Netanyahu had fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for endorsing such a suspension then he restored Gallant to his post. It didn’t quite abandon its legislative package but did agree to suspend its legislative blitz, at least until the summer session, which begins on April 30th.
More important, it could have provided a way for his allies on the religious far right to expand their powers in both the West Bank and in Israel proper (a distinction they do not recognize), and also for his populist allies in his party, Likud, to foment useful ethnic resentments within the base, by presenting the package as retaliation by poorer, less-educated Mizrahi Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries against the Ashkenazi or European élites.
#TWO WORLDS 3 ON THE WAY TRIAL#
For Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently on trial for various charges involving corruption and bribery (he denies all wrongdoing), the package potentially offered a way out of legal jeopardy. It was, in effect, an assault on the High Court of Justice that would give Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government nearly despotic powers. The showdown has been prompted by the fight over the judiciary, which brought the country to a standstill at the end of last month, when prominent leaders of the military, the business community, the universities, the media, and organized labor joined the movement that has brought hundreds of thousands into the streets to protest the package of legislative “reforms” that the justice minister, Yariv Levin, presented in January. Not unlike America commemorating its seventy-fifth year, in 1851, one feels that a rotten compromise struck at the time of the state’s founding has produced, in effect, two societies in Israel, one passably liberal and bourgeois, one traditional and supremacist, and that the latter has finally encroached upon the former in ways that make live and let live-once justified as unity against foreign enemies-intolerable. The country is in an escalating culture war, and the festivity seems only a ceasefire. Israel turns seventy-five this week: the ritualized celebrations of patriotic solidarity are, this year, unusually self-conscious and forced.
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