Wrong People, Right Battle

The AI-generated video Rothman published shows senior judicial system figures, from Supreme Court President Esther Hayut to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, being dragged away from a burning protest by police and security forces.

Beyond being provocative in a way that should have made it obvious it would rally the left-wing camp and the "state right" around it, beyond being populist and reeking desperately of election season, the video is simply a lie.

After all, if they could, why didn't they? How will the next term be different? What if the problem isn't the term, or the media, but the people advancing the reform who refuse to admit it?

The problem is different. The war over judicial reform wasn't an ideological war — it was a war over identity, belonging, and population groups fighting for dominance. And Rothman, Smotrich and Levin are the wrong people for this battle.

To strip away the lies covering the reform struggle requires doing something that won't be done in Israeli discourse: releasing the ethnic demon from the bottle where it's been sealed and hidden all these years. Because in the State of Israel you can talk about everything, discrimination against women, Haredim, Ethiopians, kippah-wearers, Arabs, leftists, LGBTQ people, even border infiltrators --- but you can't talk about Mizrahim.

So today we'll open that can and do it, and say it plainly: The struggle over judicial reform was, in its entirety, from the first letter of the first speech at Kaplan to the last pilot who refused to serve his country until 6:28 on October 7th, all of it was different layers of one thing: a violent elite revolt, or in less academic terms, an intifada by the Ashkenazi ruling class.

The struggle was sociological, class-based, ethnic, communal and cultural, not ideological. That's why it could never be resolved through negotiation, compromise, dialogue or any other framework, and never will be in the future. In identity wars, the ruling and declining minority has only two options: accept the verdict of the popular majority or subjugate it.

And like many royal classes throughout history chose, Israel's royal class also decided to break the vessels. Just as the King of France sent letters to other kings during the French Revolution calling on them to help him conquer his own country and defeat his own people, so too did ours. The people who built their status, wealth and identity on their control of Israel's security establishment dismantled it from within.

All this happened and could happen because the wrong people led the battle on the right-wing side. The only people who can truly advance judicial reform and sweep the nation behind them are populist Mizrahi right-wingers.

Imagine a scenario where instead of Yariv Levin standing on that podium, Amir Ohana stood there. Imagine the opponents' arguments about rights and status dissolving against a Mizrahi, right-wing, openly gay man who is a father married to a man.

Imagine how a Mizrahi Constitution Committee chairman could have promoted Mizrahi candidates like Bakshi and Biton with his head held high. Imagine how he could have attacked from his ethnic position and origins the establishment Supreme Court opposition to placing Mizrahim, who represent the majority of the Jewish population, on the judicial bench.

Beyond that, peripheral populism plants its roots deep in nationalism and Jewish connection, and also a degree of opposition to the Ashkenazi establishment, which has great value in the current struggle over the judicial system. If we look at Justice Solberg, described for years as a right-wing judge, perhaps the most right-wing ever on the bench, we see that sociology is stronger than even Religious Zionism rabbis.

From the outside, Deputy Chief Justice Solberg's rulings scream of an attempt to ingratiate himself with his colleagues around him. The right-wing ideologue from Judea and Samaria signed off on the worst ills of the Supreme Court.

Solberg could have withheld his signature from the reasonableness ruling, could have turned tables during judicial reform, could have rebelled against President Hayut, could have done so much. But instead he stays silent, swallows, lowers his head and remains silent until the day he sits on the president's seat himself.

Solberg is apparently motivated by narrow sectoral considerations. A Supreme Court president who wears a kippah, a settler from Religious Zionism, would indeed bring much prestige to the sector, but he's not weighing the national price in exchange for the sectoral victory.

But beyond that, there's another problem. Religious Zionism party, despite its ideological seriousness, painted itself as a populist party that tends more to stir up storms and rage than march according to an orderly and realistic plan.

At least if it were a sharp party, clean of gimmicks and disciplined, one could say it has ideological weight that would enable advancing the reform. But it seems Religious Zionism decided to prove that both intellectually and sociologically, they and others with them from the current anti-judicialization generation simply aren't the right ones for the battle.