Magnificent News: Today's WorldView: Israel’s crisis exposes Washington’s delusion

Get unlimited access to The Post for $1 a week

Read online

By Ishaan Tharoor
with Sammy Westfall

Israel's crisis exposes Washington's delusion

Protesters are sprayed with a water cannon during a demonstration in Jerusalem against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition government's judicial overhaul on Monday. (Ammar Awad/Reuters)

Last week, U.S. lawmakers celebrated Israel in the form of President Isaac Herzog, a largely ceremonial figure who began his political career on the Israeli left. His address to Congress drew full-throated bipartisan cheers. Herzog hailed the "sacred" ties between Israel and the United States, anchored in shared "values" and "true friendship." In remarks later in the day, Vice President Harris invoked the words U.S. politicians have almost ritually intoned for years, insisting that the United States has an "unbreakable bond" with Israel and that its commitment to Israeli security is "ironclad."

Yet even as Herzog spoke in Washington, the streets of Israel's big cities teemed with anger and defiance over the controversial plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to overhaul the country's judicial system. Those protests, which have raged for months, intensified Monday, after Israeli lawmakers in Netanyahu's coalition used their razor-thin electoral mandate to pass the first plank of their reforms, stripping the Supreme Court of the power to strike down government action it considers "unreasonable."

The move, in the eyes of its supporters, returns greater authority to the country's elected legislature. But analysts and critics, including the Israeli opposition and various Western governments, see it as a major blow to one of the few real checks that exists in Israeli democracy and a grim step toward a form of majoritarian autocracy. "Israeli voters are certainly entitled to evolutionary change, but current ideas about judicial reform are revolutionary in their implications," observed Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "An unfettered legislature threatens any democracy as much as an unfettered executive does."

The moment is so profound — and fraught — for the Israeli nation that Alterman cast it as "third juncture" in the country's history, following the dramatic shift in borders after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the state of Israel's establishment in 1948. While Netanyahu's extremist allies eye more radical maneuvers, including the removal of the country's attorney general, labor unions are mulling launching another nationwide general strike. Thousands of military reservists have vowed not to report for duty with the passage of this legislation, absences which may have grave security implications for Israel's defense.

Washington, though, has struggled to reckon with what's in motion. On Monday, a handful of Democratic lawmakers ventured statements of concern. The White House issued a terse release that, without naming Netanyahu, described the vote as "unfortunate" and backed "the efforts of President Herzog and other Israeli leaders as they seek to build a broader consensus through political dialogue."

But little meaningful dialogue seems to be happening. Herzog, feted by U.S. lawmakers, seems more a helpless bystander in Israel's maelstrom. And President Biden's relatively timid rhetoric has been hammered by Republican opponents, who have yoked themselves to the mast of a far-right Israel government that makes little attempt to hide its aims to carry out de facto — perhaps even de jure — annexation of Palestinian lands. At a Christian Zionist forum outside Washington last week, Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley scoffed at Biden's decision to supposedly interfere in Israel's "internal debates."

"We need a leader who not only respects Israel, but also respects her people's right to govern themselves," Haley said, making no mention of the critical mass of protesters taking to the streets while going on to complain of the cold shoulder Biden offered Netanyahu by declining to invite the prime minister to the White House over the past seven months.

The Republicans last week focused on censuring pro-Palestinian remarks made by a Democratic congresswoman and forced through a symbolic resolution in the House that affirmed "the State of Israel is not a racist or apartheid state" — the latter term one that leading international human rights organizations, as well as Israel's own, assess as an accurate description of the reality on the ground. It also linked criticism of the Israeli state to xenophobia and antisemitism.

Washington's overheated discourse on Israel serves as a major constraint on any administration that may want to speak up for Palestinian human rights or against the Israeli state's democratic erosion.

