Israel Cements Right-Wing Agenda in a Furious Week of Lawmaking

JERUSALEM — Wrapping up its business before a long summer recess, the right-wing, religious coalition that rules Israel’s parliament moved aggressively this week to push through its polarizing agenda, piling up points at the expense of its already weakened foes.

On Monday, it empowered the education minister to bar some groups that criticize the Israeli occupation of the West Bank from speaking in public schools. On Tuesday, it accelerated what critics call the creeping annexation of the West Bank by cutting off Palestinians’ access to the Supreme Court in land disputes. On Wednesday, it blocked single men and gay couples from having children through surrogacy.

The capstone, though, came Thursday, with passage of a law granting the Jewish people an exclusive right to national self-determination.

“Is there a unifying principle to this madness?” asked Donniel Hartman, a rabbi who is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, which promotes Jewish pluralism and democracy.

But to right-leaning Israeli Jews, the measures were part of a long-overdue restoration of the proper balance between Israel’s dual identities as a Jewish and a democratic state. Many supporters of the governing coalition see that balance as having been tilted dangerously askew after a quarter-century of legislating from the bench by a liberal Supreme Court.

“There are people who it’s in their interest to make it sound extreme, but they’re overexaggerating,” said Sharren Haskel, 34, a member of Likud, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party. “We are a right-wing government, we’re proud of it, and we’re bringing Israel to a better place.”

Critics in the opposition, and even some on the right, say the frenzy of lawmaking reeked of pre-election-season posturing by a coalition that has cemented its hold on power, and whose members were trying to outbid one another for the support of their most hard-core primary-campaign voters.

Israelis across the political spectrum cited support from the Trump administration as providing Netanyahu’s government with protective cover. They also pointed out that the wave of nationalism and populism sweeping across Europe and the United States made their own country look like just another face in the crowd.

Still, the rightward legislative lurch was extraordinary for Israel.

Yediot Ahronot, one of the country’s most widely read newspapers, on Friday summed up the week’s events with a drawing of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, showing a giant black flag flying overhead. “Israel 2018: Coalition celebrating, equality being trampled,” a headline read.

Nor were the divisive moves confined to the legislative chamber.

On Monday, the chairman of Brandeis University, Meyer Koplow, was interrogated by airport security on his way back to New York because, after attending a bridge-building session organized by the educational organization Encounter on the West Bank, he had thrown a brochure articulating the Palestinian point of view into his checked luggage.

He later received an apology from the government. But in an online post, Michael Koplow, Koplow’s son and an executive at the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal think tank, publicized his father’s run-in over what he said was “the most rudimentary evidence of basic engagement with the Palestinians,” calling the interrogation “yet another example in a seemingly never-ending string of the massive problem that Israel is having with American Jews.

“Israeli Jewish values and American Jewish values increasingly diverge,” Koplow wrote in the post, “and for many American Jews, the values of openness, empathy, and non-discrimination are ones that are harder and harder to find in Israel.”

Then, on Thursday, a Conservative rabbi in Haifa was awakened at his home and arrested by the police. He was charged with officiating at a wedding between a Jewish man and woman. The ultra-Orthodox rabbinate has a legal monopoly on performing such rites. But the arrest of the Haifa rabbi is believed to be the first time the police moved to enforce the law.

“Iran is already here!!!” the arrested rabbi, Dubi Hayun, wrote on Facebook from the police station — not the first time an Israeli Jew has complained that something resembling Shariah law was taking root.

Sallai Meridor, who was Israel’s ambassador to the United States a decade ago, explained the week’s developments as a precursor to elections in November 2019.

“They may feel that this is their last chance to pass laws” before the campaign season begins in the fall, Meridor said, “and they’re focusing on competing for right-wing votes, rather than on long-term, strategic issues or what the world may think.”

He also suggested that elections could be called sooner, with Netanyahu expected to be indicted in a tangle of corruption investigations.

Hartman, the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, said, “Israel is suffering from a new phenomenon, and that’s political stability.”

Indeed, even if Netanyahu were to leave office, recent polls show, the coalition, led by his Likud party, could survive with scarcely a hiccup.

“The opposition is irrelevant,” Hartman said. “And the stability of Israeli political life is enabling some of the darker forces to put forth bills and ideas that would never have been passed before.” To members of the coalition, there is nothing dark about their legislative efforts. “We have a pure-right agenda; we believe in liberty, and patriotism, and you need to have it, in a country like Israel where you’re surrounded by enemies,” Haskel, the Likud lawmaker, said.

Those enemies are not merely political. In the Gaza Strip on Friday, the Israel Defense Forces responded to the killing of a soldier by Palestinian militants with waves of airstrikes on bases and weapons caches maintained by Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip.

Yet others said Israel’s government was showing a dangerous degree of hubris — and not only with its legislative moves this week.

Bradley Burston, a left-wing columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, said in an interview that some in the government appeared to believe that it might not be necessary ever to reach a solution to the Palestinian conflict.

“Till now, leftists believed the occupation was unsustainable,” Burston said. “But on the right, the more friends they have abroad who are themselves authoritarians, accepting of illiberal rule, the easier it is to accept that there’s this bizarre, quasi-colonial situation on the West Bank. And maybe you can just keep it going long enough that it becomes permanent.”

The government may have overstepped this week in the vote against surrogacy rights for single men and gay couples.

Support for gay rights increasingly cuts across social, political and even religious lines in Israel, and calls for a nationwide protest strike Sunday swept the country within days. Scores of companies, the city of Tel Aviv and other major institutions, including the national labor federation and the emergency medical service, allowed their workers to take part.

Officials warned that the work stoppage could even delay flights in and out of Ben Gurion Airport.

With little other recourse than taking to the streets, critics on the left and in the Arab minority say the policies and hostility they see emanating from parliament are growing difficult to bear.

Ahmad Tibi, a veteran Israeli Arab lawmaker, said he and his liberal Jewish friends increasingly felt “strangled” by what he called a “fascist atmosphere.” He noted acerbically that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who was asked on Friday about the Israeli nation-state law, had stressed the need to protect the rights of minorities.

“Merkel is ready to sacrifice her coalition by defending migrants,” Tibi said, “and Netanyahu is ready to sacrifice his coalition to push this Jewish supremacy and downgrade the Arabic language. She is defending immigrants, and he is attacking the indigenous.”

Tibi, who recalled almost wistfully a kindler, gentler form of oppression decades ago — “They confiscated our land, but they talked sweetly,” he said — indicated that Netanyahu had nothing to fear from the United States, or from anyone else.

“Why are they passing these laws?” he said. “Because they can.”