If you’ve been following international news, you’ve noticed the marked rise of protests and conflict in Israel. An unprecedentedly right-wing governing coalition has been elected with Netanyahu at the helm. Hundreds of thousands of people have been taking to the streets in Tel Aviv to protest the right’s moves to get rid of independence and the self-determination of Israeli Jews. Joining us to break it all down is Edo Konrad, editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine, a left-leaning publication that tells the story of people on the ground in Israel and Palestine. Konrad joins WITHpod to discuss the political fight over which hegemonic group may rule Israel, debates over the future of Zionism, why he says there is no going back to a status quo ante and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Edo Konrad: The nightmare situation of the Israeli, kind of, liberal and center left, and the center is now kind of coming to fruition, and it’s terrifying to us.
And I think, kind of like, if I can make an analogy to the United States and to the conservatives and to the Republican Party, the attempt to enshrine minoritarian rule, right, like this attempt to, like in the United States, to take over state legislatures and to ensure that next time there is an election to make sure that the Republicans are able to basically stop the count or reverse the count or, you know, make sure that a Democratic candidate is not elected. It’s different in the Israeli system but the logic is the same, to ensure far-right minoritarian rule forever.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
If you have been following international news at all, particularly news out of the Middle East, you have noticed there is an incredible amount of uprising, protest, conflict in Israel. And unlike much of the coverage, generally what happens, I think, with Israel-Palestine is that the Western media tends not to cover it unless there is violence, basically.
Usually, if there is violence being done by Palestinians and then that is what will break through particularly, you know, attacks on Israeli civilians. If there is then Israeli invasion of, say, Gaza or incursions at the West Bank, that will get covered and then we just go back to not covering it, generally.
And then, sometimes elections in Israel, Israel is one of those places that the American media does cover elections of. There’s a very small group of countries that that’s true. But because of the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, because of the Jewish diaspora in the U.S. and people’s strong allegiance to, and affection for, and connection to the State of Israel, there’s a lot of coverage of Israeli politics.
Obviously, the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a very well-known figure. He’s probably, you know, in the top five best-known foreign leaders in America, aided by the fact that he spent a lot of time in the U.S. He speaks perfect English and, you know, could be an American. There’s not that many international leaders who you can plop down in an American TV interview, and they sound like an American. And Netanyahu is one of them.
So, for all of those reasons, the story that’s unfolding in Israel has gotten a fair amount of coverage. I would describe it as a constitutional crisis. Obviously, the Israeli state is founded in 1948, the culmination of decades of agitation by the Zionist movement to found a homeland for the Jews, to re-found a homeland for the Jews in the historical area of the world that they had been in and come from, that (ph) they were subsequently chased out of. Though, there are many Jews still in the Middle East at the time, we should note. And its institutional governing apparatus is incredibly complex.
And the short version of what’s happened here is that an unprecedentedly right-wing governing coalition has been elected with Netanyahu at the helm. It reaches into the, sort of, the furthest right-wing reaches of Israeli politics, including people that are descended from or adjacent to parties that had previously been illegal and banned for their support of terrorism, you know, attacks on Palestinian civilians, et cetera. So that’s one aspect of this.
But the big thing that has sort of produced hundreds of thousands of people taking the streets in Tel Aviv night-after-night, a protest that on the scale in the U.S. would be like, you know, tens of millions of people on the street basically, is a move by Netanyahu’s right-wing governing coalition to get rid of the independence, judicial independence, of the Israeli Supreme Court.
And we’re going to get into what the details of that are. But many people in Israel feel that this would be a kind of final blow against whatever liberal-democratic DNA is woven into the Israeli government and the Zionist project these many years later. Right? That Zionism was a movement of the left. It was a socialist Labor movement. It was always a movement of democracy and had those strong values.
There’s many people who feel like those values have been attacked and gutted out over the years and that this would be the final blow to self-determination, true self-determination for Israeli Jews in Israel proper.
Now, because this is distinct from questions, although, obviously conceptually related to the occupation and the relationship with Palestinians, it has built a very broad coalition of Israelis who have taken to the streets. There have been even people in the Likud party, that is Netanyahu’s party, calling for national strikes.
There was this incredible showdown moment that happened where basically they were going to go ahead with this move. There was a call for a national strike. You had ambassadors resigning, this whole thing. Netanyahu announced we’re putting a pause on it for a month and recollecting.
So right now I thought was a good time to sort of figure out where we are in this. And again, I would value my intro of (ph) what I’m charging you for it, so we’re going to talk to a real expert on this. That was, like, my, you know, from afar gloss.
But we’re going to talk to Edo Konrad, who’s the Editor-in-Chief of “+972 Magazine”. He’s based in Tel Aviv. “+972” is a great magazine. It sort of brings stories from the ground, Israel and Palestine. It’s, you know, extremely critical of the occupation. That’s the sort of political perspective it’s coming from. It’s something that I read regularly. And Edo has been in the thick of covering this protest in Israeli politics.
Edo, great to have you in the program.
Edo Konrad: Thanks so much for having me, Chris.
Chris Hayes: I’m not sure where to start with this whole thing. I think maybe the thing to start with is just a little bit of the basics of the governing structure of the State of Israel. Like, if someone said to me, what’s the deal with your three branches? What’s, you know, Article 1, Article 2, Article 3, Congress, president, courts? What’s the deal? What’s the relationship between the government in Israel, which is a parliamentary system in which the Knesset majority has a governing coalition. They assign ministers to the executive functions, right, and the courts.
