The Turmoil in Israeli Democracy with Yair Rosenberg

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • Weekend News Review

  • Israel’s Political Crisis with Yair Rosenberg

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EPISODE RESOURCES

YAIR ROSENBERG

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:09] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:10] And this is Beth Silvers. Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.  

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.  

[00:00:14]  Hello, we are glad you're here for a new episode of Pantsuit Politics, where we take a different approach to the news. A little housekeeping before we begin. Unlike my children, Sarah's get an entire week of school for Fall break, so she is out traveling with family this week. But don't worry, you'll hear her voice in just a few minutes and on Friday's episode. If you are a premium listener, you know that we make two pay-walled podcasts. So in addition to the two episodes Tuesday and Friday of Pantsuit Politics that appear for free in your podcast feed, we make two other shows Monday through Thursday. Sarah's show Good Morning is going to take this week off, but all of our premium listeners will receive all four episodes of the show that I make More to Say this week and on More to Say. We're going to cover so much legal news my head is spinning. So if you're looking to follow the former president's journey through the justice system, I invite you to come along for the ride with me there on More to Say. All the information to do that will be in the show notes.  

[00:01:36] There's a lot going on this week. We've had some major markers of time, especially over the past few days. Thursday evening, Senator Dianne Feinstein passed away. She died at age 90, the longest serving woman senator in our country's history. As Shawn Hubler put it in a New York Times piece, Dianne Feinstein had several lifetime's worth of accomplishment. She has been a pioneer for women in leadership, for stemming the tide of gun violence, for government transparency and accountability, especially following September 11th. She sometimes asked very tough questions. She sometimes gave very tough answers. She was overall unintimidated by public life and the pressure that accompanied it. And I know that she will be missed. On Sunday, former President Jimmy Carter turned 99. He's the first president in our history to reach that age. Former President Carter continues to receive hospice care, surrounded by friends and family as he leaves out the final chapter in his extraordinary life of service to others.  

[00:02:42] And another big marker of time happened on Saturday when Congress passed a continuing resolution to fund the government through November 17th. That resolution will fund the government at current levels. It is a hold please, so that we can buy more time to pass appropriations bills. President Biden signed that measure into law at 11:28 p.m. 32 minutes before funding expired. The bill also reauthorizes the FAA and the National Flood Insurance Program through the end of the year and includes $16 billion for much needed disaster relief. It is not a perfect bill. We could be doing this entire shutdown drama again right before Thanksgiving. It does not include additional funding for Ukraine, which is why Mike Quigley of Illinois, a Democrat, voted no on a package that all of his Democratic colleagues in the House supported. It is why Michael Bennet of Colorado held the package up for a few hours in the Senate. But both Speaker McCarthy and Leader Schumer assure their colleagues that Congress will quickly take up the matter of more aid for Ukraine, as well as other provisions that are hotly debated.  

[00:03:54] In the end, or at least in this iteration of the end, Speaker McCarthy at personal peril did what Sarah and I hoped he would do. He put something on the floor that both Democrats and Republicans could vote for, and it worked. Democrats supplied 209 of the 335 votes for the continuing resolution in the House. The Republican caucus split on it, and McCarthy's future as speaker is in jeopardy because of that. He did the right thing. It is a happy outcome, if not a perfect one. Last week, we were hearing from air traffic controllers and military personnel, USDA workers. You all told us that you were anxious because even though your paycheck was not certain to keep coming, your bills sure were. You told us that you felt disrespected by the way some members of Congress were toying with your livelihoods and disregarding the impact of the work that you do every day. We just want to acknowledge that people who work for the government often do so at a lot of sacrifice. You could take higher paying, sometimes more stable, more respected, easier jobs in the private sector. The roller coaster that Congress put us on over the past few weeks is reflective of many aspects of our governance right now. And I am so glad that at least for the moment, it has come to a stop.  

[00:05:14] There is even more news, so much related to former President Trump and congressional Republicans and, yes, Hunter Biden. And here Sarah and I are rolling into your podcast feed asking you, as all of this is going on, to turn your attention to Israel for a little while today. And that's because the United States isn't the only country in the world wrestling with very hard questions about our government. Sarah and I learned so much about how we'd like our system to operate and so much about ourselves when we look outward. Israel is facing a real test of democracy as a far right wing coalition in its legislature, the Knesset, pushes to overhaul the judiciary. They are asking serious questions about the balance of power, and Israel doesn't have a constitution. So you might read articles saying it is hurtling toward a constitutional crisis. That doesn't mean a document, that means a crisis of its very makeup. So today, Yair Rosenberg joins us to talk about what's happening with Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli public. Yair is a staff writer at The Atlantic where he covers politics, culture and religion and writes the Deep Shtetl newsletter. He is a Delight to talk to you and such a wealth of insight and information. Whether you're new to thinking about Israel or deeply immersed in Israeli politics, we think you'll find something valuable and relevant to your understanding of governance in today's conversation.  

[00:06:45] Music Interlude.  

[00:07:02] Yair, welcome come back to Pantsuit Politics. Thanks for joining us again.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:07:06] It's great to be back.  

