In February 2023, in the wake of the new Netanyahu government’s barrage of legislation aimed to whip the Supreme Court into submission, I wrote a column in this space titled “Friends of Israel, Be Very Afraid.”
Little did I know that within less than a year, most Israelis and their (alas, far fewer) friends would be far more afraid than I could ever imagine. Little did I know that our physical security, moral standing and international reputation would be facing consecutive and shocking blows. Little did I know that my government would refuse to take responsibility for any of those disasters, and would continue unabated to uproot our democracy and social solidarity.
My segment of Israeli society, a substantial, committed and active cohort, did not vote for previous Netanyahu governments, but we have never questioned their legality and legitimacy. Until the present time.
Israel’s current government has become its citizens’ worst enemy, and its leader has gone rogue.
In the name of millions of Israelis—the poll results have been stable for months—I am calling upon Israel’s remaining friends, those still rational and compassionate enough to read and acknowledge the brute facts, to make Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unwelcome in your country. To show your true loyalty to Israel by understanding that its current government has become its citizens’ worst enemy and that its leader has gone rogue.
Never in my life did I think I would say such a thing in public. My eyes are blinded by tears, but my mind is attuned to reality.
Netanyahu did not become a reprobate leader of an unraveling democracy on October 7, 2023. That happened earlier the same year, on January 4, when he sent the new justice minister of his freshly minted coalition government, Yariv Levin, to launch a bombardment of legislation in the Knesset. The proposed laws had three goals: to weaken and disable the judicial branch, to silence the liberal media and to assault the civil rights of Israeli Arab citizens and other “traitors.”
It was a three-tier plan, copied from the playbook of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán (and not unlike the one being followed by Trump’s second administration). Its masterminds, the members of a think tank brazenly calling itself the Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) Policy Forum, deftly put together a legislative package for a far-right populist regime that would cater both to libertarian oligarchs and to ultra-nationalist fanatics.
In 2019, just when police began to investigate Netanyahu on allegations of bribery and corruption, media influencers working for Netanyahu and Kohelet almost overnight launched a demonization campaign against Israel’s judicial branch of government. The accusations were that the judiciary favors the left wing and stands “on the side of the Arabs.”
Previous governments headed by Netanyahu, which included centrist parties in their coalitions, had made no such assertions against the courts. But Netanyahu’s indictments in 2020 turned him from a vocal, if slippery, supporter of the Israeli judiciary into its sworn enemy.
When he won his most recent election in November 2022, he therefore accepted the most extreme right-wing parties—including those of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir—as his natural allies. Weakening judges and subjecting them to the executive power would exactly suit Smotrich, who supports illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and Ben-Gvir, who has more than 10 criminal convictions, including one for supporting terror. This new, rogue Netanyahu accordingly saw no evil in appointing that very same Ben-Gvir as internal security minister, in charge of the police.
You may remember how Israeli civil society, headed by activists from the center and left, poured into the streets soon after Levin’s declaration of judicial “reforms.” Over the next eight months, protesters managed to stall the worst of the anti-judiciary draft laws.
Demonstrations also caused Netanyahu and Levin to back off, temporarily, from major illegal government decisions, including sacking the defense minister, the attorney general and the head of Shin Bet without due process. A majority of the country’s law professors and members of the bar were adamantly on the demonstrators’ side.
The government was losing its struggle with civil society. The harder Ben-Gvir’s police beat up members of the public who were protesting nonviolently, the more men and women poured onto the street. By summer, half a million of us regularly marched around the Knesset.
Until October 7.
On that blackest of days, and during its immediate aftermath, hundreds of thousands of the pro-democracy protesters were either in military uniform or fully occupied in turning the movement’s headquarters into a help-and-rescue operation, assisting the shocked refugees from the south and the north, organizing food and transportation for soldiers and civilians and helping the families of the missing and the hostages.
For months, the former protest movement did more for the Israeli victims of October 7 than did most of the relevant government ministries headed by hapless and ill-prepared Netanyahu cronies.
During those same horrific months, as the war in Gaza escalated and too few hostages returned home, Netanyahu was already planning to continue the judicial coup, adding a new and, for him, crucial goal: to prevent a national investigation commission into October 7. Such a commission, headed by a senior judge per Israeli law, would in all probability list the prime minister among the top echelons responsible for the calamity. That might force him to resign and hence prevent him from annulling his corruption trial.
These words are written in great sadness and near-despair for the future of Israel. Even if Netanyahu leaves office, the damage is all but irreparable, especially to the social solidarity I was raised upon. Many are not aware of the ugly abuse—by police, politicians and the Netanyahu family—of hostages’ families and other bereaved families begging to be heard. If we first thought that Netanyahu was blind only to the grief of people who didn’t vote for him, such as the kibbutzniks, by now almost all families of the 50 hostages still in Gaza are saying that they have been deceived and cynically exploited by our own government.
If Jewish Israeli citizens are treated thus, what are the chances of Arab-Israeli citizens for a fair deal from this government? What are the odds for any compassion toward innocents in Gaza? Only brave citizens are able to carry this moral torch, and a few brave soldiers calling out the atrocities done in Gaza in all our names.
The Israelis who will have to build their country from scratch—not its physical infrastructure, as in Gaza, but its moral guidance, political institutions and social cohesion—are not supporters of Netanyahu, or not anymore. But we constitute a decent mainstream, and we need the help of any and all of our friends abroad. Please, we say to them, if you support Israel, do not open your arms to Benjamin Netanyahu this time. Please know that for a huge number of Israelis he is, himself, the worst catastrophe in our history. By the time we can fix it in the November 2026 elections (if they are democratically held), it may be too late. So if you are still, in any reasonable way, “pro-Israel” at the present horrendous moment, please consider backing its civil society rather than its calamitous government. You can no longer support both.
Fania Oz-Salzberger is a writer, historian and professor emerita of history at the Faculty of Law, University of Haifa. A version of this piece will appear in the online compilation Illegitimate.