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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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Israel gives in to the politics of debasement
A small episode this week crystallized the broader pathology of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu more clearly than any grand speech or ideological argument ever could: the Knesset vote for state comptroller, one of the most sensitive institutional positions in Israeli public life.
In Israel, the 120 members of the Knesset elect the comptroller by secret ballot. The office audits government ministries, investigates failures of governance, oversees public integrity, and possesses enormous influence over public accountability. In the aftermath of the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the Gaza war, the role carries even greater significance. The comptroller may shape future investigations into catastrophic national failures and wartime decision-making.
This week — in a move straight out of United States President Donald Trump’s playbook — Netanyahu nominated his longtime personal lawyer, Michael Rabello, for the role.
Historically, the comptroller’s office has been occupied by senior judges, jurists, or respected public servants with reputations for independence. Figures such as Miriam Ben-Porat, Eliezer Goldberg, and Micha Lindenstrauss embodied a certain ethos: they were stern institutional guardians standing somewhat above partisan warfare.
The idea of placing the prime minister’s own attorney into the country’s central oversight institution struck many Israelis as grotesquely inappropriate.
Yet the truly astonishing part came during the voting itself, in which the opposition candidate was a former justice on the Supreme Court — an institution Netanyahu’s coalition has long vilified. The first round reportedly revealed substantial defections among Netanyahu’s coalition. His preferred candidate fell short. Panic spread.
Suddenly, allegations and reports emerged that coalition lawmakers were being encouraged to photograph or film their ballots in order to prove their loyalty. There was a pause in the proceedings as the Knesset speaker, Likud’s Amir Ohana, received legal advice to not allow phones in the voting area. He restarted the vote anyway. Israeli media filled with coalition lawmakers posting images of themselves voting the right way. The images and reports were the excruciating stuff of banana republics.
I cannot recall ever seeing a similar scene in a functioning democracy. Rabello was elected.
Secret ballots exist precisely because democracies understand that free voting collapses when superiors can verify obedience. The entire purpose of ballot secrecy is to protect individuals from coercion, intimidation, retaliation and patronage systems.
Modern democracies adopted secret ballots in the nineteenth century to break the power of bosses, landlords, oligarchs, and political machines that demanded proof of loyalty.
The blatant violation of these norms by Netanyahu’s coalition helps explain why so many Israelis react to him not merely with opposition, but with exhaustion, fury, and moral revulsion.
It’s not just the corruption trials, the permanent manipulation, the serial falsehoods, the failed strategic assumptions about Hamas, the relentless cultivation of tribal resentment, the attacks on state institutions, the politics of personal loyalty and the transformation of every disagreement into an existential struggle between patriots and traitors. It’s the cumulative exhaustion of watching every institutional norm eventually be subordinated to the most vulgar politics imaginable.
The episode revealed something larger than one parliamentary scandal: the culture Netanyahu has spent years cultivating. It is a system organized increasingly around personal allegiance rather than institutional responsibility. A political environment in which independent judgment becomes suspicious, dissent becomes betrayal, and every institution gradually bends toward one man’s political ambition.
So we have here a prime minister under criminal indictment pushing his own lawyer into a top civil service oversight role.
Opposition leaders Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid plan to appeal Rabello’s election to the Supreme Court, calling the vote “tainted.” Even that might not work. Several government ministers, including the justice minister, have suggested in recent months that they no longer consider court decisions binding.
And that is what outsiders often miss about Netanyahu fatigue in Israel. The anger does not emerge from one scandal, one trial, one war, or one speech. It comes from the constant sense of humiliation. This week, inside Knesset voting booths that were meant to be hidden from view, Israelis saw the whole story compressed into a single degrading scene.
The post Israel gives in to the politics of debasement appeared first on The Forward.