"U.S. presidents don't like to fight with Israeli prime ministers. It's messy, distracting and potentially politically costly especially when the GOP has emerged as the 'Israel right or wrong' party," Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me in an email. And so Biden, he added, does "a good deal of important virtue signaling" on issues like the judicial overhaul and settlement expansion, but with "no serious costs or consequences imposed."

What the moment exposes is the gulf between the political theater around Israel in Washington and the deepening reality on the ground. While Republicans rail at any suggestion that Israeli state policies can be racist, Netanyahu and his allies often explicitly say that that's what they are pursuing. Consider how, in May, Justice Minister Yariv Levin argued for the necessity of curtailing the Supreme Court's powers specifically because controlling the judges would help preserve or further Jewish supremacy in certain contexts.

"Arabs buy apartments in Jewish communities in the Galilee and this causes Jews to leave these cities, because they are not ready to live with Arabs," Levin said. "We need to ensure that the Supreme Court has justices who understand this."

And while U.S. lawmakers constantly extol their shared democratic values with Israel, some of their counterparts have a rather specific vision of which values these are. In a radio interview on Monday, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, an extremist, was asked whether Israel could benefit from the mechanisms of checks and balances that exist in the U.S. Constitution — Israel, as my colleagues have discussed, does not have a formal constitution.

"I want to take the good things from the U.S.," Ben Gvir replied. "I think that the death penalty for terrorists is excellent. I think that distributing guns to people to defend themselves is excellent."

Figures like Ben Gvir and his close ally, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, are in the driver's seat in Israeli politics, cheered on implicitly by a large segment of the American political establishment. To many Israelis, this is a shame. "We are governed today by a bunch of militants, nationalists, chauvinists, [and] radicals," former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert told Rolling Stone. "Reckless, irresponsible, and totally inexperienced people."

He added that had U.S. administrations taken far tougher lines against Netanayhu's policies and agendas — and placed Israel's special relationship with the United States in the balance — it would have had positive effects. "Had such a thing been spelled out, I guess it may have had an enormous impact," Olmert said.

1,000 Words

(Heidi Levine for The Washington Post).

Our colleagues John Hudson and Anastacia Galouchka report from Odessa, Ukraine: If the largest cathedral in this besieged port city survived Joseph Stalin, it will survive Vladimir Putin, said Myroslav Vdodovych, the chief priest of Transfiguration Cathedral, less than a day after a barrage of Russian missiles ripped the church apart alongside 24 other architectural monuments across the city of Odessa.

Talking Points

• From Madrid, reporters Anthony Faiola and Beatriz Ríos analyze the results of Sunday's election in Spain: If election night here proved anything, it's that Spain — a nation with some of the most recent memories in Europe of extreme-right repression, from the Francisco Franco era that ended in 1975 — still has little interest in reembracing the radical right. Vox — the anti-LBGTQ+, anti-feminist, climate-denying far-right party — only marginally underperformed expectations in Sunday's race, winning a handful fewer seats than some analysts predicted. But when compared with its last national showing in November of 2019, the result stood as a stark defeat.

• Cambodia is set for its first transfer of power in almost four decades — to Gen. Hun Manet, the son of its autocratic prime minister. The Cambodian People's Party (CPP), led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, declared a landslide win in Sunday's election, which was deemed a sham by the West and many international observers. Hun Sen, 70, has indicated that he will soon give up the premiership to his eldest son, Hun Manet, who was trained at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. The United States will also have an interest in how Hun Manet navigates tensions between Beijing and Washington.

• This is the 29th consecutive week of protests in Israel. And there are more to come. Our colleagues Ruby Mellen, Olivier Laurent and Joe Snell put together a visual timeline of the mass movement that has brought together hundreds of thousands of people from across Israeli society. They've closed highways. They've shut down the country's largest airport. And they've vowed to keep demonstrating for as long as it takes for the government to abandon its plans.

Viewpoints

Does Sam Altman know what he's creating?

