Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes that he learned his lesson about the progress of the legal reform in the previous round, and has no intention of repeating the same mistakes this time. The reform will pass, in contrast to some members of the coalition who believe that he opposes it at all, but all preparations for its passage will be different. No longer Yariv Levin and Simcha Rotman at the front, but all Likud ministers and coalition members. This time, he believes, when the demonstrations return and the left tries to set the area on fire, he and the other ministers will be ready for an appropriate response that will not allow the flames to ignite and burn everything like last time.
The plans Netanyahu formulated with Levin, David Amsalem and the heads of the coalition parties with whom he is speaking indicate that the planned timetable is as follows: next week the opening of discussions on the law reducing the cause of reasonableness in the Constitution Committee. At the beginning of July, the bill will be brought to its first reading in the plenum, and in the last week of the session for second and third readings. At the same time, discussions will begin on the Attorney Generals Law, with the aim of passing its first reading during the session.
In the next two weeks, the government will establish a government commission of inquiry to investigate the spyware affair at the police (the Pegasus affair), an investigation that could shake up the system and climb to the top of the State Prosecutor's Office. With the beginning of the winter session, after the High Holidays, the coalition will move the law to change the composition of the Judicial Selection Committee and strip the Bar Association of its powers. In between, the coalition will continue to pass Moshe Saada's law to remove the DIP from the State Prosecutor's Office, which has already been approved in a preliminary reading.
This package of laws is enough to reignite the protests, but the coalition is preparing for that as well. Likud ministers and Knesset members in the coalition will be given almost daily pages of messages in preparation for the interviews to which they are invited in studios and radio channels. Any claim by the opposition will be immediately answered by Likud spokesmen. The messages will be short and catchy, parallel to the slogans of the opposition and protest leaders about "danger to democracy" and "dictatorship."
One example is the law to reduce the cause of reasonableness – which the opposition also calls "Deri Law 2" – which in recent days has been turned by coalition spokesmen into the "Solberg Law," named after the Supreme Court justice who formulated the reduction of the judicial reasonableness grounds on which the law is based. The law changing the composition of the Judicial Selection Committee, the highly charged law that brought the protests to a head last time, will also be called by a catchy name that will clarify the need for it.
The talks at the president's residence are apparently over, and Herzog does not intend to press. He felt he had already done his. He'll be happy, of course, if the parties decide they're back at the table, but he's not going to ask them to
With this method, believers around Netanyahu, the protest leaders will not succeed in rekindling the masses and bringing them out en masse into the streets. When the calls for harm to democracy begin, coalition spokesmen will present the words of Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, who formulated in an article he wrote as well as in various rulings the need to reduce the cause of reasonableness and disqualify decisions of an elected level of the court.
Both in the president's outline and later in the talks at the president's residence, reducing the grounds of reasonableness was one of the easiest issues to agree on – it was clear to everyone that the court had taken too broad the authority to invalidate decisions of the government or the Knesset. Alongside this law, the coalition will also pass a law that will enshrine the right to vote and be elected, which cannot be changed by a majority of less than 80 Knesset members, in order to send a message that the government also knows how to preserve basic democratic rights, such as elections.
The rebels will not raise their heads
But not only on the PR level, the coalition embarks on the campaign differently, but also on the political level. Just before the Knesset left for its spring recess, when the law to change the composition of the Judicial Selection Committee was about to be voted on in its final reading, Netanyahu feared that at the moment of truth there would not be a majority for its approval. This was after Yoav Galant's announcement that he opposed the law, which led to the announcement of his dismissal. Netanyahu knows that the majority for dramatic changes is fragile. Just last week he was slapped by some of his colleagues who, behind the curtain, voted for Karin Elharrar as the Knesset representative on the Judicial Selection Committee, and a few more who voted for Tali Gottlieb, despite the coalition's decision to oppose her candidacy.
But open voting is another story. Netanyahu believes that this time there is a solid majority for the changes, especially when they come after the attempt at dialogue at the president's residence. For the opposition, what ended last week as a sweet victory could turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory. Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz showed courage after Elharrar's victory, and while carried on the wings of glory, announced that they were freezing talks at the president's residence. The goal was to alarm Netanyahu. In practice, their lordly behavior as landlords brought the Likud moderates straight back into his lap.
As long as the talks at the president's residence continued, it is not certain that the coalition could have recruited 64 MKs. Once the talks have broken down, the task will now be easier. With all due respect to the president's statement that no agreements have been reached, and even if the opposition leaders try with all their might to cement the public narrative that the coalition is to blame, they have already lost Yuli Edelstein and others like him within the Likud. Probably Gallant too. The defense minister is careful not to comment on the reform, and will probably prefer to speak out only at the last minute, but Netanyahu's circle is convinced that Galant will not do what he did last time and will not vote against reasonableness and the other laws on the agenda.
