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Israel’s 25th Knesset dissolved last month, setting the stage for a national election on Oct. 27. Over the course of its four-year term, Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies in government sought to weaken the judiciary, expanded political control over law enforcement and state institutions, cracked down on dissent by Jewish and particularly Palestinian citizens, and accelerated the annexation of the occupied West Bank — all while carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
Despite facing the largest and most sustained anti-government protest movement in Israel’s history — in addition to presiding over the most severe security failure in the state’s history — the coalition survived its full term. While those demonstrations helped block much of the government’s judicial overhaul, for Noa Sattath, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), they also exposed the limits of Israel’s democratic imagination: No movement has mobilized with the same force against the systematic abuse and dispossession of Palestinians.
In this episode of The +972 Podcast, Sattath unpacks what four years of far-right rule have changed in Israeli law, institutions, and political culture. She describes the “profound devaluation of human life” both exhibited and deepened by the genocide in Gaza, and traces how political appointments have eroded the already feeble restraints on power within the police, prison service, and Shin Bet. She also discusses the severe deterioration in conditions for Palestinian prisoners and Israel’s new discriminatory Death Penalty for Terrorists Law, which she describes as a testament to the far-right’s “culture of death.”
In her work leading ACRI, Sattath has confronted the complicity and limitations of institutions often invoked as safeguards of the country’s democracy, from the media to the Supreme Court. More fundamentally, she is constantly forced to ask what it means to speak of Israeli democracy at all when some 5 million Palestinians live under Israeli rule without the right to vote for the government that controls their lives.
But whatever government comes next, she argues, protecting existing democratic institutions and expanding the rights of those they have long failed to defend will be essential. However flawed, the courts, the attorney general, and the media are still necessary to ensure a free and fair election — which Sattath warns is already under threat in the run-up to the October vote — and to preserve the space for rebuilding human rights advocacy inside Israel after years of intensifying repression.
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