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........

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