Is Israel marching toward authoritarian rule? A look at the streets, the media, and the social networks reveals a turbulent society that is highly critical of the government.
On the surface, we are as far from autocracy as East is from West. But this is precisely the point: Democracies do not collapse in a single day. They weaken, retreat, and gradually shed more and more protections for individual rights, sometimes with fanfare but often through a gradual, unseen process.
Today’s Israel is a vibrant democracy. However, if you aggregate all the government’s actions, it is clear that the democratic infrastructure is unraveling.
We are witnessing a series of actions that could lay the ground for a centralized, unchecked government that will take us down the slippery slope. One where there will be nothing to stop the slide into an authoritarian regime.
Let’s connect the dots. In the last two years, with a pause for an intense war for our existence, the government has been attacking all checks on state institutions. The attorney-general, the Supreme Court and the judicial system, the head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) are all in the crosshairs.
This is not just another clash between the branches of government but a strategy with a single purpose: to discredit, weaken, and dismantle any opposition to government policy.
The attorney-general “hinders” the prime minister from implementing policies as he wishes, not because she is political, but because she enforces the law and the rulings of the High Court of Justice. Even if every decision she makes is not immune from criticism, replacing her with a confidant or consigliere would transform the role from gatekeeper to a cog in the machine.
The same pattern is repeated in the attempt to oust the Shin Bet chief, which is made to seem technocratic but is actually timed closely with the launch of a new investigation of the prime minister’s associates.
The Supreme Court of Israel under attack
Israel’s Supreme Court is under attack with unprecedented intensity – the justice minister is boycotting its chief justice amid recent ministerial declarations that the government will not comply with its rulings.
At the same time, the judiciary is rapidly becoming politicized. The initiative to change the method of appointing judges is expected to make the process much more political. The result will not only be a proliferation of “conservative” judges but a system where every judge aspiring for elevation will cater to the whims of the politicians appointing them.
This is a fundamental change: from a court designed to check and balance to a system that toes the government’s line. Politicization will become a scourge affecting not just the Supreme Court but the entire judicial system.
And it is not just the judiciary and public security that are under threat. A series of laws concerning police oversight, restrictions on press freedom, limitations on civil society organizations, and further erosion of checks on absolute governmental power are in the works.
Each of these may be justifiable on its own but taken together, they form a clear and repugnant pattern: reducing the operational scope of independent institutions and intrusive scrutiny of anyone who might check the government’s power.
The danger is not that the prime minister wishes to become a dictator; it is that the infrastructure to make this possible is already being built. It is not a matter of intention but of capability. As history and political psychology have taught us, when power is available, the temptation to wield it arises.
Israel is still far from there. But it is moving toward it with alarming speed. Red lines have been blurred, the political culture has coarsened, and principles once taken for granted, like judicial independence or the protection of oversight institutions, have become subject to debate.
This is a dangerous erosion of law but also spirit. When gatekeepers weaken, when politics subsumes professionalism, and when checks and balances are removed, the danger of changing Israel’s character increases. Israel is still a vibrant democracy, but will it remain so?
The writer is the director-general of the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) and a senior law lecturer at the Peres Academic Center.