Uncategorized
‘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.”
—
The post ‘The gun is on the table’: Both sides of Israel’s debate say that a constitutional crisis is coming appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Trump Touts ‘Peace Through Strength’ in State of the Union, but Results Are Mixed
US President Donald Trump gestures on the day he delivers the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, US, Feb. 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/NATHAN HOWARD
“Peace through strength” is a foreign policy motto that has served President Donald Trump well — when he has adhered to it.
In his hyper-partisan State of the Union address on Tuesday, there was a rare moment of strength through unity. When Trump noted the return of all Israeli hostages from Gaza, Republicans and Democrats alike — except for Congress’s most noxious members — joined in a standing ovation. Among the many conflicts Trump took credit for ending in his speech, the Gaza ceasefire is, perhaps, the one for which he deserves the most credit.
Trump praised Hamas for working to recover the bodies of the last captives despite the fact that a high-ranking Israeli military official said that the terrorist group did not assist in the recovery of the body of Ran Gvili, the final hostage rescued from Gaza.
Trump noted Gvili’s mother’s relief to bury her son. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson also humanized Israeli victims of violence by inviting as his guest the brother of an Israeli Embassy staffer gunned down in Washington, DC, while attending a Jewish event.
But what Israel watchers were looking for was a sign indicating whether Trump would strike Iran with military force. Not surprisingly, the president did not give the order from the dais or press a big red button to launch the operation. But he left his tea leaves out in the open.
Exaggerating somewhat, Trump noted the successful Operation Midnight Hammer from June 2025 that “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program” but acknowledged that Iran is busy rebuilding its nuclear weapons capabilities.
Iranians may be forgiven for a certain skepticism about Trump’s intentions going forward — whether he will indeed display the strength needed to keep the peace. In January, at the height of the protests against the Islamic Republic, the US president told the Iranians demonstrating in the streets that “help is on its way” and warned Tehran to “stop killing protesters.” But the Islamic Republic drowned Trump’s red line in a sea of its citizens’ blood.
In the weeks leading up to the State of the Union, the US military moved two aircraft carrier strike groups into the region and landed a group of F-22 Raptor jets in Israel — a lot of firepower. But to justify an attack, Trump wants to demonstrate that he has exhausted the diplomatic route.
Noting the negotiations with Iran, Trump declared, “My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy.” But, Trump stated, the Iranians haven’t forsworn nuclear weapons. Trump additionally mentioned the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program and its support of terrorist proxies as causes for concern.
Trump has also undermined his mantra through his unwillingness to seriously challenge Russia to end its aggression in Ukraine during his second term, let alone within the 24 hours he promised on the campaign trail.
During his State of the Union address, Trump said his administration is working “very hard” to end the war. But the effort has not yet borne fruit.
He lamented “the killing and slaughter between Russia and Ukraine, where 25,000 soldiers are dying each and every month.”
That was the only mention of the four-year-long war in nearly two hours of speaking. Trump appears frustrated that his Midas touch in international peacemaking has exceeded his grasp. But he partly has himself to blame for rushing headlong into negotiations without first maximizing military or economic pressure on Russia, attempting peace without demonstrating strength.
Trump could have proactively built negotiating leverage against Russian President Vladimir Putin by strengthening Ukraine’s ability to withstand the Russian onslaught while applying stronger sanctions on the Russian economy. Instead, he slashed military assistance for Kyiv and waited nine months to impose sanctions targeting Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil. Even then, his administration has not enforced those sanctions, reducing their impact.
Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin in August for what he thought would be a productive one-on-one meeting. Instead, Putin embarrassed the president by lecturing him on Russian history while refusing to back down from his maximalist demands.
Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner, have accomplished just as little in the same period. With Russia continuing to demand Ukrainian territory in the Donbas that its military cannot take by force, the White House has leaned on Ukraine to make territorial concessions, believing this will unlock peace. But that’s both unacceptable to Kyiv and insufficient to satisfy Putin, whose ultimate objective is to dominate Ukraine as a whole.
To his credit, Trump extracted a commitment from NATO members to spend 5 percent of their GDP toward defense and other security-related priorities, improving burden sharing. But Washington has added needless strain to transatlantic ties by meddling in European domestic politics, launching a self-defeating trade war, and attempting to bully Denmark into ceding Greenland to the United States.
As Trump put it in his speech, “We have to be strong, because hopefully we will seldom have to use this great power.” Washington can best deter its enemies when it applies its “peace through strength” approach forcefully and consistently and when it nurtures strong alliances rather than upending them.
David May is a research manager and senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Dmitriy Shapiro is a research analyst and editor. For more analysis from the authors and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow David on X @DavidSamuelMay and Dmitriy @dmitriyshapiro. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
Uncategorized
Four Years After Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion, Peace Requires Leverage — Not Capitulation
Rescuers work at the site of the apartment building hit by a Russian drone during a Russian missile and drone strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, Dec. 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Viacheslav Ratynskyi
Four years ago, Russian armored columns pushed toward Kyiv, expecting a swift collapse of the Ukrainian state. That collapse never came.
