Is Israel’s Democracy America’s Problem?

First there was Turkey. Then Hungary. Then Poland. Then India. Then, for a time, the United States. And now, it seems, Israel is the latest democracy to elect a leader determined to undermine democracy’s liberal foundations.

One of the first and most frightening signs that a liberal democracy has been loosed from its moorings is the subordination of a previously independent judiciary to the will of a legislature controlled by the leader’s party. That was the path of Hungary and Poland—and is now Israel. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has proposed a law that would allow the country’s single-body legislature, the Knesset, to not only override decisions of the Supreme Court but to also give itself the effective power to appoint high court judges. Under such a system, Israel’s government, which holds a parliamentary majority, could do whatever it wanted.

The law hasn’t yet passed and has provoked unprecedented public protest. But Netanyahu’s government, which includes religious zealots who have never before gained power in Israel, is preparing to launch another classically illiberal campaign by stripping away rights from a stigmatized minority. In Israel, of course, that minority means Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, already relegated to second-class status. The leaders of the two religious extremist parties in the governing coalition, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, favor annexing the West Bank, legalizing settler outposts in Palestinian territories, and authorizing increasingly brutal treatment of Palestinians by the police. Netanyahu has placed them in positions of authority over the Palestinians, and he knows that his government will collapse if he doesn’t give them at least some of what they want.

Why has Netanyahu brought Israel to the edge of this abyss? Some populist leaders, like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi or Polish party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, are genuine fanatics who regard democratic checks as an obstacle to their absolutist fantasies. That is not Netanyahu; like former U.S. President Donald Trump, he is and has always been an opportunist willing to play with fire to gain and hold power. Martin Indyk, who twice served as U.S. ambassador to Israel, told Foreign Policy that in 1996, he handed Netanyahu, who had just been elected for the first time, a letter from then-U.S. President Bill Clinton imploring him not to build a planned settlement in Jerusalem. Netanyahu put down the letter and said: “Please tell the president that politics here are tribal, and my tribe is bigger than the opposition’s. And I have to feed my tribe.” He fed them settlements. Now, he may feed them the West Bank, the occupied territories, and liberal democracy.

That is, to be sure, a worst-case scenario. Netanyahu has many other constituencies whom he cannot afford to lose. His security chiefs are increasingly worried that settlement expansion and violence by settlers will lead to another intifada (or insurrection); last week, after army forces killed at least nine Palestinians in the West Bank city of Jenin, a Palestinian gunman murdered seven Israelis outside of a synagogue in East Jerusalem. Expanding settlements will further inflame the situation, and Netanyahu recently sided with his defense minister in a confrontation with Smotrich over dismantling an illegal settler outpost. Similarly, Netanyahu would love to humble the Supreme Court, since he blames Israel’s legal system rather than himself for the indictment on bribery and corruption charges that he has faced since 2019; but he cannot ignore public opinion as easily as populist leaders elsewhere have done.

Nor, of course, can Netanyahu afford to outrage Americans who may give him a pass on the brutalization of Palestinians but not on democracy. Israel is not, after all, Hungary or Poland; it is America’s soul brother. The willingness of American leaders from the time of former U.S. President Harry Truman to lavish military, economic, and diplomatic aid on Israel cannot be fully explained either by its geopolitical situation or by the political power of the so-called Israel lobby. Americans—Jews, liberals, Christian evangelicals, and just ordinary citizens—deeply identify with this tiny country that has sustained democratic values while surrounded by hostile autocracies. The world may be at the beginning of the end of that moment.

How then, should U.S. President Joe Biden wield America’s considerable leverage over Israel? U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will see Netanyahu this week. He will almost certainly raise the judicial reform bill, the occupied territories, and the treatment of Palestinians. But Netanyahu can live with private admonitions; he makes vague promises to comply and then blames his recalcitrant partners when he fails to follow through. The United States has very large carrots that it can dangle to Israel and very large sticks that it can brandish. The carrots have never worked very well with Netanyahu; the sticks have barely been tried—in part because both U.S. Congress and public opinion have almost automatically sided with Israel in the past.

Is it time to use threats as well as bribes? And, just as important, should the Biden administration treat Israel’s democracy, and not just its treatment of Palestinians, as a question of American national interest?

Foreign Policy posed this question to four people who know a great deal about Israel and Netanyahu: the aforementioned Indyk; David Makovsky, a Middle East expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and director of the liberal Jewish lobby group J Street; and Brian Katulis, vice president of policy at the Middle East Institute and editor at the Liberal Patriot.

Makovsky pointed out that in Israel, unlike Hungary or Poland, domestic issues have national security implications. Palestinians can still petition the Supreme Court when, for example, their property is expropriated. If the Knesset can reverse those decisions, this very frail form of protection disappears altogether. Anything that deepens Palestinian resentment and despair is not, Makovsky observes, a purely internal Israeli matter. That said, Makovsky would much prefer that Biden seduce Netanyahu with promises of further “regional integration” than through threats.

That is not the only reason to challenge Israel’s illiberal drift. Biden has repeatedly declared that the struggle between democracy and autocracy is the defining issue of this time. Democracies have lined up to support Ukraine in its war with Russia; illiberal states like India and Brazil have been much more equivocal. So, too, has Israel, which has acted according to its interests rather than its values. Over time, an illiberal Israel will become a partner of convenience rather than a staunch ally. It is in the United States’ national interest to encourage the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets to protest the proposed judicial reform. Katulis suggests that while in Israel, Blinken should visit “pro-democracy activists,” as he would do elsewhere in the Middle East.

Finally, the dangerous domestic policies promoted by the religious right, which include expanded privileges for the ultra-Orthodox and open hostility toward homosexuality, are inextricable from their apocalyptic vision of a monolithic Jewish Israel from which Palestinians have been removed. Soon after becoming minister of national security, Ben-Gvir made a provocative visit to the Temple Mount, site of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. That was intended as a taunt to secular Israelis who believe that Jerusalem is sacred to both faiths as much as it was a challenge thrown in the face of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. Biden will have to draw a clear and unmistakable line at the preservation of the Temple Mount, the annexation of the West Bank, and the legalization of illegal outposts; he will have to let Netanyahu know that the cost of indulging lunatics will be very high.

What should Biden do if Netanyahu decides that he has to transgress some of those lines to keep the lunatics on board? This is the hardest question. At the very least, the Biden administration must, as Indyk suggests, stop blocking resolutions of condemnation at the United Nations and other fora. Although that will outrage the Netanyahu government, it still may not be a sharp enough stick. Israel has always felt confident that nothing it does will jeopardize its security relationship with the United States, which provides almost $4 billion in military aid every year. Perhaps the moment has come to shake that complacency. Ben-Ami of J Street argues that the United States should apply the “oversight and accountability” to Israel it demands of other recipients of aid. American funds should not be used, Ben-Ami argues, “to oversee the evacuation of Palestinian villages in contravention of international law.”

And if they are? “It certainly could lead to other steps down the road,” Ben-Ami said. That seems right to me.