A Response to Glen Loury's Interview with Bartov

Israel is the one country with no democratic crisis

In general, I don’t like to respond to attacks on Israel’s internal politics by Israeli academics who live and teach in the US but I can’t help myself now.   In a recent podcast on Glenn Loury’s Substack he had on a fellow professor at Brown, Omer Bartov and the number of untruths and misstatements by Bartov is beyond belief.   I am writing this response only because of the tremendous respect I have for Glenn Loury and the bravery he and his Substack partner, John McWhorter have in dealing with issues of race and other issues in the United States.  I don’t blame Loury for putting Bartov on or for believing (apparently) what he says, since it is difficult to keep up with the internal workings of other countries and often one has to depend on colleagues who live or lived in that country.

I don’t have access to the full interview but rather the 12 minutes available to free subscribers (btw … the business model of Substack does not work – but that is for another time):

A Democratic Crisis in Israel

Let us start with the untruths about Netanyahu and the right that are at the start of the short video that deals with the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin.  The pictures shown of Rabin in Nazi garb are real enough and were presented at rallies in which Netanyahu spoke.  However, the actual “posters” were on A4 paper (a bit larger than 8.5 x 14) and were not broadly displayed.  Pictures were taken of it by the media and presented as the main attractions of these anti-Oslo protests.   They were not.  Also, many of them, if not all, were held by a man named Avishai Raviv.  Raviv was a Shaback (General Security Service) agent whose assignment was to infiltrate the Jewish extremist organizations and who had a relationship with the assassin, Yigal Amir.  Not only did Netanyahu have no knowledge of these small posters, almost no one at the rallies had knowledge of them until they were enlarged and shown in the media.

But a little background as to the process by which the Oslo Agreements were brought to the public and passed by the Knesset.  Rabin himself campaigned on an anti-PLO platform and the negotiations were held under the sponsorship of first Yossi Beilin (then deputy Foreign Minister) and also the FM – Shimon Peres, without Rabin’s knowledge.   When Rabin was presented with the results and finally agreed to back it, the accords were brought before the Knesset.   The government did not have a majority to pass the agreement.   However, Rabin bought off two Members of the Knesset who were elected from a right wing party headed by ex-General Rafael Eitan (this party was to the right of Netanyahu’s Likud) who switched sides and became ministers/deputy minsters in what was half-jokingly called the Volvo deal – since becoming a minister meant getting a Volvo and a driver.  In the end, if I remember correctly they only got Mitsubishis.  This allowed Rabin to get his bare majority of 61. 

While wholly legal at the time there was much anger, especially from those who voted for Eitan’s right wing party.   So, while Bartov shows various “facts” he totally ignores the context as well as what happened at these anti-Oslo rallies.

Let’s move on this his libelous claim that the two ministers in the government, Bezalel Smutrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir are “mirror images of Hamas”.   It was a false statement before October 7 and an obscene statement now.   Nowhere in their statements or actions will you find them advocating mass murder against innocent Palestinian civilians.  Nowhere in their statements, writings of actions do you even find sympathy for the murder of innocents.  The exception is Ben-Gvir’s support for Baruch Goldstein, a true Jewish terrorist who murdered scores of Palestinians in Hebron 1994.  That in itself, I agree should disqualify him from sitting in the government, in spite of the fact that he has now retracted that support.  But he is far from a mirror image of Hamas

Ben-Gvir was also an early supporter of Meir Kahane, as Bartov says – but he has not, as a politician advocated Kahane’s policy of expulsion of Arabs from Israel.   Regarding their alleged desire for a theological Halakhic state – based on Jewish religious law, that is one area that Ben-Gvir has never supported.  Smutrich certainly has supporters who favor an imposition of religious law but it is not something he himself favors.   

This is not to defend either Ben-Gvir or Smutrich, many of whose policies I oppose – but to compare them to Hamas’s actions is beyond obscene.

Let’s move on to the legal reform and Netanyahu’s legal troubles.   There is no connection between Netanyahu staying in power and his going or not going to jail in case he is convicted.  Unlike in the United States where only Congress can impeach or try a President or France where no investigations can go on while the President is in power, in Israel, you only need the approval of the country’s Chief Legal Advisor to start an investigation.   Netanyahu is on trial for one count of bribery and multiple counts of a charge called “Breach of Trust”.  Unlike in American law where a law must be specific in order to charge someone in Israel the “Breach of Trust” law has no actual definition.  Much like Justice Potter Stewert on hardcore pornography “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…”   - here too it is the subjective decision of the judges in the trial  - he will know it when he sees it - that determine if the accused is guilty of the crime with no definition.

