Biden and the Democrats do not get the sea change in Israeli politics under this government, into which Netanyahu invited the most extreme factions of Jewish Power and Religious Zionism. One of his predecessors, Ehud Barak, served honorably as Israeli PM from 1999 to 2001, and has a distinguished record as a general. He sees Bibi as trying to stage a judicial coup, “with its goal of establishing a racist, ultranationalist, messianic and benighted religious dictatorship.”

It’s painfully obvious that Bibi is playing President Joe Biden for a stooge. After he upstaged President Barack Obama with a speech to Congress in 2015, it is absolutely mystifying that Democrats would leave themselves open to another choreographed insult with this invitation. Biden and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken are letting Bibi make fools of them. While Donald Trump hopes to be president again to stay out of jail, Bibi is struggling to stay in power to avoid going to prison. But Biden and Blinken act as though they are dealing with an decent ally, rather than a wily and treacherous war monger.

Bibi is openly mocking Biden!  Despite his reticence to deny significant military aid to Israel despite its deliberate atrocities in Gaza, Biden did withhold one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs in response to the Rafah invasion, which crossed Biden’s red line. These munitions cannot be used in Rafah in any case, or ought not to be.

ILTV Israel News Video: “Netanyahu’s Video Prompts Furious Response From Biden Admin”

Haaretz columnist Yossi Verter called out how Bibi has dared to dictate to the US about its own foreign policy, when said, “It’s inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunition to Israel. Israel, America’s closest ally, is fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies.” Bibi forgets that Israel is the client-state, and the US is the benefactor and enabler. Bibi also had the audacity to compare himself to Winston Churchill, as if he’s a liberator rather than a genocidal oppressor.

The July 24 demo led by UnXeptable is appropriately titled, “Non-Grata.” Offir Gutelzon, founder of UnXeptable, said, “We hope that Jewish-Americans will get off the fence and join us. We know that the majority of them support the Biden plan to end the war and bring home the hostages, and they also must know that most Israelis oppose Netanyahu, so there is good reason to be there showing their solidarity with us.” Their campaign pitch states: “Benjamin Netanyahu has lost the faith of Israeli citizens, and does not deserve the honor of addressing Congress. UnXeptable calls on all who those who care about Israel’s future as a liberal and democratic state to join American Jews and Israelis, including families of hostages still held in Gaza,” in declaring Netanyahu to be persona non grata.

NYT columnist Thomas Friedman articulated objections to Bibi’s invitation to Congress, saying that Biden and Blinken are “debasing themselves” by going along. Doing so illustrates how badly most US leaders fail to recognize how destructively radical this Israeli government is. It is ludicrous to think Bibi could offer any thoughtful perspective, “to share the Israeli government’s vision for defending democracy, combatting terror, and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region.” That’s because Bibi is actively destroying Israeli democracy and the justice system, with his Trumpian efforts to avoid prison by continuing as PM — and because he is inciting and promoting terror, not combatting it. He has adamantly and repeatedly refused to work toward any long-term peace agreement, and insists on prosecuting the genocidal campaign in Gaza.

Though he called for Bibi’s resignation in March, Schumer said he signed on, “because America’s relationship with Israel is ironclad and transcends one person or prime minister, I joined the request for him to speak.” That presumes that Bibi is a reasonable man, open to embracing new ideas and approaches. Many prominent Democrats including Sen. Elizabeth Warren plan to boycott the event. She said, “Prime Minister Netanyahu has created a humanitarian catastrophe. He has also made clear that he does not support U.S. policy for a two-state solution that will let the people of Israel and the Palestinians develop their own national self-determination and live with dignity.”

Meanwhile, disingenuous Republicans continue with their campaign of divisiveness, and wail their phony concerns about anti-Semitism (while promoting it with their unqualified support of Bibi’s government, among other factors.) They fail to recognize that the genocide in Gaza is driving global anti-Semitism worse than any time since WWII. Republicans are weaponizing anti-Semitism as a cudgel of divisiveness for the US electorate. Though Biden is also guilty of some pandering to weaponize anti-Semitism, Trump and Republicans employ this tactic with greater cynicism to their perceived advantage. Bibi’s July 24 invitation is designed by Speaker Mike Johnson to elicit cat-calls and insults from House Democrats, in order to alienate Jews from their Democratic loyalties, and drive them to vote for Trump. So many are sitting this one out. It’s yet another attempt by Bibi to interfere with US electoral politics, as no Israeli or other foreign leader has ever done; that is beyond Putin’s brazen election interference to aid Trump in 2020. Both Putin and Bibi are biding their time for Trump’s re-election, and doing all they can to promote it.

