timesofisrael.com

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The implosion of Israel’s ruling party

Over the past two months, that political culture was on display in the government’s blitzkrieg of judicial reforms, in a strategy that sought to bludgeon the opposition into desperate last-minute talks or risk a complete erasure of the judiciary’s capacity to rein in the other branches of government.
The strategy was aggressive to the point of predatory, and disastrously counterproductive. Instead of cowing before the juggernaut, half the country became convinced the extreme version of the reform was not an opening negotiating position, but proof that the reform’s original purpose was just what it looked like: an attempt to transform Israel into an authoritarian state. So it went to war.
Nearly everything the coalition has done since seemed to prove the point. It proposed bills that would impose prison sentences for immodest dress at the Western Wall, grant police the right to search homes without warrants, set aside up to 30% of positions in government corporations and public companies for Haredim alone, massively expand state subsidies for non-working Haredi men largely at the expense of secular Israelis who pay most of the country’s income taxes, expand the jurisdiction of rabbinical courts where women are at a structural disadvantage on matters as basic as the relative strength of their testimony, set gender-separate swimming hours for rivers and springs in national parks, politicize the management of elections, and on and on.
Just on Monday, among the half-dozen bills advanced by the coalition was one that would allow public servants to receive almost unlimited amounts of money as gifts, including from anonymous donors, a measure meant to allow Netanyahu himself to keep some $270,000 he received as a gift from a late cousin.
This blitz was accompanied throughout the past two months by a steady drumbeat of populist rhetoric, including coalition lawmakers calling the High Court a “tyranny” that must be overthrown, boasting that secular Israelis would be “replaced” (as one Shas MK let slip), and calmly and repeatedly explaining that a Palestinian town should be “erased.”
Some of these bills or statements were retracted after a public uproar; most were not. But even those that have failed to advance helped set the narrative and define the public perception of this government’s intentions.
Members of Knesset aren’t elected directly by the voters. Most are given their seats when their party leader appoints them to the Knesset list. Even in Likud, one of the few parties to still hold primaries, one rises or falls based on loyalty to Netanyahu more than any other factor. Most MKs are therefore beholden not to voters, but to their party leaders. And since those party leaders make up the government, Israel’s MKs essentially serve at the pleasure of the government ministers who appointed them.
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https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-implosion-of-israels-ruling-party/