A video leaked earlier this week shows Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin (Likud) stating that the United States has been aiding the mass demonstrations that halted Israel’s judicial reform legislation.
In a video first published by Walla! News on Monday, Levin is seen telling Ḥaredi political operatives that the Biden administration “is working in cooperation with them [the anti-government protest organizers] on this, as you can see from the things said by the people in the government there.”
Levin acknowledged that “there is no doubt that we are at a truly incomprehensible disadvantage” in promoting the judicial reforms.
“They have the courts, the attorney general, all of the heads of the economy, the US government… total control of journalism, of the websites Ynet, Walla.”
The justice minister was careful to clarify in the leaked videos that he believes most of the protestors genuinely believe in their cause and are not simply being manipulated by outsiders. He added, however, that even “if we would have had a perfect campaign [explaining the reform to the public], there is no chance that we would have reached a different situation.”
“The other side has an arsenal of amazing tools whose power was exposed in this event like never before. It is incredibly well-funded.”
Since the year 2016, the US State Department has transferred millions of shekels to Israel’s Movement for Quality Government (MQG) – one of the leading organizers of the protests against judicial reform. The MQG has for years been organizing campaigns aimed at removing Netanyahu from power.
Local and foreign media outlets have supported the anti-government protests uncritically, depicting Israel’s Supreme Court as the guardian of democracy and human rights in the country.
But what’s become clear in a situation where both supporters and opponents of judicial reform have presented themselves as champions of democracy punching up against authoritarian power is that all of Israel’s dominant institutions – from the security forces and media to the heads of industry and academia – rallied to the defense of the Supreme Court and the anti-government protestors, even going so far as to threaten to harm the state if power is taken away from the judicial establishment.
What’s more, the demonstrators fighting against the judicial reforms not only enjoy passive backing from the United States but even real material support. In any political battle in any developing country, the clearest way to see where justice lies is to see who the empire supports (what’s unique and admittedly confusing about Israel is that the side receiving US support is referred to inaccurately as “the left”).
And despite the media’s portrayal of the Supreme Court as a guardian of human rights, it has never actually functioned as such.
In addition to the fact that it allows for administrative detention of citizens and non-citizens under Israeli rule, the Supreme Court 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 rather fast 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.
In more or less every instance, 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 over the will of the people.
Taking into consideration the growing number of Ḥaredi and Mizraḥi 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 superstructure in Israel – despite a rapidly growing population that doesn’t buy into that paradigm.
In truth, these protests haven’t really been about democracy or even about the power of the Supreme Court. They’ve been about Israel remaining an outpost of Western civilization in the Semitic region and a client state of US empire.
The anti-government protests we’ve been witnessing since January is actually a textbook US intelligence operation. Washington does this whenever a nation elects a government that threatens its imperialist 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.