Bibi’s goal is to expand Israel’s territory with permanent annexations of the West Bank and Gaza in violation of international law, and in the teeth of overwhelming world opinion. He doesn’t deserve a platform in a joint session of Congress to promote this aggressive expansionism. With a Republican majority in the House, the invitation won’t be rescinded. Ideally, both Schumer and Jeffries would revisit their foolish invitation, and withdraw their support. They can do it gracefully by pointing out how quickly the situation in Gaza has deteriorated under Bibi’s leadership and campaign of genocide. They signed on. They should sign off!

Asked about the likely choice in November between Biden and Donald Trump, the consensus among the demonstrators was that they wouldn’t vote for “Genocide Joe,” and that there was nothing to choose from between Biden and Trump when it comes to Middle East policy. Some would simply stay home, while some might vote for the Green Party or another third party, and even those who might eventually pull the lever for Biden pledged to vote “uncommitted” in any primary to “send a message to the White House.”

Still, no matter the horrors — and they are horrors — of Gaza and of the low-intensity war Israel is also waging in the occupied West Bank, and despite Israel’s regular artillery and bombing runs against targets in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and even Iran, those who argue that there’s no difference between Biden and Trump when it comes to Israel are deeply mistaken.

Biden represents a long-standing mainstream allegiance to Israel as an American ally, but — like other former presidents, including George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama — he disdains Israel’s extremist, pro-settler far right. And as he learned during the Obama years, President Biden is all too aware that Netanyahu has long explicitly thrown in his lot with the Republican Party and, more specifically, with Donald Trump as its standard-bearer.

Trump, on the other hand — ever transactional, with distinctly bizarre attitudes toward American Jews and, in particular, Jewish supporters of Israel — has gone out of his way to cultivate his connection to Netanyahu and the most extreme wing of Israel’s governing parties. To placate Christian Zionists, who comprise a substantial chunk of his base, he’s donned the cloak of an uber-Zionist himself. During his administration, in fact, he named his son-in-law Jared Kushner as his Middle East “czar.” Kushner has lifelong ties to Netanyahu, who even slept in his bedroom when Kushner was young. (“Jared Kushner once lent Benjamin Netanyahu his bed,” is how the Jerusalem Post put it.)

So, while pro-Palestinian demonstrators are focusing their anger on Biden, they may, all too ironically, find themselves targeted for deportation by Donald Trump, should he win a second term in office. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,” was his comment on the Gaza protests. “You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”

Trump’s Record on Israel-Palestine

As a television showman, playboy, and real-estate wheeler-dealer, Trump wasn’t exactly an expert on Middle Eastern politics when he lurched into his presidential campaign in 2016. His views on Israel were then, at best, a work-in-progress, leading hard-core supporters of that country to describe him as “confused.” But having won the nomination, he quickly staked out a radical-right position on the topic. The 2016 GOP platform, in fact, shattered a long-standing bipartisan consensus by coming out against a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would, sooner or later, get a state of their own on territory occupied by Israel. “We reject the false notion that Israel is an occupier,” declared that platform, a position that dovetailed perfectly with the views of Israel’s ultra-right, including the ruling Likud Party, that the occupied West Bank — which they refer to as “Judea and Samaria” — belongs to Israel alone because of an ancient biblical heritage.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s principal advisers on Israel were the previously obscure lawyer David M. Friedman, who had helped Trump wriggle out of his casino bankruptcies, and Jason Greenblatt, a real-estate lawyer with the Trump Organization. Friedman would eventually become Trump’s ambassador to Israel and Greenblatt, a senior White House official. “If Donald Trump wins the White House, he’ll probably be the first U.S. president whose top adviser on Israel used to do guard duty at a Jewish settlement in the West Bank armed with an M-16 assault weapon,” wrote The Forward, a leading Jewish newspaper, referring to Greenblatt. Both were outspoken supporters of expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank and allowing Israel to formally annex part of it. Friedman had also served as president of the nonprofit American Friends of Beth El (AFBE), which had lavishly funded a religious Jewish outpost near Jerusalem in Palestinian territory.