Beth [00:07:07] We wanted to check in with you about all of the developing crises in Israel, and particularly now because the Israeli Supreme Court is hearing arguments about the judicial overhaul that Netanyahu's government has enacted. I wondered before we dive into the specifics of that, if you could help us put in context what the Supreme Court looks like in Israel, given that there is no constitution.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:07:40] It's a great question because when you hear the word Supreme Court, you might think a sort of 1 to 1 equivalence with the United States Supreme Court. But Israel Supreme Court is unique in a whole bunch of respects. So, like you said, one of those respects is that Israel doesn't have a constitution and that grants Israel Supreme Court a great amount of power over time to decide what laws are and aren't acceptable. Israel has a sort of body of law that's quasi constitutional. They're called basic laws. And over time, the court has come to interpret those laws as sort of a nascent constitution. But the government can constantly pass new laws of those sorts or try to repeal other ones. And so it's a little bit up in the air. And Israel Supreme Court also just in terms of the specifics, it has 15 judges. Many other countries have much larger Supreme courts than we do. And the other thing to really understand about Israel's Supreme Court is that members are not appointed by the Israeli parliament. It's not like in the United States where Congress takes the president's nomination and then confirms or doesn't confirm the nominee to the Supreme Court. Instead, there's a judicial selection body that includes judges themselves, members of the Israeli legal establishment, and then some members of parliament from both the coalition and the opposition.  

[00:08:57] So in practice, you can see that the legal establishment, plus the judges themselves, sort of have a veto over who gets to be on the Supreme Court. So it's not as democratically accountable, you might say, as other Supreme courts. And the Supreme Court at the same time has more power than many other Supreme courts. And so this has been a source of contention within Israel among people who are on the Israeli right and are upset about rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court, which they think is too activist and doing things that are anti-democratic. And on the other hand, also some good governance side of experts will look at this and say it's unhealthy for a democracy to have an unelected court that exercises such outsized power. So into that situation comes Netanyahu's very hard right coalition with a proposal to reform the Supreme Court, which is not something that most Israelis oppose. Polls show that most Israelis do agree that there should be some sort of reform of the Israeli Supreme Court. But if the problem perceived with the Supreme Court is that it's basically superpowered, that it's too powerful relative to the legislature.  

[00:10:00] So the reform put forward by the coalition inverts the problem and basically subordinates the judiciary to the coalition, to the elected parliament and basically says-- now not only these laws are passed, but this is the proposal that the parliament can override any ruling of the Supreme Court with a simple majority, that the parliament is going to be the ones who get a veto over who gets chosen to the Supreme Court, things like this. So, basically, it didn't so much adjust or carefully reform the Supreme Court, as decimated and its authority. So these laws haven't been passed. One small part of this package has been passed, but the rest hasn't been passed. But for many months, this has provoked hundreds of thousands of Israelis to protest in the streets all around Israel against what they see as sort of a power grab by the parliament, which is controlled by Netanyahu's hard right wing coalition. Because it's not just that they oppose this particular package of reforms, it's that they don't trust the power that would give to this government and this legislature if the Supreme Court was shoved out of the way. So that's a very long way of getting from what is the Israeli Supreme Court to what's going on right now with it.  

Sarah [00:11:14] Well, I think that final component is something that I've come to understand is really essential, which if you're looking at it through the lens of the United States, you'd say, well, the parliament has a check on the executive, but that's not really the case of Israel, right? The coalition government really acts in step with the executive branch.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:11:31] Yeah. So the thing to understand is that Israel has a prime minister. The prime minister is the leader of the majority of parliament and they basically just act in concert. There are 120 seats in the Israeli parliament, the Israeli Knesset. If you have 61 of those seats, which this kind of coalition does, it has 64, you can basically pass any laws and the opposition can't really do anything about it. It's not like you could filibuster it in the United States Congress. It's not like there are certain higher majority thresholds for most things. And so the main check on government power, on prime ministerial power, is actually in the Supreme Court. That's how Israel evolves. Whereas, in the United States, we have two houses in the legislature, we have a separate executive who isn't an explicit member, he's not sitting around in Congress. Joe Biden is not hanging out there. He does his own thing. He's got his own set of officers and people who are accountable to him and his own authorities and powers and then, of course, we have the Supreme Court. So you have a much more complicated set of balances and checks in the United States than you do in Israel. And so changing the court in Israel is a much more dramatic step than it might be in some other places.  

Beth [00:12:37] And it's made even more dramatic by the personal investment that Netanyahu has and some of these reforms. Can you talk a little bit about what is driven here by the far right coalition that might even go beyond what Netanyahu personally might want, and what is driven by his own interest in sort of saving his skin in several criminal matters?  

Yair Rosenberg [00:13:00] I like coming on the podcast because you've done your reading and you already know the right questions to ask. And one of the big questions about these attempts to change Israel's judiciary is, is this about Netanyahu getting himself off the hook for various corruption cases that he's currently on trial? And the answer is we don't really know because you can't read minds. And there's two ways you can look at it. You could say he's sort of a cynical mastermind who has this entire plan laid out, which is to either actually disempower the Supreme Court or just to intimidate it, basically to hold a lot of this legislation over it in order to sort of soften up whatever convictions might be in the pipeline. On the other side, you could just say that Netanyahu is actually along for this ride and it's not actually something he came up with. And I actually think that's probably more likely because if you look at the criminal case against Netanyahu, it's been going on for many years. These trials take a very long time. Some of the stuff seems to be working out better for him. It's not clear how it's going to actually turn out. And he could probably drag it out for a very long time because while he's in office, it's hard to bring him to court and put him on trial anyway. And on the other hand, there are people in his coalition that he needs to stay in power, to stay prime minister, in the hardest [inaudible] parties in the Israeli coalition who have for years been sort of telegraphing their plans to gut the Israeli judiciary, because, again, they see it as a block to the sorts of things they want to do.  

