The Anticlimactic End of Israel’s Democracy Crisis

The Netanyahu government’s signature legislation went out with a whimper. But the forces behind it have bigger plans.

On Monday, Israel’s Supreme Court issued arguably the most momentous ruling in its history: A slim one-vote majority of the justices struck down an attempt by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to curb their power. And yet, the country largely shrugged. After months of mass protest and talk of constitutional crisis, an event that was supposed to be seismic turned out to be a sideshow. External war had eclipsed internal war.

It’s hard to remember at this point, but before the Hamas slaughter on October 7, Israel was embroiled in the worst civic unrest since its founding. The cause was the Netanyahu government’s attempt to undermine the country’s judiciary. Many Israelis and outside experts had long considered Israel’s Supreme Court to be overly powerful and in need of reform. But the hard-right legislation proposed by the ruling coalition did not rein in the court so much as neuter it, subordinating the body to politicians and allowing them to overrule its decisions.

This audacious attempt to revise Israel’s democratic order, put forward by a hard-right government that had received just 48.4 percent of the vote, provoked enormous protest. Beginning in January 2023, hundreds of thousands of Israelis poured into the streets each week to demonstrate against the “judicial coup.” Weakening the high court, they feared, would grant unbounded authority to Netanyahu and his extremist allies.

The outcry had an impact. The Biden administration came out against the legislation, calling for compromise. Polls showed that the judicial overhaul was intensely unpopular. But the government pushed ahead anyway. In July, it passed the first bill in the planned proposal, which limited the Supreme Court’s ability to evaluate the “reasonableness” of certain government decisions. This law was the least controversial of the entire legislative suite, but was intended as a prelude to the full judicial revolution.

On Monday, the Supreme Court canceled that revolution, grounding the Netanyahu government’s signature achievement before it got off the tarmac. Prior to October 7, Netanyahu had refused to commit to obeying a high-court ruling against the reforms, setting the stage for a constitutional crisis that would pit the government against the judiciary and force Israel’s other institutions to choose sides.

In the end, none of this happened. Overtaken by war, the potentially apocalyptic moment for Israeli democracy became an afterthought. There remained plenty of drama: The Supreme Court’s ruling was first leaked, Dobbs-like, to the Israeli media, in what appeared to be an attempt to alter its outcome. Undeterred, the court rendered its verdict almost immediately. The justices not only struck down the reasonableness reform by a narrow margin, but ruled 12–3 that the court had the right to regulate Israel’s Basic Laws, the country’s rough equivalent of constitutional legislation. The hard right’s attempt to clip the court’s wings ended up reaffirming its power, at least for now.

In another time, this move would have provoked outrage on the thwarted nationalist right and prompted immediate calls to disregard the court’s dictates. But with fighting raging to the south against Hamas and in the north against Hezbollah, Israel has little appetite for internal conflict. Progressive and civil-society groups have claimed victory, while the reaction from the government has been muted. “The decision of the judges of the Supreme Court to publish the verdict during wartime is the opposite of the spirit of unity required these days for the success of our fighters at the front,” complained Justice Minister Yariv Levin, an architect of the overhaul that nearly unraveled Israeli society, without a trace of irony. But even Levin acknowledged that now was not the time to continue this debate. “As the [military] campaign continues on various fronts, we will continue to act with restraint and responsibility,” he said.

This was less a concession than a recognition of the new Israeli reality. The Hamas massacre has unified the country and convinced most of its citizens that their own divisions invited the attack. In this telling, Israelis took a holiday from Jewish history to indulge their internecine feuds, and the enemies of Jewish life capitalized on their distraction. Even some of the more extreme members of Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party have now expressed regret over their past conduct. “There were about 100 people who drove 9 million toward an abyss—from politics, from the media, social media influencers,” former Minister Galit Distel-Atbaryan said in an interview. “You suddenly realize that everything that you were doing and thinking was good, was actually bad. I created a rift, and I created division, and I created tension, and this tension caused a weakness. And this weakness, in many aspects, led to the massacres.”

But while the reckoning over Israel’s judiciary has been postponed, it has not been resolved. The fundamental tensions that compelled the crisis remain: a country without a constitution; a parliament that can pass quasi-constitutional laws with a bare majority, even without widespread consensus; and a high court that is the only check on the government’s power, but that lacks democratic accountability because its members are appointed by a body composed mostly of lawyers and other judges. When the war is done, Israel will still need to collectively address these outstanding issues.

Meanwhile, the far-right forces that birthed the judicial-overhaul plan and pushed the country to the brink of civil war haven’t been chastened. They’ve just set their eyes on a bigger target: Gaza. As I have written previously, the Netanyahu government is in thrall to those radicals who wish to resettle the Gaza Strip at the cost of displacing Palestinians. The same pressures that previously pushed Netanyahu to assail the judiciary, against the preferences of most Israelis, will now be marshaled to press him to build new Jewish settlements in Gaza, against the preferences of most Israelis.

Indeed, just as the Supreme Court was rolling out its ruling, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir—Israel’s most powerful far-right politicians—initiated a seemingly coordinated campaign calling for “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza to make way for resettling the enclave. The Biden administration and its international allies immediately condemned these designs, which compelled Israeli officials to deny them. But American criticism won’t stop the far right from continuing to force the issue. The energy that once went toward dismantling the Supreme Court will now be channeled into resettling Gaza. The battle over the judiciary may have reached a cease-fire, but the struggle over the future of Gaza has only just begun.