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Both of them, along with Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, promoted moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which President Trump indeed did. That move, supported by radical-right Republicans, many ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Christian Zionists, was a calculated provocation of the Palestinians, and would be condemned by the Pope, the United Nations, and much of the world.

Throughout his presidency, Trump made it clear that he supported a radical revision of U.S. policy toward the Israel-Palestine issue. In 2019, in a move that drew outrage and derision, Trump signed an order recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, seized in 1967. And later that year, in a political “gift” to Netanyahu, Trump discarded decades of U.S. policy by declaring that Israel’s massive project to build illegal settlements in the West Bank did not violate international law. “We’ve recognized the reality on the ground,” was the way Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it.

In addition, the president unilaterally shut down the Washington office of the Palestine Liberation Organization, while halting $200 million in direct U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority and $300 million owed to the United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA), which supports Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to the Middle East culminated in January 2020 when he and Netanyahu jointly released a “Middle East peace plan” hammered out by Kushner, Friedman, Greenblatt, and Avi Berkowitz (plucked from the Kushner Companies with zero experience in the region). Among other provisions, it green-lit Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley and a web of illegal settlements that house hundreds of thousands of Jewish occupiers. “Israel does not have to wait at all,” said Friedman. “We will recognize it.” Released with great fanfare, Trump’s peace plan drew worldwide ridicule and condemnation, including by the European Union, the Arab League, and Haaretz, a liberal Israeli daily, which termed it “the joke of the century.”

Finally, signaling that Trump and his family continue to have a neo-colonial view of the region as turf for future hotel-building, in the midst of the current war in Gaza Kushner proposed expelling its Palestinian population and constructing a seaside resort there. “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,” he said. “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”

Moving the people out, of course, is a euphemism for exactly what Israeli settlers have been doing to the Palestinians since 1948.

Biden’s Lifelong Ties to Zionism

Joe Biden’s constant reiteration of his support for the “ironclad” U.S.-Israeli alliance shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed his career since 1973 as a senator, vice president, and president. “I am a Zionist,” he proclaimed last December at a White House Hanukkah gathering, noting that he’s been saying the same thing for decades. He’s long claimed that his support for Israel derives in part from his father’s World War II-era understanding of the Nazi Holocaust. He’s repeatedly cited — not always accurately — his 1973 meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir as convincing him that Israel was a vital refuge for Jews worldwide. Moreover, Biden has long had the backing of Israel’s American supporters and donors. According to Reuters, citing data from Open Secrets, during his 36 years in the Senate (1973-2009), Biden was the number one recipient of donations from pro-Israeli groups.

However, unlike Trump, Kushner, Friedman, and Greenblatt, closely tied to Netanyahu and Israel’s extreme right, Biden (and the Democrats more broadly) have been far more closely allied with mainstream and center-left Israelis. They have, in fact, been engaged in a low-level Cold War with Netanyahu ever since his rise to prominence in the 1990s. In 1996, for instance, President Bill Clinton quietly helped Shimon Peres beat Netanyahu in an Israeli election. Similarly, during Barack Obama’s presidency (and Joe Biden’s vice presidency), the White House repeatedly clashed with Netanyahu, who did everything he could to undermine the president’s successful diplomacy with Iran, while insultingly accepting an invitation to address Congress without so much as a nod of courtesy to the White House. That conflict culminated in a December 2016 decision by Obama not to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements. (At the time, President-elect Trump, along with his controversial national security aide Lt. General Michael Flynn, tried to sabotage that vote.)

