What four years of far-right rule has done to Israel

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>> August 18, 2026
>> [image: Amos Brison]
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>> Amos Brison
>> Editor
>>
>> What four years of far-right rule has done to Israel
>>
>> What is the value of discussing threats to democratic institutions in a
>> country that isn’t a democracy in the first place?
>>
>> I kept coming back to this question while preparing for my discussion
>> with Noa Sattath, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in
>> Israel (ACRI) on The +972 Podcast. For the past four years, Benjamin
>> Netanyahu and his far-right allies have waged an unprecedented assault on
>> Israel’s courts, the attorney general, the media, and other institutions
>> commonly described as the “gatekeepers” of Israeli democracy. And yet these
>> same institutions have, for decades, played a direct role in maintaining
>> Israeli apartheid and occupation.
>>
>> Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara became the face of institutional
>> opposition to Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the judiciary, while also
>> advising the government’s security cabinet on international law amid the
>> military’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. The Supreme Court, meanwhile,
>> rejected a petition by the ACRI and other human rights groups challenging
>> Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza. And nearly all of the
>> mainstream Israeli media embraced and fueled the spirit of revenge that has
>> gripped much of the Israeli public since October 7, while keeping
>> Palestinian suffering off television and phone screens.
>>
>> As I was interviewing Sattath, I discovered that she shared much of this
>> uneasiness. “We think it’s very hard to call a place where 5 million people
>> don’t have a vote a democracy,” she told me.
>> [image: What is the value of discussing threats to democratic
>> institutions in a country that isn’t a democracy in the first place?]
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>>
>> Her position is not to pretend that these institutions are something they
>> are not, but neither is it to abandon them. Even though the Supreme Court
>> has repeatedly failed Palestinians, it remains an avenue through which
>> rights organizations can occasionally force the state to change its
>> policies and materially improve people’s lives. ACRI’s approach, as she put
>> it, is to “protect the institutions that we have and then to expand them,”
>> while remaining clear-eyed about how deeply flawed they are.
>>
>> Over the past few years, ACRI litigation helped shut down the notorious
>> military detention center at Sde Teiman, where Palestinians from Gaza had
>> been held amid reports of horrific abuse. It fought the Education Ministry
>> until the Parents Circle–Families Forum, which brings together bereaved
>> Israelis and Palestinians, was allowed back into Israeli schools. And its
>> work helped restore transportation for children with disabilities in East
>> Jerusalem, affecting some 15,000 families.
>>
>> None of these victories redeem the institutions through which they were
>> achieved. They certainly do not transform Israel into a democracy — and
>> there is a very real danger that such victories function as a fig leaf for
>> a regime of apartheid and Jewish supremacy. But they do make the lives of
>> actual people less unbearable.
>>
>> By the end of our conversation, I realized that the question is not
>> whether Israel’s democratic institutions deserve to be defended. It is
>> whether the limited restraints they place on state power, and the space
>> they preserve for resistance to it, are worth fighting for. If abandoning
>> them means both greater violence against the most vulnerable and fewer
>> tools with which to oppose it, Sattath’s perspective becomes much harder to
>> dismiss.
>>
>> I hope you enjoy my conversation with Noa Sattath, and subscribe to The
>> +972 Podcast wherever you listen.
>> [image: What four years of far-right rule has done to Israel]
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