A plea to the prime minister: Heed the lessons of our history in this land, and pull back from the brink

Hear this, you rulers of the House of Jacob, You chiefs of the House of Israel, Who detest justice And make crooked all that is straight, Who build Zion with crime, Jerusalem with iniquity!
Her rulers judge for gifts, Her priests give rulings for a fee, And her prophets divine for pay; Yet they rely upon GOD, saying, “GOD is in our midst; No calamity shall overtake us.”
Assuredly, because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field, Jerusalem shall become heaps of ruins And the Temple Mount a shrine in the woods.

— Micah 3:9–12. Translation from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures (Jewish Publication Society, 1985), via Sefaria.

It was the Babylonians who destroyed the First Temple, and the Romans who destroyed the Second, but the catastrophes were enabled by moral decay and corruption among the Jewish leadership, and vicious, debilitating infighting.

The Jews’ exile from the Holy Land was relatively brief in the aftermath of the first of these calamities. Not so the second. It took 2,000 years, and belated global horror at the Holocaust, for the Jews to be granted their right to return and reassert sovereignty in our ancient homeland.

And yet, as becomes more obvious every day, we have forgotten the dire lessons about what corrupt leadership and internal contempt end up doing to our country and our people.

It is less than three years since Hamas invaded southern Israel, massacred 1,200 people and abducted 251, in the worst disaster in our brief modern history. Gaza’s ruling terrorists were emboldened by the widening rifts in Israeli society, caused by a government whose prime agenda after winning power at the end of 2022 was to destroy the equitable rule of law. But that same government, lessons of Biblical and modern history resolutely unlearned, is right now accelerating the destruction of any and all brakes on its power, legislating radically inequitable policies, and stirring up hostility against those who oppose its tyrannical agenda.

Modern Israel’s founding founders, fashioning a state amid a war against Arab neighbors bent on its immediate destruction, forgivably sufficed themselves with a principled Declaration of Independence, designed to foster a majority-Jewish and democratic state, but neglected to enshrine its core precepts in a constitution. Unforgivably, that omission was never rectified.

Until the arrival of this governing coalition, four years ago, however, our two branches of government, the executive and the judiciary, coexisted in relative harmony. Our elected political leaders passed laws, ran Israel’s daily affairs, oversaw our diplomacy and military defense. Our judges, chosen via a broadly consensual process that included coalition and opposition politicians, interpreted those laws, resolved disputes from minor to national, and ensured that the coalition did not abuse its powers.

Absent that constitution, and with our third branch of government, the legislature, directly controlled by the coalition, the judiciary was and is the only constraint on a potentially dictatorial government and prime minister; it is the only defender of public and private rights in the face of autocracy.

Restored to power after an 18-month break at the end of 2022, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Justice Minister Yariv Levin avowedly set about subjugating the judiciary to their will — seeking to control the appointment of Supreme Court and other judges, to radically constrict their capacity to defend the citizenry from government abuse, and to ensure that any vestiges of judicial intervention in legislation and government decision-making could be swiftly overturned.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis rose up in protest, but the coalition was undeterred. The defense minister warned that the rift was permeating the military establishment, to the point where internal infighting had come to constitute a tangible threat to national security. Yoav Gallant was fired, then reinstated after still more intense public protests. However, his warning went unheeded. Netanyahu and his pyromaniacal allies would not be turned.

Gallant was right. Hamas had spent years planning a massive, coordinated invasion. The defense establishment had ignored the innumerable warning signs. So, too, had Netanyahu, prime minister almost uninterruptedly since 2009, who had instead presided over a policy of seeking to buy quiet in Gaza via an influx of Qatari money to the Strip. Looking at a blinkered, complacent Israeli military and political leadership, and a society gripped by infighting over its internal regime, Yahya Sinwar gave the signal, and thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst through the porous border fence to carry out their mass-murdering rampage.