[00:14:27] And those people, it's sort of like if we take an analogy to the American government, we're seeing it right now. Kevin McCarthy doesn't really want to shut down the government. He doesn't have a master plan to shut down the US government, but he needs his entire party to actually vote to keep the government open. And he can't get certain hard right members of the Republican Party in the House to sign on. And so that's why we look like we're heading for a government shutdown. And so Netanyahu doesn't want to be Kevin McCarthy. He doesn't want to be because if he becomes Kevin McCarthy, he loses his job. He no longer has a majority. So he needs to keep everybody happy. And there's a certain segment of his coalition that has this plan. And they basically walked in on day one and said, this is what we want to do. And he let them do it. And ever since then, he's been trying to sort of position himself as the reasonable arbiter between the crazy people who just happened to be in his coalition and the protesters who are also a bit extreme. And I'm going to be the person who's going to resolve this. But in reality, he's the one who allowed it to happen. But I don't think it's because he wants to get out of his court case. It's I think because he needs to keep these people on side. And that involves letting them run the show on some of these things.  

[00:15:34] In point of fact, Netanyahu wants to take up the Supreme Court. He's a much cunnier politician. He's one of the most successful living politicians in the world today. He would not have dropped a giant, very scary package on a whole bunch of different components to disempower Israel Supreme Court all at once. He would have started with one very small piece of it. And said, well, this is one that we can mostly agree on, and he'd do that. And then he does the next one a few months later and the next one a few months after that, and it would be a lot easier. He's very good at this sort of thing. That's not what happened here. They dropped everything very early on, pretty much right after this government was sworn in. And they haven't been able to escape in ever since. It's either a catastrophically bad move on the part of the part that he usually knows what he's doing or he sort of has to do it because this was what he promised them. And he said this is what they demanded in order to be in his coalition. So I'm inclined to that. But both of these narratives they're serious people who believe both.  

Sarah [00:16:27] Well, that actually is a perfect transition to what I was going to ask, which is I read the big piece in The New York Times about Netanyahu today. And I think there's parts of him I understand, there's parts of him I don't because how can we fully understand the inner workings of a person's mind or much less his family dynamics, which were very interesting. But I think what I really don't understand is this component of his hard right coalition and the motivations of particularly the ultra-Orthodox citizens of Israeli society through our American lens. I always understood Israel to be sort of secular and liberal. And there were even components of the ultra-Orthodox politics that she was talking about in that article about how they are not included in the military conscription and all this stuff. And I was like, wait, what? I think that's just a huge component of his coalition that I agree with you seems to be steering more than anything else that I don't understand.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:17:21] Yes. So one of the reasons why this judicial reform became so important to many parts of this coalition is that it wasn't just one part of the coalition that was into it. It was a lot of different parts. So on the one hand, you have sort of this more high right settler movement component. And they see the Supreme Court as an obstacle to them building more settlements in the West Bank and acting as they want when they're engaged in military conflict, say, in Gaza. And the Supreme Court has rules about certain choices. Like all legislatures and legislative bodies in Israeli-- judicial bodies, about how you can and can't act during wartime. And so they see the Supreme Court as an obstacle to many of the things they want to do and an anti-democratic obstacle from their perspective. But then you also have what you just mentioned, the ultra-Orthodox. These are very traditionally religious. You recognize them by their very distinctive dress. And the fact that they spend most of their time studying Jewish texts and not participating necessarily in the economy and not being drafted into the Israeli army. Israel has a universal draft, but one of the carve outs to that universal draft for their army is for ultra-Orthodox citizens who study in yeshiva. Instead, they study in traditional Jewish religious institutions.  

[00:18:30] And that's been a carve out that was created at the very beginning of the founding of the state when there weren't very many ultra-Orthodox Jews. Like you said, it was a much more secular place. And the first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, thought, we give these people some little special carve out for them because they really don't want to serve in the Army. They want to focus on their religious studies in the holy land of this place for Jews. And you know what? They're yesterday's news. The vanguard of Israel and the Jewish people is this more secular Judaism. And so they'll die out and we'll be nice to them until that happens. As it turns out, birth rates didn't agree. And the ultra-Orthodox had many, many more children and they successfully educated those children. And although, of course, people come and go from these communities, it's very insular and very self-contained and they vote in a democratic society. You can then create an entire bloc that has particular demands and can then basically tell people like Benjamin Netanyahu that this is really important to us. So why is Supreme Court reform important to the ultra-Orthodox? Very different from the settlers, they don't have that much investment in the settlement project. In fact, at different times, the ultra-Orthodox have been supportive of concessions to the Palestinians, although today less so. But what they are concerned with is they want to make sure that they can never be drafted into the Israeli army because that is not something they do. That's not part of their culture. And they want government support, not just to not be drafted into the Israeli army, but to get subsidies.  

[00:19:54] How do you maintain a society where you're standing and studying religious texts and you don't participate as much as the economy and you don't go into the army? You need government support and welfare to support your extremely large community and growing families. And so these communities want to codify that. And depending on who's in power, there's sort of a tug of war. And when more liberal Israeli governments come into power, they tend to try to restrict some of those subsidies and create incentives for ultra-Orthodox men to go into the workforce. And they start drafting small numbers of ultra-Orthodox Jews who are interested. And all of this is anathema to the leadership of this community. And the problem is that previous governments have passed such laws, and when those laws are not obeyed or a more right wing government comes in but isn't able to repeal the law because not every one of the right wing government is unhappy with such laws, then the Supreme Court upholds those laws which says you committed to X, Y, Z reforms where we have general laws about equality and you can't treat certain citizens differently than others. And if they're not serving in the army there, we're violating those rules. The Supreme Court is interfering with this arrangement. And so one way to solve that problem is to remove the check of the Supreme Court so that you can basically permanently instantiate this arrangement. Now, long term for Israel, how do you have a growing population that isn't as involved in the workforce and doesn't serve in the army and have a thriving society of the sort that Israel has? It's a major, major question.  

