US President Biden is not satisfied with the composition of the Israeli government. He is interested in removing "extremists," apparently members of the "religious Zionism" list, who represent a dear public and an important part of the fighters now fighting in the Gaza Strip.
Shockingly, the center-left has remained silent, perhaps contentedly, in the face of the violation of our sovereignty. This is a step up in the U.S. attitude toward Israel as a South American banana republic headed by a puppet government and a military command subordinate to the U.S. Department of Defense. If our political society were a healthy body, this knowledge would cause a scandal here. The press would be outraged and divided only between supporters of the government, who would warn against the violation of sovereignty, and opponents of the government, who would accuse the government of weakness that enabled the attack. But in our regions, the news was received with indifference, as if it was the nature of the world that the president of the United States dismantles and assembles governments here.
This is a worrying revelation of damage to the immune system of Israeli politics: the leader of another country, with interests of its own that are not necessarily identical to ours, intervenes in the selection of representatives who will advance our interests as they see fit.
Such an event must trigger an immune response of a national body that desires life. Any loyal Israeli who wants the State of Israel to be able to choose its own paths according to its own judgment should rise up, even when his positions on war and "post-war" issues are close to Biden's.
This is not a legitimate attempt to influence the decisions of the Israeli government, but rather interference in the question of who will make the decisions in Israel. It is permissible for an ally of Israel to try to influence its decisions, and to appeal to Israeli public opinion for that purpose. Israel is doing such things in the US (for example, Netanyahu's speech in the US Senate against Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran), and the US has been doing the same in Israel for decades. But intervention like Biden's is neither legitimate nor friendly.
An alliance between a superpower and a small country like the U.S.-Israel alliance can exist even when they clash with their positions, provided that the U.S. respects Israeli democracy.
The source of this vaccine failure, the lack of a meaningful response to the US president's blatant attempt to interfere in the administration of our representatives, lies mainly in negative processes that have undermined the state commitment of the center-left in Israel, along with large sections of the officers and senior officials.
It is permissible for an ally of Israel to try to influence its decisions, and to appeal to Israeli public opinion for that purpose. This is what Israel has been doing in the United States, and the United States has been doing so in Israel for decades. But an intervention like Biden's is neither legitimate nor friendly
For a long time, and as the serious failure of the political and security strategy adopted by the center-left has become clearer, its ability to win elections and form governments in Israel is fading. Forces that were the majority of the number and building of the Israeli government, both elected and superior, saw the state fall out of their hands. Their response was twofold: first, they barricaded themselves in the officers and bureaucrats, and above them in the judicial system, and assumed power above and beyond the elected echelon, which only the public can replace in elections. These were the pretext for the struggle between right and left over the legal reform and the reason for the security establishment's support for the protest against it. Second, they fostered hope that the U.S. government, the ally on which Israel depends, would impose their failed political and security strategy on Israel.
Democratic statehood has been a victim of these two unfortunate patterns of response to the electoral defeats of the center-left. After all, the ability of a free people to elect representatives to manage its affairs and replace them as it wishes – and not as the wishes of supreme judges or presidents of superpowers – is at the heart of Israeli statehood. Building Israeli statehood around this democratic heart was one of the most important achievements of our center-left, with Mapai and the Labor Party being the main one, before and especially after the establishment of the state. True to this legacy requires rejecting American interference in our democracy.
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