Edo Konrad: So, like the United States, the Israeli government is based on three branches: the judicial branch, the executive branch, and the parliamentary branch. And basically, the Supreme Court justices in Israel are appointed by a committee that is supposed to be somewhat of, like, a bipartisan professional committee. This is historically how the justices have been elected to the Supreme Court.
One of the reforms that this government wants to implement is to actually allow the government that is the ministers, the ruling coalition to appoint Supreme Court justices.
Now, why do they want to do that? If we zoom out a little bit, the Supreme Court in the eyes of this far-right government is kind of this last bastion of so-called liberalism, so-called kind of democratic structure that impedes the far-right’s vision to implement its kind of, I would say, apartheid policies, policies of annexation, policies of discrimination against sexual minorities, against religious minorities.
And one of the reasons that the far-right, especially the settler-right of Netanyahu’s governing coalition wants to undo this and wants to actually allow themselves to appoint justices and judges is so that these justices will actually rule in favor of the kind of most extreme policies that this coalition would dream up, and (ph) goes from expelling Palestinian members of Knesset from the parliament.
It means formally annexing the West Bank. It means passing legislation that would actually discriminate against LGBTQ folks and women. So, there are a lot of really, you know, good, in quotes, reasons why this coalition, this government wants to undo the power of the Supreme Court.
Chris Hayes: So one thing I think that’s just in terms of, like, translating, right, U.S. constitutional structures and the structures in Israel is, I think, in the U.S., right, we already have a situation in which there’s the governing party, meaning, you know, the White House, right, gets to nominate judges and justices. And then there’s a check, which is the Senate confirms it, right?
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: So there’s already a constitutional structure with a little bit of check and balance. So I think when people hear like, well, the governing party wants to appoint the judges, like, what’s the big deal about that? Maybe you could talk a little bit about, A, whether there would be any check on who they nominated; and, B, the role that the courts play as a check in the current structure of Israeli governing.
Edo Konrad: Sure. I mean, so as you mentioned, in the United States the Senate would actually have to approve these kinds of things. And that is a pretty significant check on the power —
Chris Hayes: Huge.
Edo Konrad: — of the executive. It’s a huge check.
Chris Hayes: Yes, as Barack Obama learned when he nominated Merrick Garland —
Edo Konrad: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: — who did not even get a hearing.
Edo Konrad: Exactly. And so I think, first of all, power in Israel, the power of the government is far more centralized. The power of the executive is very, very strong. I mean, some would even say it’s way too strong. And now that Israelis are out on (ph) the street, I think Palestinians have felt this forever, that the power of the executive and the power of the Israeli government writ large has always been extremely strong. There has been very few checks on its power, and I think the Israelis that are protesting today are coming to realize that.
And so, no, the idea of kind of undoing the power of the Supreme Court and allowing the government to decide who will be a justice on the Supreme Court is one of these tricks I think kind of comes, actually, from the more right-wing libertarian flanks of American politics where, you know, they knew long ago in the United States that they have to start bringing in their own judges —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Edo Konrad: — into the court, into the system and slowly, and slowly, and slowly build those up. And so, these are ideas that it’s not even inspired by the United States. You literally have American libertarian far-right conservatives in conversation with the Israeli far-right, as they’ve always been, and saying, this is how you undo the judiciary.
So we don’t have the check —
Chris Hayes: Ah (ph).
Edo Konrad: We don’t have, like, the Senate, we don’t have bicameral legislature. So we don’t have that kind of checks and balances, but it’s a far weaker system in Israel. But the far-right wants to undo even this small version of a check in the Israeli system in order to, you know, make their dreams come true.
Chris Hayes: So that’s interesting. So, like, you know, in the U.S., obviously, the Brown v. Board in 1954, there is “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards that go up across the South. There’s massive resistance to that. There’s then the, you know, Warren Court with a set of decisions that were, you know, protected constitutional rights, expanded civil rights, viewed by conservatives as overreach.
And then, you know, waged a multi-year plan, decades in the making, to basically turn the institution of the Supreme Court and the U.S. courts back to the right, right?
So what you’re saying is that project has been kind of exported to Israel. Like, they’re not unrelated. In fact, you know, they’re in dialogue with each other.
Edo Konrad: Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think the difference is that Israel is also an occupying power. And the —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: — Supreme Court, it plays an interesting role. On the one hand, you know, liberals and many leftists in Israel do not seek the disillusion of the Supreme Court or, you know, the hindering of its ability to stop some of the worst impulses on the far-right. I think they see it as a last bastion to stop this nightmare situation in which the far-right can do whatever it wants.
And at the same time, the Supreme Court has greenlit so many of Israel’s worst policies vis-a-vis Palestinians from the very beginning, from 1948 until today. It’s been the rubber stamp that allows Israel, on the one hand, in the eyes of the international community to say, hey, look, we have an independent judiciary. You know, we abide by this notion of complementarity in which, actually, the Israeli court is independent, and it pursues cases of potential crimes by Israeli soldiers.
So, like, this presents a veneer of independence and democracy for the world. And so this also allows, internally, the Supreme Court to do a lot of really, really shady things vis-a-vis Palestinians, and at the same time it kind of says to the world, well, look, we still have this notion of complementarity and this notion of an independent judiciary.