Despite that history of run-ins with Netanyahu, after Hamas invaded Israel and wreaked havoc, murdering and kidnapping hundreds, President Biden seemed remarkably unprepared for the ferocious Israeli counterattack that quickly became a scorched-earth campaign in Gaza killing tens of thousands, including thousands of children, and causing at least $50 billion in damage to that 25-mile strip of land so far. More than half of Gaza’s structures have been damaged or destroyed, including 24 hospitals, all 12 universities, and four-fifths of its schools. Nearly two million Gazans are now homeless. Throughout this carnage, Biden personally insisted on continuing to supply Israel with enormous quantities of weaponry, including the 2,000-pound bombs that Israel used to devastate whole city blocks. And for months he fought Republicans in Congress to secure a massive military aid package for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.

Despite his past history, by bear-hugging Netanyahu while repeatedly opposing the idea of a ceasefire and an end to the killing, Biden came to face a growing revolt at home. Voters, especially young ones, as well as Palestinian-Americans, Arab-Americans, and Muslims, began peeling away from the Democrats and distancing themselves from the Biden reelection campaign. Many liberal and left-leaning Jews, who normally would vote Democratic in an overwhelming fashion, joined street demonstrations and campus protests in favor of a ceasefire. And an ever-larger segment of the Democratic Party’s elected officials, including as many as two dozen senators, began pressing Biden to reverse course. In March, in a speech that CNN said “sent shockwaves from Washington to Jerusalem,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the nation’s highest-ranking Jewish official, demanded that Netanyahu step down.

You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, gradually, trepidatiously, President Biden began changing course. In early March, he warned Israel that he’d set a red line opposing Israel’s plan for a massive invasion of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. “[We] can’t have another 30,000 Palestinians dead,” he said. (As Israeli forces moved ever further into Rafah, that “red line” seemed to go missing in action.) A few weeks later, he hinted, and then confirmed, that the delivery of a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel had been “paused,” then halted, drawing fierce denunciations from the Trump-allied GOP but delivering an unmistakable signal to the Israeli government. And in June, Biden outlined a three-part peace plan for Gaza that, he insisted, originated in discussions with Israeli leaders and was intended to box Netanyahu into a schedule to wind down the conflict. “It’s time for this war to end,” said the president.

And mind you, he did all of that, modest as it was, despite knowing that many of the Democratic Party’s biggest pro-Israeli funders would be, to say the least, peeved. Typically, Haim Saban, an Israeli-American billionaire who is one of the Democratic Party’s biggest financial backers and hosted a February fundraiser in Los Angeles for Biden, reacted with outrage over the president’s decision to partially halt the shipment of American bombs to the Jewish state. “Bad, bad, bad decision on all levels,” he wrote in a message to Biden, as Axios reported. “Let’s not forget that there are more Jewish voters, who care about Israel, than Muslim voters that care about Hamas.” And Mark Mellman, the CEO of the Democratic Majority for Israel, a well-funded, prominent pro-Zionist organization (which, in February, had begun running ads supporting Biden in Michigan) spoke out against the arms halt. “There are a lot of people in the pro-Israel community who are very worried, very upset and very angry,” he said, in a statement reported by Fox News.

Undeterred by sporadic outbursts of opposition from hardcore, pro-Israel American Jews, Biden went even further in an interview with Time magazine, saying explicitly that Netanyahu was prolonging the war for political reasons — that is, his own survival — and reiterating his support for a Palestinian state.

It is, of course, fair to blame Biden for his egregious refusal to rein in Israel’s brutalization of Gaza. Many of his critics argue that Americans are, in fact, turning against Israel and that actions to cut off Israel would be popular. Perhaps, but no one, including those denouncing “Genocide Joe,” knows what political price Biden would have paid, had he, say, suspended all military deliveries to Israel and ordered his U.N. ambassador not to veto U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s war. At the very least, he would have triggered thunderous broadsides from Trump, congressional Republicans, and the massive domestic arsenal of pro-Israel supporters, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFA), and the ultra-right Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC). At the same time, it isn’t clear that Biden would end up gaining significant additional support from left-liberal voters who’d cheer such an action.

What is certain, however, is that, if reelected in November, Trump is likely to renew his unqualified support for Israeli expansionism, not only when it comes to annexing the West Bank and resettling Gaza but also for a broader regional conflict that could unleash Israel against Iran and its allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. Such a catastrophic wider war could happen anyway, especially if Netanyahu decides that the only way he can survive politically is to open a major new eastern front. So far, the Biden administration has, at least, worked hard to contain the current conflict. Count on one thing: Donald Trump, who unleashed a campaign of maximum pressure against Iran, wouldn’t have done so.

