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Netanyahu’s Judicial Reform
Israel’s History of Democracy & Politics
Mass protests in Israel against Mr. Netanyahu’s judiciary overhaul plan virtually brought the country to a standstill and threatened to split the military and drag it into the current political conflict. My guest for this episode, Dr. Gideon Rahat, explains that this is one of the direst crises in Israel’s history. This assessment was recently confirmed by Mr. Netanyahu’s speech, in which he talked about preventing a civil war!
In this episode, we look into the history of Israel’s constitution, its legislature, its systems of checks and balances, and its polarized and personalized politics. Dr. Rahat is the Gersten Family Chair in Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research fields are comparative politics and Israeli politics. His interests include political parties, electoral reform, the personalization of politics and candidate selection methods. He is a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, and an International Fellow at the Peltason Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine.
Dr. Rahat is the author of several books, including From Party Politics to Personalized Politics?: Party Change and Political Personalization in Democracies, which we discuss in this episode.