Netanyahu, far from resigning, has spent the ensuing 1,000 days resisting the necessary state commission of inquiry into what went so horrifically wrong, deflecting blame to the opposition, the judges, the military, anywhere but himself and his coalition colleagues, and claiming victory — over Hamas, and then Hezbollah, and latterly Iran. In fact, while all of these enemies have been set back in their mission to destroy Israel, none of them has been vanquished, and all are currently engaged in rebuilding.

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I believe that a strong, independent court allows for the existence of all other institutions in a democracy…  Show me one dictatorship, one undemocratic society, where a strong independent court system exists. There’s no such thing. In places with no strong and independent court system, rights cannot be protected. In fact, the difference between countries in which rights are only on paper and those in which there are actual rights — that difference is a strong, independent court. That is the reason that I am doing, and will continue to do, everything I can to protect the court system [so that it remains] strong and independent…

Over the past few months alone, I have scrapped every law that threatened to harm the independence of the system — from the attempt to hold hearings for judges in the Knesset, through limiting petitions to the court, to changing the composition of the committee for selecting judges. I will continue to operate this way. Every time a bill comes across my desk that could harm the independence of Israeli courts, we’ll take it off the table.

— Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech at a handover ceremony for Supreme Court chief justices, held at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, February 28, 2012.

Complacent, disingenuous, blustering and again insistently blinkered to the reviving dangers from without, Netanyahu, Levin and the rest of the political leadership are now — quite unbelievably — using the final days before the Knesset dissolves ahead of October’s election to resurrect their efforts to centralize all power in their incompetent, would-be autocratic hands.

On Sunday the government announced, in an unprecedented declaration, that it will not obey a Supreme Court ruling in a matter regarding commercial television. That particular issue, though hardly marginal, is not the real point, however. For the first time, the government made shamelessly clear that it will choose whether to adhere to the binding decisions of Israel’s Supreme Court. If the justices’ rulings are to its taste, then that’ll be fine. But if not — say, for instance, that the public ousts this coalition in October’s elections, and the court upholds the election results — then Netanyahu and his cronies have now set a declared precedent for ignoring the court, and by extension, ignoring the election result.

On Wednesday, Levin elevated the contempt for democracy another rung, demanding that the government ignore the Supreme Court’s ruling ordering a revote for the post of state comptroller — after a Knesset vote in which Netanyahu managed to install his own personal attorney in that independent watchdog role, with coalition members illegally required to film themselves meekly assenting to the prime minister’s diktat in what the law requires be a secret ballot.

The legislative agenda being advanced by the government this very week, meanwhile, includes stripping the attorney general — the government’s chief legal adviser and the head of the state prosecution — of much of his or her powers, with the role to be completely neutered in subsequent legislation that it has run out of time to pass before the Knesset’s dissolution. The government has already tried in vain to fire the incumbent attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara, whom some ministers falsely refer to as “the dismissed” attorney general and whose legally binding (for now) rulings they already demand be ignored.

The government has also secured the passage in the Knesset, in the first of three necessary readings, of legislation aimed at establishing a coalition-appointed and coalition-mandated inquiry into the October 7 disaster, as opposed to an independent state commission, in large part because Netanyahu knows full well that any serious, fair-minded inquiry, getting to the bottom of what went wrong and how to avoid a recurrence, would recommend his urgent departure from public life.

It is advancing, as well, a media overhaul law that would give the government oversight of hitherto independent media, and boost the resonance of pro-Netanyahu outlets. A previous version of the bill also sought to give the prime minister, in consultation with his handpicked new Shin Bet chief David Zini, the right to shut down media outlets during election campaigns.

And it is advancing multiple aspects of its most inequitable and downright unsustainable obsession — enshrining in law the ongoing broad exemption from military service of the fastest-growing community in Israel’s demographic mosaic: ultra-Orthodox Jews, 14% of the population today, and heading for close to 25% by 2050. On the agenda this week is work not only on the bill perpetuating this exemption, but also on accompanying legislation designed to make it harder for the Supreme Court to strike down such a law, a bill to bar the arrests of members of the ultra-Orthodox community who have failed to comply with summons for service, and one to stream further financial benefits to the community at the expense of those who do perform mandatory military service and reserve duty.

