seems to be waiting, with a mixture of dread and hope, for the arrival of, well…what?
Don’t ask Beckett. He almost always insisted he had nothing to say about his plays, not to mention contemporary events. This claim is reflected in stage sets as bare and bleak as the dialogue — dialogue which gradually withers into monologues, then drifts into the mute gestures of mimes. When a French radio producer who was preparing a show on the play asked what it meant, Beckett told him, “All that I have been able to understand I have shown. It is not much. But it is enough, and more than enough for me.”
This was not enough for Bert Lahr, best remembered as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, who had been cast as Estragon in the Coconut Grove production. His son, the theater critic John Lahr, recalled in a New Yorker essay that the elder Lahr was terrified not that he would forget his lines, but instead that he would never understand them. Still, the younger Lahr who, when he was 14, ran the play’s lines with his father, recalled: “If Dad was mystified by the play’s idiom, he understood all too well its psychological terrain: waiting, anguish, bewilderment.”
There are certainly clues enough to the play’s meaning in the world wracked by world wars and cold wars, genocidal regimes and totalitarian ideologies, the poisoning of our natural resources and denaturing of our political discourse. Obviously, Beckett could not fully remove himself from this world. As one of his favorite thinkers, Arthur Schopenhauer, observed, even Dante mined the material for his hell from his medieval world.
Similarly, Beckett found his hell in a modern world ever more brutalized in ever more technologically advanced ways. The play’s stage set — a bare tree, an empty road, a rocky mound — suggests the world that, a few years earlier, had been the scene of death camps and death marches. As a volunteer at a pile of rubble that was once a hospital in the liberated, and almost entirely obliterated, French city of Saint Lô, Beckett saw firsthand the unfathomable cost of total war. He was no less stricken by what the war cost European Jewry. As Germany defeated and occupied France in 1940, Beckett was among the earliest recruits to the French resistance. He was appalled by what the Nazi occupation meant for French Jews, including his friend Alfred Péron. (When Beckett’s resistance network, “Gloria,” was uncovered by the SS, he just managed to escape to southern France, but dozens of fellow résistants, including Péron, were captured and imprisoned.)
Though it is always a dicey matter to connect settings and dialogue from fiction with those from fact, there are instances in Godot that, like Estragon, beg for such attention. An early exchange between Didi and Gogo anticipates the work on antisemitism by Hannah Arendt, who managed to hide in Montauban, a city a few dozen kilometers from Roussillon, the city where Beckett was hiding.
Vladimir: Your Worship wishes to assert his prerogatives?
Estragon: We’ve no rights anymore?
[Laugh of Vladimir, stifled as before, less the smile.]
Vladimir: You’d make me laugh if it wasn’t prohibited.
Estragon: We’ve lost our rights?
Vladimir: [distinctly] We got rid of them.
Or take another exchange between the two displaced and disoriented friends, one that evokes what was revealed to the world with the liberation of Auschwitz.
Vladimir: Where are all these corpses from?
Estragon: These skeletons.
Vladimir: Tell me that.
Estragon: True.
Vladimir: A charnel-house! A charnel-house!
Estragon: You don’t have to look.
Vladimir: You can’t help looking.
There are many other clues, some so obvious that Beckett dropped them from the final draft. For example, Estragon was originally named Lévy. (More than 1,500 individuals by that name, the most common Jewish name in France before the war, were deported to the death camps.) Or that estragon, as commentators have remarked, is a bitter herb that is rooted in the practice of Passover.
But to over-emphasize these possible meanings of Beckett’s play is to underestimate a broader and deeper meaning. Didi and Gogo offer something of immeasurable value — apart, that is, from uneasy laughter. They embody the virtues of solidarity and compassion — virtues that, paradoxically, go hand in hand with Beckett’s pessimism. In this tragicomedy, there are luminous moments of goodness, as when Didi cares for Gogo by offering him carrots, calming him with a song, and covering his shoulders with his own coat while Gogo sleeps.
