Historically, and even theologically, Jews have always been closer to Muslims than they were to Christians. It was in Muslim lands, the late eminent historian Bernard Lewis told us, that Arabic “became the language of science and philosophy, of government and commerce, even the language of Jewish theology when such a discipline began to develop under Islamic influence.” The Moroccan-Israeli historian Michel Abitbol couldn’t have been clearer: “The transformation of Judaism following its encounter with Islam affected all aspects of Jewish life profoundly and irreversibly.”  The great scholar of Jewish thought Maimonides (whose face graces the Israeli sheqel as seen above), wrote his classic Guide to the Perplexed in Judeo-Arabic. It is common today to talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition to distance the West from Islam, but one can more appropriately talk about a Judeo-Muslim one.

Actually, similarities between Judaism and Islam made Jews targets in Christian Europe. “Why should we pursue the enemies of the Christian faith in far distant lands,” wrote Peter the Venerable of Cluny to Louis VII in 1146, “while vile blasphemers far worse than any Saracens, namely the Jews, who are not far away from us, but who live in our midst, blaspheme, abuse, and trample on Christ and the Christian sacraments so freely and insolently and with impunity!?”

After their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century, Jews were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim lands. A Frenchman by the name of Isaac Zarfati, deploring the treatment of Jews in Germany, encouraged his co-religionists to join him: “I proclaim to you,” he wrote, “that Turkey is a land wherein nothing is lacking, and where, if you will, all shall yet be well with you.”

Prominent nineteenth-century Jewish scholars from Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire such as Abraham Geiger, Heinrich Graetz, and Ignaz Goldziher who played a key role in developing what we now call Islamic Studies were convinced of the superiority of Islam to Christianity and felt a strong kinship with Muslims. The British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a descendant of Spanish Jews, was disdainful of European culture and proud of his Semitic ancestry. He called Jews the “Arabian tribe” and Arabs “Jews upon horseback.” In his novel Coningsby, or the New Generation, Disraeli wrote: “Why do these Saxon and Celtic societies persecute an Arabian race, from which they have adopted laws of sublime benevolence, and in the pages of whose literature they have found perpetual delight, instruction, and consolation?” For this reason, Jerusalem cannot be ruled by uncouth Europeans and “will ever remain,” he wrote in Tancred, or the New Crusade, “the appanage either of Israel or of Ishmael.”

Following their emancipation in Germany, Jews, eager to reclaim their Oriental heritage, used Moorish designs to build their synagogues because they offered the closest model they could imagine to the original Temple of Solomon. This led Orientalist scholar Paul de Lagarde to comment: “What is the sense of raising claims to be called an honorary German and yet building the holiest site that one possesses in Moorish style, so as to never ever let anyone forget that one is a Semite, an Asiatic, a foreigner?”

Still, Jews saw themselves as Orientals connected to Arabs and Muslims more so than they were to the alien traditions of their host European nations. As one writer put it in the monthly journal Jüdische Monatshefte: “Who is Ishmael to us?  What does the Islamic world mean to us?  The Muslim religious doctrine, customs and laws, the Muslim science and beautiful literature contain golden seeds which seem borrowed from us and the Jewish hereditary stock and thus seem familiar and related.” In fact, the association of Jews and Muslims persisted well into the Second World War when Nazis called the most degraded of their inmates in Auschwitz Muselmänner, or Muslims

The great Iraqi poet Ma’ruf al-Russafi wrote: “We are not, as our accusers say, enemies of the Children of Israel in secret or in public/How could we be, when they are our uncles, and the Arabs are kin to them of old through Ishmael?”

In 1948, King Abdullah of Transjordan told Golda Meir: “I believe with all my heart that divine providence has brought you back here [to Palestine and the Middle East], restoring you, a Semitic people who were exiled to Europe and shared in its progress, to the Semitic East which needs your knowledge and initiative. Only with your help and your guidance will the Semites be able to revive their ancient glory. We cannot expect genuine assistance from the Christian world, which looks down on Semitic people. We will progress only as the result of joint efforts.”

Just like Moroccan Jews in Israel and Muslim Moroccans are united by their love for their ancestral land, a better appreciation of the common heritage uniting Jews and Muslims could also help lessen tensions and establish a more durable foundation for peace.

Excerpted from Tingis with the author’s permission. Read the entire essay here .

