The country’s mass protests were its last democratic guardrail. But Israel’s wartime goals have become a higher priority than keeping Netanyahu in check.
By Oded Haklai and Andrew O’Donohue
November 2024
On November 5, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant. This was not the first time he tried to remove Gallant, who had served as “the main voice of dissent” in Netanyahu’s government. In March 2023, the prime minister dismissed Gallant after he publicly opposed the government’s plan to overhaul Israel’s judiciary, a move that would virtually eliminate judicial constraints on executive power. Yet mass mobilization across many sectors of Israeli society and long-term, large-scale protests forced Netanyahu to retreat, reinstate Gallant, and suspend the judicial overhaul.
These protests were a last resort. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue, societal mobilization is often the final democratic guardrail when elections, political parties, and legal institutions fall short. Israeli populist politicians have for years been undermining democratic guardrails. Now societal mobilization is under severe strain as well. Israel’s ongoing, multifront conflict against Iran, Hamas, and Iran’s other proxies is deterring mobilization and dampening popular protests. For many of the prewar protesters, wartime goals have become a higher priority than defending their country’s checks and balances. The result is troubling: Since 7 October 2023, the Netanyahu government has been undermining constraints on executive power, from the police to the Supreme Court and beyond.
Around the world, populist leaders like Netanyahu have embarked on a process of “executive aggrandizement,” crippling or altogether eliminating the checks and balances fundamental to democracy. Yet, as Kurt Weyland argues, populist leaders succeed in destroying democracy only when a country’s institutions are weak or easily changeable and that country is experiencing a crisis that empowers the executive. Both conditions are present in Israel today. The country’s institutions are easily changeable because it lacks a firm and unified constitution, and in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, popular appetite for mass antigovernment protests has weakened.
Thus the country’s widening, multifront conflict is, in our view, making the country more vulnerable to “democratic backsliding” and increasing the risk that Netanyahu will continue to undercut constraints on executive power. There will be repercussions for the rights of Israelis and Palestinians.
Israel’s Last Democratic Safeguard
Democratic backsliding in Israel is not new, though. What is happening today represents an intensification of processes that began before and during Netanyahu’s previous tenure as prime minister (2009–2021). He has persistently chipped away at the ability of the media, political parties, and legal institutions to check his power since as early as 2007.
That year saw the beginning of a years-long, systematic effort to weaken the independent press with the launch of the conservative newspaper Yisrael Hayom, funded by the late American billionaire Sheldon Adelson at Netanyahu’s encouragement. Handed out for free, the newspaper became Israel’s most widely read daily by 2011 — and it exerted significant electoral influence through persistently favorable coverage of the prime minister and critical coverage of his rivals. In 2014, the far-right television station known today as Channel 14 launched. The channel has been widely viewed as loyal to Netanyahu and has received special favorable regulations, such as exemptions from the mandatory ethics codes. Such loopholes provided Channel 14’s owners, “who are affiliated with the religious right, with greater capacity to influence content.” In 2015, Netanyahu went so far as to appoint himself the country’s minister of communication, a position with considerable control over media regulation. Notably, the prime minister has for years been under three criminal indictments, including for charges of trading favorable regulations in return for sympathetic coverage.
Beyond the media, Netanyahu has also evaded and eroded political-party constraints. Having served as chairman of his Likud party for almost two consecutive decades, he has managed to push out potential rivals and independent-minded politicians within Likud who might have reined him in, such as former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon or former interior minister Gideon Sa’ar. Netanyahu has also reduced constraints from other political parties in his governing coalition by assembling a government in 2022 that many analysts view as “the most-right wing in Israel’s history.” His far-right coalition partners, including Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit Party and Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party, have cheered the government’s attempt to overhaul the judiciary.
Finally, the current Netanyahu government has circumvented provisions intended to prevent authoritarian incursions. In 2020, the High Court of Justice declined to bar Netanyahu from serving as prime minister despite his ongoing criminal prosecution. The year before, the High Court ruled that Ben-Gvir, who had been convicted of inciting racism and belonging to a terrorist organization, could run for elected office — despite a provision in the Basic Law of the Knesset that bars racist parties or candidates from running for the legislature. In 2024, the High Court ruled that Ben-Gvir was eligible to serve as minister of national security, overseeing the police.
With these institutional guardrails weakened, when Netanyahu’s government introduced its sweeping judicial reform in January 2023, the only remaining recourse was mass mobilization. Week after week on Saturday nights, Israelis protested by the thousands to oppose measures that would largely strip the courts of their oversight powers. Trade unions, business leaders, leading economists and legal scholars, the Israeli bar association, and military reservists threw their support behind Israel’s judiciary. Ultimately, this sustained, broad mobilization forced Netanyahu to back down.
How the War Enabled Democratic Backsliding
Israel’s war has inhibited the type of mobilization that not long ago stymied Netanyahu’s efforts to expand executive power. Crucially, however, the conflict has not generated majority support for the prime minister’s coalition, despite improving poll numbers for his Likud party.
Rather than mobilizing popular majorities behind Netanyahu, the war has demobilized societal efforts to constrain him. For many Israelis, the war — and returning the hostages, in particular — has become the top priority, more so than protecting institutional checks and balances. Recent reporting in Israel shows that many protesters are confused about how to balance these priorities. Should protests focus on securing the release of the hostages or opposing autocratization?
