Likud’s Soft Coup Under Pretext of Pandemic

The Likud lost the most recent election, yet they continue to cling to power exploiting every dirty trick in the book. Blue and White (B&W) received 61 votes to form the next government and Pres. Rivlin tasked Party leader, Benny Gantz with the task.

The first trick employed was to tempt enough MKs to defect so that B&W would no longer have a majority and stalemate would ensue. It succeeded in persuading a single MK to betray her commitment to the Labor Party. Her excuse was that a government which co-habited with the Palestinian Joint List was somehow a betrayal of the values of the nation. But with an original count of 62 in the center-left bloc, that still left B&W with 61. Though two other MKs threatened to bolt for the same reason, they didn’t do so.

Once the first trick failed, Likud resorted to even more drastic measures. Bibi Netanyahu’s corruption trial had been scheduled to start this week. But a Netanyahu capo and justice minister decreed that all courts would close, ostensibly due to the Coronavirus epidemic. This in effect postponed his trial till at least April, if not later.

But that only staves off one element of Netanyahu’s predicament. In order to remove the political obstacle to Likud’s retaining power, it had to devise a way to throw a wrench in the legislative gears. In order to form a new government, a new Knesset Speaker is named. The current Likud Speaker, Yuli Edelstein, conveniently ordered the Knesset shut down. No committees may meet. No Knesset plenums may be scheduled. No business may be conducted. That includes the business of forming a new government, including replacing him. Edelstein again exploited the ploy of the epidemic to justify his decision.

Among the bizarre, racist reasons Netanyahu offered for Knesset bodies not being permitted to meet is that Blue and White has refused to commit not to appoint MKs from the Joint List to be committee chairs.  According to this dictum, the Joint List “supports terror” and such people may not be permitted to hold such posts in the Israeli parliament.  A wholly invented dictum only Netanyahu could devise.

The Knesset’s legal counsel told a meeting of the Party leaders that the Knesset had:

“Died the kiss of death. It no longer exists.  This situation is unlike any other democratic state in the western world, which suffers from the CoronaVirus no less than we.  When we refuse to establish these institutions [Knesset committees], we tell the world that we are a crippled democracy.”

There is even more at stake here than preventing B&W from forming the new government. If it does so, it plans not only on removing Likud from power. It plans on several legislative initiatives which would prevent Netanyahu from ever becoming prime minister again. One would prohibit an MK from becoming PM is he had been indicted. Another would prohibit PMs from serving more than two terms (Bibi has served four). This eventuality is adding to the desperation of Netanyahu and his Likud gang.

We in the U.S. complain about the politicization of the virus by Trump and his cronies. He does so in order to score points with the electorate, which he hopes will forget his malfeasance come November. But in Israel they’re not just engaging in political posturing through invocation of Coronavirus, they’ve actually engineered a soft coup.

Global emergencies like this one offer a field day for dictators and wannabe strongmen. They become the Indispensable One. The Responsible One. The one to turn to in the hour of need. Under the guise of saving the lives of his countrymen and women, they toss aside political niceties and conventions and rule by fiat. That is more of less what the Likud is doing now.

Pandemics and Normalizing the Surveillance State

Why else would it have bypassed the courts and Knesset itself in summoning the Shabak to expose the private data of Israeli citizens suspected of having the Coronavirus? In the name of public safety? No MK voted to permit this. No judge reviewed a plan to do this. No one thought to consider that by criminalizing illness, the victims would be reluctant to come forward and admit they are sick.  That would push the illness farther underground.  Then no one would know who had it and who didn’t. Everyone would suspect everyone else.  You’d then have a true Hobbesian society: a war of all against all.

By fiat, Netanyahu has directed the Shin Bet to monitor the physical location of such individuals, forbidding them from leaving their homes, and potentially punishing them if they do. The police will monitor people’s whereabouts through their cell phones. If they stray, they will receive warnings by phone or text message. Presumably, police visits would be next. Failing that, I presume quarantined concentration camps will follow (in the satiric tradition of Jonathan Swift I exaggerate, but not by much). Welcome, Big Brother. Israel invites you to assume control.

Shabak has this information because unlike in the U.S., where there is a minimal level of judicial review (FISA warrants), the Knesset directed all telecommunication companies to provide the private data of every citizen to the security agency.  It does not need a warrant to obtain this information. It already has it and may use it as it sees fit.  If that seems like the first stage toward a surveillance state, welcome to my nightmare:

The Shin Bet has been quietly but routinely collecting cellphone metadata since at least 2002, officials confirmed. It has never disclosed details about what information it collects, how that data is safeguarded, whether or when any of it is destroyed or deleted, who has access to it and under what conditions, or how it is used.

Two laws and a number of secret regulations and administrative orders govern the data-collection effort and its use by the Shin Bet, officials said.

The Telecommunications Law, amended in 1995 with the advent of widespread cellular networks, gives the prime minister broad powers to order carriers to allow access to their facilities and databases “as necessary to perform the functions of the security forces or to exercise their powers.”

Article 11 of the Israeli Security Agency Law, enacted in 2002, lets the prime minister determine what sort of information about cellphone subscribers “is required by the service to fulfill its purpose,” and declares that the companies must “transfer information of these types” to the Shin Bet.

…Since 2002, a former senior Justice Ministry official said, prime ministers have required cellphone companies to transfer to the agency a vast range of metadata about their subscribers. The official refused to say what categories of data were being provided or withheld, but metadata includes the identity of each subscriber, recipients or initiators of each call, payments made on the account, as well as geolocation information collected when phones communicate with cellular transmission towers.

In the U.S., Edward Snowden caused a national security crisis. In Israel, the spooks laugh at how prudish we are. They’ve had far more power and control over such data for decades with almost no oversight.  And no one bats an eye.

Why a Soft Coup and not a Hard One?

Why is Likud pursuing a soft coup, rather than a hard one?  I remember when I spent my last academic year studying at the Hebrew University.  There was a bus route from the Hebrew University which passed a defense ministry building in Jerusalem.  Since this was 40 years ago, I can’t remember if I fantasized this or it was real, but we student radicals used to joke that the tank sitting outside the building was in anticipation of a military coup we half expected Ariel Sharon to engineer at any moment. The ex-general and future Butcher of Sabra and Shatilla never mounted that coup.  He didn’t need to. He and his Likud supporters eventually took over the country and bent it to his will.

But that was then, this is now.  Today, neither the military nor the intelligence services would support a coup to keep Bibi in power.  They generally oppose the most adventurist plans of the politicians, like attacking Iran. They certainly wouldn’t support a coup.  And it’s not because they’re liberals or especially humane. It’s because they recognize that the Likud is corrupt and handing them the country in perpetuity would mean ruin.

Blue and White is appealing Edelstein’s decision to the Supreme Court. Somehow the government hasn’t yet succeeded in fully shutting down the judicial branch. Though one hopes the Court will see through the outrageousness of this trickery and restore sanity, there is by no means a guarantee. Many of the justices are settlers. Almost all are Likud appointees. Some even obtained their seats through corrupt double-dealing. The decision in this matter could go either way.

But even if the Court does expose the Likud charade and restores some normalcy to the political process, let’s not make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief and celebrating the victory of Israeli democracy. This is a country in which such values are only skin-deep, if they exist at all. If it takes a half-step forward, as it did when Blue and White agreed to form a minority government with the support of the Palestinian Joint List, it can just as easily take two steps back–and do so in a heartbeat.