The macabre incident took place in the middle of last week, when 16 Israeli policemen went to the home of a young Palestinian man in the Shuafat refugee camp on the outskirts of Jerusalem to arrest him. They maintain that he refused to go quietly, and they were constrained to use force against him. His attorney said when he was arraigned on Thursday that every bit of his body was black and blue from the beating the 16 policemen gave him, and that at one point they held him down and branded his cheek with the Star of David, which has been made a symbol for Israel. The police tried to explain this brand away as being from a policeman’s boot.

At Saturday’s demonstration in Tel Aviv, protest leader Shikma Bressler denounced the extremist ideology of “Kahanism,” insisting that it was all along at the core of the ruling right wing Likud Party. “As a result,” she said, “we are witnessing a breaching of all the dams… Jews stamped a Star of David on the face of a Palestinian detainee. Shame.”

As for the plight of Israeli women, it is dire, as can be seen from the country’s rankings. On women’s political power, it has fallen from 61st among 146 countries in the world in 2022 according to the World Economic Forum to 96th this year. Some educational courses are being segregated by gender to accommodate Ultra-Orthodox men, who won’t sit in a room with unrelated women. This accommodation has been permitted by the country’s High Court, whereas in other instances it has ruled in favor of equal rights for women and men. The current extremist government is hoping to increase the power of rabbinical courts, which are all male and rule in accordance with Jewish religious law, the halakha. Divorce is already in the hands of the rabbinical courts, and as a result, only men can initiate a divorce in Israel, not women.

In one incident this week, teen girls were ordered to “cover up” and sit in the back of a municipal bus, because some Ultra-Orthodox men were passengers. The bus driver accused the girls of “feeling comfortable being naked” and said, “You need to understand this, this is the Jewish state.”

Haaretz writes that a mother of one of the girls, Galit Alush Reuven, a member of the women’s protest group Bonot Alternativa, gave a speech at the demonstration, saying, “misogyny, darkness, racism, coercion – everything erupts under the auspices of the coup that gives free rein to dangerous forces.”

Many Israeli women believe that without the check of the country’s Supreme Court, the government will increasingly make women second-class citizens and defer to Ultra-Orthodox politicians.

Meanwhile, Palestinian-Israelis, some 20% of the population of Israel, are planning demonstrations for Monday against the decision of Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich to divert hundreds of millions of dollars in spending from the Palestinian-Israeli towns to which it had been dedicated to illegal Israeli squatter-settlements on the Palestinian West Bank. Palestinian-Israelis had not joined the protest movement in large numbers because they viewed the Israeli High Court as an internal Jewish matter and had sometimes been disappointed in its rulings. But now the extremist government is impelling even this community to protest.

The Knesset passed a law preventing the Supreme Court from striking down laws they find “unreasonable” in light of the country’s basic laws and from nixing governmental appointments on grounds of corruption. This is the culmination of a campaign by Israeli PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, and Ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezelal Smotrich to consolidate their far-right wing coalition power in perpetuity, and to pass anti-democratic legislation to ensure that aim. This step would aid Netanyahu’s fight against graft and corruption charges, and upend democratic norms in Israel. It would also open the door legislative annexation of Palestinian territories in violation of international law.

Embed from Getty ImagesIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (C) and Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich (L) attend a weekly cabinet meeting in the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, on June 18, 2023. Netanyahu vowed on June 18 to advance the government’s controversial judicial reforms, which have seen his premiership marred by mass protest against the proposed overhaul. (Photo by Ohad Zwigenberg / POOL / AFP) (Photo by OHAD ZWIGENBERG/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

If a majority in the US Congress took similar steps in these polarized times a civil war could erupt here that would make January 6 look like a picnic. The battle for democracy in Israel thus mirrors the parallel struggle in the U.S. The protest dynamic in Israel, on the other hand, bears some similarities to recent US movements, from “Occupy Wall Street” to “Black Lives Matter,” with big crowds in the streets that sometimes block key thoroughfares. I have discussed the vertical alliance between Donald Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu; and pointed to the political, governmental and historical parallels.

Haaretz columnist Yossi Verter argues that Netanyahu, “ . . . made a blood pact with the racist, messianic, ultra-Orthodox and nationalist State of Judea . . .  He will now be able to marginalize the Supreme Court, depose the attorney general, and appoint a ‘general prosecutor’ to prosecute his cases.” Bibi’s “fan base” is the ultra-Orthodox Haredim and far-right settler communities, and he’s granted their entire wish list of agenda items; including ongoing exemption from military service for the Haredim, and the equivalent of Israeli Proud Boys in key ministerial positions.

