A few days until the elections, and one battle was decided even before the first ballot was cast.
After four rounds in which the parties of the current coalition turned the spotlight on the Netanyahu trial and used it as a major propaganda tool, in the current round words like "the accused" disappeared almost entirely from the campaigns, chants of "bribery, fraud and breach of trust" and flame-cutting interviews about the ongoing trial.
Even in the media it seems that they almost forgot about the sentence that opened each edition for years.
Suddenly he is neither interesting nor important.
The neglected sentence.
Benjamin Netanyahu at the district court, archive, photo: Oren Ben Hakon
The meaning is clear.
The efforts of the Israeli law enforcement system and the Saladin party failed to achieve the ultimate goal.
Netanyahu is still on his political feet and enjoys stable popularity, while the public's trust in the judicial-police system, in all its branches, is deteriorating month by month, from measure to measure.
The people actually decided, and not only in the context of Netanyahu's trial.
The judicial system and its loyal branches in the executive branch and the legislative branch sought to direct the State of Israel to a more universal, more enlightened, more cosmopolitan place, crystal clear and beautiful, and if that means giving up a little on the Jew - then why not.
To this request the Jewish majority answered with "No!"
resonant.
The idea of a state for all its citizens does not appeal to most of those who have the right to vote.
They prefer without a veil but with a tefillin, less beautiful in appearance and more beautiful in tradition, and above all with a clear and dominant Jewish identity that is expressed in the public sphere.
Be Jewish even when you leave.
Still standing on his political feet.
Netanyahu, photo: E.P
Restore the balance
This statement has, of course, a political derivative.
A public that expresses a position does not do so for entertainment purposes.
He calls for action, and expects action that will restore the balance between the authorities, that will curb the rampage of the prosecutor's office, the police and legal counsel against the sovereign, and will fortify Israel's Jewish identity against officials, lawyers and judges, who seek to engineer without authority the face of the Jewish state.
If the right-wing succeeds in getting 61, Netanyahu and his government members will be required to begin a reconciliation process, which will allow the restoration of trust between the right-wing representatives in the Knesset and those who sent them there, and thus perhaps trust in the system will also be restored.
In the right-wing camp there is justified anger at the lack of action in the critical legal field.
No excuses will be accepted this time.
What is at stake is too heavy, too dramatic.
This is the time for the sovereign, through the Knesset and the government, to repair the many damages caused by countless figures like Mandelblit and Shai Nitzan, to heal the wounds created by the judicial revolution and the "everything is fair" concept of Aharon Barak, and to claim the insult of citizens, who for too long have seen how they were denied the right to influence on what is happening between the sea and the Jordan, and lost the right to shape and maintain the state according to their concepts, while in their place a handful of jurists appropriated this power for themselves.
Netanyahu and former legal advisor Mandelblit, photo: Emil Salman
And this, of course, is possible.
Politically, the members of the right-wing bloc around the Likud make it clear that this is at the top of their minds.
Religious Zionism has released a comprehensive legal plan, which even if some of its sections can be improved, is an excellent direction call for the path to be followed.
Moshe Gafni stated this week that if the required changes are not made, his party will not sit in the coalition.
These are not trivial things.
Gafni does not make a lot of future coalition threats, and indicates that the fight to deny the option of a state for all its citizens is a central flag for his party and for the public it represents.
A lesson in governance
Beyond that, in the last year the right has experienced what real governance is like from its place in the opposition.
How moves are appointed and motivated even without the approval of the legal advisors, how the Knesset is bypassed when it is a weight on the government's decisions, how associates are appointed, budgets are passed and decisions are implemented while ignoring legal motivations of this and that.
"Doesn't use threats."
Moshe Gafni at the "Israel Hayom" conference, photo: Yossi Zeliger
Another thing that has been proven in the last year is that the victory is important - but what you do with it is even more important.
The threat of handing over the keys to the democratic system to those who sometimes see even the word "Jewish" as something outdated that must be removed from the world, including the repeal of the Law of Return and the replacement of the national anthem, is real and tangible.
The citizenship law, the willingness to compromise on the issue of family reunification and the persecution of any religious symbol were not random events in the political field, but part of a policy.
The political question at hand does not only concern the magic number 61. Elections in Israel are always fateful, as the cliché goes.
But after years in which the political system was in turmoil due to the megalomania and tyranny of legal officials, the upcoming decision has far-reaching implications for Israel's image and its ability to preserve its Jewish tradition and identity in a hostile space, unimpressed by liberal and progressive values.
The question of the Jewish state or the state of all its citizens is not theoretical.
It concerns the decision to endanger Golani's soldiers, Israel's immigration policy, the appointment of judges, the protection of our borders and the most basic core values of Zionism - and also the democratic order of the separation of powers and deciding who is actually sovereign.
The citizens have already decided on these issues.
If a decision is indeed reached in the right direction this coming Tuesday, no one has permission to disavow the word of the sovereign and ignore it.
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