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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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Why Walter Benjamin was all things to all people
Walter Benjamin’s life, to use the kind of metaphor he was so fond of, was not unlike the Parisian arcades, those covered retail passages that he loved so much.
He was born into a world with the finer things on display. He marveled at his mother’s jewelry, the cut-glass champagne glasses and carafe stoppers in the shape of animals and gnomes in their Berlin home. But his passage through life as an adult was seldom easy, and existed in tension with those glittering objects in their vitrines.
An omnivore par excellence, as a young man Benjamin announced his intent to be the “foremost critic of German literature,” but ended up spending much time translating works from French to German, musing on Marxist concepts and generally resisting any easy classification in ideology or literary genre.
“Adhering to any doctrine awakened in him some kind of allergy,” said Peter E. Gordon, the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard. “I think it’s at those moments that his real originality shines through.”
Gordon’s illuminating new book for the Jewish Lives series, Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver, is a portrait of a thinker who couldn’t conform. In keeping with his subject’s unconventional spirit, and his unique sense of cyclical time in which tragedies repeat, Gordon begins at the end.
As Benjamin navigated the Pyrenees, escaping from Vichy France and into Spain, he took a lethal dose of morphine. Gordon winds back the clock from that moment, and ends the narrative right on the cusp of his journey through the mountains.
“I thought on Benjamin’s idea that history should not be written by the victors,” Gordon said in a phone interview. “And that means not permitting the fascists to have the last word, as if his death were the end of his influence.”
Indeed, one could say Benjamin’s death was only the beginning of the legacy.
I spoke with Gordon about Benjamin’s life, work and why he may not be an entirely appropriate fit for the Jewish Lives series. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
PJ Grisar: You have a little uncertainty about whether Benjamin fits comfortably into a series like this. How does he fit the bill and in what ways do you think he might fall short of it?
Peter E. Gordon: He escapes almost any traditional categories that are available to us. People have trouble figuring out, was he a critic primarily? Was he a philosopher? Was he a Marxist? Was he an historian? Moving away from academic disciplines, he exhibits the same resistance to being placed within any distinctive tradition. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to directly answer the question of whether he belongs to some kind of canon of Jewish thought or Jewish philosophy.
He’s always operating at the margins or just outside the boundaries of any settled doctrine or tradition. Bertolt Brecht couldn’t figure out if Benjamin was really a Marxist and had some suspicions that Benjamin’s Judaism was distorting his Marxist insights. And then on the other hand, people like [Benjamin’s close friend, Kabbalist scholar] Gershom Scholem vigorously argued that Benjamin’s best insights were, in fact, ones that belong to Jewish tradition, but he warned Benjamin that he was distorting those Jewish insights because of his Marxism.
So Benjamin was being pulled and pushed in various directions by the people who were closest to him intellectually. But they all saw, I think, that he couldn’t easily be corralled fully within their fold.
It does seem like he did have a tendency, depending on who he’s associating with, to adopt some of those ideas. As you said, he buys into them to a point before making it his own. What do you think of that impulse?
There might be a temptation to see him almost as a chameleon who adapted to the interests of the friends who were near him, but he also frustrated those friends because of his own instincts, and some of those instincts he once described as nihilistic. There was a fierce debate over Benjamin’s legacy, going back to the first edition of his correspondence and writing, published cooperatively by Adorno and Scholem after Benjamin’s death. The more militant Marxists at the time were furious and felt that Scholem and Adorno had falsified Benjamin’s legacy and weren’t honoring its true Marxist credentials. I rather doubt it had true Marxist credentials.
One of the things I say at the end of the book is that there’s a key principle in Marxism that Benjamin’s own Jewish themes seem to contradict. Benjamin describes an intrusion into history from a place that comes from the outside, and he calls that the Messianic. Any moment in history could be the gateway through which the Messiah might enter. And Marxism has a commitment that whatever changes might occur in history, those changes emerge from the immanent contradictions in history itself, not from a place outside history.
So Benjamin’s allusion to a Messiah who enters into history through some kind of gate, as if from the outside, is very hard to square with Marxism. And so there you find him operating with what you could call a syncretism of Judaism and Marxism. But even those two might not be really sufficient to capture everything that’s going on. He was really fascinated by Christian theology as well.
I didn’t know that he struggled so much in his lifetime that he didn’t have a professorship. He had to scrape by to make a living. Because the way the book is structured, we leave him in the Pyrenees so we don’t really see his afterlife. How did he become a well-known thinker? Was it the efforts of Adorno and Arendt after he died?
The peripatetic quality of his thinking, that it crossed so many boundaries has made him available for a great many people with different sorts of commitments, and also for the great community of humanists who share with him a sense of boundary-crossing in their disciplines. The rise of cultural studies in the Anglophone world since 1945 owes a great deal to Benjamin, and perhaps to Benjamin more than anyone else.