The rise and rise of the Zionist far right is connected with major population movements. A mutant brand of zealous religious Zionism has supplanted the political Zionism that was established in Basel in 1896, after the organic Jewish settler movement began in 1882.  The “Revisionist” (fascist-leaning) Zionism of Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky, who founded the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa and then helmed far right wing organizations in British Palestine, ultimately gave rise to the Likud Party, which first came to power under Menachem Begin, a Jabotinsky protégé, in 1977.  The Likud won in part because it attracted the support of many Mizrahi, Middle Eastern Jews, who felt disadvantaged by the Labor Party establishment dominated by European, Ashkenazi Jews. The right-wing zealotry that Begin promoted was wrought up with the ambition to gobble up the remaining Palestinian territories under a regime of settler colonialism. Even leftist and centrist Israelis often supported the settlement movement in the West Bank, which Israel seized in 1967. Those hundreds of thousands of settlers, many of them ultra-Orthodox or Mizrahim and on the far right politically, are championed by several of Netanyahu’s coalition partners and are in a position to dictate policy to the centrists. So first, the relatively secular far right Likud supplanted Labor, and then Likud itself increasingly allied with the religious, messianic Zionists, bringing them to power.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC-aka “The Joint”) was founded in 1914 to aid Jewish victims of World War I, and Jews settling in Palestine. This refugee relief organization has been branded as a “radical leftist organization” by Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, as he moved to defund its programs. He canceled a 3 million shekel ($817,000) allocation to fight crime in seven troubled Israeli Arab towns, because the program is run by the AJDC.

The Hon. Daniel Cormer, former Israeli Ambassador to India to called this, “a scandalous, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish move,” while opposition lawmaker Meirav Cohen tweeted, “Boycott the Joint? Seriously? Who’s next? The Jewish National Fund?”  This right-wing mindset is tragically represented by Ben-Gvir, “whose worldview doesn’t extend beyond the settlement of Kiryat Arba,” as characterized by Haaretz columnist Yossi Melman.

Embed from Getty Images
The Israeli far-right Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, appeared at both the Gay Parade and the far-right demonstration in Jerusalem on June 1, 2023. (Photo by Stefano Lorusso/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Israel now faces a constitutional crisis, in which the Supreme Court could strike down the legislation designed to curb its powers. The government may in turn refuse accept the new decision and seek to retaliate. This active political volcano is a result of four years and five inconclusive elections in Bibi’s pursuit of these goals. It has become the battle for Israel’s parliamentary and perhaps, spiritual soul. The conflicts pitch existential questions for Jews such as, “What is Zionism, and what has it become?” How did a political movement designed to protect Jews from persecution morph into a monstrous force of persecution of its own?

Thousands of protesters have been met with violence by the police and government supporters in throughout Israel. Bibi is trying to turn Israel into his own singular dictatorship. After the beatings by police and organized right wing thugs at the demos, Bibi called it a “necessary democratic step aimed at restoring the balance between the branches.” Bibi’s buzz phrases such as “balance” and “safeguarding rather than endangering democracy” turn the obvious meanings of “balance” and “democracy,” pointing to just how Orwellian his far right and corrupt agenda has become.

Israel could well be heading toward its own January 6. The parallels are real. Both the Republican Party and Likud have empowered and invested in their countries’ most extreme far right-wing ideologues, and seized upon opportunities and vulnerabilities to dismantle democratic guard rails that disrupt their agenda. While the U.S. has empowered Congressional Reps such as Marjorie Taylor Green, Tommy Turberville, and Lauren Boebert; Israel has elevated Bibi’s extremist henchmen Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to czar-like positions on the Cabinet, where they can pursue their worst draconian fantasies against both Palestinians and Israeli leftists and centrists, whom they dismiss as traitors and terrorists. 

At the same time, Israeli protesters mounted a massive miles-long march on Jerusalem.