And it plays this kind of bait-and-switch, this two-faced game in order to perpetuate a status quo of the occupation. In a sense, the Supreme Court is the rubber stamp for the occupation internally and externally, and at the same time is a last bastion to hold off the worst impulses of the far-right.
It’s a very tricky kind of thing to wrap your head around. And it makes it incredibly frustrating to try and mobilize resistance against, you know, from a legal perspective, against the occupation as well.
Chris Hayes: Well, what I’m hearing from you as you’re sort of carefully choosing your words there is that, I mean, you’re on the left in Israeli politics. I think that’s probably clear at this point in the conversation. And, you know, the left in Israeli politics has been really reduced in size —
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: — and political force and is —
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: — a smaller and smaller minority of the politics there.
And one thing that’s happened here is this kind of broad popular front coalition against the Netanyahu government that includes, like I said, spanning a whole bunch of the parts of the spectrum of (ph) Israeli politics.
What kicked off these protests and why did it take off the way it did?
Edo Konrad: So the protests kicked off in early January following the announcement by the Justice Minister Yariv Levin, one of Netanyahu’s right-hand men, who is, kind of, one of the progenitors, one of the dreamers of this reform which, you know, we’re calling it reforms, but people are calling it a judicial overhaul, people call it a judicial coup.
And he announced these reforms. This included this change to the way the justices are appointed. It included an override bill, which is really just something that you don’t see in kind of Western style democracy in which the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, could override a Supreme Court decision.
Chris Hayes: Oh, wow. Okay.
Edo Konrad: Yeah. So, you know, if the Knesset decides to, okay, we’re going to pass a law to expel African asylum-seekers from Israel, the Supreme Court says, okay, that’s unconstitutional. There is the possibility to, at least according to the way the far-right envisions it, with only a small majority of members of Knesset to override that law.
So a slew of these kind of laws, a package of laws, was introduced on January 4th by Yariv Levin, the Justice Minister. And he said, we’re going to spend the next few months basically piecemeal passing these pieces of legislation.
And very quickly, there was a first demonstration, I think, within the span of a few days. The first demonstration of 20,000 people and it’s organized by a kind of a left-wing popular movement called Standing Together, and it included a march and a rally that had Ayman Odeh, one of the Palestinian members of Knesset, speak and actually kind of had a much more left-wing flavor to it.
Not that many Israeli flags, and messages of (ph) much more geared towards like equality, ending the occupation and things like that. Very quickly, within a week, this version of the protests was sidelined completely by kind of mainstream Israeli groups, people that come from the Army, the reserves, the elite kind of intelligence units and the reserves, the Air Force, people in the Israeli finance and Israeli economy, ex-members of the military, the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret security service. Like, suddenly this strange conglomeration of people are marching into the streets, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Israeli flags.
There’s no mention of the occupation. There is no mention of Palestinians, but there is the mention of the word democracy. Democracy becomes one of the central tenets of these protests. And you go, even you walk the streets of Tel Aviv, people are talking about, you know, Israel turning into a dictatorship. People are talking about how (ph) we need to preserve democracy.
Now, in the eyes of many of these protesters, they view democracy kind of in a very slim version of democracy, and I think this is something that is kind of a civic problem in Israel. The kind of imagination of what democracy is, is very, very limited, considering the fact that when these people are talking about democracy, they’re talking about separation of powers and checks and balances, things that, you know, you mentioned in the, let’s say, in the American context we talk about democracy. That’s what we’re talking about, very generally.
And here, you’re excluding millions and millions of people who, for decades, for over half a century, have lived under military occupation in the occupied territories. You’re excluding Palestinian refugees who, you know, with the founding of Israel in 1948, were expelled en masse; 750,000 people were expelled in 1948, in what Palestinians called the Nakba, and have been refugees living in refugee camps since then.
They’re completely out of the picture. They’re not included in these conversations. Twenty percent of the Israeli public are Palestinian citizens of Israel, but they, I think, see very clearly that what’s happening is a war, or a battle, or a struggle between two elites over the future of Zionism.
And for Palestinians, I won’t deign to speak for Palestinians, certainly, but I think, you know, reading what they’re talking about, speaking to friends, to Palestinian friends, a lot of the reporting that’s been happening, it’s very clear that this is not about them, and that the words equality and democracy, apart from very kind of small marginal groups on the left which are doing really, really important work, this does not apply to them.
Chris Hayes: Right. But, I mean, sure, that seems quite clear. But it also seems to me that, like, what you said before about, you know, the foundational vision is a liberal-democratic Zionist state, right? A homeland for the Jews built along these, sort of, Labor liberal democracy lines. And this is a battle over retaining whatever’s left of that vision under the strain of kind of creeping right-wing populist authoritarianism, right? I mean, is that a fair characterization?
Edo Konrad: Look, I think maybe that’s how a lot of the protesters see this.
Chris Hayes: I mean, my point is that you’re not a Zionist, right? I mean, you —
Edo Konrad: No.
Chris Hayes: — think the whole project is illegitimate. So it’s going to look like a factional dispute if you don’t believe in Zionism. But if you’re a Zionist, which most Israeli Jews are, it’s going to feel existential.