When it comes to the Middle East, the choice in November 2024 is clear enough. If only it were better.

Copyright 2024 Bob Dreyfuss

Via Tomdispatch.com

1. Here’s an essential one: “We assess that Iranian leaders did not orchestrate nor had foreknowledge of the HAMAS attack against Israel.”

After the horrid October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israelis, the majority of them innocent civilians, the usual suspects went wild blaming Iran. The Wall Street Journal, a bizarre hybrid of Rupert Murdoch conspiracy theories and sterling reporting, erred on the side of the former with lurid allegations that Iran trained and put Hamas fighters up to the terrorist attack. The Iran War Lobby swung into action. And yet. The ODNI says all that was a fever dream.

2. It should come as no surprise that the Israeli response, which the International Court of Justice found plausibly genocidal, has given a fillip to al-Qaeda and ISIL, and that the ODNI expects it to provoke terrorism against the US. This conclusion, which seems fairly obvious, contradicts the favored inside-the-Beltway meme that Israel is an asset to US security. Its current government’s dedication to policies that produce starving children is likely to lead to anti-US terrorism.

3. But the assessment also says, “The Nordic Resistance Movement—a transnational neo-Nazi organization—publicly praised the attack, illustrating the conflict’s appeal to a range of threat actors.”

This ugly neo-Nazi movement, by the way, celebrated noisily when Trump won in 2016 and saw it as the beginnning of a global far right revolution.

The European and North American far right is confused about Arab-Israeli conflicts. On the one hand, some of them see Israel as “white” and so side with it against Arabs. But in this case apparently they were willing to idolize Hamas if only it would kill innocent Jews.

4. Another important observation: “Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from HAMAS for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralize HAMAS’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces.”

In other words, the stated goal of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, of wiping out Hamas, is impossible. Hamas will pose a danger for “years to come.” Likewise, Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s support for the far right Netanyahu government’s total war on Gaza is misplaced, since he said he believes it is waged “so that this never happens again.” Combine points 2, 3, and 4 we can conclude that Netanyahu is virtually assuring that it does happen again.

5. Then there is this:

“• Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has publicly stated his opposition to postwar diplomacy with the Palestinian Authority (PA) toward territorial compromise.”

First, the ODNI is saying that there isn’t an icicle’s chance in hell of there being a two-state solution as long as Netanyahu is prime minister. This conclusion contradicts everything President Biden keeps saying about the future of the Palestinians, and his tired mantra about the imaginary “two-state solution.”

Well, you could say, if the problem is Netanyahu, he may not be there very long. But what the assessment doesn’t say is that the entire Knesset just voted against a Palestinian state. So it isn’t just Netanyahu. It is the Israeli mainstream.

Times of India: “Netanyahu Out? U.S Intel’s Stark Assessment Of Israeli President’s Political Career I Key Details”

6. Speaking of Netanyahu not being there:

“• Netanyahu’s viability as leader as well as his governing coalition of far-right and ultraorthodox parties that pursued hardline policies on Palestinian and security issues may be in jeopardy. Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections. A different, more moderate government is a possibility.”

Note that US intelligence concurs that the Netanyahu government is extremist, which is the only way to understand the hope for a more moderate successor. Netanyahu gets between 17% and 19% approval in opinion polls, and keen observers of the Israeli political scene believe that his far right Likud Party and its extremist allies (Religious Zionism and Jewish Power) will take a bath in the next parliamentary elections. So US intelligence is not telling us here anything we don’t already know.

Making this assessment public, however, is surely intended to give courage to Netanyahu’s political opponents and to signal that the US intelligence community thinks America would be better off with a different leader.

Members of the government criticized the court for issuing its ruling in the midst of the Israeli campaign against Gaza, while others feared that it would reignite deep divisions in Israeli society that had provoked regular, massive demonstrations in the first eight months of 2023.

