I spoke last week to Daniel Kahneman, who is known for winning a Nobel prize for economics and soon turns 89. The professor told me: “This is the worst threat to Israel since 1948 [the year it was founded].” It was worse even than the Yom Kippur war of 1973, when Israel’s survival seemed to hang in the balance – because this time the damage “may be impossible to repair ”.
Kahneman was not speaking about a foreign army massing on the country’s borders, an Iranian nuclear bomb or the gathering prospect of a third Palestinian uprising, but rather something Israel is doing to itself: what Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gently calls his “judicial reform” plan, but what others describe as the evisceration of the Israeli courts, handing unchecked power to the government.
The visiting US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, delivered a diplomatic version of the same warning last week, giving Netanyahu a civics lesson on the importance of an independent judiciary and the rule of law. Meanwhile, hundreds of notables, Kahneman among them, signed an “ emergency letter ” denouncing the proposed changes.
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