Russia failed in its central objective. Kyiv did not fall. Ukraine’s government did not crumble. NATO did not fracture. What Vladimir Putin sought to prevent remains intact: a sovereign, Western-aligned Ukraine.
Russia today occupies roughly one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea and large swaths of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. Much of that territory was seized either in 2014 or during the early months of the 2022 invasion. Since then, Moscow’s gains have been incremental and costly, measured in devastated villages rather than decisive breakthroughs.
Ukraine, despite facing a significant infantry shortage, continues to hold Russia to incremental gains while inflicting heavy casualties. The war has killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of soldiers and displaced millions of civilians. Cities such as Mariupol, Bakhmut, and Severodonetsk lie in ruins.
But the consequences of this war extend far beyond Ukraine’s borders. Europe has begun to rearm, addressing chronic underinvestment in defense since the end of the Cold War. As a result of the Russian invasion, Finland and Sweden joined NATO, doubling the alliance’s border with Russia, a strategic setback the Kremlin apparently didn’t anticipate. Energy markets have been reshaped as European states have largely weaned themselves off Russian oil and gas. Washington and its allies have been forced to rethink deterrence, force posture, and industrial capacity for sustained conflict.
In Ukraine, Putin faces a dilemma: he cannot impose the outcome he wants on the battlefield, yet he refuses to scale back his maximalist demands. So, the Kremlin has turned negotiations into another front in the war. Moscow has sought to use diplomacy to split the United States from Ukraine and Europe and enlist US help in forcing Kyiv to swallow Putin’s terms. The Kremlin demands that Ukraine cede the remainder of its eastern Donbas region, abandon its aspirations of joining NATO, accept limits on its military’s size and capabilities, and enshrine legal protections for Russian cultural influence. In short, Putin seeks to achieve through diplomacy what Russia has failed to secure decisively through force.
That approach only works if Moscow believes time is on its side. At present, the Kremlin appears to calculate that Western political divisions will deepen and that Russia can eventually exhaust Ukraine’s resistance. Until Putin’s calculus changes, diplomacy without leverage will not moderate Russian objectives. It will entrench them.
Shifting that calculation requires raising the cost of continued aggression and making Putin understand that neither Western will nor Ukrainian resistance will break. The United States retains significant tools to do so. Rather than slashing military assistance for Kyiv as the Trump administration has done, additional support can help Ukraine increase the price Russia pays for its battlefield advances. Strictly enforcing and building upon existing sanctions, particularly on the energy revenues that finance the war, can tighten economic pressure on the Kremlin.
Pressure, steadily applied, can shape negotiating behavior. Concessions offered prematurely are counterproductive. By leaning on Kyiv to bend to Moscow’s demands, Washington risks reinforcing Kremlin intransigence. And by rushing into negotiations without first establishing leverage, the Trump administration wasted valuable time.
Ending the war is a worthy objective. But the terms matter. A settlement that emboldens Russian revanchism or merely grants Moscow time to rearm for a follow-on war would damage US interests — with implications extending well beyond Ukraine. It would undermine the credibility of US security guarantees, destabilize Europe’s security architecture, and shift American strategic bandwidth away from higher-priority theaters.
Four years into this war, the lesson is not that diplomacy is futile. It is that diplomacy must be facilitated with strength. The United States still possesses the tools to create that leverage. Using them is not escalation. It’s smart negotiating.
Keti Korkiya is a research analyst in the Russia Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
Uncategorized
The Jewish Audacity to Have Vision Against All Odds
Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman in June 1953. Photo: Phto Birnfeld, Tel Aviv / National Library of Israel, Schwadron collection via Wikimedia Commons
We have all suffered the frustration of dealing with construction delays. But the news this week out of Spain should give us all pause. In Barcelona, cranes gently hoisted the final 12-ton section into place completing the central tower of the Sagrada Família cathedral, bringing the structure to its full height of 172.5 meters and officially making it the tallest church in the world. The construction project has finally been completed … after 144 years.
You read that right. Ground was broken in 1882. A year later, the eccentric architect Antoni Gaudí began the project in earnest. He devoted the remainder of his life to Sagrada Família, and died a century ago, in 1926, with less than a quarter of it built.
Wars intervened. Funding evaporated. Portions of his original models were destroyed. George Orwell dismissed it as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world,” and remarked wryly that the anarchists who controlled Barcelona while he lived there showed poor taste in not blowing it up.
And yet, finally, this week, crowds gathered to watch as cranes completed a vision that originated in the 19th century. It is hard to think of anything more bizarre in our age of instant results and overnight success than a project that spans nearly a century and a half — except perhaps the audacity of the man who designed it knowing full well he would never live to see it finished.
Gaudí once remarked, almost casually, “My client is not in a hurry,” meaning God. It was a line delivered with a shrug, but it contained his entire philosophy. What Gaudí saw in his mind’s eye would emerge, and he knew it.