[00:21:17] But that is not the concern, obviously, of the politicians for this community who are looking out for their own communal interests. And so, yeah, now you've got already now two components for this. And then within Netanyahu's only code party, the mainstream, many of them have looked askance at the Supreme Court again for blocking just general right wing legislation as a sort of a club of the sort of left wing elites. Because remember, again, the judges themselves, plus the legal establishment, like lawyers from the Israeli Bar Association, basically get to decide who goes on the court. And this chafes against many Likud voters, many of whom come from the Mizrahi communities or Jews from Middle Eastern lands who fled to Israel, unlike Ben-Gurion people who were Ashkenazi Europeans. And so these people feel like they're the underclass. They're looked down upon by the Ashkenazi elites. And the Supreme Court is sort of a symbol of all of that. And so they want to sort of bring it down a bit. See, in all of these different interests, all converging on this idea that the Supreme Court is something that needs to be changed. And so then they come up with this plan. The problem for Netanyahu and for the government is that the plan they came up with was so extreme that it didn't look to most Israelis like a reasonable recalibration of the court's powers. It looked like a revolutionary disempowerment of a major component of Israeli democracy, and that has completely upended the entire country.  

[00:22:34] Music Interlude  

Beth [00:22:46] Just stepping back from the current judicial overhaul, as you describe these fractures, even among sort of the mainstream and the ultra right in Israel, it makes this persistent narrative that we have in the United States about an eventual two state solution sound absurd because there are so many more constituencies to address here than just two. I wonder, given your recent piece about Netanyahu and his fundamentally pessimistic view of human nature and power, what do you think a realistic path forward even on the international stage looks like for Israel and Gaza and the West Bank?  

Yair Rosenberg [00:23:28] So you're absolutely right about the many different constituencies within Israel. To really sharpen it, when you're talking about a coalition that includes we just talked about these ultra-Orthodox and very traditionalist religious types who study in yeshiva all day, and then you have the speaker of the Knesset, who comes from Netanyahu's Likud Party, and he's a married gay man, that coexists. That shows you the diversity of just the right side of the Israeli spectrum right there. And then, of course, within the Palestinians, both within Gaza and the West Bank. And then not to mention within. So let's start with Israel itself. Israel has 2 million Palestinian citizens. Some of them call themselves Palestinians. Many of them call themselves Arabs or Arab-Israelis. Polls show you different numbers and different things. And they have two very different groups of political parties. The largest political party in Israel now is led by a man named Mansour Abbas, who supports participating in the Israeli government's in joining the Israeli coalition. He was in the last Israeli government, that sort of rainbow government that was designed to keep Netanyahu out of power that fell after a year. It included for the first time an Arab party, and that was this party. And on the other hand, some of the people that bring down that government were some of these other Arab parties that refuse on principle to participate in any government run by the Jewish parties. And so you have this diversity within Israel like that. And then, of course, you have the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.  

[00:24:48] And the two of them put it very, very mildly, do not get along. They're actually in a state of war, basically. And so creating some sort of two state solution with all these different groups has been incredibly difficult for policymakers. And so if I had a fantastic solution to this, I would not be doing this job. I write about the problems. If I could solve them, perhaps I would go and try to do that. And there's a tremendous number of incredibly brilliant people who have tried. Fundamentally, what you actually need is simply for more people on both sides to want to figure out a way to end their conflict rather than having reasons to perpetuate. At different times in Israeli and Palestinian history, you've had those majorities. And then right now it looks like you don't. And I've spent time reporting in the West Bank and talking to people there about their situation. And I spent time in Israel, and there's just this tremendous pessimism that rains right from both directions. Netanyahu is an incredibly pessimistic character, and to an extent his persona and his incredible ability to communicate his worldview has affected the Israeli public. But he's also a representation by reflection of the journey Israelis have gone on since the early 2000 when you had the Oslo Accords and Bill Clinton and this assumption that down the line there would be some sort of separation between Palestinians and Israelis, to where we are now, where neither side trust the other to hold any agreements.  

[00:26:10] And like even if you had a peace agreement, you wouldn't really trust the other side to keep it. The Israelis look from their perspective that they pulled out in 2004 from Gaza, took up all their settlements, pulled out all their settlers. And of course, today, Hamas runs Gaza and fires rockets from there into Israeli towns that they couldn't reach before. So the theory is, if we then get out of the West Bank, what do you think is going to happen? The people with the guns will win. Even if good people signed the agreement with us, they won't be able to hold the power. And from the Palestinian perspective, they say, look, we signed all these agreements. We made a lot of concessions. We have lived under occupation for decades upon decade upon decade. And then you come around and no one seems to be interested in trying to solve this problem. In fact, Israel's government has gotten more hardline and more extreme. And at what point is the party with all of that power responsible for what's going on in this situation? And so I don't have a great solution. Some people look at this and say, well, there is no solution or you need some radical or dramatic one. I don't think the two state solution is the most sensible solution because if you talk to people and you look at polls across the land, people want the most political control they can get in the most amount of territory they could get.  