Edo Konrad: Yeah, I think a lot of these things feel existential for Israelis. I think maybe not being a Zionist gives you a lot of clarity, gives you a lot of clarity about the situation. You know, from 1948 until 1966, Palestinian citizens of Israel lived under martial law, under a military —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: — dictatorship inside Israel.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: They were given the right to vote, but they had to get permits to go from village to village. I’m talking about citizens, not people under military occupation today in the West Bank. So that already, you know, that calls into question this very premise of Israel as a democracy, Israel as a democracy that was established on the ruins of 500 Palestinian villages, people who weren’t allowed to return.
So yes, I think there was a lot of rhetoric of democracy, there were certain trappings of liberal democracy, the parliament and the right to vote for all citizens, but this was after a pretty robust campaign of expelling Palestinians.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: And so, it’s kind of like if you go back to Andrew Jackson, who’s taking over large swaths of land and you go to Native Americans who, you know, had just been expelled and ethnically cleansed from their land and you say, oh, this is democracy, right? Like, here are these democratic impulses.
I think they’ll probably look at you pretty strangely. So I think for Palestinians, and I think this is kind of important to say, for Israelis and Israeli Jews, the Israeli project has always been a Jewish and democratic one.
Chris Hayes: Yes, right.
Edo Konrad: And this far-right kind of contingent is now saying, hey, we’re not really interested in any of these democratic trappings anymore. We want to go all the way with this vision.
And for Palestinians, it’s a totally different story. And so I think, maybe not being a Zionist gives one the ability to look at both of these stories and see how they work against each other and how they work side by side.
Chris Hayes: Right. I mean, I guess the question, right, it seems to me that the sort of Jewish democratic, you know, liberal democracy, you know, the sort of contradictions, people have long pointed to the contradictions in the heart of the Zionist project. And, of course, defenders of Zionism and the Israeli states say, well, there’s contradictions in every modern state, which I think, to your Andrew Jackson point, is quite true in the United States. Obviously, it was, you know, a state founded on slavery, and ethnic cleansing, and the removal and genocide of indigenous people.
What has happened now, though? Like, it seems to me that basically whatever you call liberals or the left in Israel has been on the decline for a very long time. I hear what you’re saying which is that you sort of view this as a battle between two sets of elites, basically over the future of what Zionism is, as an exclusionary movement that does not provide equal rights and democracy for Palestinians.
But I still don’t see why the panic, why the spark. Like, what happened here about the movement by the Justice Minister that gets hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, that gets Shin Bet and, you know, members of the Air Force? Like, why do they suddenly feel this existential threat?
Edo Konrad: I mean, I think it has to do with the makeup of the people in this government. You have people like Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is the National Security Minister, who comes from the Kahanist movement, a far-far-right movement that was started by Rabbi Meir Kahane of the Jewish Defense League fame, infamously the head of and founder of the Jewish Defense League in the United States, moved to Israel, founded the Kach party, as you mentioned in your intro, which was eventually banned from the Knesset.
And even, you know, members of Likud when Meir Kahane would get up to speak, famously when he would get up to speak in front of the Knesset, even members of the right-wing Likud party would get out and would step out of the hall and boycott his speeches.
You have people in power today, like Bezalel Smotrich, who is the Finance Minister, who is a fundamentalist right-wing messianic settler who has been given charge of the civil administration. This is the body within the Israeli Army that deals with the day-to-day lives of millions of Palestinians living in the occupied territories from infrastructure and health and so forth.
So these are the people who are in charge today. These are very, very unsavory characters. They are, I think, frightening to a lot of Israelis. And I think, in a lot of ways, the Israeli public has woken up to what it means to have the far-right run its country. And they’ve started to wake up to realize, okay, these people have been kind of waiting in the wings, building their power for decades. And now, our nightmare situation, I’d say the nightmare situation of the Israeli kind of liberal, and center-left and the center is now kind of coming to fruition and it’s terrifying to us.
And I think, kind of like, if I can make an analogy to the United States and to the conservatives and to the Republican Party, the attempt to enshrine minoritarian rule, right, like this attempt to like in the United States to take over state legislatures and to ensure that next time there’s an election to make sure that the Republicans are able to basically stop the count, or reverse the count or, you know —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: — to (ph) make sure that a Democratic candidate is not elected. It’s different in the Israeli system, but the logic is the same: to ensure far-right minoritarian rule forever.
And the court, I think, is one of the things that really stops the far-right from achieving that goal.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Talk a little bit about this sort of move of the right to the center. I mean, the move from the far-right from the sort of fringes of Israeli politics towards the centers of power, I mean, that is one of the main stories, right, to tell about Israeli politics over the last few decades.
That seems like a story about also the occupation, which is, I think, the critique and the analysis that folks like yourself share, right? That it’s not a coincidence that the far-right, most sort of racist and exclusionary and, in some cases, you know, violence-adjacent parts of Israeli politics gain power under conditions of essentially permanent occupation because it’s a kind of epiphenomenon, right? It’s the contradictions of the occupation made manifest in the domestic politics.
Like, is that your read on this situation and why has the Israeli right gained so much footing?
Edo Konrad: I mean, there are a lot of answers to why the right has gained a lot of footing. I guess I can start by saying that the Zionist right and the Zionist left have always played this game of accommodating one another in order to kind of achieve stability for the Zionist project —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: — from the founding of the state and until very recently.
I think what we’re seeing now is a kind of rupture of that status quo between the right and the left. And I think a lot of it has to do with Benjamin Netanyahu and his personality and the coalition that he’s built for himself.