For a moment, Isaac Herzog succeeded in turning the President's House into the center of attention. His ability to shift the center of gravity of political activity from the Knesset and move it to the residence of Israel's presidents is a considerable success, especially at a time when the need for this institution has been repeatedly considered. But every good thing has an end, and so ended the talks that took place under his auspices, probably forever. The coalition makes it clear that the door has been closed. The opposition, whose representative was ultimately elected, now wants a one-month freeze only because the coalition has not yet elected its representative, and they cannot be satisfied under any circumstances. And if you want to achieve anything, even a minimal one, by the end of the session, you have to move forward independently.
Herzog does not intend to pressure the sides. His, he feels, he has already done. He opened the president's house, brought in professionals, and to a certain extent also managed to lower the flames. After all, today's demonstrations are not as intense as they were before the talks. Of course, he would be happy if the parties decided to return to the table, but he is not going to ask them to do so. It was important for him to clarify that, contrary to what the coalition said, there was no agreement on the issue of reducing the cause of reasonableness. He is right and wrong. There were indeed no agreements, a fact that there is no signature. On the other hand, everyone who was in the negotiating room testified in real time that there is broad agreement on the issue and that the parties are already in the process of formulating the text of the law on the matter.
The more loaded law, which changes the composition of the judicial selection committee, will only begin to be advanced by the coalition in the winter session. The original law, which stipulates that the coalition has a majority to appoint judges, will be replaced by a law dealing with another composition that has not yet been determined but will be equal between the coalition and the opposition. The judges are outside and the lawyers are outside. According to Minister Amsalem's proposal, two representatives from the coalition and two from the opposition will be appointed, and each side will appoint additional jurists on its behalf, such as retired judges or those who are legally qualified to serve as Supreme Court justices. The coalition is giving up the built-in majority it wanted, but it is given the opportunity to obtain a majority, an option that the right has never had before on the Judicial Selection Committee.
Played on the wrong pitch
This is also why Justice Minister Levin was not interested in the Knesset members elected to serve on the committee, nor in the lawyers, whose identities will soon be decided by the chamber's council elected this week. Opponents of the reform succeeded in dealt a blow to consciousness in the battle for the leadership of the Bar Association, with the victory of Adv. Amit Bachar and the defeat of Efi Nave. Over the past few weeks, Naveh has been presented as a representative of reform supporters and Levin's man on the judicial selection committee, and he didn't even know he was. While Bachar devoted himself completely to the protest and was its representative in the elections for the Chamber, Naveh continued to convey vague and non-binding messages about his positions on the reform issue. This is one of the strangest cases in which one side won an election, but it is not certain that the other side lost. The question is whether he coped at all.
Not a representative of the right. Efi Nave, Photo: Gideon Markowitz
A month ago, Naveh's campaign headquarters ran aground when his chief of staff, attorney Roy Abrahamovich, resigned from his position and wrote a harsh post against the man who had been his close associate and right-hand man for 13 years. Abrahamovich understood that Neve was playing on the wrong field. That what brought him to victory last time will not help him, in the slightest, to beat Behar this time.
In this vein, he was also conveyed by his strategic advisor, Nevo Cohen, who served as Itamar Ben-Gvir's advisor. Naveh met with Cohen to hire him. During the meeting, the advisor was shocked to discover that Neveh did not understand the forces facing him this time. He tried to explain to the candidate that today's game is not like the game of then, and sketched the map of the opponents facing him: the leaders of the anti-reform protests, Cryme Minister, brothers in arms, former politicians and chiefs of staff, the leader of the opposition, and the leaders of the incumbent left-wing parties. Of course, this is also the side supported by most of the media in the country. A huge array of money, activists, a well-oiled messaging machine, social networks, active WhatsApp groups and access to vast databases. These were national elections, he said, not local elections of 77,<> eligible members of the bar.
Naveh was not convinced. He was sure that what had helped him last time would stand in his favor now. That great lawyers owe him favors, which he will now collect. Let him succeed in distancing himself from matters of reform, and present himself as someone who comes to work for the lawyers and not for the politicians. Naveh was not willing to spend large sums on the campaign, and the contacts between him and Cohen ended without agreement on cooperation.
Adv. Bachar was promoted to the Premier League, when Naveh shuffled in the league for jobs. In interviews with the media even in the final days before the elections, Naveh refused to express support for the reform and disavowed Levin ("I'm not his proxy," he repeated) and the right-wing camp in general. In interviews after the defeat, Naveh sounded almost surprised, and of course quite a bit disappointed, that it was the reform that headed the election campaign and not him personally. "It wasn't me who lost, it was a vote against the reform," he said. The ease with which he disavowed the reform, which he never supported, justified the fear of right-wingers, who constitute the majority in the chamber, of making him their representative. It's not that the right wing lost, it actually didn't run at all.
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