Israelis are also psychologically exhausted. After more than a year of war with no end in sight, people are tired and uncertain. In a September survey, 73 percent of respondents stated that their sense of personal security had deteriorated since October 7. What is more, Israelis may fear that protesting against the government will send a signal of internal division and weakness to Israel’s adversaries. In a post–October 7 survey, a large majority (70 percent) of Israelis believed that the sharp disagreements within Israel over the judicial overhaul affected Hamas’s decision to attack.
The most vivid illustration of how the conflict has inhibited Israeli society, however, is the starkly different reactions to the firing of the same defense minister before and during the war. In March 2023, Netanyahu’s decision to fire Gallant triggered an overwhelming backlash. In what is now commonly known as the “night of Gallant,” hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered throughout the country, blocking highways and major intersections, and demanding a halt to the judicial overhaul and reversal of Gallant’s dismissal. The following day, national labor unions, local governments, and major business leaders declared a widespread strike. Netanyahu conceded to the demands.
In contrast, the public response since Netanyahu’s latest firing of Gallant has been comparatively restrained. Although protesters called for a “Gallant night II,” trade unions, business leaders, and civil society groups have been more reluctant to declare a strike. Protests, although widespread, have been smaller. Whereas before the war reservists in the Israeli military threatened not to report for duty, it is much harder for them to credibly do so today. These are just a few of the ways in which the war has limited civil society’s ability to block the prime minister’s concentration of power.
The Wartime Power Grab
At precisely the time when other constraints have weakened, Netanyahu’s government has intensified its efforts to dismantle checks and balances. Thus democratic backsliding is deepening and rights and freedoms are taking a beating, including freedom of the press, freedom of association, and legal protections for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Particularly worrying are the government’s attacks on the autonomy of the police and the oversight powers of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General’s Office.
To begin with, Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, has “weaponized Israel’s police” against political opponents. After he became national-security minister in 2022, the government amended the law governing the police to expand Ben-Gvir’s authority, including over criminal-investigation priorities. Ben-Gvir, himself a convicted criminal, has wielded his influence not only to set broad policy but also to manage the specifics of particular operations, the use of force, and, crucially, promotions within the police force. Under Ben-Gvir’s direction, the police have been accused “of lax policing of settler violence in the occupied West Bank, of aggressive tactics against anti-government protesters, and of failing to halt far-right attacks on aid convoys to besieged Gaza.”
The upshot is an increasing politicization of law enforcement. Around 66 percent of Israelis think the police are doing a poor or very poor job of “enforcing the law in a politically neutral manner,” according to a survey conducted this September. The share among Arab Israelis was even higher at 79 percent.
Equally important, Netanyahu’s government has undermined Israel’s Supreme Court by breaking the informal norms safeguarding judicial independence. For the first time in Israeli history, the Supreme Court has been operating without a permanent president — now for more than a year. Against the explicit legal advice of the attorney general and against a ruling by Israel’s top court, the justice minister, who is a Netanyahu loyalist, has refused to convene the committee that would appoint a Supreme Court president.
The justice minister has also blocked new appointments of judges for more than a year: Three seats are now empty on Israel’s Supreme Court as well as dozens more on lower courts. This obstruction has not only punished judges by increasing their workload but also shifted the ideological balance on the Supreme Court in favor of more conservative judges. By violating established administrative practices, the Netanyahu government has “already changed the face of the Supreme Court.”
Netanyahu’s government has also tried to delegitimize and circumvent legal constraints imposed by Israel’s attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara. The attorney general plays a key role in holding the government to account — not least because she oversees the ongoing corruption trial against Netanyahu. While the prime minister’s defense lawyers have sought to postpone his testimony in the trial until at least 2025, Baharav-Miara opposed this request. Netanyahu is now scheduled to testify in December. Faced with an independent-minded attorney general, government officials have repeatedly attacked her legitimacy. One minister labeled Baharav-Miara an “enemy of the people.” Another accused her of “making life easy for our enemies.”
The government has invoked the war not only to delegitimize Baharav-Miara but also to evade her oversight. In October, when she found that the security cabinet had made a decision without consulting legal and security experts, as required by law, the Prime Minister’s Office accused her of engaging “in baseless claims where there is a real danger to lives.” Israeli observers now fear that Netanyahu may remove the attorney general, just as he did Gallant.
If Netanyahu does fire the attorney general or revive the judicial overhaul, will society again rise up to defend checks and balances, even amid the strain of an ongoing war? In other words, will Israel’s last safeguard against executive aggrandizement hold strong against Netanyahu’s moves — or, as we fear, has it been too weakened by the war? That remains to be seen. But without the type of organized, mass mobilization that took place before October 7, the risks of further backsliding will be far greater than ever before.
Oded Haklai is full professor in the Department of Political Studies and director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy and Diversity at Queen’s University (Kingston) and a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center. Andrew O’Donohue is the Carl J. Friedrich Fellow in Harvard University’s Department of Government and coeditor of Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization.
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Sebastian Scheiner-Pool/Getty Images
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Why Israeli Democracy Is in Crisis |
Inside the Fight to Save Israeli Democracy |
Why the Defenders of Liberal Democracy Need to Stand Up |