And really, I’d say that the kind of (ph) far-right that wants to (ph), you know, we walked about the Zionist revolution in 1948, take the Zionist revolution to another level and say, no more of the kind of liberal trappings that we had in 1948. We’re done with that.
And so, there has always been an accommodation of the far-right as well. You know, I’d say, what I mentioned before about Kahane being banned, I think that was maybe one of the only cases in which the far-right wasn’t accommodated. But the settler-right, not even the Kahanist extreme-extreme-right, but the settler-right was always accommodated by even the Labor Zionists that you mentioned earlier.
You know, the occupation started in 1967 under a Labor government.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: And only in 1977 was Labor kicked out of power, replaced by Likud, who has been running the country for most of the years since then. But the settlements began in the ’60s, in the ’70s under a Labor government. They accelerated under the successive of Likud governments, but really it began with Labor.
And so slowly, I think, the settler movement for years really, I mean, they worked very, very smartly, I think, up until like the Oslo years where they really had to resort to mass violence in the assassination of an Israeli prime minister who was making moves toward some kind of Palestinian sovereignty, some version of Palestinian autonomy.
We can argue about whether or not that would be a Palestinian state or not, but that period of time, they had to resort to, or they felt they had to resort to, violence in order to stop that thing. But for many years, they worked very quietly within the system. They played the game. They rose in the ranks in the Israeli military to become officers.
They became members of, you know, like Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, you know, is not a West Bank settler himself, but he is from the national religious movement of Israeli society that represents a large population of whom are settlers, and Bennett did represent the settlers. And he became prime minister, right?
So, you know, slowly but surely, this was a movement that took over the Israeli state, which has largely been more secular and secular-adjacent regime. And that’s really changed, I think, over the last 20 years.
Chris Hayes: Well, that seems like one of the main dividing lines in Israeli Jewish politics, right, which is secular foundations of the state, the secular vision of the sort of Zionist movement from Herzl, you know, forward, and the increasingly sectarian and religious potency of major voting blocks in Israeli life and a division between basically religious and secular forces inside Israel.
Edo Konrad: Yeah, I’d agree with that. I mean, from the founding of the state, you know, there was the signing of an agreement called, kind of like, a status quo agreement, where the religious, the ultra-orthodox, the Haredis would be excluded from military service, and they would be able to control certain aspects of religious life. And on Saturday, on the Sabbath, everything kind of shuts down here. These are all kind of parts of that status quo to integrate the Haredi population, the Haredi leadership into Israeli society in 1948.
And the religious Zionists, the religious nationalism (ph) I was talking about, the settler movement, which is kind of in between rather, the more kind of, I’d say, quote/unquote, modern version of that. They believe in the State of Israel as opposed to the ultra-orthodox, which were never Zionists, and many of them actually were anti-Zionist but accommodated this idea of a Jewish state.
As opposed to them, the settlers believed that the state is kind of this next phase in their messianic vision of Zionism. A large part of what’s animating these protests is the division between the religious and secular Israelis.
Chris Hayes: So one of the things when you when you mentioned the, I think, it was Justice Minister who says, look, we’re going to pass all these pieces of legislation just, again, to kind of restate how few checks there are, right? In the U.S., you couldn’t just say, well, we’re going to pass a bunch of stuff to change the Constitution or whatever. I mean, there’s a huge process to do that and you’ve got a million things to override (ph).
So that’s not the case, right? But for the protests, like, they have the majority in the parliament, in the Knesset. They could just pass all this stuff, and basically completely, you know, undermine the power of the court, right, if they can do it, which is why the protests were sort of like last gasp attempt to sort of block it when there’s no other formal mechanisms to block it. Is that right?
Edo Konrad: I think so, yeah. I think, I mean, what’s happening now is that the protests have become so large, they’ve threatened the stability of the Israeli military because so many reservists are saying, we’re not going to serve.
And there’s this huge rupture. The country is almost (ph) at a standstill. And the government is basically saying, okay, we’re going to pause, we’re going to pause this legislation, some of which we’ve already, you know, put into motion and we’re going to go into negotiations over these reforms with leaders of the opposition and come up with some kind of reform that will be amenable to both sides.
Now, I mean, they’re just buying time. Benjamin Netanyahu needs this these reforms. He needs the defanging of the Israeli judicial system because he is facing potential jail time for pretty severe corruption charges. He has vested self-interest in making sure his case goes away. And to do that, he needs to completely undermine the system.
Chris Hayes: Okay. So I want to talk about that. Let’s just pause there because —
Edo Konrad: Sure.
Chris Hayes: — I’m talking to you on the day that Donald Trump is being arraigned in —
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: — Manhattan court. And Israel has a head of state who is under indictment currently, right?
Edo Konrad: Yes. He’s been indicted, exactly, facing trial.
Chris Hayes: And he’s facing trial and he’s also pushing reforms to try to neuter the power of the judiciary.
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: Which seems like not a coincidence, as you note.
Edo Konrad: Right. I mean, the Attorney General of the Israeli government actually barred him from speaking about and dealing with these reforms. That’s why you don’t actually hear him talking so much about these reforms, except when he announced that he was going to freeze them. And when he said he would fire his defense minister, because his defense minister said, well, the army is coming apart, I cannot support these reforms and hold together an army at the same time.
So he’s actually been barred from speaking about these things as a conflict of interest. But, yeah, he is essentially backing these reforms. These reforms are in many ways tailored to him, so that he can undo the power of the court and they’re tailored to the rest of the far-right coalition.