[00:27:27] So if you tried to force both of these groups to live in one state, for example, which some people suggest, they would not like it. Because that would mean ceding a tremendous amount of control to the other 50% of the population in every election. You think it's bad in our country where the whole democracy rests on what happens with who gets 51% in this very, very polarized country. Now imagine it's like 50% Jewish and 50% Palestinian. Israeli, Jewish and Palestinian. What would elections be like every single time unless there's great trust which doesn't exist? And so what's much more likely to be sustainable is to have a Palestinian state and an Israeli state. And the Palestinian state would ideally have a Jewish minority and the Israeli state would have, like it does right now, an Arab-Palestinian minority. But that way each one would have that national self-determination that they so, so deeply desire for very good historical reasons. And functionally, that's just a matter of drawing the line on a map and saying, here's where the line is. And on one side it's Israel on one side it's Palestine. You just need leaders and populations that are willing to do it. And it requires a lot of trust and, say, living together in the same space, which is functionally what they're doing right now. Yeah.  

Sarah [00:28:33] And I can see Netanyahu's very pessimistic worldview and the sort of post Oslo Accords to how we got to where Israel is now with regards to Palestine. What I can't see the pessimistic worldview president, is in the Abraham Accords and the normalization of relationships with the surrounding countries. How do you see that pessimistic worldview play out there. It looks increasingly like they live in normalized relationships with Saudi Arabia. That to me is so interesting in contrast with this hard right lurch with Palestine.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:29:06] Yeah. Well, so the one thing to understand is that Netanyahu is a pessimist. Before Israeli society became pessimistic, he was running against the Oslo Accords. And he was running against and saying these are naive ideas that people have. None of this is going to work. And then slowly but surely, Israeli society overall has come around to part of that position. But his pessimism is so much more fundamental. It is about just that the world is run-- and he says this explicitly. The world is about jockeying for power with other actors, for better or for worse, and the weak get destroyed and the strong to continue and live on. A lot of Jews don't actually agree with that. For one thing, Jews have not been great in number for a very long time. For their entire history Jews are point two percent of the current world population. And so obviously not particularly numerous, not particularly powerful overall. Only had Israel, the state, for like 70 or so years and haven't had sovereignty in Israel for much of their history. They had it. It was taken away. They had it again. It was taken away. And now they have it one more time. And so it's not that Jews were powerful, but yet they survived much longer than others. So I'm getting my little critique of his review, but that's what he believes. He thinks that the strong survive and the weak eventually just fade.  

[00:30:14] And so in that context, he's like, I will give no concessions to the Palestinians because that signals weakness and we're going to outlast them in this conflict. And I'm happy to make alliances with other states. And he sees the Abraham Accords as affirmation of everything that he has been working on because he says, look, everyone said we couldn't have peace with the Arab world unless we gave lots of concessions to the Palestinians so the Arab world would sign on and accept us. And he said, no, you have it all backwards. The Arab world doesn't accept us because they think we're weak or we're temporary or impermanent and we're going to be destroyed. And there have been several wars that the [inaudible] waged to try to erase Israel. And he's like only when they think we really should stay because we're the biggest guy in the room. So then they'll be for it. And this has been borne out. It's very much a self interest play on the part of these Arab states. They're not doing out of the goodness of their hearts. They're doing it because Israel is an economic and technological powerhouse.  

Sarah [00:31:09] And they're getting stuff in return.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:31:11] And they're getting stuff in return from the United States and also from Israel. It's like it's a self interest play. And his idea is we're the strongest country with the strongest alliances in the region, and you want to be friends with us. And so to him, that actually tracks very nicely with his pessimism and sort of alliances with the strong and setting up one of conservative Zionist philosopher called the iron wall. The idea that we're sort of immovable; we will never leave. And so that so he understands this moment.  

Sarah [00:31:38] Pessimism bordering on cynicism, I would say.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:31:40] For sure. The critique of Netanyahu has always been that he's a creature of the bunker, sort of by having experienced many centuries of Jewish history of oppression and persecution, that he does not trust the world to do something different if given the option. And so all decisions are made in an environment of distrust. You'll never go broke being a pessimist sadly in today's world. But you sometimes miss opportunities for revolutionary change because you're always taking the under on anything. I wrote about this in the Atlantic that Netanyahu always bets against any hopeful vision of future progress. Whether it's coming from Elon Musk and he's talking about how amazing AI is going to revolutionize the world, because Bibi did this conversation recently with Musk in San Francisco and it's very interesting because Netanyahu is really very skeptical of what must be selling, even though they're supposed to be sitting down for sort of a PR stunt. Right. That's not supposed to be hardball. But Netanyahu asked a bunch of hardball questions to Musk about whether it's really going to make the world better because he thinks it's going to create winners and losers like everything else. Whether it's the Iran deal which Netanyahu did not trust to actually work or for Iran to adhere to, or concessions to the Palestinians. All of these things he just always bets against it. And his critics say that sort of pessimism, it holds you hostage because the world does change. And you're never going to be open to it if that's how you always proceed in life.  

