How to Stop a Dictator: Upholding Israel’s Judiciary

If you want to become a dictator one day, be sure to keep reading.

I’m coming to you from just outside Manapouri in New Zealand. The week’s big news is that the judicial reforms being pushed by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have been put on hold.

Dictatorship 101 states that the first step towards lifelong power is breaking the independence of the judicial branch. Once that is gone, nothing is preventing you from rising to power. Thankfully, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was able to prevent this from happening in Israel…at least for now.

Attacking the judiciary is no secret, and it can be highly effective when done correctly. Two failed attempts at this are Trump and Bolsonaro. Their attempts to challenge the electoral process were laughed off because they failed to disrupt the judicial branch effectively. For all intents and purposes, that’s probably for the best.

Prefer to read the transcript of the video? Click here

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TRANSCIPT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from just outside of the southern New Zealand town of Manapouri. The big news that has happened in Israel today or earlier this week is that the judicial reforms that Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, had been trying to push through for a few weeks now, have been, at least temporarily halted.

Now, let’s say that you’re the leader of a country in the free world, and you decide you want it to be in the not so free world so that you can rule pretty much forever regardless of what your motivation is. The first the most important thing that you need to do if you want to hang on to power is to break the independence of the judiciary. Now, you already control the executive branch, at least in part, and the legislative branch that can ebb and flow based on public opinion and elections. But the judicial branch is always the block that prevents authoritarians from rising to power. If you can break that, then you can rule forever.

So in the case of a number of situations throughout recent history, especially in Latin America, in the 1970s and 1980s, local would be dictators would be authoritarians. Breaking the judicial branch was always the first thing to do. And in more recent times, folks like Erdogan in Turkey, that was the first thing you after Viktor Orban in Hungary, that was the first thing he went after. The Kaczynski twins in Poland, that was the first thing that they went after. And in doing so, they’ve basically ensconced themselves as the only power that matters, because once you break the judiciary, it’s just a matter of having some sort of break in public opinion or an election and then the broken judiciary will interpret things your way.

In the case of Netanyahu, he was under a series of corruption investigations. You can say that they were politically charged. You can say that they were real. Doesn’t really matter. With the judiciary intact, those investigations will ultimately go forward. And the only way he can retain immunity is to continue as being prime minister. But as you might have noticed, Israel is a bit of a national security state and the judicial reforms that Netanyahu was trying to do were so damaging to the fabric of the political system that his own defense minister, defense in Israel is a big thing, stood up and said that this has to stop. Netanyahu fired the dude earlier this week, which meant that the coalition that allows Netanyahu to even be prime minister in the first place was suddenly in danger. And so he had to back down, at least for now.

Now, there are other countries that are kind of in play with the same sort of factors. The two that are the most important are Brazil and the United States. In those cases, you’ve got Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Donald Trump of the United States who have both attempted to subvert the electoral process in order to remain in power. But neither of them were capable or competent or whatever the word is you want to use to come up with the idea of breaking the judiciary first. So in every instance where some ally of Trump or Bolsonaro brought a legal case to court to attempt to challenge the electoral system, those cases were laughed out of court by none other than the judges, in many cases the judges appointed by these two men in the first place. So for those of you who are concerned about democracy in the United States and Brazil, I don’t mean to suggest it’s a non-issue. But as long as the courts hold firm and to this point, they seem fine. Even the courts whose judges were appointed by Donald Trump have stood firmly to a man against every single case that has been brought forward to challenge the last general election. We’re okay. And for those of you who are Trump supporters, think of it this way. We survived eight years of Obama and we’re fine. We can certainly survive four years of Donald Trump not being the president.

Alright. That’s it for me. See you guys later.

From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem

The administration of US President Donald Trump declared December 6 that from now on the U.S. government would recognize the city of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The result has been quite the political cacophony, with condemnations from Trump’s traditional opponents across the United States, a wide bevy of countries – particularly those in the Middle East with an Islamist bent – and throughout the United Nations system.