I think, you know, what’s important to say is that Netanyahu is going to be gone one day, right? He’s going to leave Israeli politics. But the impulses of the far-right and this growing hegemony of the far-right, that’s not going anywhere. You know, that’s going to stay with us for a very long time.
And so, Yariv Levin, the Justice Minister; Simcha Rothman, who heads the Knesset Constitution and Law Committee, who’s really making this legislation go through committee into the Knesset Plenum for (ph) votes, he’s written (ph) the major engine, these two major engines of these reforms.
They’re not looking at the Netanyahu trial so much. They want annexation of the West Bank, they want to make sure that, you know, there are no more pride parades in Jerusalem, a place where it’s very, very difficult to march as a queer person already.
They want to make sure that African asylum-seekers do not have rights here, that all asylum-seekers do not have rights here. They want to make sure that Palestinian citizens of Israel have their rights curtailed, really just this vision of a completely anti-Democratic vision without any of the lip service to Western democracy that the Israeli state has had until now.
Chris Hayes: The trial for Netanyahu, obviously he’s got his own reason and your point there being well taken about why the right wants these judicial reforms, but is there like a timeline for his trial? Is that going to happen? Is that just in a weird state of —
Edo Konrad: No, it’s happening. It’s happening. It’s happening. He’s just not summoned. You know, he’s going to be summoned at the end to testify. But it started in 2020, 2021, but it’s been ongoing for years. We’re talking about four different cases all kind of wrapped up into one scandal. It takes time to parse these out, and bring in witnesses and all these things.
And, you know, he’s the prime minister. And so he’s asked and received permission not to attend all of the hearings. And there’s a lot of leniency for him because he has to run the government, apart from one year last year when he was no longer the prime minister. But still, because of who Netanyahu is, because of his power and because, you know, he, you know, has this, you know, in the eyes of his supporters, a valid excuse to not be at the trial, it’s taking a long time.
And I think that’s part of the plan, you know. Like, make this thing go away, make people forget about it, just like elongate it in perpetuity so that it becomes this weird —
Chris Hayes: Background noise.
Edo Konrad: — yeah, this weird background noise that no one has to deal with while defanging the court.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to think about in our context, obviously, on the day of Trump’s arraignment, what it would look like. I think it’s going to be a very similar situation sort of to the extent that the shock wears off of a former president being indicted, and to the extent that he can sort of attenuate the process and draw it out, it then just becomes background noise. And then it’s like, all right, well, yeah, of course, he’s facing indictments. Like, it’s (ph) just —
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: — that’s what we all acclimate to. And it seems like that’s what Netanyahu has been able to successfully do politically there. Like, everyone knows it, but it just is kind of an asterisk next to him, but it doesn’t really seem to matter that much.
Edo Konrad: Totally, I think that’s totally true. And I think another thing that I would say that these two things have in common is that, you know, it’s kind of crazy to take stock of the fact that Donald Trump was in power for four years and did some incredibly heinous things and Netanyahu also has been in power since 2009, 2010 and has done incredibly heinous things to Palestinians. And he is going on trial, he is being put on trial for corruption scandals and Donald Trump is being put on trial —
Chris Hayes: Right, yeah.
Edo Konrad: — for hush money paid to a porn star —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: — rather than the really awful things that both of these leaders have done.
Chris Hayes: Huh (ph).
Edo Konrad: You know, there are enough Palestinian bodies to fill multiple graveyards, to show here are the —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Edo Konrad: — results of Netanyahu’s policies.
Chris Hayes: So the occupation seems to have embedded itself thoroughly. The Oslo process seems just obviously dead. Sort of, the Palestinian Authority, you know, I think a lot of Palestinians view it with contempt as essentially a jailer. You’ve seen more and more sort of protests, and uprisings, and pushback on the Abbas, you know, Palestinian authority.
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: You know, it just seems like the Israeli right-wing, I think, is a little more honest about its vision, which is like if we have to choose between a Jewish state and a democracy, we choose a Jewish state. We don’t care about democracy. In fact, we don’t even like it that much.
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: And we will be a Jewish state. We will be an ethno-nationalist Jewish state in this land, and we’ll take it. And there’s no hypocrisy. There’s no contradiction here. There’s no tensions. This is what we are. This is our land, these are our people, and we will rule over it.
And that’s the kind of argument that’s being made. It seems to me like part of what’s breaking Israel apart right now, Israeli politics, is that conflict. But I just don’t know, it’s very hard for me to see, like, a way forward that isn’t just, like, the permanent grinding and violent status quo.
Edo Konrad: Right. I mean, I’d agree with that. I think maybe Netanyahu a few years ago would pay lip service to the two-state solution. I think since the Trump years he’s been advocating annexation on and off —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: — annexation of the of the West Bank, and that was kind of part of this grand vision of the Trump deal of the century that did not come to fruition.
But today, you won’t hear Netanyahu talk about the two-state solution. But you don’t hear him talk about Palestinians at all. You don’t really hear anyone kind of on the Zionist spectrum, the Zionist political spectrum talking about Palestinians. The Palestinians have been completely made absent from any of this.
And like you said, in the introduction, the only time we hear about Palestinians is when they commit acts of violence, but the occupation commits acts of violence against Palestinians every single day. And also inside of Israeli society, inside Israel against Palestinian citizens, the Israeli government commits acts of violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel on a daily basis.