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My irrational, possibly problematic obsession with an $85 yarmulke
Growing up, we had a rule of thumb about yarmulkes: the closer yours was to your forehead, the more strictly religious you were. The frum bochurim placed theirs practically on their noses; the boys from Conservative families bobby-pinned their kippahs on the back of their heads, like climbers gripping a rockface. The cool kids, of course, stuffed theirs in their pockets.
The Jewish skullcap, in other words, was a signifier of much more than the religious precept it embodied. Over the years not only a yarmulke’s positioning but also its style, size and material have come to place its wearer somewhere on a continuum of Jewish identity. Trends in yarmulke wearing, then, may tell us a story about where Judaism is — forgive me — headed.
So what kind of Jew wears an $85 yarmulke, and what kind of Judaism demands it? These questions gnawed at me when I first learned about Rubenstein Paris, a new kippah couturier whose ads found me on Instagram. Available in a range of expensive-looking solid colors (copper, cream, sapphire) and fabrics (velvet, corduroy, even horsehair), these kippahs are here to replace your tattered souvenirs.
“Everybody’s just walking around with their kippot from — I don’t know, Mendel and Rachel’s wedding, 2019,” Jonathan Hirsch, Rubenstein’s German-Israeli founder, told me recently. “I was like, ‘It’s such a sacred item, you know? Why isn’t there any beautiful kippah, that you can really acknowledge for what it is?’”
He’s onto something. Even as an image-conscious, Shabbat-observant millennial, I had largely neglected the yarmulke; when I wanted to look sharp, I ditched it. I was not completely out on Jew-caps, to be sure — like every other frat boy who thought Mac Miller was Moses, I went through a vintage snapback phase in college. But when I’ve had to clip up, I’ve made do with whatever I had lying around — usually something suede, dark, and folded more times than an origami fortune teller.
Hirsch offered to send a freebie, but at $85, accepting it felt compromising. The loaner we agreed to instead came in a branded drawstring bag, which was accompanied by a sleek black storage box. Though I’d secretly hoped for the horsehair model, the kippah Hirsch sent was more utilitarian: a ribbed velvet, golden brown, with the rise and structural integrity of one of those dome-houses you see in Architectural Digest. Velvet piping twisted around its circumference; its cloth inner lining depicted a globe and a shofar.
I put it on.
Skullcap semiotics
The story of the kippah begins in the Talmud, when 3rd-century sage Rav Huna proclaimed that he never walked more than four cubits without his head covered to symbolize that the divine presence was always above him. After rabbinic law codified the practice in the 1500s, the kippah evolved into a marker of Jewish cultural mores.
For example, 20 years ago, most Modern Orthodox boys wore black suede kippahs, but today, as people debate whether Modern Orthodoxy is dead, suede is disappearing, replaced by black velvet, the standard among Haredi Jews, and the kippah sruga — the crocheted yarmulke associated with the Israeli Religious Zionist movement. Pluralism out, orthodoxy in.
But it’s also a fraught moment to be displaying any marker of Jewish identity. Wearing a kippah in public makes you subject to a certain type of attention these days: the glare of being Jewish at a time when the Jewish state is embroiled in enormously unpopular and destructive wars. Hirsch, who is 29 and lives in Berlin, knows this firsthand — these days he doesn’t feel safe wearing a kippah in public.
And yet I suspect that growing Jewish isolation also puts the lie to our assimilation fantasies; it makes us more likely to wear the things that attach us to each other. Indeed, there is a renaissance in Judaica today driven by new designers and younger consumers finding joy in their heritage. The name Rubenstein is a play on Hirsch’s middle name, Reuven. But he also just thought it sounded cool.
All about the Benyamins
First ironically, then with some resignation, I found that the Rubenstein was the only kippah I wanted to wear — my fancy kippah became my everyday kippah. Putting it on was a daily treat — I was humored by the upgrade. I began picturing how gloomy and shallow life would be without it. I debated the unthinkable — ponying up to keep the loaner.
