The Long Brief: Furious, and Half Right

Some of your fury at Israel's governing coalition is earned. Some was handed to you by people who want Israel gone. Here's how to tell which is which.

Shabbat shalom, friends.

I want to talk to the friend across the table who has done the reading. Not the one who repeats whatever the last hostile headline told him — thankfully, you are not that person.

You have watched the UN turn an investigative mandate into a standing accusation.

You have watched “genocide” get pinned on the one army in the region that calls the people it is fighting and tells them which buildings to leave.

You have stood up in rooms where standing up for Israel cost you something, and you did it anyway, because you love the place and you can read.

And somewhere in the last two or three years you arrived, furiously and sincerely, at a verdict: that this government is dismantling Israeli democracy, that what is happening to the courts is an executive coup, that the men who run the country now are a danger to it, and that they have to be removed before they finish the job.

I am not writing to talk you out of the fury. I wouldn’t bother. I’m more than just a little peeved myself.

What I want to do instead is hand you a ledger.

The anger is not really the problem. The problem is that two very different things have been welded together inside that verdict — and it’s not always particularly obvious what’s going on.

Some of what you are furious about, you earned the hard way, by paying attention to a country that has genuinely failed its own people on more than one front. And some of what you are furious about was machined for you, in advance, by people who want Israel gone and needed you to carry their words into rooms they could never reach.

The earned grievance and the borrowed verdict arrived together, and the borrowed verdict now wears the earned grievance like a uniform.

So when you say “coup,” you think you are describing the thing you saw with your own eyes. You are not. You are describing the thing you saw, plus a word that was waiting in your pocket before you ever looked.

This piece is the work of telling those two apart. You can keep every ounce of the fury. You can want Netanyahu gone, want this coalition voted out, want the whole cast retired by an electorate that has had enough.

None of that is what I am here to touch.

I am here for the words, because the words were never yours, and they are doing damage you did not sign up for.

Start With What Democracy Is

Before the coup, the thing it is a coup against.

A democracy is the machine that lets a coalition govern on the mandate it won and lets the voters fire it at the next election. That is the whole of it.

It is not a guarantee that you will like the government, or respect it, or be able to look at the people running it without your jaw tightening.

A government you find repellent, governing badly, on a mandate you wish it did not have, is a democracy doing exactly what a democracy does.

Disagreeing with a government, even despising one, is ordinary politics, and a healthy republic absorbs a great deal of it.

That distinction is the one the word “coup” is built to collapse, so hold onto it.

Now the harder part, because I want to give the coup charge its strongest form and not a strawman. The strong version is real: elected governments can in fact strangle a democracy from the inside. It has happened. A leader wins a legitimate majority, then uses it to rewire the rules so that he can never lose again, and by the time anyone calls it what it is, the ballot box has quietly stopped working. That is a real category, and someone who waves it away with “they were elected, so it cannot be a coup” is not being serious.

Being elected is not a defense, so the honest test has to look past who holds office.

The signature of a self-coup is the closing of the exits.

A self-coup captures the independent count and prosecutes the opposition into silence.

The next election gets postponed, or stage-managed, or never held at all. And certainly you can see that elsewhere in the region.

The marks of a government killing a democracy are always the same: it makes itself impossible to remove.

Hold this coalition up against that test and watch what happens.

The judicial reform that is supposed to be the coup ran through the Knesset as ordinary legislation, in public, over months. It was challenged in court, in the very court it aimed to rebalance, and in January 2024 that court struck down its central piece and the government complied. And the government that is supposedly seizing permanent power is, as I write this, dissolving itself and sending the whole question to the voters in an election it called.

Every exit a self-coup has to weld shut is standing wide open.

The legislation was contestable, and it was contested.

The court was reachable, and it ruled against the central piece.

Now the government itself is dissolving and handing the whole question to the voters.

That last point is worth sitting with, because it is the one the coup frame cannot survive. This coalition is going to the voters because a rabbi in his mid-nineties instructed his handful of lawmakers to walk, and the arithmetic that had kept the government alive evaporated in an afternoon.

A government that a single faction can collapse with a phone call, and that answers by handing the whole question to the voters, is the opposite of a junta.

Israel does not even make this hard.

Unlike Germany, which requires the Bundestag to line up a replacement chancellor before it can remove the sitting one, the Knesset can dissolve itself and go to elections without naming who comes next.

The sharpest version of the charge does not claim the exits are shut today. It claims the reform was built to shut them later, and that politics, not safe design, is all that stopped it.

Take that seriously, because it is an honest form of fear. The line it runs into is reversibility. Every government ever elected wants fewer constraints on itself. A self-coup is the point where the constraint-removal passes beyond what ordinary politics can undo.

This reform never reached that point. The override clause never passed. The selection change has not taken effect, and it sits right now in front of the very court it concerns.

And when the whole project was put to the test, ordinary politics unwound it in a relatively mundane expression of process. A reform that a coalition wobble can still reverse leaves the exit contested, and a contested exit is an open one.

There is a quieter claim folded inside the charge, and it is worth pulling out, because you have probably nodded along to it. It runs like this: that a clutch of small, unworthy parties has hijacked the state, that a minority is masquerading as the national will, that the tail is wagging a country that never voted for any of this.

I understand the feeling. But the leverage of small parties is Israeli democracy working exactly as it was built to work.

A system of pure proportional representation with a low threshold seats a dozen parties and forces them to bargain, and the bargaining hands outsized leverage to whoever is willing to walk away.

That is true of the haredi parties this year. It was true of the secular-Russian party that has jailing draft-dodgers in its platform. It is true of the Arab party that held the balance in a recent government. Small parties extracting concessions above their seat count is the machine running as it was built to run. You can hate the concessions. The mechanism that sets them is the same mechanism that will let you vote the price-setters out.

So the coup charge does not fail on a technicality, and it does not fail because I have defined coups to exclude anything Israel might do.

It fails on the facts. The exits are open. They are, at this moment, in use.