LETTER FROM ISRAEL MINISTER OF CHAOS

Itamar Ben-Gvir and the politics of reaction.

- RUTH MARGALIT

Late last year, as Israel swore in the most right-wing government in its history, a despairing joke circulated online. A picture broken into squares to resemble a captcha—the test designed to tell you from a robot— depicted the members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. The caption read, “Select the squares in which people who have been indicted appear.” The correct answer involved half of them. It was the kind of message that has become typical of Israel’s center and left in recent years: grim, cynical, ultimately resigned.

A few weeks later, Netanyahu’s cabinet introduced the first stage in a judicial overhaul that would weaken the country’s Supreme Court and render the government largely impervious to oversight. Right-wing legislators had floated a similar measure before, but it was regarded as too drastic. What changed, Netanyahu’s opponents say, is that he is a defendant now, on trial for allegedly providing political favors to tycoons in exchange for personal gifts and positive press coverage—charges that he denies. By removing constraints on executive power, the overhaul threatened to place Israel among the ranks of such illiberal democracies as Hungary and Poland. In an extraordinarily blunt speech, the country’s chief justice, Esther Hayut, called it a “fatal blow” to democratic institutions. Since then, tens of thousands of protesters have poured into the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities each Saturday. One marcher’s placard summed up the sentiment: “For Sale: Democracy. Model: 1948. No brakes.”