While India’s Prime Minister Modi addressed the Israeli Knesset today, there was a notable, deliberate, absence. Knesset Speaker and Netanyahu acolyte Amir Ohana, in his eagerness to please his boss, had refused to extend the invitation customary on such occasions, to Supreme Court Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit. The symbol of the law in this country, Amit was not welcome. Law had been banished.

Also today, pro-government demonstrators turned up yet again to harass Channel 13 anchor Lucy Aharish at her home (just as, only a few nights ago, they had done the same, blasting messages through a loudhailer just outside her front door and badly frightening her five-year old child). Also today, as I type this, I read that more pro-government activists have gone to the home of a veteran protest couple in Modi’in (the same, usually sleepy city, where some weeks ago a gang of young pro-government teenagers beat up an elderly protestor, sending him to hospital).

See the symbolism? Law was not welcome in the Knesset today, and order is increasingly absent in the country.

I won’t go into the specifics of the cases above – suffice to say that Lucy Aharish and also her husband each saved many Israeli lives since the October 7th attack, and that the Modi’in protests are invariably well-behaved and dignified and attended by true patriots – because I don’t need to. The headlines make the case very clear.

Crime in Israel is rising, on steroids. Ever since this government came into power, dismantled the infrastructure that their predecessors had installed for tackling crime in Arab society and seemingly have replaced it with nothing at all, the murder rate has skyrocketed. Now we have a grenade being drone-dropped onto a house, and apathy and perhaps worse from those we elected to keep us safe. Neither will this mafia-style crimewave stay ‘only’ in Arab areas. Back to sleepy Modi’in – it’s not so long since that city saw a gunman enter the municipality, pursued by police. It will get worse if we don’t get it under control, quickly.

Charedi protests against equality in the military draft are turning uglier. Despite tragic deaths at two of their protests, the hounding, by a thousands-strong crowd, of female soldiers in Bnai Barak this month gave us a bitter taste of perhaps worse to come.

At the same time, the increasingly-widespread bullying of people who dare to express strong disagreement with the government is taking hold. Doesn’t matter whether they’re war heroes or elderly Holocaust survivors, the ‘poison machine’ will go for them, barracking them at thier houses, blocking their cars, even propagandising against them in their synagogues. This was also evident in the ‘make their lives hell’ attitude of Netanyahu’s allies during the Bennett/Lapid government, whose MKs were duly persecuted, while the government sent out clear signals of how to behave by not supporting even important bills needed to keep the country running. As a side-note, who remembers Miri Regev’s widely-leaked exhortation to her fellow (then-) Opposition members: “We decided as a party that we’re going to be a fighting opposition and that we want to bring down this government…So there is no queasiness [when voting against] the disabled, and there is no queasiness with cases of rape, and no queasiness with battered women, and no queasiness with soldiers, because we all understand that this is the rationale.”

And now we have government MKs reportedly assaulting the forces and symbols of law on all sides. They frequently call for Supreme Court decisions to be ignored, they break into an army base to protest an IDF military arrest, they seem to want to blame every problem this country faces on the judiciary…we could be here all night.

But what’s the big surprise? This is an anti-law government. Around a third (one-third!) of it’s members – staring with the Prime Minister – are either under indictment or serious investigation, or already have serious criminal records including spells in prison. This is unheard-of in the history of the state. As is appointing as Minister of National Security a multiple-time convicted criminal who kept the portrait of a mass murderer on his living-room wall and was previously named in police reports as being a primary cause of race riots – Itamar Ben Gvir. Small wonder perhaps that they are straining to diminish the Supreme Court, and to fire and/or negate the role of the Attorney General.

But guess what? A healthy society needs laws – enforceable, enforced and government-supported – to protect its democracy (which it also needs), and all of this has consquences. We’re seeing it in the thuggish bullying now on our streets. If the government keep running down this path of assaulting the judiciary and legal system, if they keeping trying to batter the law, order will break down as well. One always follows the other out the door. We’re already seeing the signs.

But – what about Ben Gvir’s much-touted (by him) National Guard? Established at his insistence, at a time when the actual police are very under-staffed, a Knesset panel found this week that this new force has been operating “without directives or oversight”. Whisper the words, “Ben Gvir’s private militia.”

No, today law was not welcome at the Knesset. And, in some places, order took the night off. We should take that very seriously. And be worried.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)