Do Israelis believe in an anti-Netanyahu deep state conspiracy? - opinion

In an opinion article in Haaretz last week, Uzi Baram – a former Labor MK and cabinet minister – spoke of a conversation he had recently held with a right-winger who had serious misgivings about the fact that “all the IDF chiefs of staff, all the former generals, all the heads of the Mossad and Shin Bet, most of the former police commissioners, most economists, doctors, and legal experts are against the reform. How is it possible that they all think alike?”

According to Baram, his interlocutor added: “We have a coalition, a Knesset and the justice system, and then there is also a political underworld – a deep state. It is made up of the heads of security, the heads of the economy, former judges, the medical personnel, and the senior bureaucrats. It is said that the leader and chief financier of the deep state is Ehud Barak. They get together sometimes and plan all the petitions, protests, and sanctions – this is the true focus of power in Israel today.”

What this right-winger said is certainly not completely a figment of his imagination, though the concept of the deep state is. It cannot be denied that despite the fact that the current government commands 64 of the 120 Knesset seats, which it won honestly in the last elections, most of the country’s elites (with the exception of most of the leading rabbis) oppose, or have reservations about, the government’s judicial reform and its policies and activities in many fields; believe that Israel’s liberal democracy is in danger, and that religious coercion is in danger of being enhanced.

However, not all the members of these elites are necessarily centrists or left-wingers.

In all the Western democracies, the elites of most of the right, left, and center parties are inclined to believe in the basic principles of liberal democracy. In Israel as well, until not long ago, Israel’s main right-wing party – the Likud – had a large liberal component. Let us not forget that the two main founders of the Likud in 1973 were the Herut movement and the Israeli Liberal Party. It is only in the last decade or so that this has changed.

Today there are very few Likud ministers and MKs who may be counted as liberals in their basic approach, and undoubtedly a certain dissonance has been created. How this dissonance will be dealt with is yet to be seen. Hopefully, the current government will not try to deal with it by simply making appointments to top positions from among its cronies, without paying heed to qualifications, standards, and moral norms, as Regional Cooperation Minister David Amsalem appears to be trying to do in the case of government corporations.

The deep state narrative in Israeli media and among politicians

However, the fact that a certain dissonance exists does not indicate that there is a “deep state” phenomenon in Israel, of the sort that certain conspiracy theories have given rise to. In Israel articles that keep appearing in certain newspapers (especially Israel Hayom) and commentary on certain TV channels (especially Channel 14) promote the deep state theory and spread a lot of misinformation and fake news about its alleged organized existence.

We know that the prime minister’s son Yair Netanyahu has tweeted a lot about both conspiracy theories and the so-called deep state. But what about his father? 

Back in April 2020, at the time that negotiations were being held for the formation of a national emergency government between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz, Haaretz reporter Gidi Weitz wrote the following: “People who have met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent months have heard lengthy lectures that seem to have been taken out of one of Oliver Stone’s conspiracist screenplays. He told them that even though he keeps being reelected, in reality, the country is controlled by a ‘deep state.’

“There’s no democracy here, but a regime of bureaucrats and jurists,” he said.

The strings of this shadow government are ostensibly pulled by the prosecution, which Netanyahu views as more dangerous than Hezbollah’s precision missiles. Prosecutors and judges, he believes, have a symbiotic relationship, the goal of which is to oust him.

“They want to see me sitting in jail,” he said in one private conversation.” 

Netanyahu has undoubtedly not changed his view, and still believes that the deep state really exists. However, the more pertinent question is what percentage of the Israeli public believes so as well.

TWELVE DAYS ago I corresponded with one of my numerous second cousins about the death of my mother’s last surviving cousin, Eliezer Ben-Ami, who died three months before his 100th birthday. Eliezer, who had been a member of the Stern Group, gained fame when, back in 1947, while serving a sentence in a prison for his underground activities, he prepared two explosive devices in the shape of oranges, with which two other underground prisoners, who had been sentenced to death, committed suicide several hours before they were to be hanged. We used to chat twice a year, before Rosh Hashanah and Passover. To his last day he remained a staunch right-winger, as did most of that part of my family.

In the correspondence with my cousin, I commented that until recently I had hoped that in the last resort Netanyahu would do the right thing to save the social and political cohesion of society, but that today I no longer believe in his ability or desire to do so.

My cousin’s reply was that “I am convinced that Bibi has always done his best to do ‘the right thing’ in a manner that would promote his and his voters’ world approach, even if it is different from what you consider ‘the right thing.’”

I guess that as in the case of the deep state, so in the case of “to do the right thing,” each of the sides to our internal conflict thinks within a different set of perceptions and beliefs.

Had I continued the argument with my cousin, I would have asked him how the political Right perceives of bringing the Israeli society and body politic together again, given that it seems to view the opposition and the protesters as conspirators in a deep state, and as traitors to the pluralistic state, who are solely concerned with preserving their privileged status.

The common perception in the Center-Left is that Netanyahu is not concerned with cohesion, but, rather, with his own political survival and trying to extricate himself from his legal travails, and in a more general way with preventing Iran from going nuclear, and the normalization of Israel’s relations with Saudi Arabia, as part of his heritage.

Here there emerges another fundamental question, which is whether Netanyahu’s voters and supporters actually support Netanyahu’s real agenda, or an abstract image of him as “father of the nation” (in the words of Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distel Atbaryan). From recently held opinion polls we learn that at least part of Netanyahu past supporters object to many of the current policies of his government and no longer view him as their first choice for prime minister. So at least currently it is not at all clear that Netanyahu is following his voters’ wishes, as my cousin suggested.

All this is part of a Gordian knot that seems to be tightening around us.

The writer worked in the Knesset for many years as a researcher, and has published extensively both journalistic and academic articles on current affairs and Israeli politics. Her most recent book, Israel’s Knesset Members – A Comparative Study of an Undefined Job, was published by Routledge last year.