For Beckett, this was and remains, as Pozzo declares in the play, “a bitch of a world.” And yet, Gogo and Didi, who always threaten to go, nevertheless always fail to do so. Of course, this offers a very dim prospect. But the image of these friends reminds us that Beckett never gave up on humanity. We must not, either.
The post In ‘Waiting for Godot,’ the tragedy and comedy of the Jewish experience appeared first on The Forward.
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Rep. Jared Moskowitz becomes latest Jewish lawmaker to reveal antisemitic threats
(JTA) — The messages that Rep. Jared Moskowitz said he received at his office were filled with obscenities, calls to “kill Jews” and warnings that the Florida Democrat would be “going down.”
Moskowitz played the voicemails during an interview with CNN’s Sara Sidner on Friday as he described a sharp rise in antisemitic hostility against Jewish lawmakers since Oct. 7, a trend he said reflected a broader normalization of antisemitic rhetoric in American public life.
“We seem, Sara, to have passed a Rubicon now with these antisemitic threats,” Moskowitz said. “It used to be once in a while you’d see a swastika on a building, once in a while, you know, someone would say something online. Now it’s every day, all the time, on podcasts, online, in the media, in the halls of Congress, and they’re trying to get Jews.”
CNN played multiple messages that illustrated Moskowitz’s point, with Sidner warning viewers that what they would hear was “deeply disturbing.”
Moskowitz, who is Jewish, said the spate of threats had caused him to need a police officer stationed outside his home 24 hours a day, since a man was sentenced to prison for plotting to kill him in November 2024.
“The U.S. government needs to kill Jews, you kill these f–cking nasty Jews, kill every single f-cking Zionist scumbag,” a caller said in one of the voicemails. “Zionism is treason to ‘we the people’ in our U.S. Constitution. Kill Israel.”
Another caller left this message: “Hey you Zionist Jew f-cking pig. How about no more money for Israel? Funding Israel, stealing more of our money for Israel. F-ck Israel, let them f-cking burn to the ground. You’re going down too, sir.”
Moskowitz is far from the only Jewish lawmaker to report a rapidly increasing number of antisemitic threats and harassment in recent weeks. The shift comes as both parties grapple with internal tensions about how to handle antisemitism within their ranks, and as anger about Israel and the Iran war funnels more attention to U.S. Jews. It also comes amid rising political violence in the United States.
“It’s no longer a Republican and a Democrat [issue],” Rep. Max Miller, a Jewish Ohio Republican, told Axios this week. “Both ends of our parties are wackadoos who hate Jews.”
Miller received a message warning that “antisemitism is on the rise because you guys think you own the f-cking world,” according to Axios, which said the caller added, “You guys are going to be shot dead every f-cking day.”
Among the messages highlighted by a recent Axios report on the phenomenon was a letter sent to New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, in which one constituent wrote that “Hitler was spot-on, 100% right about the filth that you Jew-bastards, you kikes are.” In a voicemail left for Ohio Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman’s office, one caller said, “I don’t like Jewish people, and the congressman should just go die.”
The lawmakers say the phenomenon is new. “Across the board, we have never seen anything like this in my lifetime in public office,” Jewish California Rep. Brad Sherman told the New York Times last month. “It’s like you turned the volume up from two to 10.”
The volley of antisemitic threats has also spilled into the real world, with Miller reporting last year that a man had attempted to run him off the road while calling him a “dirty Jew.” Last year, a man set fire to the residence of Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro hours after his family hosted a Passover seder there.
“We need good people to not be quiet,” Moskowitz said when Sidner asked him what message should be sent in response to the rise in antisemitic rhetoric targeting lawmakers.
“There are people out there, they may disagree with U.S. policy, they may not like the leader of a country, but they shouldn’t be allowing antisemites into their movement,” Moskowitz said. “They should not be embracing this sort of behavior, because they’re trying to win some sort of political point. It should be obvious.”
