In a Deep State of Denial and Deceit

With his tweet yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down on his efforts to tie his battles against Israel’s “Deep State,” with President Trump’s sweeping moves against the civil service and the judiciary in the United States:

In America and in Israel, when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will. They won’t win in either place! We stand strong together.

Leaving aside whether he still gets to call himself a “strong” leader after the most catastrophic security blunder in Israel’s history happened on his watch, it is notable that he wrote this in English. In Israel, his star has fallen dramatically; an election now would see him a long way short of being able to form a coalition, but he is still very popular with American conservatives. He is surely right to assume that he can only strengthen this support by identifying himself ever closer with the President.

But Bibi is not Trump, and Israel is not the United States. I’ll let others, more expert on American domestic politics, to analyze the merits of the case for or against an American “Deep State”. But in Israel, when Netanyahu or his supporters talk about the “Deep State”, they really mean the institutions and individuals that have been trying to protect the state from the corruption and lawlessness of this government.

Contrary to his tweet, those opposed to his attempts to transform Israel into Hungary, are not part of one political faction. They are certainly not all “leftists”; in fact they include many people who were previously associated with the Likud Party.

In an essay I wrote some months ago, I argued that while Netanyahu had played the classic populist card of claiming to represent “the people” against the “elites”, Israel’s pro-democracy movement, that came out every week in their hundreds of thousands to protest the judicial overhaul, was far more representative of Israel that this far-right/ultra-Orthodox government.

…unlike in the United States, Israeli protestors were not bashing the founding values of the country: they were celebrating them. Neither were they drawn from a particular ideological group or supporters of a particular party. They included leftists, centrists, and liberal-rightists. It is certainly the case that “elites” were prominent (the academy loudly condemned the government’s plans), but multiple sectors of Israeli society were active in campaigning to stop the judicial “reforms.”

The same people who were leading the protest movement up to October 6, 2023, were leading the civil society effort to help the survivors and internal refugees of the Hamas pogrom after October 7. The government was shell-shocked and hopelessly inept in those first days after the atrocities. Ordinary Israelis stepped up and stepped in, organizing food, childcare, counseling, and other services. And the most active organizations were those that had been coordinating the weekly anti-government protests. They pivoted, and they utilized the resources and organizational know-how they’d developed that year for a different challenge. They made a mockery of the populists’ claim to be speaking for “the people.” They were the people. And they were there for their stricken countrymen while the prime minister was still trying to work out how he could avoid taking responsibility for the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust occurring on his watch.

One way to understand Israeli politics these past years is to see them as a battle between two theories: let’s call them the “Louis XIV” theory; and the “Deep State” theory.