The dismal figures published by the Israel Democracy Institute about the public's waning trust in the justice system weren't received by the Left, heaven forbid, as a sign of revulsion over the increasing intervention and politicization of the courts, rather as the outcome of an attack. "Pour out your wrath on the courts," tweeted Shelly Yachimovich, "incite against the attorney general, invent evil false conspiracies about the State Attorney, and then call on the justice system to self-reflect."
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Yachimovich isn't alone in employing such rhetoric to deflect criticism from the Supreme Court. But when it comes from her, as a leader and spirited spokesperson of social-democracy in Israel, we have to scratch our heads. I'm skipping over the de-humanization of entire sectors of the population – the majority of the public, essentially – which are perceived, implicitly, as passive receptors of "incitement" and "false conspiracies," and as people whose criticism toward centers of power wasn't formulated as a sober evaluation of reality but as a product of brainwashing.
This certainly isn't something new, but in the recent elections, as we repeatedly cast our ballots to fight against disparaging large swathes of the population as "sheep," the Left has moved on to its next rhetorical station: aggressive de-legitimization of any form of critical discourse from the Right. Any criticism from the Right toward the state's bodies and mechanisms are instantly and efficiently flagged as incitement against them. Any right-wing focus on socio-economic exclusion and wealth gaps is repudiated as incendiary and divisive. Any right-wing mention of systematic racism is denounced as fomenting strife amongst brothers and exacerbating existing rifts.
When the ties between private capital, power and justice are successfully criticized and highlighted, for example, against tycoons and the wealthy, then there is no loftier cause than mapping out the array of hidden interests. But when the people stand up and ask how mechanisms are working in the dark to protect the interests of non-transparent and non-representative power centers, this is derided as the dissemination of deep-state conspiracy theories.
As long as the Sephardic discourse can be channeled to cultivate a post-Zionist narrative about Orientalism and Jewish Colonialism and as long as it incorporates calls to dismantle the Jewish state or for Sephardic-Palestinian unity – the newspapers joyfully run op-eds and stories highlighting the country's history of Ashkenazi-establishment discrimination, condescension and abuse. But when critical-Sephardic discourse happens to lead to the opposite conclusion, that perhaps the Right is offering the Sephardim a better cultural-social-economic alternative – the speaker is accused of fanning tensions and grievances for political purposes.
This modus operandi can be found in Marxist literature: the bourgeoisie class, the enemy of the revolution, is accused of mentally oppressing the revolutionary consciousness by marking critical intellectuals as a threat to solidarity and social order. This is the essence of reactionary discourse.
It is through this prism that we should understand Yachimovich's bizarre tweet, or the quasi-lynching of Avishay Ben Haim and Gadi Taub – two courageous intellectuals exposing power balances and manipulations perpetrated by the centers of power, just as one would expect of intellectuals – who are being depicted as anti-intellectuals threatening our intellectual integrity. This isn't merely intellectual bankruptcy, it is an indication that the Left has gone from being a movement seeking change to a security agency for the established mechanisms of power. This is one of the meanings of the term "gatekeepers," incidentally, in Marxist theory.
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