Outside the glass and Jerusalem stone of the Knesset, the winter air carries the familiar residue of civic exhaustion. For years, the plaza leading to Israel’s parliament has served as a staging ground for a society at war with its own institutional soul, crowded by demonstrators hoisting blue-and-white flags to defend an embattled Supreme Court, and counter-protesters demanding the unfettered supremacy of the legislative majority. Inside the chamber, the ceremonial fanfare of swearing in a new parliament offered a veneer of stability, but beneath the procedural rituals lies a political order pushed to the brink of constitutional collapse.
The immediate drama turns on a historic opportunity: Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief of staff and chief rival to Benjamin Netanyahu, has been granted the first mandate to assemble a governing coalition. For Netanyahu, whose career has been defined by an uncanny ability to survive political mortality, the prospect of being ousted from the prime minister’s residence is not merely an electoral setback. It is an existential peril inextricably bound to his ongoing corruption trials in the Jerusalem District Court. For half a decade, the machinery of state has been contorted to shield a single leader from legal accountability, testing whether the rule of law applies equally to the premier or bends to the demands of political survival.
To understand the stakes of this moment, one must look beyond the parliamentary arithmetic and examine the wounded landscape of Israeli civic life. The past several years witnessed an unprecedented assault on the judiciary, spearheaded by Netanyahu’s hard-right allies who sought to strip the courts of their power of judicial review. That campaign was never just a technical debate about checks and balances; it was an effort to dismantle the only institutional mechanism protecting civil liberties in a nation without a formal constitution or a bicameral legislature. The civic movement that rose up against those measures brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, forging an urgent, if fragile, consensus that an independent court is the bedrock of democratic life.
Yet, as Eisenkot begins the grueling work of coaxing disparate factions into a working majority, the definition of justice remains painfully contested. For the center-left and the civic movements that mobilized against autocracy, the priority is restoring the integrity of the attorney general’s office, depoliticizing the police, and rebuilding institutional norms. But an honest appraisal of civil rights in Israel must acknowledge what the mainstream coalition talks so often push to the margins: the enduring inequities faced by Arab-Israeli citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population, and the moral crisis of an entrenched military occupation over millions of Palestinians who possess no vote in the parliament that dictates their lives.
Eisenkot himself embodies the paradoxes of Israeli leadership. A career soldier who led the military through fraught regional conflicts, he represents a tradition of security figures stepping into the political breach to restore order. In Israeli history, former generals have often been seen as steadying hands capable of bridging tribal divisions, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak. Yet governance filtered through the lens of national security rarely expands the frontiers of civil liberties. A change in leadership may halt the immediate dismantling of the High Court, but it does not guarantee that the rights of vulnerable minorities, dissidents, or marginalized communities will suddenly be championed.
Moreover, the reactionary forces unleashed during Netanyahu’s tenure will not vanish if he is relegated to the opposition benches. The far-right factions that entered the corridors of power over the last parliament fundamentally altered the political climate, encouraging aggressive policing against political demonstrators, pursuing punitive measures against civil society organizations, and promoting a majoritarian doctrine that equates judicial restraint with treason. Reversing the damage inflicted upon the police force, which has grown increasingly politicized, will require far more than a fragile cabinet cobbled together on the premise of shared opposition to one man.
Democracy is rarely saved in a single afternoon of backroom negotiations, nor is it preserved merely by rotating the personnel in the prime minister’s office. The swearing-in of this new parliament marks a fork in the road for Israeli justice. If Eisenkot and his partners succeed, they may grant the nation’s battered institutions a vital reprieve from deliberate sabotage. But the true work of justice—rebuilding a social contract grounded in equality before the law, human dignity, and genuine accountability—will still be waiting long after the coalition papers are signed.