So what’s the big deal? Israel has held all its capital business in Jerusalem for decades, but nearly all countries run their embassies out of Tel Aviv. The issue is regional politics. Israel conquered the bulk of the city of Jerusalem in wars that occurred after its modern founding in 1948, and as the city is important for three mainline religions, it is often also considered the capital of the once (and future?) Palestinian state. By claiming Jerusalem, the Israelis are not all that indirectly claiming that the Palestinians cannot have it. Trump’s recognition similarly implies that the United States has given up on any meaningful two-state solution, instead siding wholly with Israel – the Palestinians be damned.

As such, the issue of embassy-placement and capital-recognition has been a hot button topic in all things Middle Eastern ever since Israel declared Jerusalem the united capital of Israel in 1980.

But before we condemn or extol the virtues of the Israeli government or the Trump administration, let’s keep a few things in mind.

First, there is not one Arab government that loves the Palestinians. Though maybe not for the reasons you’d think. Before 1948, the Palestinians were the forward-thinking, secular, economically vibrant jewel of the Levant (and by extension, the Middle East). Geography and ports made them a cosmopolitan capital, and a religiously and ethnically diverse population – reflected by Jerusalem – ran contrary to what we see in Wahabbist-states like Saudi Arabia or Shia-hardliners in Iran. As such, they earned the envy or worse of Arab governments everywhere who considered the Palestinian way of life a threat to the fabric of nepotism that was the regional norm. When the Israelis displaced those Palestinians – first in their Independence War of 1948 and later in the 1967 and 1973 wars, the fervor of the celebrations in some Arab governing institutions was only matched by the hypocrisy of their condemnations. So something happening now that heats up the Palestinian issue isn’t really something that any Arab governments feel is particularly problematic. (That is, outside of those countries who host a large Palestinian diaspora and so see riled Palestinians as less something to be encouraged than to be contained.)

Second, the Israelis have physically – and unilaterally – altered their relationship with the Palestinians during the past fifteen years. There is now a thirty-foot-tall concrete wall with precious few access points separating Israel proper from most Palestinian-controlled territories. Even if every Palestinian could simultaneously grab a gun and charge the nearest Jew all at once, the Palestinians simply lack the access to do much anything more than scream. Palestinian suicide attacks dropped off to almost zero not because the Palestinians had a collective change of heart about all things Israeli, but because they are on the other side of an uncrossable barrier. If there is a third intifada, it will rage in Palestinian lands rather than anywhere that the Israelis (or anyone else) cares about.

Third, there is less than a zero chance of a war erupting because of this. Syria is in civil war. Libya is a farce of a non-state. Lebanon is edging into (another) civil war. Iraq is shattered. Jordan is a satellite. Egypt is folding in upon itself into an isolationist dictatorship. Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting a not-quite-cold war. Groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State are at war with other Muslim entities; they cannot and have never been able to get at Israel. Sure, groups like Hamas (based in the West Bank) and Hezbollah (based in Lebanon) will continue to lob rockets into Israel, but no one in the region has the capacity to even obliquely threaten Israel with invasion. Israeli diplomats would never say this on the record, but this is the best strategic situation the Jews have been in since the decades immediately after Moses.

Finally, there isn’t an Israeli-Palestinian peace process to protect. Any possible peace between the two peoples require unified positions on both sides in favor of rapprochement – and an underlying strategic or at least economic reason for that rapprochement. None of that currently exists. The Israeli government sits fairly hard to the right and isn’t about to trade land for peace when the wall gives Israel all the peace the government thinks they’ll ever get. The Palestinian “government” is split between Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which favors taking the fight to Israel, and Fatah in the West Bank, which is indirectly on the Israeli payroll. The wall also eliminated the role of Palestinian labor in the Israeli economy, reducing the Palestinian territories to open-air prisons completely dependent upon Israeli power infrastructure and international handouts for operation. About the only institution keeping the “two state solution” alive is the United Nations, and even UN efforts are little more than going through the motions.