Benjamin Netanyahu’s Democracy Problem

Bibi, we need to talk.

You’ve been many things in your many turns as prime minister of Israel.

Reactionary, racist, authoritarian, nationalistic, opportunistic. None of those things are particularly out of character. Not for you, not for the many like you who have popped up in so many places around the world in recent years.

What you never seemed to be — until your recent attempts to limit the Supreme Court’s ability to overrule the government — was inclined toward outright dictatorship, until now. In fact, you once seemed to be a moderate secularist, something that no longer seems convenient now that you face the possibility of prosecution on corruption charges.

You have been doing your thing for so long — and so successfully — that you can probably stake your claim as being the O.G. of right-wing populism now that Berlusconi has shuffled off for a lap-dance in the great bunga bunga party in the sky.

In many ways, you drew the rightward map that so many that came afterward followed. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro. They followed the xenophobic, autocratic path in your footsteps. If you care about such things, consider them your legacy.

But they are also your cautionary tales. Take a look at where they are now. Departed and disgraced after pushing it just that little too far.

You are a learned man, Bibi, so I know you will be at least familiar with the Overton Window, if not a master of its application.

The Overton Window charts the upper and lower limits of the ideas and policies that the population can live with at any given time. This window shifts and moves with time, but a canny politician can look through it to see the difference between what is marginally acceptable in the public opinion — even the severe and the troublesome — without crossing over to the radical and the unthinkable.

You have proved the canniest of them all in the past but, this time, with your proposed limits on the Supreme Court, you may have cracked that window open a little too far.

You are staring down the barrel of your own Waterloo. Or your own Brexit. Your own let’s-hide-classified-documents-in-the-bathroom.

To be charitable, maybe you feel pushed in that direction by the choices you made in coalition partners at last year’s election. But they were a choice, and one the Israeli people seem increasingly uncomfortable with. Were you pushed to this point by those allies, or is this move as much about protecting yourself from erstwhile friends as much as from perceived opponents?

They certainly seem to hold more sway over your decision than the tens of thousands of your own citizens who have marched through a heat wave against this decision. Many of them are young and moderate — neither is among your favorite demographic — but many more are not. The opposition has also come from the equally horrified military, intelligence, and police force communities. Even more stunning is what sparked opposition among these organizations, which are not exactly known for their traditionally pinko-leftist views. Their concerns are that crippling the judiciary will fundamentally reduce the security of Israel.

10,000 military reservists have already threatened to resign if you succeed in passing a law that reduces the Supreme Court to little more than a rubber stamp. This alone would inflict severe damage on the nation’s military readiness.

Israel’s security used to matter to you. Listening to you on the stump, it’s fair to say it was often the only thing that did. You fought election after election decrying the constant existential threats to the security of a free and democratic Israel. The existential threat is now you. You and the ultraorthodox and ultranationalist zealots who helped carry you once again to the top of the political food chain.

But they aren’t the ones you should be listening to right now. Thousands of your own people are marching against you on this, not to transform the country with suspect intent, but to simply preserve the nation’s judiciary, if not its soul. They are the inheritors of the men and women who, against all odds, built a homeland for your people in the most hostile and unlikely of environments.

Just open the window and you will hear them loud and clear.