By Ross Andersen | The Atlantic ● Read more »

Our generation was told liberal economics would make us free. Look at us now. We were misled

By Nesrine Malik | The Guardian ● Read more »

Netanyahu still has time to step back from the brink. Will he?

By The Washington Post Editorial Board ● Read more »

China's global leap

A Singaporean man crosses the Trengganu street in the Chinatown area of Singapore. (Amrita Chandradas for The Washington Post)

SINGAPORE — As China accelerates efforts to build its global power, President Xi Jinping has laid out an extravagant vision for overseas ethnic-Chinese communities that he hopes will "give shape to a powerful joint force for advancing the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation."

Promoting these communities as a vehicle for China's geopolitical ambitions has become something of a mantra in Beijing, often wrapped in bland rhetoric like building a "shared future." But in seeking to incorporate citizens of other countries into its vision, critics say, Beijing is stoking divided loyalties, and their potentially destabilizing consequences, across Southeast Asia — home to more than 80 percent of the ethnic-Chinese people outside China and Taiwan, researchers say.

Concerns are most pronounced in Singapore, a multiracial city-state with a majority ethnic-Chinese population that is increasingly sympathetic to Beijing. A 2022 survey of 19 countries by the Pew Research Center found that Singapore was one of only three that saw China and Xi in favorable terms. In June, the Eurasia Group Foundation released a survey conducted in Singapore, South Korea and the Philippines that found Singapore was the only one that viewed China more favorably than it did the United States. Fewer than half of respondents in Singapore viewed the United States favorably, compared with 56 percent who viewed China favorably.

"If too many Chinese Singaporeans are foolish enough to subscribe to Xi's version of the 'China Dream,' the multiracial social cohesion that is the foundation of Singapore's success will be destroyed," said Bilahari Kausikan, a former permanent secretary of Singapore's Foreign Ministry. "Once destroyed, it cannot be put together again."

Singapore's government passed a law to prevent foreign interference in domestic politics that went into effect last year, and has warned its ethnic-Chinese population against "hostile foreign influence operations" and stressed a distinct Singapore-Chinese identity. But messaging by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on key issues such as the role of the United States in the region and China's internal politics is already entrenched in Singapore, including in a leading Chinese-language publication long backed by Singapore's government.

Beijing has been increasing its media presence in Southeast Asia. Thambi Magazine store in Holland Village, Singapore, sells domestic and international publications. (Amrita Chandradas for The Washington Post)

The flagship broadsheet, Lianhe Zaobao, illustrates the shifting attitudes toward Beijing. Its reporting, once a reflection of Singapore's careful neutrality between China and the United States, now routinely echoes some of Beijing's most strident falsehoods, including denying evidence of rights abuses in Xinjiang and alleging that protests in Hong Kong and in mainland China were instigated by "foreign forces," according to an examination of more than 700 Lianhe Zaobao articles through 2022 and early 2023 by The Washington Post and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Additionally, the paper has been running regular opinion columns since 2016 from at least two CCP officials without noting their party affiliation, referring to them simply as China affairs commentators. One of the columnists, Deng Qingbo, directs the online propaganda and comment division of Hunan province's cyberspace administration office, while the other, Ding Songquan, is part of the CCP's committee at Huzhou College in Zhejiang province and has held several positions in the Zhejiang education department. Another columnist, Hong Kong-based Xing Yunchao, writes sometimes identical columns in the China Daily and Lianhe Zaobao, blurring the line between Chinese state media and the privately held Singaporean newspaper.

As part of its carefully calibrated neutrality between the United States and China, Singapore maintains extensive military and economic ties with Washington alongside its close economic relationship with Beijing. The city-state buys weapons from the United States and trains its military on American bases, while U.S. naval ships frequently make port calls in Singapore. Meanwhile, Singapore and China this spring formally upgraded their bilateral relationship after a visit by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to China, bolstering a free-trade agreement, environmental collaboration and telecommunications exchanges. – Shibani Mahtani and Amrita Chandradas