3/18/20
JERUSALEM — As he has every night since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Israeli citizens on Wednesday evening. "Israel has been ahead of the curve from the start of it,” he said in a televised statement, noting that the country hasn’t recorded any deaths from the pandemic. But Netanyahu may be ahead of the curve in another way: In only four days, he has shut down Israeli courts, ordered the internal security services to secretly track citizens using their cellphone data and incapacitated the nation’s parliament. Legal experts say the measures — ostensibly taken to protect public health — is a power grab without precedent in Israeli history, including wartime, and may serve as an example to other leaders as the crisis unfolds. One beneficiary of the shutdown of the judiciary, which was announced at 1:30 a.m. Sunday, was Netanyahu himself, whose trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust was scheduled to open on Tuesday, and as a result of the measure was postponed until late May. The decree instructing the Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency, to covertly access the phones of people diagnosed with the coronavirus, or those suspected of possible infection, was not made public. It had not even been seen by the ministers who voted for it before dawn on Tuesday, in a Cabinet meeting held by teleconference. The measure went into immediate effect, and would normally be reviewed after two weeks. On Wednesday evening, 400 Israelis received text messages saying, “Hello, you were in close proximity to someone with corona.”
Netanyahu has served as a caretaker prime minister since December 2018, through three stalemated elections. The first two, in April and September 2019, left him and his top opponent, the centrist former army chief Benny Gantz, without sufficient parliamentary support to establish a government. But following the third round, early this month, Gantz assembled a narrow majority of parliamentary supporters, and, in the worse political reversal Netanyahu has suffered in a decades-long long political career, President Reuven Rivlin on Monday tasked Gantz with forming Israel’s next government. On Wednesday, for the first time in the nation’s history, the will of a majority of the parliamentarians was stymied when Speaker Yuli Edelstein refused to convene the house, on the grounds that health guidelines prevented such an assembly. In a phone call to Edelstein, Rivlin warned him that keeping the Knesset adjourned threatened “to harm our democratic system.” “Especially when we are on an emergency footing, the Knesset plays a crucial role,” Rivlin told the speaker, and keeping it paralyzed “harms the ability of the State of Israel to function well and responsibly in an emergency.” Elyakim Rubinstein, a former Supreme Court justice, said in an interview that the confluence of events presented a “clear danger to Israeli democracy.” “These are not good days,” he said, “both because of the coronavirus and the almost inconceivable constitutional crisis.” “Not accepting the rules of the democratic game is a very negative development,” said Mordechai Kremnitzer, a Hebrew University professor of constitutional law and vice president of the Israel Democracy Institute. “It is an attempt to stay in power as long as possible, to prevent Gantz from forming a government and an exploitation of the health crisis to advance the project of a national unity government established under conditions beneficial to Netanyahu.”
