Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's trial can be seen as a major victory for the old elites in Israel, but also as an epic fail.
Let's start with the failure: Upon entering the courthouse Netanyahu said that democracy began in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. For Netanyahu, as well as those who consider the French Revolution to be the birth of democracy, what those events heralded was the participation of the masses in politics.
This is the biggest moral and practical challenge the noble classes and the elites have to face: How to let the people partake in the political game, how to allow equality and a fair division of the resources and how to give up feudal privileges.
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The Israeli elites have failed to meet this complicated challenge and have been unwilling to give up their special status.
When it turned out, after the Right won in the watershed election of 1977, that democracy and equality threaten the elites' hegemony, they launched what would become a lengthy process to chip away at the masses' rights to take part in democracy. They did that through the weakening of the political system. This was their success.
This was done through legal violence that has been directed at figures representing the Israeli religious and political Right, but by extension also toward the overall political system.
The elites have managed to essentially paralyze the political system, and by doing so, gave it the power to limit democracy and turned the judiciary into a holy institution, as the new bastion of state power for the old elites.
But unlike the stereotypical narrative that the elites are trying to set, support for Netanyahu is not support for corruption and not even a form of retribution of "primitive" oriental Jews against the Ashkenazi founders of the state.
It is a responsible and patriotic position that respects the institution of the prime minister and its occupant for so many years, who has become the most representative Israeli and Jewish figure in the 21st century.
This attempt to suppress the emotional attachment toward the leader is part and parcel of the liberal elites' efforts to suppress the national sentiment and almost delegitimize the term Jewish, almost to the point that it is not politically correct to use that term to define one's ideology.
But casting the judiciary as an alternative to the national and classical ethos and the patriotic symbols, you cannot escape the thought that Netanyahu's trial is a post-national and post-Zionist event.