That practice of cultural studies is all about drawing the unlikely connection, say, between literature and economics, between history and theology and so forth. And that’s a risky but very original practice. Benjamin’s one of the great avatars for people who wish to pursue that practice. His study of the Parisian arcades is maybe the best example of that, because he’s trying to figure out, how does 19th century Paris contain all of these conflicting energies that are evident in architecture, like the passage itself, but also in its social movements, and in its poetry and he tries to bring all these together in what he called constellations of culture and society.
I saw your recent piece in the New York Review of Books, writing about historical analogies and how it’s an imperative to invoke the memory of Jewish persecution when discussing ICE raids or Gaza. Because Benjamin was a refugee, and he insisted that historical crises recurred as a rule, I’m wondering if he was on your mind when you were writing that?
I’ve been very close to immigrants in my life. My own family were immigrants and refugees to the United States from Nazi Germany on one side and from pogroms on the other side. That experience is always very much on my mind. I would hope it would be on everybody’s mind, regardless of identity or history.
Benjamin says “the amazement that things like this are still happening is not philosophical.” And I very much agree with that. I know no polity is blessed with immunity from the worst things. Benjamin himself was a victim of fascism. He died in a moment of despair, thinking that there was no way for him to survive, and taking his own life which he thought was better than the alternative. Tragically, he was mistaken, but it was an entirely plausible inference, given the situation that he saw around him.
And the U.S. at the time beckoned as a refuge for many people fleeing fascism, whether on account of their ethno-religious origins or their politics. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re that country anymore.
The post Why Walter Benjamin was all things to all people appeared first on The Forward.
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Benjamin Disraeli once saved Britain’s monarchy — the current one may be beyond repair
Not a bad send-off for a commoner whose family’s religion still prevented them from holding political office or attending Oxford or Cambridge up until the second half of the century.
This was the reason why the young Disraeli was baptized in the Church of England. His father, a prominent literary scribbler, thought this would ease his son’s way in society. Little did he know how far and fast this would happen.
Starting in his early twenties, Disraeli began to write wildly romantic (and self-promoting) novels, several of which star a brilliant and, predictably, mysterious hero named Sidonia, who prides himself, as did his (possibly mistakenly) creator, on his Sephardic ancestry. Disraeli uses Sidonia to turn the era’s racial prejudices inside out, having him wax on the brilliance of his race’s civilization while the ancestors of the British aristocracy were still mucking about as “Baltic pirates” and “tattooed savages.”
Similarly, when the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell made an antisemitic slur against the twenty-something Disraeli, the latter — in a fashion worthy of Sidonia — declared “Yes, I am a Jew. And when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.” He then challenged O’Connell to a duel, which was happily quashed by the police.
With the same alchemical genius that transmuted the alleged dross of Jewishness into the gold of racial superiority, Disraeli launched his political career, making his way to become leader, rather remarkably, of the Tory conservatives rather than the liberal Whigs. He persuaded his party’s mostly well-born and dull-witted members to embrace both political reform — the Torys pushed through the Second Reform Bill of 1867, which dramatically extended voting rights — and progressive social and economic reforms during his second term as prime minister.
But Disraeli’s most remarkable achievement was not a matter of political or social reform but of monarchical reinvention. It was, quite literally, spectacular and starred the woman now known as the “widow of Windsor.” Following the premature death of her beloved Prince Albert, the stricken Victoria withdrew from public life and turned inward. Grieving and always garbed in black, she ignored her ceremonial duties, often seeking refuge in distant Scotland at her Balmoral estate.
In an echo of the British Crown’s current crisis, republican voices in Parliament began to question the immense sums spent on the monarchy while those on the street began to ridicule the queen. On a sign pinned to the gate at Buckingham Palace, one wag had written: “These premises to be let or sold, the late occupant having retired from business.” For the British public, it felt increasingly as if they were paying a lifelong subscription to a show that had permanently closed.
As a result, when Disraeli reached “the top of the greasy pole” upon becoming prime minister in 1868, his overriding concern was to cultivate his ties with the sovereign. As he confided to the poet Mathew Arnold, “everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”
The newly arrived prime minister was as good as his word. As he wrote in his first message to the queen, “Mr. Disraeli with his humble duty to Your Majesty. He ventures to express his sense of Your Majesty’s most gracious kindness to him and of the high honour which Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to confer on him. He can offer only devotion.”
Swept off her feet by such declarations of devotion, Victoria described her new prime minister as “her kind, good, considerate friend.” She allowed her friend unprecedented privileges, such as front row seats for him and his wife for the wedding of the Prince of Wales, and even more shockingly, the permission to sit during their frequent private audiences, though he insisted on standing.
Disraeli continued to lay it on thick over the course of their relationship. “If your Majesty is ill,” he wrote in the third person during a political crisis, “he is sure he will himself break down. All, really, depends upon your Majesty.”
