On Israel’s 75th Birthday, Is Optimism Still the Keynote?
On Israel’s 75th Birthday, Is Optimism Still the Keynote?
A new poll found that 51 percent were pessimistic about the future of the Jewish state.
In an interview aired on Israeli TV on Sunday, President Isaac Herzog called Israel’s intense domestic dispute over judicial reform, which has been raging for more than three months, “the most serious internal crisis in the country’s history.”
With the celebrations for Israel’s 75th Independence Day set to begin on Tuesday evening, Herzog was not alone in having a sense of crisis and apprehension.
Surveys in recent days have found a pessimistic mood in the country. In a Channel 12 news poll, 51 percent were pessimistic about Israel’s future, only 43 percent optimistic; the Kan public broadcaster found 48 percent saying Israel’s situation will worsen in the coming years and only 20 percent saying it will improve.
In the Kan survey, 53 percent of Israelis said the judicial overhaul was harmful to the country, while only 32 percent saw it as beneficial. Again, as I’ve stressed in previous posts on this site, such figures show that opposition to the overhaul or “reform” is not a “leftist” phenomenon; people who can reasonably be described as leftists are only a limited minority of Israelis.
But politics aside, are such figures really surprising? Isn’t Israel a country fraught with problems—not just the domestic strife that has marked 2023, but also terrorism and military threats, including ongoing threats from Iran to annihilate Israeli cities if not the whole country?
That Israel faces harsher challenges than other democracies—even when Israelis aren’t fighting among themselves as they have been this year—is undoubtedly true. Yet for the previous year, 2022, Israel scored a remarkable fourth in the world on the World Happiness Report, and its scores have steadily been in the top ten or close to it.
That high level of societal happiness can be attributed to much more favorable factors, such as: a strong sense of national purpose; strong family life with a high birthrate; and a positive, life-affirming Jewish ethos. Does the judicial-overhaul crisis now threaten to derail all that?
I admit that, in recent months, it has sometimes looked that way to me—as it has to many others. Now, though, I think we can see signs that rationality is taking over and a way out of the morass will be found.
In an interview to CBS on Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he does “not accept a blanket ability of the parliament to overcome judicial Supreme Court decisions, just as we don’t accept that the court can abrogate any decision by the parliament. Both sides of these extremes hinder the balance between the three branches of government.” Such a blanket overhaul of Supreme Court rulings, he said, “is not going to happen.”
Why has it taken Netanyahu three and a half months to make those clear assertions? The answer probably lies in the fact that, with the judicial overhaul having been drafted and championed by members of his own coalition, he feared to do anything that might threaten to unravel that coalition.
On April 15, though, the Israeli media reported the dramatic news that Moody’s, one of the three leading credit-rating agencies, had downgraded Israel’s rating. Not mincing words about what led to the decision, the agency’s report said it stemmed from a
deterioration of Israel’s governance, as illustrated by the recent events around the government’s proposal for overhauling the country’s judiciary.
While mass protests have led the government to pause the legislation and seek dialogue with the opposition, the manner in which the government has attempted to implement a wide-ranging reform without seeking broad consensus points to a weakening of institutional strength and policy predictability.
As plainly as possible, Moody’s stated that, if implemented, the judicial overhaul would “materially weaken the strength of the judiciary and as such be credit negative.” Apart from Moody’s, it’s widely expected that—if nothing changes—the two other leading credit-rating agencies, Fitch and S&P, will soon also lower Israel’s rating.
These are, of course, external, professional bodies with no connection to the Israeli left, which some have inaccurately blamed for the societal crisis. And Netanyahu, known for his acumen in the economics domain, undoubtedly grasps the implications for Israel’s economy of sagging credit ratings—as he also grasps the implications of his coalition’s and, particularly, his own Likud party’s recent steep decline in opinion polls.
And as for that dialogue on the Supreme Court issue, referenced by Moody’s, between the coalition and the opposition, it’s being held at President Herzog’s residence under his sponsorship. While sounding the alarm on the growing rift in the country, Herzog has also expressed cautious optimism on these negotiations, stating: “Just a year or two ago we couldn’t even talk about this topic. Today it’s clear that there has to be some sort of reform with broad consensus.” Herzog also said he was “convinced Netanyahu wants to reach a compromise.”
In 75 years Israel has racked up an amazing record of huge demographic growth and—for what remains a very small country—unprecedented achievements in a wide array of fields including immigrant absorption, high tech, agriculture, water management, medicine, military prowess, and others. Count me among those who don’t believe that a badly conceived but eminently improvable judicial “reform” is going to undo all that. If the talks do fail, it may get bad for a while, but eventually the rational elements in the society will prevail.