What makes the story so extraordinary is that Gaudí was not sketching fantasy in the vague hope that some future engineer would figure out how to put it all together.
Gaudí constructed meticulous scale models. He calculated load-bearing curves with obsessive care. He suspended chains from ceilings and used mirrors to study how gravity naturally shaped arches, effectively reverse-engineering physics long before computer modeling made such things easy.
His vision was undeniably romantic — but it was also rigorously disciplined. He imagined something magnificent, and then he subjected that imagination to mathematics, materials, and method. He was planning, deliberately and patiently, toward a future he knew with absolute certainty he would never live to see.
The Jewish people understand that kind of vision very well. Amid the Second World War, as European Jewish life lay in smoking ruins and every yeshivah had been obliterated together with their students and rabbinic faculty, one man in Eretz Yisrael began speaking about the future in a way that made some of his contemporaries quietly wonder whether grief had unhinged him.
His name was Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, but he is better known as the Ponevezher Rav. He managed to escape the inferno of Europe, but his community in Ponevezh had been annihilated, along with his beloved yeshiva — once one of the crown jewels of prewar Lithuania.
The Ponevezher Rav’s world had been erased. Most people in his position would have focused on survival, on securing a modest foothold in a fragile new country, on mourning what could never be restored. Instead, he focused on rebuilding — not cautiously, but on a scale that seemed to defy the broken reality around him.
One day in 1944, even as the Holocaust still raged and the fate of millions hung in the balance, Rav Kahaneman climbed a barren hill in Bnei Brak and declared that he intended to build the greatest yeshiva in the world.
And then, astonishingly, he began raising funds. People thought he had lost his mind. There were barely any serious yeshiva students in Eretz Yisrael at the time. The economy was fragile. The British Mandate was unstable. Arab opposition to Jewish statehood was intensifying by the day. The idea of constructing a vast Torah citadel under those conditions felt detached from reality, almost delusional.
But the building went up anyway — stone by stone, floor by floor — until a grand edifice crowned the hill. When it opened, the cavernous beit midrash stood largely empty. A handful of students sat in a corner learning Gemara in a vast space designed for over a thousand yeshiva boys.
The image must have been surreal: a monumental structure with barely enough students to fill a corner. As it was going up, someone had asked the Ponevezher Rav whether this enormous building was not, perhaps, a touch ambitious. Would it not be wiser to start modestly and expand later?
His response has echoed through the decades: You do not build a small yeshiva and hope it becomes great. You build a great yeshiva — and then you fill it.
He could already see what others could not yet see — generations of students, the hum of Torah, and the glorious restoration of what was destroyed. Because the vision in his mind was so vivid, for him it wasn’t a vision; it was reality. And in time, it became reality.
It is precisely this energy that pulses through the Haftarah for Parshat Tetzaveh (Ez. 43:10–27), which contains one of Ezekiel’s most remarkable prophecies. He is not standing in bustling Jerusalem. He is in exile. The First Temple has been destroyed, its vessels looted, its glory extinguished, and the Jewish nation has been dragged to Babylonia in chains. The present is bleak, and the future seems hopeless.
And yet, in that very setting, God instructs Ezekiel to talk to the people about the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem. The prophecy is dazzling, comprising a meticulous blueprint for the Temple, down to the smallest detail. We are given architectural plans, dimensions, measurements, and procedures, along with a seven-day dedication sequence laid out with methodical clarity.
Can you imagine how this must have sounded to a beleaguered nation whose hopes for revival could easily have been dismissed as delusional? They are sitting by the rivers of Babylon, mourning what has been lost — and the prophet is discussing the floor plan of a Temple that does not yet exist. It borders on ridiculous.
But that is exactly the point. When you can picture the future clearly enough — when you can measure it, describe it, and it vividly inhabits your imagination — you begin, quietly but powerfully, to live differently in the present.
Gaudí did not live to see his church completed, but the clarity of his plans ensured that generations of architects, artisans, and engineers could continue his work long after he was gone. The Ponevezher Rav did not know how many students would one day fill his massive yeshiva, but his refusal to think small created the conditions in which greatness could take root.
Ezekiel’s generation did not rebuild the Temple, but they were handed something powerful: a design that made hope structured and concrete rather than sentimental and abstract. There is a profound difference between fantasy and vision. Fantasy floats, untethered from reality, comforting but meaningless. Vision, by contrast, submits itself to measurement. It accepts the discipline of detail. And most importantly, it draws plans.
In our own lives, we often hesitate to articulate what we truly hope for because we are afraid it may never materialize. We temper our ambitions, soften our aspirations, and downsize our dreams in order to shield ourselves from disappointment. We build small because small feels safer.
But Judaism has never been a small-building civilization. Three times a day we pray for the rebuilding of Jerusalem, in deliberate, specific language. It is blueprint before redemption. The Jewish story is about seeing beyond the current constraints, and then proceeding methodically in quiet determination.
And one day — sometimes decades later, sometimes a century later — the cranes come down, the halls fill with voices, and the towers stand complete.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.