These are people living under an apartheid regime and facing really violent colonial structures that have been put in place and entrenched here since 1948. And I think this is what we’re not talking about, but it’s always bubbling below the surface.
Chris Hayes: But is it really? I mean, I guess the question is, like, I sometimes wonder, like has it just been entirely successful? I mean, obviously not in moral terms. I think it’s a moral abomination, the occupation. I mean, in the sort of brute force real politique terms of, like, you know, colonial administration and conquering.
Like, Israeli citizens are relatively well-protected from violence, although there has been some. That obviously is, like, the soul focal point, right, for the security state. It’s not the Palestinian rights. It’s not that they’re flourishing. It’s like, are Jews under threat, right? They’ve been largely successful in reducing, if not completely extinguishing, threats to Jewish life, and everything else after that is like, you know, who cares. That as a project, in and of itself, seems like it’s been a successful project such that I’m not sure how it comes apart.
Edo Konrad: I think that what’s interesting about this moment in Israeli politics is that this left-right accommodation in order to ensure the stability. And the United States, you got to say, like, it doesn’t matter if you’re Trump. It doesn’t matter if you’re Biden. It doesn’t matter if you’re Barack Obama. What they want at the end of the day is stability —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: — a stable client state in Israel to ensure that, you know, American interests are served.
But this left-right kind of status quo accommodating each other is now being broken. And it’s being broken over something called judicial reform or judicial overhaul.
But what I’m saying about things bubbling under the surface is that the occupation is always going to be there. You saw settlers in the West Bank committing a pogrom against Palestinians in the village of Hawara a few weeks ago, and burning homes, burning cars. One Palestinian was shot dead. It’s unclear if by a settler or by a soldier, but the soldiers were accommodating the settlers in this pogrom. They were there with them. The police could be seen on the scene as well.
So these kind of things are reminding Israeli society constantly, constantly, that there is this thing called a military dictatorship over Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. And Israelis can try as much as they want, they will never be able to make Palestinians disappear.
And I think Palestinians make it very clear that, you know, they will resort to all sorts of means in order to remind Israelis that they live under oppression and that they’ve always lived under oppression.
And I think, you know, any oppressed group, whether it’s Ukrainians fighting against Russian occupation or whether it’s Native Americans who were fighting against settler colonialism in the United States, doing really horrendous things to white settlers. If you look at the history —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Edo Konrad: — the kind of violence that —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Edo Konrad: — Native Americans used against white settlers is horrific. But at the end of the day, that was a project of removing them from their land. And this is a project of removing Palestinians from their land, and you won’t be able to make that go away.
I think the far-right is saying, oh, we are going to be able to make that go away. This is actually what we came to do. We came to police Palestinian citizens inside Israel with an iron first. And we came to expel them from their homes and their land in the West Bank and potentially expel Palestinian citizens as well.
But this is the far-right of Israeli politics. They’ve never hid it. They’ve never hid it. It’s just that they were able in these last elections to be elected to Knesset and to form the government and to really drag a very weak Benjamin Netanyahu far more to the right than I think he would want to go.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: You know, I think the accommodation you talk about sort of breaking down in these protests is there’s a parallel process happening in the U.S. And, obviously, there’s, you know, a profound and intense connection between U.S. and Israeli politics for a bunch of reasons. The U.S. has the largest population of Jews outside Israel.
And American politics, obviously, because of those connections to the Jewish diaspora and because of the bipartisan strength of groups like APAC, has always been a key ally of Israel for both geostrategic reasons, and I think ideological reasons also, and because of, small D, democratic reasons because of the mobilization of folks.
And one of the things that I think is breaking down in the same way that you’re seeing in the breakdown of the (ph) protests is, you know, APAC and the project of the U.S.-Israeli alliance has always been an intensely bipartisan one.
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: And it’s becoming more and more partisan. I mean, even the sort of tenor at these APAC conferences, the polling among progressives and Democrats in the U.S., like it’s harder and harder to keep this up. And I think that it’s interesting to see the U.S. reaction to these protests, where you’ve got Michael Bloomberg even, who’s —
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: — you know, incredibly supportive of Israeli in the early (ph) state and Netanyahu in other circumstances spends lots of money towards groups that support Israel, you know, coming out and supporting the protests, basically expressing his concern at judicial reform.
I do wonder like how much this reverberates in U.S. politics, how much it accelerates the already sort of like increasingly conservative right-wing partisan valence of Israel support go further. Because now you’re getting Republican politicians, Ted Cruz and others, saying like this is like a color revolution that’s being —
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: — funded by, I don’t know who. The U.S. is funding the protests or Soros and —
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: — Biden shouldn’t be speaking about it. So you’re seeing (ph) —
Edo Konrad: The CIA.
Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly, you’re starting to see. I saw some right-wing person who wrote a thing like, saying it’s a color revolution. It’s just —
Edo Konrad: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — like how they, you know —
Edo Konrad: Yes. Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley, they’re on that train. They’re on that train.
Chris Hayes: They are. And so, it’ll be interesting, too, to see how much this is a cleaving point in what is already a pronounced trend in American politics in which Israel is getting increasingly partisan and ideological in the valence of support.
Edo Konrad: Yeah. I think that kind of that accommodation that we talked about in Israel also has international reverberations.
