The Right to Say No
The comparison between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump is usually made at the level of temperament and rhetoric. Both attack the press, denounce prosecutors and judges, and present themselves as victims of entrenched elites. All of this is accurate, but it is also the least interesting part of the comparison.
The deeper similarity lies elsewhere. Both have understood that contemporary power does not need to abolish democratic institutions. It needs only to change the conditions under which those institutions can act. Courts may continue to sit, parliaments may continue to legislate, elections may still be held, regulators may retain their names, and commissions may continue to publish reports, preferably in buildings with functioning air-conditioning and no remaining authority. What disappears is not the institution itself, but its capacity to make refusal consequential.
Israel offers one of the clearest implementations of this mechanism. The Netanyahu government has not staged a military coup. The Knesset has not been dissolved by force, the army has not seized power, and elections have not been formally cancelled. Instead, the transformation has proceeded through the system itself. Legislation, coalition discipline, appointments, dismissals, administrative paralysis and attacks on judicial authority have performed, step by step, the work that an older coup would have attempted in a single night.
A traditional coup suspends the system from outside. The Israeli project works from within it. It does not declare that law no longer applies; it seeks to determine which law applies, who may interpret it and whether an adverse judgment must be obeyed. This is a more sophisticated political technology, and also a tidier one: fewer tanks, more committees.
No political project can become real outside the institutional machinery that translates decisions into consequences. Governments require law, budgets, appointments, enforcement, public information and administrative continuity. Oppositions require the same infrastructure if they are ever to replace a government and make their own programmes effective. Whoever controls that machinery controls more than the present government; he shapes the conditions under which any future government will be able to act.
The central question is therefore not only whether Netanyahu remains in office, but what kind of state his successors will inherit. A weakened attorney general, a politicised appointment system, a judiciary whose authority has been openly contested, regulators accustomed to paralysis, security institutions pressured toward personal loyalty and inquiries shaped by those they are meant to investigate do not disappear when an election is lost. A change of personnel may occur without a restoration of political possibility, and this is precisely how institutional asymmetry survives electoral defeat.
The continuing protests in Jerusalem do not contradict this diagnosis. They clarify it. A democracy is not preserved merely because citizens remain free to gather, speak and oppose the government. The decisive question is whether dissent can still travel from public expression into institutional consequence.
When protest remains visible but loses the capacity to alter appointments, legal authority, administrative practice or structures of accountability, freedom of expression survives while political efficacy contracts. Twentieth-century authoritarianism often attacked expression directly. The newer form of power is more selective: it may leave protest, media debate and electoral competition intact while taking control of the channels through which opposition becomes law, judgment, investigation or administrative fact. Citizens may still say no, but the more difficult question is whether their refusal can still enter the machinery of the state and produce a binding effect.
This is why the struggle over the attorney general cannot be reduced to a personal conflict. The office represents something intolerable to concentrated power: a legal judgment that does not originate within the executive itself. In a constitutional order, law must remain partially external to those who exercise power. It must be able to confront the government as something the government does not own.
Once the executive can decide what it wants to do and then decide for itself whether doing it is legal, legality ceases to function as a limit and becomes an instrument of self-authorisation. The government does not abolish the law. It merely improves the law’s attitude.
The same logic governs the assault on judicial independence. The dispute is often described as a conflict between judicial activism and democratic majority rule, but that formulation already accepts too much of the coalition’s narrative. The real issue is whether any institution may retain authority that does not derive from the government currently in office.
If the answer is no, then an elected majority becomes more than a temporary political majority. It becomes the sole interpreter of the public will. Here the asymmetry becomes visible. The coalition claims the right to restrain the court because it was elected, while the court is denied the right to restrain the coalition because it was not elected. One side is permitted to define the limits of the other while refusing any equivalent judgment upon itself.
The executive retains the power to enter every institution, while no institution is permitted an equivalent power to confront the executive with a binding judgment. This is not democratic reciprocity. It is one-way permeability, a structure in which one fragment of the polity acquires the privilege of speaking for the whole.
A parliamentary majority is real, but it is not the people. A government is real, but it is not the state. Electoral victory is real, but it is not unlimited sovereignty. Security is indispensable, but it is not the totality of political life. The moment a fragment claims the authority of the whole, democratic order begins to deform. This is the central idolatry of contemporary majority rule.
The language of the “deep state” performs an essential role in this process. It is often treated as a conspiracy theory that should simply be disproved, but its primary function is political rather than descriptive. It converts every institution capable of resisting the executive into an illegitimate force acting against the electorate.
Prosecutors become conspirators, judges become usurpers, civil servants become saboteurs, investigators become political agents, journalists become enemies, and security officials become disloyal whenever their loyalty to law conflicts with loyalty to the leader. The relevant question is therefore not whether a “deep state” exists, but what the accusation allows the government to do. It allows institutional independence to be redefined as treason against democracy.
The attempt to remove the head of Shin Bet exposed this logic clearly. A security service investigating matters connected to the prime minister’s political environment was no longer treated as an organ of state responsibility; its independence was recoded as insubordination. The meaning of loyalty changed with it.
In a democratic state, the head of a security service must be loyal to law, institutional duty and the continuity of the state beyond any one government. In a personalist order, such loyalty is treated as hostility to elected leadership. Loyalty to the state is replaced by loyalty to those who temporarily control it.
The same mechanism appears in struggles over media regulation and commissions of inquiry. A regulator does not need to be abolished if it can be deprived of appointments, quorum, funding or enforceable authority. A commission of inquiry does not need to be banned if the government can shape its composition, mandate and evidentiary limits.
Control over an inquiry into October 7 is therefore not merely a matter of avoiding blame. It is a struggle over the production of public causality. Who determines what happened determines what counts as failure; who defines failure shapes responsibility; and who shapes responsibility influences which reforms become politically imaginable. A government investigating itself is not merely protecting its past. It is narrowing the range of possible futures. There is, after all, no more efficient form of accountability than appointing the accountable to design it.
This is where the Israeli and American cases converge. In the United States, the Trump administration has sought greater influence over election administration, voter registration, federal oversight, law enforcement and the interpretation of executive power. The American institutional field is more dispersed, because federalism, state governments and multiple jurisdictions complicate centralisation.
Israel is more exposed. It has no federal system, no second legislative chamber and no single entrenched constitution standing outside ordinary coalition power. The government is formed through a parliamentary majority that also controls legislation, making the remaining independent institutions unusually important and unusually vulnerable.
That is why the language of “democratic backsliding” is insufficient. It suggests a retreat toward an older authoritarian model, whereas what we are witnessing is more inventive. The system is not abandoned; it is made to perform the work of its own neutralisation.
Elections remain because elections legitimise. Courts remain because courts provide constitutional scenery. Parliament remains because coalition discipline can convert partisan interest into formal law. Regulators remain because an empty institution is often more useful than an abolished one. The result is a democracy in which institutions continue to exist but no longer possess an effective right of refusal.
Without that right, democracy becomes indistinguishable from temporary majority ownership of the state. This should concern Jews in both Israel and America for reasons deeper than ordinary partisan politics. Jewish political memory should make us especially suspicious of every fragment that declares itself the whole: the leader who becomes the people, the government that becomes the state, security that becomes morality, the majority that becomes truth.
The danger does not begin when elections disappear. It begins when those who win them claim that no binding authority may stand outside their victory. Netanyahu has not suspended the Israeli system from outside. He has shown how an elected executive can use the system’s own procedures to acquire one-way power over the institutions meant to restrain it.
The names remain democratic.
The asymmetry does not.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
