The majority of the Israeli electorate who voted for a right-wing government were aghast when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant last month called for a halt to the coalition’s signature policy: judicial reform.
The defense minister’s ungallant announcement, on a Saturday night while the Prime Minister was traveling overseas, made no sense for at least two reasons.
First, you don’t rise to become defense minister without understanding that it is your sacred responsibility to quell a rising mutiny immediately. No army can function if a minority of its reservists decide they will not serve in needed combat roles if their personal policy preferences are not honored. Yet, instead of stripping these insubordinate pilots of their rank and privileges, or at least giving them a year of latrine duty, Gallant took up their cause and demanded that the public suspend its ambitions for reforming a corrupted judicial system.
Second, Gallant was not known to be a closet lefty. He himself waxed endlessly about the vital need for judicial reform in a videotaped address he gave to the Kohelet Policy Forum that is easily findable on the internet.
So how does a defense minister violate these two innate and fundamental drives – to maintain a disciplined fighting force and to see the success of a favored political position? Could it have been a black briefcase stuffed with cash handed over by U.S. Ambassador Tom Nides, or whoever is coordinating ops for the U.S., as a down payment for his assistance? There are no reports I have seen of the defense minister upgrading his lifestyle recently.
But there is an aphrodisiac more powerful than the love of money and that is the one we need to worry about the most. That of course is the love of power. What if the U.S. offered Gallant, instead of or in addition to filthy lucre, the premiership?
This is not a conspiracy theory – I have no evidence for this – but a thought experiment:
The way things are going, Israel is headed for a constitutional crisis. The government will hopefully pass the reforms the people are demanding, but from all we have seen, it definitely cannot be assumed that the justices of the Supreme Court and their minions in the State Attorney’s office would respect the voice of the people.
Indeed, that is why the majority last month passed an Incapacity Law reasserting in unambiguous terms what Israeli law already required, that it is physical or mental incapacitation alone that could unseat a prime minster. The Likud coalition understood that the Attorney General – who outrageously ordered Netanyahu not to speak out on judicial reform out of a “conflict of interest” because of spurious charges against him, and despite an obvious conflict of interest of the judicial autocracy, including the Attorney General herself, which stands to lose power if the reforms are passed – was waiting for him to violate the gag order. The juristocracy would then count the statutory number of days required to declare him incapacitated and thereby nullify the elections of last November.
That should be a clear a signal of what is at stake in the political onslaught against the elected Israeli government. If a constitutional crisis ensues (e.g., the reforms are passed and the Supreme Court strikes it down), it is possible to imagine Gallant being asked by the Biden administration to step in to “save” Israeli democracy and be embraced by the government of the United States, whose democracy-supporting credentials would certify that this step was necessary to maintain the “rule of law” and “judicial independence” in a “democratic” ally.
I have no access to the CIA’s black budget. I don’t know Gallant or his motives. All of this is based on the idea that the Jewish people will be reaffirming at their Passover seders in two days: “in every generation they stand against us to annihilate us.”
Israel’s democratic majority must buck up its wobbly leaders, demand accountability against mutineers in its armed forces and ensure that its judges and defense ministers, among others, follow the law and not take it into their own hands. You simply can’t get more firable than Gallant, who tore down orchards in Shiloh, evacuated a Yishuv in the Shomron and administratively detained two Jewish suspects a court had released for lack of evidence.
Netanyahu can’t seriously believe that we’re doomed without Gallant at the helm – he who allows airmen to select their preferred judicial policies. Indeed, we need to wonder from whom Gallant is taking his orders. In his short tenure so far, he’s failed his voters repeatedly but has gotten straight As from the Biden Administration. Gallant must go.
Gil Weinreich is a writer living in Jerusalem. His latest book is A Torah Guide to Personal Finance