“He lives for Her,” he continued, “works only for Her, and without Her all is lost.”
Okay, even “thick” fails to describe Disraeli’s flattery. But here is the vital point: his conversations and correspondence with Victoria, while over-the-top, were also sincere. He was impressed by her character and her capacity to represent the nation. The future of Great Britain, he believed, depended on a vibrant and visible monarchy, one in which Victoria would of course play the starring role.
Deeply moved by Disraeli’s attention, the queen was drawn out of her shell of mourning. “After the long gloom of her bereavement,” Lytton Strachey wrote in his biography of Victoria, “she expanded to the rays of Disraeli’s devotion like a flower in the sun.” Gradually, this expansion was not just private and emotional, but also political and ceremonial.
In fact, Disraeli did not distinguish between the two. The imperial and spectacle were one and the same. In 1876, this conviction led him, with the Queen’s delighted complicity, to push a bill through Parliament that bestowed upon Victoria the title of Empress of India. Rather than pause her ceremonial ambitions in the years following Disraeli’s death, Victoria doubled down on her mentor’s playbook. She orchestrated her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and then years later, her Diamond Jubilee.
With these earlier spectacles in mind, Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter continued the tradition, with stunning success, not just with the first two jubilees, but adding, shortly before her death, the Platinum Jubilee in 2022. And yet, that triumph was soon followed by Elizabeth’s death and the diminishment if not death of the monarchy, in part thanks to Andrew’s abhorrent antics.
“A man’s fate,” Disraeli once remarked, “is his own temper.” But now, the fate of the very monarchy Disraeli helped build hangs in the balance — a turn of events that perhaps even he could not solve.
The post Benjamin Disraeli once saved Britain’s monarchy — the current one may be beyond repair appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli bobsled squad is disqualified from Olympics after trying to swap in Druze teammate
(JTA) — The Israeli bobsled team’s historic journey to the 2026 Winter Olympics ended in anything but storybook fashion on Sunday, as Israel’s own Olympic committee withdrew it from competition after learning that the team had lied about a member’s health.
The withdrawal meant that Israel did not compete in the four-man race on Sunday, the final day of competition in Milan and Cortina.
After finishing the first two heats of the four-man bobsled race as the slowest team, Israel planned to swap out Uri Zisman for team alternate Ward Farwasy, who would have become Israel’s first-ever Druze Olympian had he taken the ice.
But bobsled substitutions are only permitted in the event of an athlete’s injury or illness, so Zisman had agreed to lie and tell officials he was sick. He had reportedly obtained a medical certification for the false story.
In a statement, Israel’s Olympic committee said it had learned of the team’s plan to substitute in Farwasy “in an improper manner that does not meet the standards expected of Olympic athletes and is not in line with Olympic values,” and chose to withdraw the team from the race.
“The Olympic Committee of Israel views any deviation from the Olympic values as unacceptable and cannot accept inappropriate behavior,” the statement said. “It should be emphasized that, up to this point, the participation of the bobsleigh delegation has taken place in the spirit of sport and without any violations by the athletes.”
David Greaves, the president of the Israeli Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, told the Times of Israel that he was “deeply disappointed in the actions of the team.”
AJ Edelman, the team’s captain and main driver of its existence, took responsibility for the scheme.
“I apologize profusely for the disappointment,” Edelman posted on X. “But I will always remain proud that the team looked at their Druze brother, who had earned his place on the team, and unanimously said ‘we want this for you.’ I signed off on it and I take responsibility.”
Later, fending off criticism that he had compromised the very Olympic program he had sought to build up, Edelman appeared to blame Zisman’s mother for calling foul on the switch and said he did not regret it.
“I make no apologies for the decision. At all. The switch is not only common in our sport, we did it believing it was good for the country and to honor our teammate. We thought we were putting country first,” he wrote. “The end effect was not intended but I am proud of the team’s consensus in that moment. It was only an issue because the mother of the athlete replaced was upset it was her child, not another athlete. The decision itself was not in question and I remain okay with it.”
The disqualification ignited criticism of the team from both pro-Israel sports fans and those who had protested Israel’s inclusion in the Olympics in the first place. Edelman and Menachem Chen’s last-place finish in the two-man bobsled event last week was overshadowed by a Swiss broadcaster’s criticism of Israel and Edelman during the race. The broadcaster later removed the clip from its website.
On Saturday, Italy’s public broadcaster apologized for a commentator’s off-camera remark calling to “avoid” the Israeli team. The network’s director issued an apology for what he said was an “unacceptable expression that in no way represents the values of public service broadcasting or of RAI Sport.”
The controversies came after the bobsled team’s apartment was broken into while it trained in the Czech Republic. Israel was competing in Olympic bobsled for the first time, in what Edelman and some fans dubbed “Shul Runnings,” a reference to the Jamaican bobsled team’s similarly improbable run in 1988.
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