Embed from Getty Images
Demonstrators lift flags as they walk near the Israeli village of Moshav Shoresh on July 21, 2023, during a multi-day march from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to protest the government’s judicial overhaul bill ahead of a vote in the parliament. Israel has been rocked by a months-long wave of protests after the government unveiled in January plans to overhaul the judicial system that opponents say threaten the country’s democracy. (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP) (Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images)

A committee of the parliament, dominated by a right-wing coalition that includes out-and-out extremists, reported out an article of the new law on the judiciary that removes the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review on the grounds of whether a law is “reasonable” in the light of Israel’s basic laws on issues such as human dignity. The country does not have a formal constitution, but some laws, on human rights issues, have been taken as the basis for overturning subsequent legislation that contradicts the basic laws. Removing the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review would make Israel an elective dictatorship, where the ruling party can pass retrograde laws permitting discrimination against women, Christians, Muslims, secularists and gays, in accordance with the principles of the Israeli Religious Right.

The Supreme Court has also branded some squatter-settlements by Israelis on Palestinian-owned land in the West Bank as illegal, and extremists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir want to prevent the court from so ruling in the future.

It is expected that the government will pass the controversial legislation on Monday, since the current coalition has more than enough votes to do so and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is unmoved by the huge demonstrations that have been mounted for 28 weeks in a row. Netanyahu is on trial for corruption, and the new legislation may save him from being convicted.

Thousands of protesters against the new law set out this week from Tel Aviv, walking on foot to the Givat Ram district of Jerusalem where the Israeli parliament or Knesset meets, to stage a big demonstration this weekend and into Monday against the passage of the law neutering the Supreme Court. The journey is about 44 miles. On Friday evening, the group, some 10,000 strong, halted 9 miles outside Jerusalem to hold Friday evening worship ceremonies.

Although they never blocked the main road, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, and notorious extremist and racist, ordered the police chief to clear it with as much force as needed. Ben-Gvir seems to want to treat secular Jews rather as the occupied Palestinians are treated. It shows that once you go in for occupying other people and depriving them of their rights, it eventually blows back on the metropole.

Embed from Getty Images
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir arrives to attend the weekly cabinet meeting at the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem on July 9, 2023. (Photo by GIL COHEN-MAGEN / POOL / AFP) (Photo by GIL COHEN-MAGEN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The demonstrators issued the following statement:

“We are entering the most fateful days in the history of the state. This is a war of independence for the vast majority of the citizens of Israel, patriots who have given up everything and have been fighting for months for its future as a liberal democracy. We are in the phase before the destruction of the Third Temple, and the government and its president must hear the people’s cry and stop. Starting Saturday evening we will all be in the streets, and only with firm resistance will we stop the dictatorship.”

The reference to the destruction of the Third Temple is almost apocalyptic in tone. Solomon’s temple, the center of Jewish worship according to the Bible, was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. The Iranian Achaemenid Empire then conquered the Near East and allowed Jews to return to the Levant, to a special district for them named Yahud. There they built the Second Temple. It was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. Thereafter Judaism developed as a different sort of religion, based in scattered communities rather than around a central cultic site, and developing rabbis who advised on the practice of the religion in the absence of a temple. The destruction of both edifices is lamented in Jewish tradition. The protesters are saying that Israel as a secular liberal democracy functioned sort of as a Third Temple for the Jewish people, and that Netanyahu and his colleagues are no less a threat than had been the Babylonians and the Romans.

Last Thursday, Israelis demonstrated in front of the US Embassy in Israel, demanding that the United States pressure Netanyahu to back off his plan to gut the country’s supreme court. They said they feared the change would harm US-Israeli relations.

On Saturday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Democratic Progressive Caucus, denounced Israel as a racist state. She clarified on Sunday that she only meant that the current Netanyahu government is racist, not that the idea of Israel is. I don’t think that remark will mollify the Israel lobbies, but the episode shows how alienated some corners of the American political scene have become from the horror show in Tel Aviv.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Tel Aviv and other cities for the 28th week in a row to demonstrate against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s planned legislation to gut the powers of the country’s Supreme Court. They also announced that they would devote the coming week to disruptions, including of the rails.

These massive protests, in which fully a fourth of the country has taken part personally, and which are supported by a majority, have demonstrated the polarization of the country.

On Sunday, Netanyahu was constrained to expel from his far right Likud Party the activist Itzik Zarqa. Zarqa had gotten into an argument with protesters, who are generally coded as Ashkenazi or European Jews, while the current coalition draws a great deal of support from the Jews of the Middle East, called Mizrahim.

