The Crisis in Israel Has a Distinctly American Flavor

A feature writer, columnist and broadcaster.

TEL AVIV

Hours before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed a proposed judicial overhaul that has prompted mass protests, the head of one of Israel’s most powerful unions made a small, seemingly off-topic remark as he announced a nationwide strike Monday.

“We are soldiers of the democratic state of Israel. Our country, and no one else’s,” hollered Arnon Bar-david, the union leader. “This is not the country of Kohelet — this is a country that belongs to all its citizens.”

The Kohelet Policy Forum is a libertarian-leaning think tank reportedly funded by at least one American billionaire that has emerged as the ideological architect of the proposed overhaul. The plan’s intellectual backers have routinely pointed to the American model of elected leaders nominating and confirming Supreme Court justices as their inspiration. By invoking the forum, Bar-david touched on a key aspect of Israel’s social and judicial crisis that has been too often overlooked: American influence.

While many observers have pointed to trends in Israel as harbingers for the United States, just as compelling an argument can be made that it is the other way around. In many ways, the fight over the future of the judiciary marks the culmination of the Americanization of Israeli society. A segment of Israeli society has always admired the United States and has striven to reimagine itself in its image. Over the past few decades, though, it hasn’t been America’s grand traditions of democracy and multiculturalism that have infiltrated the psyche of many in the Jewish state but rather its less admirable attributes.

As in America, many on the Israeli right have stopped defining themselves based on policies and have resorted instead to nativism and resistance to democratic norms. The political wedge issues in Israel are no longer questions around Palestinian statehood but rather the independence of the courts, good governance and plain decency. It’s no surprise, then, that the heirs of Israel’s earlier generation of conservatives can no longer find their place in the ruling Likud party. They’ve become Israeli versions of so-called RINOS, or Republicans in name only.

Without the demarcation of the ideological rivalries of the past, Israel’s political map is now defined mostly along identity lines, with the ultra-orthodox, nationalist settlers and working-class Mizrahi voters on one side (the “red” Israel) and the wealthier, mostly Ashkenazi, educated class of the coastal Tel Aviv and Haifa regions on the other (the “blue” Israel). Despite the socioeconomic gaps between them, the main points of contention tend to revolve around matters of decorum, tradition and grievances.

The Americanization of the Israeli judicial system at the hands of extremist leaders, even if they are elected, would rupture the essential trust and faith that Israelis have put into their system of governance and end the country’s long-held belief that good-faith actors in government have the best interests of all of Israel at heart.

If there is one positive American influence to point to these days, it is the awakening of a civil resistance movement.

But the larger issue boils down to this: Israel has enough problems of its own without also importing those of America.

Traditional versus progressive, religious versus secular, rural versus urban. Sound familiar?