To get governance back on track, Netanyahu must go - opinion

Last Tuesday, I attended a conference held by the Jewish People Policy Institute at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The topic of the conference was “A Thin Constitution: Securing Israel’s Governance System,” with special emphasis on the question whether the Knesset is able to perform its task of overseeing and supervising the government.

Among the participants of the conferences were past and present MKs, three former Knesset speakers, former legal adviser to the Knesset Adv. Eyal Yinon, academics who specialize in parliamentary studies, former Supreme Court justice Elyakim Rubinstein, and the members of a professional team involved in the “Thin Constitution” project at the JPPI.

The majority of those who spoke expressed great concern about the current state of affairs in which the executive branch of the government is almost in full control of the legislative branch, and seems determined to gain control over the judicial branch, and weaken the legal advisory (gatekeeping) network. 

The team working on the Thin Constitution project plans to work out a minimal constitution that will enable our governance system to function smoothly in a situation of an extreme schism in our society. This schism is grounded in the question whether our basic system should continue to be based on liberal principles, which have evolved since the establishment of the state, and with greater intensity since the 1990s, or shift the system in an illiberal direction, with possible elements of authoritarianism, and to a fundamental change of the current elites. 

The project takes it for granted that in the current situation the chances of agreement on a complete constitution for Israel (Israel does not have a constitution – just a set of incomplete Basic Laws) are virtually nil. The conclusion is that one should concentrate on those elements of a constitution that will lay down ground rules for a smooth functioning of the government system, which appear to be lacking these days.

The last effort to reach a complete constitution in Israel, was made during the term of the 16th Knesset (2003-06), when the late Likud MK Michael Eitan was the chairperson of the Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee. The Israel Democracy Institute was deeply involved in that project. Eitan managed to get nearly all the various parliamentary groups to participate in his committee’s effort, but was unable to complete the task before the elections to the 17th Knesset, and sadly, the project was shelved.

According to one of the members of the current JPPI team, the team will utilize some of the materials prepared by Eitan’s committee, all of which are available on the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice website. The team is planning to prepare a workable draft of the narrow constitution, but at this stage is not intending to tackle the Gordian knot of how to get all the parties concerned, in both the coalition and the opposition, to rally around this draft.

I believe that it is less problematic to work out draft documents that successfully tackle the immediate governability problems that Israel faces today, than to get the various sides of the political game to accept, and implement them. As long as he who heads the current coalition – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is more concerned with preserving his own political career by keeping his coalition together at almost any cost, there is no chance that he will seek workable compromises with the current opposition.

At the same time, among those who were involved in efforts to reach compromises between the coalition and the opposition over the judicial reform/revolution in the first nine months of the current government’s existence, there are some who argue that it was the opposition that was unwilling to make any real compromises. 

Prof. Moshe Cohen-Aliya, an expert on constitutional law, who participated in talks in the President’s Residence to reach compromises on the judicial issue, has argued that the participants in the talks from the opposition would not budge on any issue that endangered their status as the state’s traditional elites. He might be right, but revolutionary regime changes cannot be attained by means of compromises, only specific changes can, and there must be some basic trust between the sides involved, for such compromises to be reached. 

Cross-party trust is at an all-time low

At the moment the level of trust between the two sides is very low, and constantly deteriorating. Since all the opinion polls in the last year and a half show the current coalition losing its comfortable majority and going down to no more than 51 Knesset seats (out of 120), the coalition is correct in assuming that what the opposition wants more than anything else, are new elections as soon as possible, that will bring it back to power.

The opposition, on the other hand, understands that the only reason the coalition rejects early elections is that on the basis of the Israeli system it can remain in power, until the end of the term of the 25th Knesset in October 2026, as long as it can hold on to its existing majority, elected over two years ago. 

The problem here is that when the last elections took place the issues of a judicial reform/revolution and the aftermath of the catastrophic Hamas attack in southern Israel of October 7, 2023, were not on the agenda. 

The opposition also sees that the only compromises Netanyahu is willing to make these days is towards his own coalition members – the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, the Religion Zionist Party, and Otzma Yehudit – and that these compromises run counter to the compromises that must be reached between the coalition and opposition.

There seems to be a broad consensus among those who wish to try to solve the problem, that a first step must be to lower the tones and contend of the fiery rhetoric that is going on between the coalition and opposition. However, a majority of them also believes that the main problem is that most of the leaders on both sides are part of the fiery rhetoric, which is frequently encouraged by what is referred to as “poison machines.”

The content of last Thursday’s Uvda program on Channel 12 on how part of the poison machine around Netanyahu works, shows just how serious the problem is. I believe that the hate talk and incitement on the side of the opposition is not as organized as that around Netanyahu, but its existence is undeniable.

My personal view is that it will only be possible to start dealing with this problem after Netanyahu will depart from the public scene. However, nobody knows when that will occur.

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.