Zarqa was caught on video shouting, “It’s not for nothing that six million were killed. I’m proud that six million of you were burned!”

He quickly backtracked, but that moment of intense political hatred that turned into an ethnic slur and a glorification of the horrific Nazi genocide of six million European Jews crystallized the rhetorical civil war that has gripped Israel.

Netanyahu has pledged to hold a vote on Tuesday on an article in the bill that takes away from the Supreme Court its power of judicial review of acts of parliament on grounds that the latter are “unreasonable.” The Court can overrule laws it finds contradict the basic principles of reasonableness set out in Israel’s organic law, which jurists have maintained have the force of a constitution.

If the article passes, as it likely will, the Supreme Court will no longer be able to overrule acts of parliament on these grounds, setting the stage for a tyranny of the parliamentary majority. The court would also not be any longer able to strike down appointments of politicians to high office on the grounds that they have shown a pattern of corruption. Women, gays, Muslims, Christians and other groups fear that the Jewish fundamentalists in the cabinet will then pass laws depriving them of their rights, and that the Supreme Court will not be able to counteract such measures. Others fear that Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, will use the provision to ensure he cannot be found guilty and go to jail.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari points out that Israel has only a unicameral legislature from which the prime minister is elected, and therefore has no other checks and balances on government power save for the Supreme Court. Remove the latter, he says, and you have a dictatorship.

The popularity of the leading parties in the current government has plummeted according to opinion polls. The polling suggests that if elections were held today, the opposition would get well over the 61 seats needed to form a government in the 120-member Knesset.

Ironically, the public changed its mind too slowly. Netanyahu’s current majority is firmly ensconced, and despite the enormous weekly demonstrations, the parliament can certainly pass the bill gutting the judiciary if it so desires. It almost certainly will.

The extremist, fascist parties in Netanyahu’s cabinet intend to use the gutting of the Supreme Court as a way to accelerate illegal squatter-settlements on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, and to ensure that there can be no judicial backlash against their plans to colonize Palestinian land intensively with Israeli migrants into the territory, and then to annex it, while keeping the Palestinians stateless and without rights.

The site of the French ambassador to the United Nations, Nicolas de Rivière, explains that the European Union chose May 9 to commemorate a major speech of then French Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Schuman on May 9, 1950, in which he outlined new forms of cooperation in Europe that would achieve long-term peace. His proposal is now considered the “Birth Act” of the European Union. This year the EU is beginning the Year of Skills, encouraging Europeans to seek lifelong education.

Schuman suggested that France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg create a common market for their coal and steel resources by abolishing tariffs. He made this suggestion in concert with Jean Monnet and while he had established a channel to Konrad Adenauer, working for reconciliation.

In contrast, Ben-Gvir is a notorious racist, having been charged 50 times with incitement to racial violence. He wants to deport from Israel all those Israelis of Palestinian heritage who disagree with his policies– and even such Israeli Jews. “It is time for us to be landlords,” he says. He has defended a group that wants to ban intermarriage as “miscegenation” and that considers churches to be centers of idolatry that should be closed down. He has more than once pulled a gun on Palestinians. He told Palestinian security guards at a parking lot who asked him to move, “I’ll take care of you!” as he pulled his weapon.

He recently said he wanted the Palestinian hamlet of Huwara “shuttered and burned down.”

Like all extremists, Ben-Gvir got on his high horse about this snub, demanding the freedom of speech that he routinely attempts to deny to others, and confusing incitement to violence with free speech. Ben-Gvir tried to take control of Tel Aviv police to force them to take harsher measures against Israeli protesters against the government.

Let us turn to Europe Day’s honoree. From his European Union page and the Schuman project we can gather this about Schuman: He was born in Luxembourg, and lived in Alsace-Lorraine and so came under the influence both of France and Germany. After France regained Alsace-Lorraine he ran for the French parliament from there and was elected. He had devoted himself after his mother’s death to peacemaking, and hoped that the Vichy could find a way to restore peace. But he came to understand that the Nazis could not be reasoned with.

He refused General Petain’s offer of a job under Nazi occupation in France and so was arrested and transported to prison in Germany in 1940. The Nazis tried very hard to recruit him to write for them, threatening him with consignment to a death camp at Auschwitz if he did not comply, but he refused. In 1942, he managed to escape. He went to France.