The charge of bribery, while serious in and of itself is against Netanyahu a charge that he received positive coverage from a specific news website in exchange for approval of the sale of Bezeq that netted the many millions to the main shareholder.   However, as the prosecution rested its case, the judges informed the prosecutors that they have not proven their case and suggested they drop the charges.   Israel does not have trial by jury but instead three judges hear the case and rule based on majority vote.  In spite of the advice of the judges, the current Chief Legal Advisor refused to drop the charges and the trial goes on.

Putting all that aside, I don’t know if Netanyahu in fact is guilty and if he will serve jail time or not if he is. But the claim by Bartov that his being PM keeps him out of jail is just plain false.

Which moves us to the reform of the Justice system that was proposed exactly a year ago.   Now, every democratic system has its “non-democratic” parts to it that are used to, ostensibly, protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority.  The US has the Senate, the UK has the House of Lords and France has its powerful Presidency in a parliamentary system.  You can agree or disagree with any of these but they are important parts of the system.  The claim by the proponents of the judicial reform was that the justice system is undemocratic.  On the face of it that is correct.  For example, in Israel all judges, including Supreme Court Justices are appointed by a committee that consists of 9 people – three of whom are Supreme Court justices themselves and two are members of the Bar Association – lawyers who argue cases in front of the country.  The chief justice of the Supreme Court in Israel is a member and he or she appoints the two other justices on the committee.  Therefore, the Chief Justice has de facto veto power over the appointment of who will sit on that and all other courts (you need 7 votes to appoint a judge or justice). 

This arrangement does not sit well with me as an American, but I understand that this too could be part of that non-democratic nature of the system.   However, the issue seems to be that Israeli judges are the most activist in the free world and take it upon themselves to rule on issues that no other court rules on.   In addition, over the years the Chief Legal Advisors of each ministry have given  themselves veto power over every policy decision in the respective ministry.  The Supreme Court has even ruled that a minister or ministry cannot overrule the legal advisor giving lawyers and the courts absolute control over policy. 

This is not a left vs right thing in that both parties have been hurt by these decisions. However it does make the elected government impotent  and has made every policy issue that comes before the government into a legal issue.   Again – one can be an idealist and say that these legal advisors are just objectively interpreting the law, but there is no check and no balance to them.    That in itself is a dangerous thing to have in a democracy. 

That is not to say that all the reform issues were good or that it was approached properly – rather that the issues are serious and neither side has a right to call the other dictators.  There was no coup attempt on the part of the Netanyahu government.  If there was it would have been the first coup in history run by a government in power, without the support of the army, police, media or wealthy.   Quite an accomplishment it would have been.

Bartov also contradicts himself many times.  The most blatant has to do with the formation of the government.   Like he stated, Netanyahu always liked to have a party to the left of him to balance out those to the right.   He tried this time, too but none of the parties would join since they campaigned  (their only campaign theme really) on “Anyone but Bibi”.  He had a built in coalition of 64 (you need 61) after the fourth election in two years and it would be absurd to expect him to go to elections yet again after having a majority of the Knesset in support of him.  At any time he would have welcomed another party into the government but they all refused.   On the one hand Bartov states that Netanyahu formed the right only government because that is what he wanted and on the other hand he states that he formed it because others refused to join him.    He was correct for the latter reason and not the former.

One think I wholeheartedly agree with Bartov is Netanyahu’s inexplicable attempt to shed responsibility for the October 7 disaster.  This is not to say that he made the fatefully bad decisions leading up to that morning but he controlled the policy narrative that ended up being a total disaster.  I certainly expect that there will be elections in the next six months in which the people will be able to tell him – and the others who were partners in this, what they think of them.

We can go on and on for there are many other areas in the 12 minute video where he either tells untruths or twists or gives incomplete facts, but we will stop here.

Mr. Loury and Mr. McWhorter –  I would like to point out one thing to you.  Your interviewing Bartov in order to understand the political situation in Israel is similar to someone wanting to know about the race issue in the US but will speak only to Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Claudine Gay. 

Israel is a vibrant democracy that is stronger now than it was before October 7 since its people – from all walks of life, will never give up the freedom they have fight and die for.  It is neither on the brink of fascism nor a mirror image of Hamas.   Israel is a Mediterranean-Middle Eastern country with the passions (and cuisine) you would expect of one. 

However, these passions are firmly in the democratic camp and there is no threat and no possibility of it changing.