Caroline Glick
On Monday night, as the public waited for the polls to close and the exit polls to be released, Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s biggest prime-time satire show broadcast a sketch that perfectly captured the state of the Democrats’ Israeli counterparts. The sketch portrayed Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz on election day on one side of a split screen and Likud leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Election Day on the other.
Gantz’s character spent the day lolling around his house, clueless and indifferent to the elections. It was only at the end of the day that he remembered he was supposed to vote – and campaign.
Netanyahu’s character, on the other hand, spent the day frenetically searching for votes, campaigning relentlessly, if comically for every constituency he could think of.
The gag perfectly characterized the basic distinction not only between Gantz and Netanyahu but between the political Right and the political Left in the lead-up to Monday’s elections. From the moment the last Knesset dissolved itself and third elections were called, Netanyahu canvassed the country from one end to the other, over and over again, talking to voters. The Likud put together a ground game the likes of which it hadn’t deployed in ages to get voters to the polls on Election Day and expanded its voter base by more than 200,000.
Blue and White’s campaign, in contrast, was barely noticeable. For over a month, Gantz refused to give media interviews and ordered his party members to say as little as possible. Blue and White’s campaign, such as it was, was hateful and contemptuous of voters. Yair Lapid, Gantz’s number two, outdid himself last week when he called right-wing voters “sh*ts.” His party colleague Yoaz Hendel gave an interview where he derided Likud voters along elitist lines. In a swipe at Sephardi Jews, Hendel insinuated that Likud voters come from the culture of darbukas drums, and Blue and White voters, come from the classical music culture of Vienna.
Blue and White made no attempt to win over voters. All they cared about, to the extent they cared at all, was uniting their camp under a tent of elitism, bigotry and hatred of Netanyahu whom they portrayed as Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his primitive, sh**ty voters.
Gantz inadvertently explained the lackadaisical campaign strategy in a radio interview last week. Gantz said that from his perspective, political leaders aren’t really that important. The real leaders of Israel are the legal fraternity.
In his words, “The Supreme Court is the top authority.”
Why bother campaigning when political leaders don’t decide anything anyway? And more to the point, why should Gantz and his colleagues fight for votes when the only votes that matter are those belonging to Supreme Court justices and the state prosecutors? The legal fraternity has made abundantly clear that it prefers Gantz to Netanyahu and will stop at nothing to get rid of Netanyahu. So why campaign at all? Might as well sleep in on Election Day.
Blue and White, with its official platform rejecting all legal reform, isn’t alone in its view that democracy is a thing of the past and that the people’s vote is no more binding than an op-ed. In the last two weeks of the campaign, there was a sudden rash of letters by veterans of elite IDF units, the Israeli Air Force and the diplomatic corps calling for the Supreme Court to bar Netanyahu from forming a government. These elitists didn’t even bother to wait to see how the public voted. It made no difference to them.
If Lapid and Hendel let the cat out of the bag in their sneering and hateful remarks about Likud voters, in 2016, Clinton called the tens of millions of Americans that supported Donald Trump “a basket of deplorables … the racists, the sexists, the homophobes, the xenophobes, the Islamophobes.”
In Israel, the checks and balances move in only one direction. The Knesset and the government – that is, the elected branches of government – are fully checked by the legal fraternity. The justices, attorney general and state prosecutors, for their part, have no checks on their power at all. The reason they keep seizing the powers of the Knesset and the government is because they can.
Whereas Likud and its coalition partners are committed to pursuing significant reform to check the power of the prosecutors and justices, Blue and White’s platform dismisses outright all possibility of reform. The Left knows what its source of power is. And it isn’t the people.
On Wednesday, Blue and White announced it will seek the passage of a law barring indicted officials from serving as prime minister. In so doing, Blue and White formalized its rejection of democracy. If passed into law, Blue and White’s bill will do two things which are both antithetical to democracy.
First, it will give the unelected attorney general the power to decide who can run for office. If all that is needed to block a politician from running is a criminal indictment, then the only person who matters in Israeli politics will be the attorney general.
Second, the bill seeks to cancel Monday’s election. More than two million Israelis voted for Netanyahu, either directly by voting for Likud, or indirectly, by voting for its coalition partners. And the Blue and White bill intends to throw their ballots into the trash.
If the law passes, Israel’s parliamentary system will have more in common with Iran’s parliamentary system than with Britain’s. In Iran, the Guardian Council of the Islamic Revolution decides who can run for office. In Israel, the Guardian Council of the legal revolution will perform the same function, and to the same end.
It’s not at all clear how we can proceed from this point. But what is clear enough is that we have reached an inflection point. Either three members of the Blue and White coalition break ranks and join Netanyahu to form a government and save Israeli democracy, or Israel will cease to be a democracy.
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