Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “isolated and desperate” to pass the judicial reform, former prime minister Ehud Barak charged in an interview with CBS on Wednesday.
Barak said this was a result of Netanyahu’s “blatantly illegitimate” government which he called an unholy alliance “to save himself from three criminal court cases.”
“To do this, he joined hands with extreme parties, one of which is a messianic, supremacist, and racist party,” said Barak, referring to National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist party who joined together in the last election.
He went on to compare the appointments of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to appointing members of the white supremacist Proud Boys in the US to secretaries of state for the treasury and security.
Ehud Barak: Israel's government can achieve nothing of value
“I don’t think this government can achieve anything of value,” he added, going on to accuse the government of destroying Israel’s economy, security, relations with the US, and the cohesion of the Israeli system.
Barak said that despite Netanyahu’s popularity in the election, he “doesn’t have a majority on this issue because he never talked about it in his election campaign.”
Barak also echoed past statements he made where he said the judicial reform risked turning Israel into a de facto dictatorship.
“We will not turn into a de facto dictatorship, whether it’s the Polish version, the Hungarian version, or the Turkish version,” he said. “We, the people, are defending our democracy from an attempt to destroy it from within.”
Meanwhile, in a meeting with hi-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Monday, Netanyahu claimed that he thought the law to limit the reasonableness clause was not good in that it sought to take away the imbalance in favor of the High Court of Justice and put it somewhere else instead of restoring balance in general.
Prior to his departure for the US, Netanyahu had given his okay for a compromise outline that included a less extreme law. Many accused him of pushing for the outline in order to gain a meeting with US President Joe Biden while he was in the US, but others, like National Unity leader Benny Gantz, said the motive didn’t matter if the outline was good for Israel.
Barak has spoken out against negotiations. On one occasion, he compared President Isaac Herzog, who was leading the talks, to former UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain who negotiated with Adolf Hitler before World War II. Instead, Barak said that protests would stop the reform; but he was sure that Israel was not in danger of a civil war.
“There might be violence,” he clarified. “But it always comes from the Right. We will win through the most non-violent protest in Israel.”
Over the past few months, anti-reform protests have been plagued with violence multiple times from all sides. This includes attempts by pro-reform people trying to run over protesters but also clashes between protesters and police.