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........

© The Times of Israel