As long as Vichy was not under direct rule from Berlin, he was able to move about and address audiences, assuring them that Germany had already lost the war and it was only a matter of time until it was defeated. The Nazis put a $100,000 bounty on his head. He was one of the first sources to report, with horror, on the mass killings of Jews in Ukraine, which he probably heard about in prison or from the German officials who tried to recruit him. He also, however, had gained a good idea of the massive losses taken by the German people and military, which was the origin of his conviction that Berlin had already lost.

He had to go into hiding when Germany asserted direct rule, and was in touch with the French Resistance. General De Gaulle attempted to persuade him to come to London, but he preferred to operate covertly in France.

After the war he reentered parliament and then became the French foreign minister. In a major speech at the Court of St. James on May 5, 1949, Schuman said that a new supranational Europe would emerge without anyone giving up their national identity and traditions. It would be sited in France, of which he said

“Our revolutionaries once carried beyond our frontiers the new message of liberty – today this has became the legacy of all mankind. In their zeal they did not always know how to keep themselves within the limit of peaceful methods. We will not suffer the same temptation. Example and persuasion will be the only means available in this enterprise; it will be exclusively peaceful and constructive. We will threaten nobody.”

He warned against selfish nationalism: “We know only too well where the ‘splendid’ and selfish isolation of states can lead us. States, like individuals, were created to get to understand each other and to help each other out.”

Schuman stood against racial animosity, and it was his ability to reach out to Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first post-war Chancellor, that helped lay the foundations for the European Union.

This is the man and the vision that May 9 honors in Europe.

Schuman and Ben-Gvir could not be more different. The EU was correct to cancel the diplomatic reception once Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had the temerity to send the infamous proponent of “Jewish Power” to represent Israel there. The episode shows the ways in which the current government, the most extreme and fascistic in Israeli history, is raising questions about the place of Israel in polite society. Its Apartheid practices should already have done that, but ex-colonial powers in Europe touchy about their own sordid past seem to have difficulty denouncing them. Open Jewish supremacy is another matter.

The death in custody on May 2 of Khader Adnan, the first Palestinian to die of a hunger strike for more than 30 years, sparked mass protests in Gaza and an exchange of fire between Israel and armed Palestinian groups. It was later announced that a ceasefire had been agreed, but the situation remains febrile.

It’s another headache for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s already struggling to hold together his fractious coalition in the face of mass protests over his government’s plans to overhaul the country’s judiciary to make it effectively subordinate to the Knesset, or parliament. Netanyahu was forced to shelve the plan in April after four months of street protests in Israel’s cities.

But there is also significant support on the right – both within Netanyahu’s coalition and on the streets. On April 28 an estimated 200,000 pro-overhaul protesters gathered in Jerusalem for a mass rally ahead of the reopening of the Knesset after Passover.

They were addressed by figures including the justice minister, Yariv Levin, who said the government remained committed to the planned overhaul. He also attacked opposition parties for refusing to compromise over the legislation as part of a mediation process being led by Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog.

Netanyahu’s promise in April to seek a compromise plan has been met with scepticism by many opposition figures and ordinary Israelis. This is at least partly due to promises from government ministers to plough on with the measures one way or another and their hostile rhetoric against the supreme court and the millions of Israelis who want to prevent the reform.

On April 15, the number two at the justice ministry, David Amsalem, called for an investigation into the protests and for the current supreme court president, Esther Hayut, to be charged with “an attempted coup”.

Tens of thousands took to the streets again last weekend, the 17th consecutive week that Israelis have turned out for mass demonstrations against what many see as a plan that would undermine Israeli democracy.

Challenges on multiple fronts

Meanwhile, clashes between Muslims and Israeli police during Passover and Ramadan led to heightened tensions with the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states. After Israeli Defence Force troops twice stormed al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, arresting hundreds of worshippers and injuring several, it drew an immediate response from what are believed to be Hamas members based in Lebanon.

A barrage of 34 rockets was launched into Israel over the following weekend, but were mainly intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defence system.

Warming relations with the Gulf states, meanwhile, have also turned progressively chillier in recent months due to inflammatory language regarding Palestinians from far-right coalition members and heightened settler violence in the West Bank.

These are dangerous times for Israel as it marks the 75th anniversary of its statehood. Israeli society is fractured – and external enemies of Israel know this. But so too does Netanyahu.

He is an inveterate political survivor, who understands that the current situation is untenable. The decision to prevent Jewish worshipers from entering the Temple Mount, where Al Aqsa is located, until the end of Ramadan seems to have been designed to de-escalate tensions.