Moskowitz’s comments echoed a growing debate over the normalization of antisemitic rhetoric within American politics on both the left and the right, with Jewish lawmakers and watchdog groups warning that language once relegated to the fringes has increasingly become mainstream.
Last week, Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he would not campaign with Maureen Galindo, a Democratic congressional candidate in Texas who says she wants to open a “prison for American Zionists” among other incendiary remarks. Talarico said in a statement that “antisemitic rhetoric has no place in our politics.”
On Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul’s son William apologized after he made repeated antisemitic comments directed at New York Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who is not Jewish, including calling Jews “anti-American.”
Moskowitz told CNN that, while people may criticize the Israeli government and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the voicemails left at his office illustrated “how quickly, you know, they go from Zionism to Jews, Israel to Jews.”
“Listen, if you don’t like Netanyahu, great, go out and criticize him all day long,” Moskowitz said. “But don’t let people into your tent that you know are threatening to kill my family or my kids.”
The post Rep. Jared Moskowitz becomes latest Jewish lawmaker to reveal antisemitic threats appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish groups denounce fatal shooting at San Diego mosque, say it proves need for security funding
(JTA) — Jewish groups are denouncing a fatal shooting at a mosque in San Diego in which three people, including a security guard, were killed. They are also saying the incident, which follows attacks on synagogues, underscores a need for more federal funding for security at houses of worship.
Police in San Diego said they are investigating the attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego as a hate crime. San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said two teenagers, ages 17 and 19, who appeared to have carried out the attack were found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a car nearby.
“We are heartbroken by today’s attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego. Islamophobia has no place in California or anywhere in this country,” Jesse Gabriel, chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to working with our colleagues to strengthen protections for houses of worship and combat hate-motivated violence.”
The attack, which occurred at about 12:30 p.m. local time, sent five area schools into lockdown, including a Hebrew charter school.
“We’re safe and we’re following the direction of the police,” a representative for Kavod Hebrew Charter School told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by phone on Monday afternoon. Kavod is a non-religious bilingual K-8 school that employs a number of Jewish and Israeli educators.
A synagogue that houses a school in an adjacent neighborhood also said it was briefly locked down in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
The mosque attack comes two months after a man rammed an explosives-laden truck into one of the largest synagogues in the United States, Temple Israel in Michigan. There, the synagogue’s robust security training was credited with halting the attack. Children were inside the adjacent preschool at the time.
“The images coming from San Diego are all too familiar to us,” Temple Israel said in a message to its community that it posted to social media. It said that one of its rabbis, Jen Lader, was in Washington, D.C., to lobby for $1 billion in federal security funding for houses of worship.
Jewish Federations of North America said it had more than 400 local Jewish leaders in Washington to lobby for the security funding, which it said was necessary to protect religious communities from threats that are “real, urgent, and growing.” The $1 billion ask is a centerpiece of JFNA’s response to growing security concerns and would represent more than a doubling of federal spending on security needs for houses of worship.
“To anyone who feels this is excessive, what happened to Temple Israel two months ago, and now, the Islamic Center of San Diego, proves that it is not optional funding,” Temple Israel said. “Every dollar will be necessary to protect houses of worship all over the country.”
Imam Taha Hassane of the Islamic Center of San Diego, which includes a mosque and the adjacent Al Rashid School, said teachers, students and school staff were safe.
“At this moment, all that I can say is sending our prayers and standing in solidarity with all the families in our community here, and also the other mosques and all the places of worship in our beautiful city,” Hassane said during a press conference Monday afternoon. “They should always be protected. It is extremely outrageous to target a place of worship. Our Islamic Center is a place of worship. People come to the Islamic Center to pray, to celebrate, to learn.”
Law enforcement across the country are tightening security measures in response to the attack in San Diego.
“While there is currently no known nexus to NYC or specific threats to NYC houses of worship, out of an abundance of caution, the NYPD is increasing deployments to mosques across the city,” the New York Police Department said in a statement.
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