Hundreds of protestors blocked traffic into the Terminal 3 departures area at Ben-Gurion International Airport Thursday morning as part of massive nationwide demonstrations against judicial reform taking place throughout the country this week.
The special focus on the airport Thursday morning was due to an official trip by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) to Rome to meet with far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Prior to boarding the plane, Netanyahu told journalists: “We continue our efforts to reach an understanding [on the judicial reforms]. Unfortunately so far all these efforts have been met with a blanket refusal by the opposition and attempts to plunge the country into anarchy. The issue is not the judicial reform, the goal here is to overthrow a democratically elected government.”
Israel is currently entering its third month of anti-government protests that began on January 7 and appear to be gaining momentum.
The official issue that these protests are organizing against is the coalition’s judicial reform plan, with organizers warning of the dangers of Israel becoming a dictatorship under Netanyahu and his political allies. The claim is that without a powerful judiciary, there would be no checks on the government’s power.
Local and foreign media outlets have for the most part supported the protests uncritically, depicting the Supreme Court as the guardian of democracy and human rights in Israel.
But the truth is that the Israeli Supreme Court isn’t and has never been a defender of human rights. In addition to the fact that it allows for administrative detention of citizens and non-citizens under Israeli rule, it has consistently protected Israel’s arms industry from public scrutiny over sales to human rights abusers abroad.
The depiction of the Supreme Court as a defender of of human rights falls apart when faced with the fact that in Israel’s judicial system there exists no presumption of innocence until proven guilty, no right to remain silent, no right to privacy and no protection from torture at the hands of police interrogators. At almost every junction, Israeli courts tend to favor ruling class interests over the basic rights of the common citizen.
What the Supreme Court is, however, is a defender of Israel’s contrived Western identity. It has consistently acted to promote the impression that “enlightened” bourgeois liberalism is synonymous with democracy and should be aggressively championed.
Taking into consideration the growing number of Mizraḥi and Ḥaredi Jews – along with Palestinians – coupled with the attitudes of Israel’s Westernized ruling class towards these groups, the Supreme Court isn’t actually a bulwark of democracy so much as a defense against it. It’s not a mechanism to empower people to influence the structures they live under but rather a safeguard to protect the class interests of Israeli elites and to maintain bourgeois liberalism as the dominant ideological paradigm in Israel – despite a rapidly growing population that doesn’t buy into that paradigm.
In truth, these protests aren’t really about democracy or even about the power of the Supreme Court. They’re about Israel remaining a client state of the United States and they’re being manufactured from the outside.
This campaign of civil disobedience is actually a textbook CIA operation. Washington does this whenever a nation elects a government that threatens US imperial interests. Sometimes these campaigns are successful (Egypt). Sometimes they fail (Cuba). But orchestrating anti-government protests is what the empire does in nations it feels itself losing control over.
At the first of these protests, on January 7, several groups shared responsibility for organizing the event and Palestinian flags were prominently waved alongside Israeli flags. But by the second protest, the Palestinian flags were gone and only one organization – the American-funded Movement for Quality Government (MQG) – was in charge.
Since then the protest movement has done everything right, targeting soft Likud voters and convincing much of the public that Israel’s in danger of transforming into an authoritarian Jewish theocracy. The organization, discipline, radical aesthetics and messaging of the protests are all highly impressive. The media support obviously helps but it’s clear that the organizers are very well trained.
In addition to providing training, the US is directly funding the local activists organizing the demonstrations, pressuring Netanyahu to submit to their demands and breaking diplomatic protocol by publicly coddling leaders of the opposition.
Leaked WhatsApp messages from Thursday morning’s organizers revealed that those participating in the action at the airport were given 250 shekels each, plus reimbursements for for their gas expenses, demonstrating that a lot of American money is being thrown around the anti-government protest movement.
Netanyahu has many flaws, as do his coalition partners. But the fact that Washington is publicly putting its prestige and money behind the anti-government protests, revealing that its in the self-perceived interest of empire to oust Netanyahu from office, should make anyone participating in these protests realize they’re being used as pawns in a much larger game.