The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that the Supreme Court voted 8 to 7 to reaffirm its prerogative of judicial review based on the country’s Basic Laws enacted by parliament, giving the Court the authority to strike down the July 24, 2023, law passed by the extremist parliament. The latter had removed the Court’s ability to interfere in cabinet decisions and appointments on the basis of what is called “the reasonableness doctrine,” which is rooted in British common law.

Israel does not have a constitution but Parliament (the Knesset) has passed a series of Basic Laws, beginning in 1958, which have constitutional implications. This is especially true of of two important laws of the early 1990s, the 9th and 10th. The Center for Israel Education notes, “The Tenth Basic Law of Israel was passed by the Twelfth Knesset on March 17, 1992. It states that human rights are based on recognition of the value of man, the sanctity of life and the fact that he is free. Its aim is ‘to defend Human Dignity and Liberty, in order to establish the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.’ It defines human freedom in Israel as being the right to leave and enter the country, to privacy, intimacy, and refrainment from searches of private property, body, possessions, speech, writings, and notes. Violations of the dignity or freedom of man is permitted only in accordance with the law.'” The current extremists in power in Israel would like to roll back these liberties, and their attempt to gut the “reasonableness” doctrine was only the first step toward neutering the Supreme Court entirely.

About a year ago, as the extreme, fascist government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was consolidating itself, the PM tried to appoint Aryeh Makhlouf Deri as Minister of Health and the Interior. Deri, the leader of the fundamentalist Shas Party, had had several run-ins in with the law and even gone to jail for corruption, and the court held he recently had made a deal to stay out of political office to avoid going to jail yet again, on which he and Netanyahu reneged. The Supreme Court intervened to strike down Deri’s appointment, invoking the reasonableness doctrine. The Supreme Court had also ruled against Israeli sovereignty in the Palestinian West Bank, castigating vigilante Israeli squatting there.

The law that the far-right Israeli Knesset passed on July 24 forbade the High Court of Justice from in any way appealing to the reasonability standard to check the power of the government, whether in making cabinet decisions or appointments.

Twelve of the 15 justices ruled that the Supreme Court has the prerogative to exercise judicial review based on the Basic Laws, including any parliamentary attempt to abrogate those laws, which form the basis of the future constitution of Israel. The Supreme Court plays this role, they said, to prevent “harm to the democratic values of the state.” The reaffirmation that the court could use the reasonableness doctrine to overrule cabinet decisions and appointments despite the new Knesset legislation, however, was only passed by a margin of one vote.

Monday’s Court decision noted that “judicial review (judicial oversight of the decisions of the legislative and executive branches) is the only effective brake on the great power concentrated in the hands of the government and its ministers.” It added that last July’s legislation curbing the court’s ability to abrogate cabinet decisions and appointments “exceeds the authority of the Knesset, and contradicts the principles of democracy, and undermines an essential part of the court’s role in defending the individual and the public interest.”

The majority decision observed, “As a result of the extreme and exceptional wording of the amendment, and given the existing constitutional situation, it causes unprecedented damage, by its scope, to the principle of the separation of powers.”

The legal issues are complicated inasmuch as the July legislation was itself considered a Basic Law, and this is the first time the Supreme Court has overruled such a Basic Law. It essentially pitted the previous Basic Laws against this one and found it incompatible with its predecessors.

Aljazeera English: “Israeli Supreme Court strikes down Netanyahu’s controversial judicial overhaul law” (with interview with Gideon Levy)

Netanyahu’s Justice Minister, Yariv Levin, responded to the ruling by complaining that the “decision of the Supreme Court justices to publish the ruling during the war contradicts the ‘spirit of unity’ required these days for the success of our fighters at the front.”

He went on to reject the principle of judicial review, charging that the justices “have effectively monopolized for themselves all the prerogatives that are supposed to be divided in a balanced manner among the three Powers in democratic systems.”

Not only did Levin reject judicial review, a basic principle of democracy that has been increasingly embraced around the world since WW II, he went on to put forward a fascist principle that the masses should be able to subvert the rule of law, saying that a “situation in which it is impossible to enact a basic law or take any decision in the Knesset or in the government without the approval of the justices of the Supreme Court deprives millions of citizens of their voice and their basic right to be equal partners in the decision-making process.”