Beth [00:33:04] I tend to compare Netanyahu to Trump mentally, but as I was reading today, especially about this deal with Germany for a missile defense system, I was getting Mitch McConnell vibes. Like, you don't have to love me, but I am such a player on the big stage that you need me in this seat.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:33:20] That was actually what he ran his last election campaign on. He ran through several election campaigns over the years saying, I know that you may not like all of my politics or you may not-- and this includes not just left wing people, but people to his right, people in his coalition who find him to be a squish. I think they feel that he rolls over when he should be fighting for whatever right wing thing they want to do. But you can't find anyone who can do what I can do, especially on the international stage. And I've written my own critique of that. I think he overstates, let's just say, his accomplishments. But that's part of his brilliance, is that he is an incredible salesman for himself. And he can basically refashion any event into something that he intended to happen and that is part of his plan. And how much of it is and how much and it isn't questionable. But that's still an incredible skill for a politician. You read books about like Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, and other famous politicians, and this is the thing that politicians do. Which is that they are very good at telling stories where events that happened that are outside their control become part of what they control. And depending on how good you are, you can really bring people along with them. So sometimes I think Netanyahu is often taking credit for things that were happening because of larger historical forces that he didn't very much had that much to do it. But he's good at presenting it that way. And that's why it's a big difference from like him and Trump. Trump is pure pure instinct and Netanyahu is pure calculation. There's nothing he does that he hasn't thought 25 different ways about why he's doing it. So they may align together because it was mutually beneficial in various different ways, but they're completely different thinkers and people in their approach to politics and to life.  

Sarah [00:35:02] No one's immortal, even the best, most capable politician. What are you seeing as the future of Israeli politics when Netanyahu is no longer on the world stage or the Israeli stage?  

Yair Rosenberg [00:35:15] Assuming Netanyahu does not manage to create a robo Netanyahu like some AI version of himself, he shouldn't put past him. It's a great question and it's a really big question. And I think a lot of Israelis haven't really grappled with, certainly on the right, which is that one of the ways that Netanyahu has kept himself in power has been by systematically drumming out anyone who could possibly have challenged his power within the Israeli, within his mainstream right wing Likud Party. And he slowly but surely transformed the Likud Party into a pretty diverse, effective right wing political vehicle, into a Netanyahu political vehicle or say "a cultic personality". And very, very few of the people in the party today have the skills or stature that he has to do what he does. And he has not cultivated proteges. He has not taught people how to do what he does. He has not brought people under his wing. Some of this may be that he is a difficult personality just in general, but some of it is the sort of paranoia and the fear that if I give these skills to somebody else, they will eventually knock me off as often happens in politics. But the consequence of this is that you have a leader in his early seventies who either through the natural course of life or through his court cases, will not be prime minister forever. And then an Israeli right that simply doesn't have anybody like him that they could put forward afterwards. And that's by his design, but it's not to the benefit of the country nor to his own political party.  

[00:36:37] And so what you might see actually is that there are different possibilities. You can have some of the people he drummed out of the party. What do they do? Some of them left politics, but some of those people started other satellites, smaller right wing parties. And a theory is maybe they go back, but it depends if Netanyahu will find parties willing to take them. And if not, well, right now, when Israel goes to parliamentary elections, there's tons of parties. One of the biggest parties is Netanyahu's Likud. And then there's usually some opposition party or two that are very large and then a lot of smaller parties. If Netanyahu is no longer running Likud, it's possible a bunch of the voters for Netanyahu's Likud say we've lost the big guy like we talked about. I'm going to look at some of those other more right wing parties. I'm no longer a Likud voter. I was Netanyahu's voter. He's gone. And so you'll start to see a lot more smaller parties cobbling together governments in Israel rather than any dominant parties at all. The Israeli will fragment in interesting ways, which will have unforeseeable consequences in terms of what Israeli coalitions will look like, because, again, there's 120 seats in the Israeli parliament. You need 61 to create a coalition. And if you got a five seat party here or seven seat party there, then you can create jigsaw puzzle in all sorts of ways. But there isn't like an obvious candidate to succeed Netanyahu. We haven't touched on this much, but on the Palestinian side, a very similar thing is going on with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, who is in his late seventies and doesn't hold elections in order to kick him out. But eventually he is going to pass on and there also isn't a clear successor to him. And so we're in this sort of moment of uncertainty and transition and also lots of behind the scenes, a lot of people jockeying for position.  

Beth [00:38:12] That variety of possible outcomes feels true of the judicial review of this overhaul as well. As I understand it, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the cases in front of it concerning these reforms by sometime in January, and they could say the reforms can't stand. They could say they're on pause, hoping that a new parliament will reconsider. I wonder if there is an outcome that's foreseeable from that court that would be just devastating to Netanyahu, or is he such a tactician that he'll be able to work with whatever happens?  

Yair Rosenberg [00:38:53] I think he has plans for whatever happens. That doesn't mean those plans are going to work. Again, sometimes it's like spinning things at his plan after whatever it is that actually happened. I do think that the Supreme Court has the ability to throw the kind of coalition to recrimination and chaos if it strikes down some of the reforms or if it, as you said, like postpones their enactment or in other ways messes with it. There are two ways that can go. You could have the coalition sort of say, well, we couldn't get it past the Supreme Court. Now we have a constitutional crisis. Are we willing to ignore the Supreme Court? And then the fight amongst themselves will be very, very vicious and obviously very offending to many Israelis, because you have literally the government fighting over whether or not to listen to the Supreme Court, and that has unforeseeable consequences. You can also have them say, well, we just need to pass a lot more of this judicial overall package, because remember, all that's passed so far is a very small component of it, [inaudible] at least consequential part of it. We need to replace the judges. We need to be able to override what they do. And you pass all of that stuff and basically just say, like, we've now just completely done away with the Supreme Court as a major force in Israeli politics. So it could galvanize them. It could cause them to collapse into internecine fighting and just sort of gum up the works. It's very hard to know. It really depends also like how much infighting there is.  