I was still conflicted about the idea of the object, which felt like a metaphor for the sticker-shock that accompanies Jewish life, especially Orthodox life, in the U.S. today. There’s the skyrocketing cost of real estate in Jewish neighborhoods, the eyewatering day school tuition, even the price of kosher meat and grape juice. Was it an $85 kippah, or a yeshiva-league Sorting Hat?
I put the questions to Hirsch. There are very few ritual objects, he pointed out, from the kiddush cup to candlesticks to one’s tallit, that we pride ourselves on buying cheap. Why should kippot be the exception? “You’re giving your humility a bigger meaning,” he said, “by the fact that you’re wearing this on your head.”
It was true — I felt more humble than ever before, and expected others to acknowledge my commitment and my sophistication. I can see you are a man of taste, they would say, presumably lowering a monocle. (I would nod, then dip my double-dark chocolate Milano cookie into a steaming teacup.)
It was true my designer yarmulke was not the conversation starter I’d anticipated. Only one person complimented me on it unprompted — that singular infallible judge of quality, my mother. Everyone else, I’m certain, was stealing covetous glances. But they didn’t need to praise, ask about, or even notice my beloved yarmulke, which I’m sure I’ll return soon. The premium fabrics, the shofar in the lining and the devotion it all symbolized were between me and Hashem.
The post My irrational, possibly problematic obsession with an $85 yarmulke appeared first on The Forward.
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How Iran is outsourcing terror plots against Jews
The prosecution of an Iraqi national in connection with thwarted alleged terror plots in the U.S. and Europe has put the behind-the-scenes role of Iran in the spotlight — part of what security experts say is a growing and hard-to-trace threat.
Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood Al-Saadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi national accused of ties to an Iran-backed militia, pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court this week to charges linking him to a series of attacks and alleged terror plots targeting American interests and Jewish communities in Europe and the United States.
Prosecutors allege Al-Saadi was connected to attacks, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in London’s heavily Jewish Golders Green neighborhood and an arson attack on a synagogue in North Macedonia. They also accuse him of attempting to recruit individuals online to firebomb synagogues in New York, Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Arizona.
He also reportedly planned to attack Ivanka Trump, who is both the president’s daughter and an Orthodox Jew — making her a “double target,” in the words of Oren Segal, vice president at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.
Iranian attacks on Jewish and Israeli institutions abroad are not new. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran and its proxies have targeted diplomats, Jews, Israelis, political dissidents and others perceived as aligned with the West.
Matthew Levitt, director of the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, maintains a detailed database of such attacks. He told the Forward that since the current war began, such plots have significantly increased.
The Al-Saadi case is a prime example of what Levitt calls Iran’s “gig economy” model of terrorism. Rather than dispatching trained operatives directly from Iran, Iranian-linked actors and proxy groups are recruiting individuals online who live in the country they wish to target. Some are not even aware they are attacking on behalf of Iran or its proxies.
In court filings, prosecutors allege that Al-Saadi, who prosecutors link to the terror organization Kata’ib Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, sent maps and photographs of a prominent Manhattan synagogue and other Jewish institutions to an undercover agent he was attempting to recruit to firebomb them. He allegedly offered the agent $10,000 in cryptocurrency in exchange for carrying out the plot, and discussed whether the recruit should “set the place on fire” or use an improvised explosive device.
Iranian-linked operatives, who are either part of Iran’s security apparatus or within its network of terror proxies, reach out to potential recruits on encrypted platforms like Telegram.
According to Levitt, the operatives are ordered by “very senior” elements of the Iranian regime to find recruits. “It stretches the limits of credulity to think that plots like this in the United States could be done without very senior top-down instruction,” Levitt said. “These are not rogue actors.”
Those they manage to recruit online are often financially motivated, agreeing to carry out attacks like vandalism, surveillance, or assaults in exchange for cryptocurrency payments. Others appear driven by ideology or online radicalization. Over the years, Iran’s recruits have included teenagers as young as 13.
“These are inexpensive plots,” said Levitt. “It requires just a few people to sit at a computer and try to recruit people and direct people.”
