Netanyahu wants to return Israel to Oct. 6 and his judicial coup

Over the past three months, the world has witnessed the tectonic disintegration of the Iranian “axis of resistance.” The swift fall of the brutal Assad regime — which killed over 500,000 civilians in the 13-year Syrian civil war and displaced half of the country’s 23 million population — was precipitated by the collapse of Hezbollah in Lebanon as a true fighting force against Israel and as the protector of the Syrian regime. Hamas in Gaza has been decimated, and there is an expectation of a ceasefire deal and the return of at least some Israeli hostages by Jan. 20, 2025. The Biden administration has also moved more forcefully against the Houthis in Yemen.

At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his minions continue their assault on democratic norms in Israel — particularly Israel’s independent judiciary — even in the face of a criminal arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. While the ICC warrant has been derided by Israel and the U.S., most European countries have vowed to abide by it, meaning that Netanyahu’s foreign travel is severely restricted — reportedly causing the prime minister to cancel a visit to Poland to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Notwithstanding that Israel’s judicial independence was the best argument against the ICC indictment, Netanyahu and Justice Minister Yariv Levin are steadily returning Israel to the Oct. 6, 2023 state of affairs, whereby Israel was in a state of near-civil war. The 10-month long protests against Netanyahu’s judicial coup (calling it “judicial reform” wildly understates the intended impact) ended immediately after the brutal Hamas massacres of Oct. 7.

Netanyahu appears bent on returning Israel back to Oct. 6 and internal civil war — with no real concern for the hostages nor with the basic concepts of civil society — that kept Israel distinct from its neighbors.

It is important to recall that during the first few weeks of the Gaza war, the Netanyahu government was inept and paralyzed in the aftermath of the brutal Hamas attack. It was the protest movement that held Israel together, mobilizing civil society to provide food, clothes and shelter for Israelis who had been living near Gaza and in the north.

It should also be recalled that members of the Netanyahu government called the anti-judicial coup protestors “traitors,” called for air force pilots leading the protests to be shot (37 of the 40 pilots in the Israeli Air Force’s 69th Air Force Squadron refused volunteer reserve duty during the protests) and even called leaders of the protests the “antichrist.” It was, however, those antichrist pilots — the 69th Squadron — that flew the missions that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

In the immediate aftermath of the ICC warrants, I wrote in The Hill that Netanyahu could be saved by the very judiciary whose independence he was trying to destroy. Now it would appear he will count on the incoming Trump administration get the ICC warrants dismissed — a dubious proposition — and in the interim he can move to destroy the independence of Israel’s judicial system.

Remarkably, even in the face of the ICC warrants and Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial, he and Justice Minister Levin have reinvigorated their relentless assault on the judicial system. Levin has delayed for over 10 months the appointment of a president of the Israeli Supreme Court and four additional justices. The court is now operating with 11 of 15 justices. In the past, the president had always been the most senior member of the court.

Levin has refused to convene the judicial nominating committee for any judicial vacancy. He continues to push controlling the judiciary by changing the mechanism by which judges are appointed — to be controlled by the government not by a panel with legislative, judicial and bar association representatives (the advantage of the Israeli judicial selection system was that it was less controlled by politics — though it was not perfect). He wants to withdraw from the judiciary the power to review acts of the government and legislature. Levin has ignored rulings of the Supreme Court ordering him to convene the appointment committee and to appoint a president.

By returning to his coup, Netanyahu seeks to control not just the executive branch — which means the legislative branch too, since as a parliamentary system, the government only serves as long as it has a majority in the Knesset — but the judicial branch as well.

Jonathan D. Strum is an international lawyer and businessman based in Washington and the Middle East. From 1991 to 2005, he was an adjunct professor of Israeli law at Georgetown University Law Center.

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