The biggest question may now be whether the Israeli prime minister and his allies can successfully gamble that the fuss in Washington will die down – or whether Biden is ready to try and save Israel from itself 🖊️ Donald Macintyre
A prime minister on trial on three serious corruption charges is hospitalised with what emerges as a cardiac problem. A pacemaker is installed just in time for him to arrive at the country’s parliament – the Knesset – to push through a bitterly divisive law seeking to neuter the powers of the supreme court, while 600,000 of his fellow citizens But there’s more to this high octane drama than that.
Nor need Nolan worry that the story might seem a bit distant for American audiences. For the US President is increasingly a central player in the events unfolding 6,000 miles away. Indeed Joe Biden had twice personally issued public warnings to Benjamin Netanyahu not to press ahead, at least without a national consensus, with the “judicial overhaul” .
Despite the State Department’s understated description of it as “unfortunate”, it is well understood in Washington that Monday’s Knesset vote – which at a stroke torpedoes what in the UK would be known as judicial review – is a notable snub to by far and away Israel’s closest and most valuable ally. So why did Biden get involved at all? For not only is he a viscerally pro-Israel politician, much more so than Barack Obama for example, but he has enjoyed a long and quite intimate relationship with Netanyahu himself. Moreover, with so much else on his hands – including the Ukraine war – he has determinedly sought to avoid being embroiled in this corner of the Middle East in the way that almost all of his predecessors were.
As a politician steeped in the US founding fathers’ doctrine of checks and balances, Biden of course fully understands what is happening in Jerusalem. He knows for example that in the absence of the vigorous bicameral Congressional system in the US, Israel’s supreme court is the only real check on the abuse of power by an Israeli coalition. And that a further bill is already oven-ready, which would give the government sweeping powers over the appointment of judges.
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