Meanwhile, after firing his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for speaking out against the overhaul, Netanyahu has awkwardly rescinded that decision – another sign of how serious the situation has become. But given the language being used by various hard-right government ministers and the violence they are whipping up, it’s unclear how long any relative calm can last.

The path ahead

Facing unfavourable conditions at home and abroad, Netanyahu will probably attempt to focus on preparing and passing the budget in the coming weeks. This, he may hope, will distract hardliners in his coalition from the judicial reform and secure some political breathing space.

Yet it’s far from certain that many ministers will be so easily diverted. Even as Israeli society tears itself apart and investors pull their money from the country in response to the proposed overhaul, many members of the government remain ideologically committed to neutering the courts – no matter the cost.

This could unleash more trouble. Many protesters feel Netanyahu, a man renowned for stabbing even his allies in the back, cannot be trusted. Even if he attempts to defuse the situation, the attitude of many of Netanyahu’s ministers is likely to make many people even more sceptical of his real intentions. Protesters are unlikely to disappear from Israeli streets any time soon.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has already shown he is willing to bend to the demands of the far-right in order to keep them behind him – though cracks in the relationship are beginning to show with several members of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party threatening to resign.

Lost in much of the coverage in the west as Netanyahu announced his plans to pause the judicial overhaul, was the price the security minister Itamar Ben Gvir – a convicted supporter of a Jewish terrorist organisation – managed to elicit from the premier in return for support for the legislative pause: an armed “national guard” under his command.

The force has not come into being yet. But despite Netanyahu’ efforts to water down the force’s powers and Ben Gvir’s grip on the organisation, the decision to hand the extremist minister such a force demonstrates the hold hardline and far-right ministers have over this government.

All signs point to continued chaos as ministers continue to call to push through the deeply divisive overhaul legislation and the far-right continues to profit from its intransigence. Ben Gvir’s national guard could further ignite tensions with the Palestinians and by extension armed Islamic groups in the Middle East. Although Passover provided a welcome break in Israel’s political drama, more unrest is on the cards.

James Sunderland, DPhil in Global History, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sam Sokol, Aaron Rabinowitz, Bar Peleg and Josh Breiner at Haaretz quoted one far-right Israeli counter-protester as calling for running over protesters with cars. Another said, “We should go to the [Supreme] Court with gasoline, the Nazis here. Gasoline, explosives, tractors, guns, knives. From today, everything is kosher.”

Clashes between the two factions, and road closures, lasted into the night. On Monday, Israel had been paralyzed by a strike of workers belonging to the Histadrut federation of unions. Most international flights into Ben Gurion Airport were cancelled because the airport workers were also on strike.

In Tel Aviv, centrist crowds were not mollified by Netanyahu’s announcement that he had placed a “temporary freeze” on advancing the legislation on the courts through parliament. Thousands closed one of the city’s main arteries, Ayalon Highway, but late at night police loosed water canons against them to open the road.

Extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security, spoke to the rally in front of the courthouse in Jerusalem, saying that he had considered resigning from the Netanyahu government over the freeze on judicial legislation. He said, however, that in the end he did not want to give a victory to what he calls “the anarchists.” In actuality, most opponents of the restrictions on the powers of the Israeli Supreme Court are center-right. If they were Americans they’d be Mitch McConnell Republicans.

In fact, Ben-Gvir’s permission was needed for Netanyahu to pause the legislation gutting the Supreme Court, and he was reluctant to give it. As mentioned, he had threatened to resign. That step could have brought down the government. He had suggested this weekend that it would be much better to break the heads of the protesters and just proceed to pass the legislation in parliament, which Netanyahu probably has the votes to do. In the end, Ben-Gvir acquiesced in the pause, but only because Netanyahu promised to give him a “national guard” to “fight crime.” Critics of the Netanyahu government lambasted this proposed new security force as Ben-Gvir’s private militia, which he will run without oversight.

The Israeli centrists have no doubt that Netanyahu is the source of all the trouble, since he brought the extremists into the government. BBC Monitoring pointed out that Yossi Verter at Haaretz blasted Netanyahu as more dangerous to Israel than Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrollah or Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi.

Meanwhile, Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, accused the US State Department of payrolling the demonstrations against his father, according to Euronews Arabic.