For Iran, this method is particularly strategic amid wartime. “Iran can’t go toe to toe with the U.S. or Israeli militaries, but it can engage in these asymmetric plots to show that they can still reach out and touch us to increase the cost of continuing to prosecute the war and to make people feel afraid,” said Levitt.
By relying on online recruits and loosely connected operatives, Levitt says Iranian-linked actors can obscure their involvement and maintain reasonable deniability. The calculation, he explained, is that authorities will be satisfied with arresting and prosecuting the individual carrying out the attack, rather than blaming Iran. This allows Iran to limit the risk of direct military escalation with the United States while continuing to conduct operations against it.
The Online Battlefield
According to Segal, Iranian influence increasingly permeates online.
“The threat to Jewish communities right now is multidimensional — Iranian-linked plots, cyberattacks, online propaganda,” he said. “They’re all converging at once, making it one of the more complex threat environments for the Jewish community in a long time.”
For years, Iranian state media outlets such as Press TV have targeted Western audiences with antisemitic content, including Holocaust denial, claims that Zionists control world events and other extremist narratives. A 2023 report by the ADL and the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Press TV receives roughly one million monthly visits, with more than half of its traffic coming from Western countries.
Segal said Iranian-linked propaganda networks also increasingly operate in online spaces that overlap with broader activist communities. One such example is Resistance News Network, a Telegram channel with over 150,000 subscribers frequented by members of pro-Palestinian activist groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. The channel is filled with official Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi propaganda that is then reshared by American activists on mainstream social media accounts.
“What that does is enable the exchange of ideas, of propaganda, and of narrative that we then see show up at actual events on the ground,” he said.
Segal argues that exposure to such propaganda can make recruitment efforts easier.
“Our concerns are not only from somebody who may have been placed here or somewhere in Europe,” said Segal, “but from individuals who are animated by the propaganda they ingest every single day.”
Levitt agreed, stating that rising antisemitic and anti-Israel sentiment since the outbreak of the Gaza war has created a larger pool of individuals who may view attacks on Jewish or Zionist targets as justified.
“A lot of people are going to be much more willing to do something … especially if it’s not actually killing someone, but fire bombing something and/or targeting property that has symbolic value,” he said.
But the threat is not limited to physical violence.
Since the war began, Segal said Iranian-linked cyberattacks have “gone into overdrive.”
He says Jewish organizations and media outlets have faced hacking attempts on their websites, while Jewish individuals have had their identities stolen, with personal information being exposed online in mass doxxing campaigns.
Many such attacks are conducted by Iranian hacking collectives. One of the most notorious among them is Iranian hacker group Handala Hackers, which has conducted several attacks against Jews, Israelis and Americans. The FBI reported that in March, the group claimed to have stolen 851 gigabytes of confidential data from Sanzer Hasidic Jewish community members, which the hackers described as “documents of financial cooperation, witchcraft ceremonies, and secret correspondences with Netanyahu …” They added, “We warn the leaders and members of the Sanzer Hasidic community: No place is safe for you. Betrayal of the oppressed leads to nothing but disgrace and shame. Expect more documents to be revealed.”
Despite the growing number of plots, experts say the relative lack of successful attacks inside the United States reflects the effectiveness of American counterterrorism efforts.
Still, Jewish communities across the United States are investing heavily in security upgrades. Asher Lopatin, director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, said synagogues in Michigan have increased security following a March attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield by a Hezbollah-linked man. Communities are installing bollards, expanding surveillance systems, and hiring additional guards.
“People are definitely doubling up on security,” Lopatin said. “Everyone is traumatized.”
Levitt says that even after the war concludes, he does not expect the plots targeting American interests and Jews to cease.
“I do not think that when the war ends, these necessarily stop,” Levitt said. “The pace may change, but Iran has a distinct interest in exacting revenge for all the damage that was done to it.”
The post How Iran is outsourcing terror plots against Jews appeared first on The Forward.