And, you know, you’re seeing protests, solidarity protests across cities in the world and in the United States, in San Francisco and in New York. And it’s interesting to see the messaging there, kind of, break down between people who are more on the left. And they’re saying, okay, this is an opportunity to talk about the occupation. It’s an opportunity to talk about equality for all between the river and the sea, that is for all Israeli Jews and all Palestinians. And people who just, you know, are there to talk about judicial reform and kind of bringing us back to the status quo ante, turning back the clock to the status quo before the introduction of these judicial reforms.
I mean, people might not like this government. A lot of the folks who are out protesting here and protesting in the United States might not like this government, but it is the reforms that are activating them. It’s not the fact that Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is the National Security Minister, who’s in charge of the police, actually, in order to accommodate him and to get him to say, okay, we’re putting a pause on these reforms, he got his own private militia.
And you don’t have hundreds of thousands of people going out into the streets neither Israel nor in the streets of New York, protesting the fact that the most extreme vigilante member of the Israeli government, an heir to Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was banned from the Knesset, who was disgraced, who most people consider to be far beyond the pale, even for right-wing Jews considered far beyond the pale, at least historically, is now going to have his own private militia.
Chris Hayes: Just wait, I just want to clarify. So he was assigned essentially a security force that they’re calling, like, I don’t know what it is in Hebrew, but like a National Guard, basically —
Edo Konrad: Exactly (ph).
Chris Hayes: When you (ph) say militia, it’s like ostensibly a state enterprise that he is going to oversee.
Edo Konrad: Exactly. That is —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: — separate from the police. And there’s a lot of criticism by the Israeli Police, the upper echelons of all of the security establishment is saying this is a really bad idea. But Netanyahu is so weak that he —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Edo Konrad: — has to accommodate these really far-fetched and crazy ideas, very violent and radical ideas.
In Israel, certainly, the protest movement has not really addressed this. There was a specific protest against the militia, this idea that Ben-Gvir will get a militia, and it was just kind of a few thousand leftists that were on the street. But you didn’t see the hundreds of thousands of people who came out, who are coming out on a weekly basis, protesting the fact that the most violent and frightening member of the coalition will get a militia.
And I think this reverberates in the United States, this kind of disconnect where there’s this (ph) small contingent of people who are saying, okay, here is an opportunity to talk about real equality between the river and the sea and a very large contingent of American Jews and let’s say Israeli expats who are saying, no, no, no, this is about the reform.
Another kind of disconnect that we see is kind of going back to your question about American Jews and where that’s headed. You see Democrats today. The latest Gallup poll showed that Democrats are far more supportive of Palestinian rights or of Palestinians than they are of Israel. And there is a disconnect between, I think, the Democratic Party leadership —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Edo Konrad: — and the Democratic base around —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Edo Konrad: — these things.
Chris Hayes: Hugely, yes.
Edo Konrad: Yeah. And so this disconnect will have huge ramifications, and it’s part of the story of what brings out people into the streets to protest and what angers people, what animates people.
Chris Hayes: Right. Let me end on this point though, because obviously, like, you have a very deep ambivalence based on your politics and your desire for a, I think, one state between the river and sea with equal, equitable, and dignified and respected representation for all citizens, right, as equals.
Edo Konrad: Yeah. I don’t know if it would be one state or 300 states, the ideas of justice, equality, liberation, return and reparations for Palestinians, equality among the different groups in Jewish Israeli society. That is my vision for the future, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Right. So that, just to be clear, is a real minority view in Israeli politics.
Edo Konrad: Right.
Chris Hayes: But I guess my question for you is like, it seems like this ambivalence is, like, there’s this question for you of like, is there something here to build on to pursue that vision or is this fundamentally a sort of fight between Zionists that doesn’t matter for folks that have a post-Zionist vision of a democratic state on the land of Israel?
Edo Konrad: Yeah. I think I can split that question up into two. I don’t have hope that this is going to be a game-changer. I don’t have hope that from these protests, and from this clash between these two elites and these two Zionist elites will arise something better in the immediate term. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t really good people, you know, talking about decolonization and they’re talking about apartheid, they’re talking about occupation.
In these protests, there’s a radical block of left-wing Jews protesting every week in Tel Aviv, usually about a thousand people talking about the occupation waving Palestinian flags and showing solidarity with people that don’t want to be there because they’re excluded or they can’t be there or they never wanted to be there, but really at least bringing this idea that there are Palestinians between the river and the sea.
And so that provides some kind of opportunity for bringing in a third way, for bringing in a democratic project, a project of equality and liberation that the Israeli radical left and the Israeli left writ large needs to be a part of, one that is based in real true tenets of democracy and equality.
Do I see that happening in the near future? No, but that doesn’t mean that this doesn’t matter. I think for anyone who’s just saying this doesn’t matter is not really reading the situation of the political map in the right way. These will matter and it will have long-term repercussions for anyone who’s interested in finding the way forward to equality and to justice and liberation for all.
Chris Hayes: Edo Konrad is the is the Editor-in-Chief of “+972 Magazine”. He’s based in Tel Aviv. “+972 Magazine” is written in English, so if you want to check it out and you don’t read Hebrew, you’re in luck because it is an English language publication.
Edo, thanks so much for your time.
Edo Konrad: Thanks so much, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Edo Konrad. Like I said, you could check out “+972 Magazine” online wherever you get your content.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email at WITHpod@gmail.com. Be sure to follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.