Under the guise of a “show of support” for the disqualified cabinet member Arye Dery, the prime minister and his cabinet ministers paid a visit on Monday to the Shas caucus meeting room, the abode of the modern Dreyfus. In what looked like a sequel to the Sicilian-style speech at the Jerusalem District Court at the opening of Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial (in which he assailed his prosecutors and investigators), now came the turn of the Supreme Court. The last institution Netanyahu has so far refrained from publicly lambasting became a target of a thuggish onslaught by him and his associates.
The message was clear: From the moment the court struck down Dery’s appointment , harming the interests of the government and its leader, its fate was sealed. The court is subversive and treacherous just like the police, the attorney general’s office, the state prosecution, legal advisers, the left and the media. This shameful event was “dignified” by the presence of Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana.
The sweet talk and commiserating humanity Ohana expressed toward the LGBTQ community during his inauguration speech was transformed into an acidic spray of invective and hatred hurled at the judges. “A show of arrogance, high-handedness and a sense of supremacy,” he labeled their ruling. “Contortions and playing innocent,” he defined their reasoning.
Ohana forgot, and in fact never remembered, that he was the Speaker of the Knesset, representing all 120 of its members. His semi-statesmanlike role forbids him from participating in gatherings such as these. Less than a month ago, in a gesture of respect for the role and toward parliamentary tradition, most opposition members refrained from voting against Ohana’s appointment.
On Monday, he spat in their faces, sullying and grievously damaging the institution he was elected to head. Competing with the speaker in verbal violence was, not surprisingly, Justice Minister Yariv Levin . “This is not a democracy,” he opined about the High Court ruling.
“It’s the opposite of the rule of law…people sit there and use the great power bestowed on them in order to replace the will of the people…”. In a mafioso version of his own, echoing the words of Shas MK Avraham Benayahu Bezalel, Yariv said, “they are shooting themselves in the head,” and promised: “This will turn around and bite them. ” No head of a criminal organization would have dared threaten any court in this country, that if it dared rule against him, its ruling would come back to bite it.
Even in the most violent underworld, there are inviolable rules of play. Obviously, this whole show of horrors would not have taken place if Netanyahu were not totally committed to carrying out the regime coup advanced by Levin. Against this backdrop, it’s hard to understand the gesture made by Benny Gantz, calling for a dialogue with this bunch of fascists (Yair Lapid also raised a delusional proposal that the president establish an independent committee to discuss the judicial revolution).
What else needs to happen so that all seekers of compromise realize that you don’t dialogue with anarchists waging a messianic jihad against the foundations of democracy. You fight them. After all, Netanyahu and Levin made it clear that in order to return Dery to the government they intend to pass a law which will bypass the ruling and forbid the High Court of Justice from intervening in the appointment and/or firing of ministers.
This is but an addendum to the package of “reforms” proposed by Levin and Simcha Rothman, which is being advanced in a snap process of questionable legality at the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee. To this one should add the explicit threat issued on Monday by the heads of the coalition toward the attorney general should she declare that the prime minister must step down due to a conflict of interest. It’s like a “coup attempt by a military man” (which carries a death sentence, as proposed by MK Zvika Fogel from Otzma Yehudit for Gantz and Lapid – or “not jail,” as clarified by the prime minister’s son).
Another slippery precedent Thus, nonchalantly, another precedent was set on the slippery slope down which the Zionist state is sliding towards a fascist dictatorship. The most senior watchdog is warned that if she takes a certain action, as required by her role, she will find herself facing a military court. Shortly before the Knesset experienced another shameful milestone, we all got a laugh over the backwards somersault done by Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar.
His flippant and inane initiative to immediately suspend cultural events funded by his office and held in outlying towns on the Sabbath was quickly squelched by Netanyahu. In this government you have a transportation minister who works against transportation, a communications minister working against the media, and now we have a culture minister shutting down cultural events. In the name of “culture,” Zohar squashed a really nice initiative by his predecessor Chili Tropper, which brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis to events on the weekend at no charge.
In the name of protecting the “religious,” he directly and adversely affected the religious and Haredi public, which enjoys these events without having to pay for them. This inglorious move by Zohar, himself a native of outlying Kiryat Gat, shows us that he was never a user of these services, provided by local authorities to their citizens. That’s regrettable.
Culture is more than soccer. The speed at which Zohar was made to flip his foolish move, which angered secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox people, and mainly Likud voters, provides indirect proof of the prime minister’s total commitment to upend the regime. When something doesn’t suit him, whether an illegal outpost or a pointless move by a rookie minister who didn’t bother to look at Google and see what he was cancelling, Netanyahu knows how to remove the obstacle from his path.
On the way to turning Israel into a clone of Hungary and its ilk, he doesn’t want any background noise or any disturbances. .
