The real crisis began when too many Israelis decided the Right’s victory was valid only if it did not govern like the Right.

Israelis argue constantly about democracy, but the starting point has to be honest. In the last national election, the Right won. Not by rumor, not by spin, and not by some backroom maneuver, but by the legal, official, democratic rules of the State of Israel. In the November 1, 2022 election, Likud won 32 seats, Religious Zionism won 14, Shas won 11, and United Torah Judaism won 7. Together, that gave the Netanyahu led right religious bloc 64 seats out of 120, a clear governing majority in the Knesset. Turnout was 70.63%, with 4,794,593 ballots cast and 4,764,742 valid votes counted. Those are not opinions. They are the official election results.

That matters because Israel is not a presidential system. It is a parliamentary democracy. Governments are formed by whoever can command a majority in the Knesset, not by whoever is most popular in Tel Aviv, loudest on television, or most capable of mobilizing a protest on Kaplan. Under Israel’s system, 61 seats is a majority. Netanyahu’s bloc won 64. That is the democratic fact from which every serious discussion must begin, not the beginning of a legitimacy crisis. The opposition has every right to criticize the government, campaign against it, and organize against its agenda. That is democracy. But what followed was not only opposition. It was, in too many cases, refusal! Refusal to accept that the side that won the election also won the right to govern.

That refusal became most visible during the battle over judicial reform.

To understand the scale of exaggeration that followed, one has to start with what the reform actually was on paper. Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s plan described four main first-stage components: changing the system for selecting judges, limiting the Court’s use of the reasonableness doctrine, advancing an override mechanism in some form, and reducing the concentrated power of legal advisers. Levin himself framed the first part of the reform as ending a system in which judges effectively choose themselves and replacing it with more equal representation for the branches of government on the Judicial Selection Committee.

Whatever one thinks of that agenda, it was not, on its face, a plan to abolish elections, shut down opposition parties, silence the press, or cancel judicial review altogether. In fact, even within the coalition, the most far-reaching versions were later narrowed. In July 2023 Education Minister Yoav Kisch said there would be no override clause by a bare 61-vote majority and no automatic coalition majority on the Judicial Selection Committee. That matters because the public was often told that the reform package amounted to an imminent dictatorship, even as the legislation moving forward in practice had already become more limited than the slogans suggested. 

The clearest example is the reasonableness law itself, the part that actually passed. The official Knesset text did not eliminate judicial review across the board. It did not say courts could no longer examine illegality, conflicts of interest, procedural defects, or bad faith. It said that a judicial authority would not hear claims regarding the reasonableness of decisions made by the government, the prime minister, or another minister, and would not issue orders on that basis. The Knesset’s own press release on the first reading described the proposal in essentially those terms. In plain English, this was a restriction on one judge-made doctrine as applied to top-level elected officials, not the end of democracy.

This is why many viewed the reform not as a power grab, but as the beginning of overdue guardrails. The argument that Israel’s Supreme Court had accumulated exceptional influence in a system with no single written constitution, no upper chamber, and no federal structure to diffuse power. The reasonableness doctrine had become a kind of elastic judicial tool allowing judges to substitute their own sensibilities for those of elected officials. Others have described the broader reform debate as an effort to curb a Court that had expanded its reach over time. One can disagree with that argument, but it is a serious constitutional argument, not an authoritarian one.

The left answered that argument not only with disagreement, but with chaos. Benny Gantz branded the reasonableness bill “the corruption clause.” as well as saying that “the reform endangered democracy, weakened the state, and threatened institutional collapse.” That was politically powerful rhetoric, but it also transformed a real constitutional dispute into a totalizing moral emergency. The message was no longer merely, “This is bad legislation.” It quickly became, “This government must not be allowed to legislate at all.”

And that is where the democratic problem began.

Opponents of the reform certainly had the right to protest, and Israel remained plainly democratic enough to tolerate huge protest movements. But the methods mattered. On the Day of Resistance in March 2023, when demonstrators blocked roads and sought to disrupt access to Ben Gurion Airport as well as highway blockages and major disruption campaigns tied to the judicial overhaul fight. Protest is democratic. Trying to make normal public life ungovernable after losing an election is something more serious.

There was another line crossed as well. In July 2023 around 10,000 reservists from various units said they would cease volunteer reserve service if the legislation continued, and that around 1,000 Israeli Air Force reservists had issued a similar warning earlier. Whether one views those moves as conscience or coercion, they were not routine democratic disagreement. They were part of an escalating effort to fence in the meaning of an election result through social, economic, and military pressure centers outside the Knesset.

Then came the moment that crystallized the case. In January 2024, the Supreme Court, by an 8 – 7 majority, struck down the reasonableness amendment, the first time in Israeli history that the Court invalidated a Basic Law passed by the Knesset. 12 of the 15 justices held that the Court has authority to review Basic Laws in exceptional cases. For many, that was not merely another controversial ruling. It was the clearest possible proof that the Court does not see itself only as an interpreter of the constitutional order, but as a final guardian standing above even the constituent power of the legislature.

This is where critics of the Court often go too far rhetorically. To claim that the Court is 100% corrupted is not something public evidence can establish. But one does not need that language to make the real point. The documented complaint is that the Court has become unusually activist, unusually interventionist, and unusually confident in overriding elected branches on matters that many conservatives believe should be settled by democratic politics rather than judicial doctrine. 

Israel’s right-wing voters are not a temporary inconvenience in their own state. They are not interlopers to be contained until more responsible people return to office. They are citizens, and they voted in large numbers for a government that openly promised to change the balance between the elected branches and the judiciary. The coalition did not hide that agenda. It campaigned on it. Then it won.

In a democracy, the losing side does not get to claim that the winners may govern only within boundaries drawn by the losers, the legal establishment, and the street. Elections do not become sacred only when the “correct” coalition wins.

Israel’s democratic crisis did not begin at the ballot box. It began when too many people decided that the ballot box was binding only up to the point where it threatened the institutional order they preferred. And if that instinct remains uncorrected, no amount of rhetoric about saving democracy will hide the deeper problem. A refusal to accept that democracy includes the right of your opponents to win, legislate, and govern.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)