[00:40:11] And I would also say that there's a very big X-Factor that we've sort of referenced here, but not in this context, which is normalization with Saudi Arabia, which is simply the Biden administration has been working very hard on diplomatically in the region. But in order to normalize the Saudi Arabia, they're going to need to make some sort of concessions to the Palestinians. The Saudis have made that very clear. The Biden people have made that very clear. And so you have this sort of demand that's going to be made of Netanyahu to get this great prize. And then he's got to turn to this very right wing coalition and say, we've got to do these things. It's not like he could do that. And so this also may create significant problems for his coalition, ironically, sort of Pyrrhic victory. The irony, of course, is that within Israeli politics there's a majority for solving all these problems within the parliament right now. There's a bunch of centrist parties and center left parties that could work with parts of the Israeli right and pass the Supreme Court reform by consensus that most Israelis would like, and that could ratify a deal with the Saudis and make concessions to the Palestinians, because that would be fine by them. And Netanyahu could be part of that, except that he's on trial for corruption and nobody trusts him because he's always drumming out every possible successor. And basically has alienated everyone who is not his closest confidants.  

[00:41:23] And that has made it impossible for anyone to serve in government with him from the center or the center left, right. They all pledge we won't sit with Netanyahu because we consider him to be corrupt and untrustworthy. And they have good reason to think that he's not trustworthy. Because a couple governments ago, one of the opposition parties actually broke their pledge and did a joint government with Netanyahu. And it was supposed to be Netanyahu for a little bit as prime minister and then the head of that party as the prime minister and Netanyahu managed to collapse the government rather than let the other guy become prime minister. And so basically there's nobody left to trust this guy and therefore nobody will sit with him and their voters would punish them if they did, so they can't. And so that Israel's parliament, even though there's an Israeli majority for solving a lot of these social problems, there isn't a political majority to do it.  

Beth [00:42:07] Well, this is so helpful. Thank you very much for giving us all of this context. Do you have time to hang with us for a little Outside of Politics segment?  

Yair Rosenberg [00:42:15] Absolutely. Way less depressing.  

[00:42:17] Music Interlude.  

Beth [00:42:37] Yair, we always end our show by talking about something Outside of Politics. We've been talking about Netanyahu's pessimism. I feel like you have been writing in The Atlantic and on social media in a very optimistic way about what social media can be. And I wonder what sparked your interest in this conversation and what their response has been to your writing?  

Yair Rosenberg [00:42:59] So my recent interest in writing about how we do social media and whether we could do it better is sparked by the fact that one of the major social media platforms has dramatically collapsed. As Elon Musk took over Twitter and rebranded it and changed a lot of things about it, and lots of people are mad about that. And they say, I don't like this. And I think that was a good opportunity to say, well, there's a lot of things about social media we don't really like. And maybe some of this has heightened that for us, but there's a lot of ways that we treat each other on social media that isn't healthy. There's a tremendous amount of stuff that you would never say to somebody to their face, or in person, but people feel comfortable saying online. And it's not always good the way that people comment on articles that they haven't read. And, yes, I have an interest in this since I write articles. But I also think what kind of discourse do we have when people are constantly arguing over stuff that they never even bother to read? It's just a very weird sort of situation and you see it a lot. And so I try to say like, okay, we have this moment where people are looking for new social media platforms. They're upset because one of the ones they used has been degrading in their eyes. What would it look like to make better ones? Because we now have Facebook got their Threads, and there's this thing called Blue Sky and there is a bunch of others.  

[00:44:08] And so I started writing articles suggesting what both companies building these platforms could do better and what people themselves using the platforms could do better regardless of whether the companies get their act together and make healthier platforms. Because a lot of this stuff comes down to how we conduct ourselves on social media. Like no one is forcing you to comment on an article you didn't read and to respond only to the headline when you didn't actually click the link. Nobody's making you do that. You don't have to do it even if it's very tempting. And nobody is sort of making you argue for no reason for hours on end with someone who just makes you feel terrible and that you're never going to persuade. Maybe that person you should just block, or maybe you shouldn't engage with them at all and recognize that that's not what social media is for. So there's all sorts of just basic practical things that we can ask ourselves about social media as technology that we don't always do. And it's not really just about social media. It's more of we live in an age where a lot of new technologies are coming down the pipeline, like artificial intelligence and its many permutations. And it's not a question of are these things going to happen? It's basically when they're going to happen and then what we're going to do about it. And we can either have them sort of foisted upon us and they're going to use us, or we can consciously decide how to use them.  

[00:45:19] Social media sort of just came onto the scene and people signed up and it was free so no one really thought very much about it. And then it suddenly changed how we interact with each other, how we related to politicians, how we elected politicians, all sorts of things. It changed how we talk because suddenly soundbites of a certain type went really far on social media and so more and more people start talking that way. Even though is that the healthiest way to talk about complex things? I don't think so. So the technology started using us because no one had a collective conversation about what is this good for and how could we use it Well. And so I'm trying to have that conversation belatedly about social media. I'd love for us to have that conversation about technology in general. I think about it in terms of my dad who was a wonderful educator, and he would often integrate new technologies into the classroom. He became like one of the tech coordinators in his school, which is unusual for someone who's one of the older teachers. But he was very good with technology. But the secret to it is not being able to figure out how to use the technology, is to know when it actually adds to your classroom and makes it easier to teach something in a way you couldn't before.  