Actually, in a parliamentary system where the government only has 64 of 120 seats, for it to act in an unrestrained manner would disenfranchise nearly half the citizens, in what is known as a “tyranny of the majority,” of which James Madison was terrified. The Likud, rooted in the Central European far right thinking of the twentieth century interwar period, actively seeks a tyranny of the majority and so of course is annoyed by checks and balances such as judicial review.

The web page of the US Supreme Court contains this language: “Hamilton had written that through the practice of judicial review the Court ensured that the will of the whole people, as expressed in their Constitution, would be supreme over the will of a legislature, whose statutes might express only the temporary will of part of the people.”

Thus, it is Levin who is being anti-democratic and favoring a violation of the rule of law.

Levin pledged to continue the battle “on various fronts” and said that the ruling “will not weaken us.”

The far right Likud Party and the fundamentalist Shas Party both basically repeated Levin’s talking points.

The convicted racist, and obviously fascist, minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power bloc, erupted, saying, “The Supreme Court decided to weaken the morale of the fighters in Gaza and harm them first and foremost.” He continued, “The Supreme Court’s ruling is illegal, and includes an unprecedented cancellation of a basic law, in the absence of a source of constitutional powers, while the judges have a conflict of interest. This is a dangerous and undemocratic event – and at this time, the Supreme Court’s ruling is harmful to the war effort.”

Branding the court’s ruling “illegal” is a declaration of war by the executive and the parliamentary majority against the national judiciary, and presages dire internal conflict as soon as the artificial unity fostered by the Gaza campaign subsides.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid Party wrapped himself in the patriotism of the Gaza campaign from the other direction in expressing approval of the Court decision. He said, “Today the Supreme Court faithfully stood up for its role in protecting the citizens of Israel, and we give it our full support.”

He continued, “If the Israeli government once again begins its struggle with the Supreme Court, then it will not have learned anything. They have not learned anything from October 7th. They have learned nothing from 87 days of war to defend the homeland.”

The latest death toll was reported by the ministry at 9:30 p.m. The ministry added that 2,771 people were injured.

Six of the slain Palestinians were minors under the age of 18, including one girl.

According to the ministry, at least 1,204 Palestinians were injured with live ammunition. 79 were injured in their necks, 161 in their arms, 62 in the back and chests, 52 in their stomachs, and 1055 in their lower limbs.

At least 203 of the injured were reported to be children, and 78 women.

The Gaza Ministry of Health identified some of the slain Palestinians as : Anas Hamdan Qudeih, 21; Qudeih was killed in Khan Younis, Musaab Youssef Ibrahim Abu Laila, 29, in eastern Jabaliya, Ubaida Salem Farhan, 30, Muhammad Ashraf Abu Sitta, 26, Izz al-Din Moussa al-Sammak, 14, Izz al-Din Nahed al-Uweiti, 23, Bilal Ahmad Abu Duqqa, 26, Jihad Mufid Abed al-Munem al-Farra, 30, Fadi Hassan Abu Salah, 30, Ahmad Awadallah, 24, Mutasem Fawzi Abu Luli, 20, Muhammad Mahmoud Abed al-Aal, Ahmad Fawzi al-Tatar, Ahmad Adel Moussa al-Shaer, Muhammad Abed al-Rahman Ali Miqdad.

The Palestinian Red Crescent said that until 13:15 p.m., their teams treated 390 injuries, 253 of which are with live ammunition, 68 tear-gas inhalation cases, 28 shrapnel injuries and 41 hit with tear-gas bombs; 76 of the injuries were in the northern Gaza Strip, 134 in Gaza City, 41in the central Gaza Strip, 86 in Khan Younis and 68 in Rafah City.

Two were injured in eastern al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip while others were injured in eastern Gaza City.

Several protesters cut the Israeli border fence and reportedly attempted to enter the other side, as Israeli military forces were heavily deployed alongside the borders, constantly opening fire.

Palestinians headed to the “return camps” early Monday stationed along the border, setting fire to tires near the border fence.

In Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, Israeli forces had thrown flammable material at the return camps in an attempt to prevent youths from approaching borders.

Photos via Ma’an.

Via Ma’an News Agency