With a judiciary controlled by the coalition, and unable to protect basic rights, the ultra-Orthodox political leadership could, in theory, one day, find its community targeted by a dictatorial leadership, with no recourse. But it is betting that, with its sky-high birthrate, its community is in the ascendant, and will continue to help set the governing agenda rather than become its victim.

Similarly determined to maintain and deepen their control of Israel’s destiny are the far-right parties led by ministers Itamar Ben Gvir (the criminal who runs our police force and prisons service) and Bezalel Smotrich (our finance minister who also holds a ministerial position in the Defense Ministry), both of them Jewish supremacists, and the latter an outspoken advocate of an Israel run according to the laws of the Torah — that is, an illiberal Jewish theocracy.

Theocratic Israel is looming, but the untenability of the Israel that this coalition is working to enshrine in law is a genuine concern right now.

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We are children of Holocaust survivors; how can Jews hurt one another?… Look at this devastation, it’s a pogrom. What is this, Kristallnacht?

— Meira Sohlberg, wife of Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, after an ultra-Orthodox mob attacked their home, June 3, 2026.

Internally, the blight of ultra-Orthodox non-service has imposed an incredibly heavy burden on the military since October 7, 2023, with Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir warning his political masters, unheeded, that it faces collapse. The army has stressed time and again that it is in urgent need of 12,000 combat soldiers for essential roles in Israel’s immediate defense. This at a time when there are an estimated 80,000 IDF-eligible ultra-Orthodox young men evading service.

The understaffing in the standing army has, in turn, placed extraordinary pressure on Israel’s reserve forces — with people in the 20s, 30s, 40s and even beyond having served hundreds upon hundreds of days at the various fronts since the Hamas invasion.

The strain and grievance are exacerbated by the ongoing reallocation of public funds to the non-serving ultra-Orthodox community, whose extremists also routinely block the nation’s roads — preventing working Israelis from getting on with their daily lives — with demonstrations declaring they would rather die than defend the country. Non-ultra-Orthodox Israelis, in other words, are both physically defending and financing the country’s fast-growing, non-serving community, which is indulged and cossetted by their government — in a situation that the Supreme Court has repeatedly declared illegal.

Last month, an ultra-Orthodox mob attacked the home of the Supreme Court’s deputy president, Noam Sohlberg, an Orthodox Jew, with him and his wife inside, vandalizing the entrance and smashing windows.

Already, the combination of strain and injustice is prompting some Israelis to move abroad and many more to consider doing so — Israelis, that is, who do work and serve, and without whom the country would be immeasurably weakened. An annual survey this week claimed 73% of Israeli workers are “considering relocation” — an 18% increase on its findings last year. The legislation moving through parliament this week can only accelerate the trend.

In First Temple Jerusalem, as the prophet Micah and others retell, the ruling elites abused their power; there was no justice; the wealthy systematically robbed the poor, and false prophets asserted that Jerusalem was invincible. Those who spoke out and warned against the dangers were persecuted and jailed. Then came the Babylonians.

In Second Temple Jerusalem, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus recounts in “The Jewish War,” the priestly leadership had been corrupted, and Jewish military forces in Jerusalem fought for power against each other, even setting fire to food storehouses, causing widespread starvation. Then came the Romans, and 2,000 years of exile that ended barely three-quarters of a century ago.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, son of a historian and a wide, deep reader of Jewish and world history, it falls to you, more than anyone else in Israel, to heed the warnings of our own history in this very land — the warnings from the temple eras and from the past few years. You may consider them false, alarmist, inapplicable to you, but heed them nonetheless. You may consider this plea itself divisive and unjustified, but do internalize that many fine, patriotic and responsible Israelis feel this way. Pull back from the brink. Right now. Before it’s too late.

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This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.