In Israel, streets swell with an urgent battle cry: ‘Democracy!’

As protests go, there’s a difference between chants, over the years, of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Bibi has got to go,” and repeated shouts of “Democracy!”

This one word – pronounced “De-mo-crat-ya” in Hebrew – is the protest slogan of the moment.

In recent weeks, it has echoed across Israel with increasing urgency, anxiety, and frequency. And it is repeated – often accompanied by a steady beat of drums – by citizens from a widening swath of the political spectrum.

The groundswell is a reaction to proposed legislation by the new hard-right religious-nationalist coalition led by “Bibi,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which would give the government more power to select judges and allow it to overrule Supreme Court rulings with a simple majority in parliament.

The government calls the legislation a needed reform of an overpowerful judiciary. Others see it as a way to weaken the Supreme Court and attorney general – and hand the government unchecked power.

Hundreds of thousands of people – from members of the ultra-Orthodox community to army veterans to high-tech executives – join together week after week, making comparisons to democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland.

“Look around at the demonstrations,” suggests Yotam Margalit, a Tel Aviv University political science professor and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. “People look stunned at the situation they are in. Something truly unprecedented is happening.”

Broadening opposition

The rhetoric is sharpening, with mutual accusations of incitement and attempted coups. Sunday night, President Isaac Herzog stepped out of his normally ceremonial role to issue a televised warning. Conceding the need for some judicial reform, he asked all sides to work on it together to avoid a “constitutional collapse” and possible violence. “This powder keg is about to explode,” he said. “This is an emergency.”

Over the last 75 years, Israelis – argumentative, opinionated, polarized – have voiced many frustrations and demands: “Stop the occupation!” “This is not our war!” “Traitors!” Even, in the lead-up to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, “Nazis!”

“Sure, one side or another in this country has almost always disagreed with the policies of those in power,” says Professor Margalit. “But we never thought the basic fundamentals of our country would be threatened in such a way in our lifetimes. And yet it’s happening, rapidly.”

Weekly Saturday night protests in Israel’s major cities have morphed into an almost daily ritual, with activities outside the homes of coalition members and in front of the Knesset and Supreme Court. “Save our Democracy” petitions are being passed around, WhatsApp groups are proliferating, and tempers flaring.

Protests reached a crescendo Monday when the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee held its first vote on the proposed judicial changes – prompting Israelis around the country to strike and travel en masse to Jerusalem with their flags and chants.

Unsurprisingly, almost the entire legal establishment has come out against the proposed changes.

Perhaps even more critically, so have many of Israel’s top financial and economic leaders, from the governor of the Bank of Israel to CEOs of the country’s major banks and leaders of Israel’s vaunted high-tech industry.

Jewish communities across the world are taking out full-page ads in the Israeli press to express support for the anti-bill camp. Foreign leaders, typically careful about commenting on internal Israeli affairs, have offered veiled rebukes of the plan too.

“The genius of American democracy and Israeli democracy is that they are both built on strong institutions, on checks and balances, on an independent judiciary,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in a statement to The New York Times.

“What would I have done?”

The Black Flag movement, which came to prominence in 2020-21 to protest Mr. Netanyahu’s continued tenure as prime minister while facing corruption charges in court, has returned as part of this broader protest movement.

Mr. Netanyahu has everything to gain from weakening and controlling the courts, says the movement’s founder, Shikma Bressler, a physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. But the larger implications of the proposed judicial changes are far more chilling than the promotion of one man’s narrow self-interest, she says.

“They are knowingly dealing with a nation of a people who grew up on stories of how bad things can get when a dictatorship takes hold,” says Dr. Bressler, excusing herself for the Holocaust comparison, and then immediately taking it up again. “This is a nation of people who ask themselves all the time: ‘What would I have done if I had lived in those days? What would I have done when I understood minorities were not going to be protected anymore?’ Well. Now is the time to answer that question.”

On Monday, Dr. Bressler was out in the plaza in front of the Knesset, together with scores of thousands of other protesters.

“Hundreds of thousands did not go to work or school today,” she says. “That’s a statement. And we are willing to take more aggressive steps and shut down the economy.”

It’s not only the number of protesters that is critical to organizers, but also their diversity, though the government and its supporters accuse the current wave of protesters of being homogeneously white, privileged, and leftist.

Mr. Netanyahu calls them “anarchists.”

“We are patriots”

“We resent being dismissed this way,” says Noga Halevi, spokeswoman for a protest group called Brothers in Arms, made up of alumni of Israel’s most elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, and other elite units.

“We are patriots. We are Zionists who care and love this country. We have served it and we will keep on serving. In fact, we feel that this protest is our best way of serving now.”

“Most of us in this group are not typical activists,” says one member, speaking off the record because he still is in active service. “Also, many of us are on the right side of spectrum! I am not here against Bibi. I want the government to succeed! I even believe there needs to be judicial reform. But I know reform and I know danger. This is danger.”

While these soldiers urge legal and peaceful means of protest, some politicians are less reserved in their choice of words.

“We now must get to the next stage, the stage of war, and war is not waged through speeches. War is waged in a face-to-face battle, head-to-head and hand-to-hand, and that is bound to happen here,” former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert – once a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party – said in a TV interview this week. Mr. Netanyahu and his party announced they were filing a police complaint against Mr. Olmert for incitement.

Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, also facing a similar complaint, warned demonstrators on Monday that “democratic countries such as ours can become dictatorships. But dictatorships can only return to be democracies through bloodshed.” 

A crisis scenario

How effective, then, are all these demonstrations, warnings, and threats?

Professor Margalit says one likely scenario is a clash between branches of government, the judiciary and the executive. If the courts ruled against one of the new laws, and the government chose to ignore the ruling, that would precipitate a serious crisis.

In such a standoff, the numbers and diversity of Israelis standing up to be counted lend legitimacy to the judiciary, argues Professor Margalit. “The Supreme Court needs to have not only legal justifications in this battle, but also a moral justification,” he says. “Having a clear majority of the country behind them could strengthen their resolve.”  

For a few days after President Herzog made his appeal, the ruling coalition seemed open to his offer to broker a compromise. So far, however, it is rejecting the opposition’s insistence that, in order to start such negotiations, the government needs to pause the race to get the bills passed.

Justice Minister Yariv Levin, a close ally of Mr. Netanyahu, said the judicial bills will be tabled in the Knesset, as planned, for the first of three readings, this coming Monday.

Leaders of the protest movement immediately countered that they would be there too.