[00:46:19] You don't just put on a smart board because it's cool and you could tell the parents and say, "Look, we are smart boards in our rooms." Okay, but what is the purpose? Are the kids just watching television during recess? What does is it actually do? And if you can ask the question that pretty much any technology and you say, what is it that I want to do in life and how does this help me do that? And is there a way it can help me do that? And if not, maybe it's not for you. Even though it might be for somebody else. And I think we'd all be better off if we ask those questions of this technology whether it's social media or it's the next AI chat bot or many other things. And that's a bigger project I think we haven't done a great job of it at this point. We're always catching on. But I think you can actually come up with thoughtful ways to approach these things and make conscious decisions in our lives about how we use technology. And I hope that we can do that. So am I an optimist? I don't know. But I guess there's an inherent optimism in writing these articles and hoping that enough people will see them and read them and think, yeah, I can do that. And that can slowly but surely make a little bit of change.  

Sarah [00:47:17] Well, the conscientiousness you speak of reminds me that we just passed Yom Kippur. I don't know if there's a phrase for being jealous of another religion or observance, but I have it for Yom Kippur. So I wondered if you could speak to the importance of that in the religious calendar so people don't get confused with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene post a picture of a Hanukkah symbol during Yom Kippur.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:47:40] Yeah. So right now we're in this part of the Jewish calendar where there's a series of Jewish holidays at the very beginning of what is the Jewish New Year, which goes by the lunar calendar. And so it starts with Rosh Hashanah, which is literally the new year, the Jewish New Year. And then ten days after that, you've got Yom Kippur. And this is sort of a set period of introspection and reflection. And it begins with Rosh Hashanah and it culminates in Yom Kippur where Jews spend a lot of time in synagogue. Many Jews will spend most of the day in synagogue. Even Jews are not particularly religious or observant, often spend a lot of time in synagogue on Yom Kippur. And there are all sorts of prayers that are said that were written over the many different centuries that Jews have been around expressing what we consider to be our failings and ways that we hope to be better and ways that we hope God will will help us and forgive us to be better in the coming year. And for many people, this has significance, even if they're not particularly religious or even if they believe in God, because the liturgy is very thoughtful about the ways human beings are frail and flawed, but also capable of redemption and changing themselves. And so it's a set time of the calendar. It's sort of set for like taking stock of your year. It's sort of like New Year's resolutions.  

[00:48:53] But if you put it all really on steroids and force yourself to think about it and talk about it all the time, you could never do that the whole year without going crazy, right? But we can do it for a set period of time. And obviously, a big characteristic of young people is that you you basically try to keep everything else out of mind. So you fast all day from sundown the night before to sundown at the end of the next day. And you're just focused entirely on these ideas and things. But and it's also a beautiful day because by the end it culminates in sort of this idea that the combination has been forgiven by doing these rituals and saying these prayers and thinking about these things, resolving to be better, that collectively we have been forgiven. And so there's like a celebration at the end and a moment of catharsis that's very powerful. And so that is sort of in a nutshell. But there's the infinite depths to any religions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, many others been around for a very long time. There's an incredible depth to this sort of stuff. And one of the amazing things about something like Yom Kippur is that you can live your entire life and you will not have gotten to the bottom of it because there's just too much  

Sarah [00:49:57] Love it.It feels like we could use that kind of ceremony around social media where we all admit our failings and we all know what we've done wrong, and we ask for forgiveness and redemption and try to do better.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:50:07] One year for Yom Kippur, I did write a somewhat satirical article about the 10 greatest social media sins that people should repent for. Whatever number nine was commenting without reading the article. And number 10 was adding filler content to your Listicle to get to a round number. Yeah, I do think there are things that we can think about, but it's absolutely true. One of the things that troubles me about social media is that I used to do this as an ironic thing on the New Year, you know, on December 31st. Congratulations to Twitter on another year in which it got nothing wrong and no need for introspection or to consider why it could be better because Twitter is always moving too fast to ever ask, did we get last month right, let alone last week? But wouldn't it be great if there was sort of like a pause button and it said, okay, here's what was really viral the last week. Was that good? I don't think we like what we saw, but that's why we just keep going so we don't have to look back and [inaudible] things like that are designed to make us look back for a little bit.  

Beth [00:51:07] And how much better prepared would we be for new forms of technology if we did that kind of retrospective? Because I thinking about your dad saying, what does this add to my classroom? It is very hard on the front end to say, and what will it cost and is it worth that cost to get this edition? But if we did more regular stock takes of our use of technology, maybe we would get better at answering that question.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:51:34] Exactly right. Because we do have the ability-- to we may not be able to predict the future, but we can look at our own past use of technologies and see what our own propensities are and perhaps what our own feelings are, and that can help us project better how we could use something else.  

Beth [00:51:48] Well, Yair, you have just joined us for a very classic Pantsuit Politics experience from judicial overhauls in Israel to Yom Kippur and Twitter. And I think that it's been great. So thank you so much again for joining us.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:52:02] From worldly justice to divine justice.  

Beth [00:52:04] That's right.  

Yair Rosenberg [00:52:05] Thank you so much.  

Beth [00:52:10] Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks to Yair for his time and expertise. We will be back in your ears on Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.  

[00:52:19] Music Interlude.  

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. 

Beth: Alise Napp is our managing director. Maggie Penton is our director of Community Engagement. 

Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima. 

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