Caroline Glick argues that, in his next term, Benjamin Netanyahu should work to curb anti-democratic forces in Israel. A beginning move would expand freedom of the press by striking back against a recent attempt by left-leaning legislators to outlaw the right-leaning newspaper Israel Hayom:
The government should act as quickly as possible to open the television and radio waves to market forces. Everyone with the financial wherewithal should have the right to buy and operate a radio or television station. To achieve this, the government needs to take two steps.
First, it needs to end all restrictions on content in television and radio broadcasting aside from provisions barring the airing of pornography and other social ills. Second, it needs to make media licensing conditional on the licensee’s prior agreement to broadcast IDF messages during states of emergency. . . .
The Israel Hayom draft law was a threat to Israeli democracy. And the threat would have been carried out if the election results had been different. To ensure that we don’t face a similar threat in the future, we need a media market full of different voices saying different things, competing for our attention. As long as Israel Hayom remains the only mass-media organ with a unique voice, it will remain under threat from the forces that prefer unanimity to variety in our public discourse.
Next, writes Glick, for practical reasons the prime minister should reconsider the bill declaring Israel “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” and instead focus on procedural reforms that will more effectively solve the problems the bill was intended to address:
Although the next Knesset will have the votes to pass the nation-state bill, there is no pressing need to do so. . . . The reason it doesn’t matter one way or another is that he legislation is redundant. Its central components, those that define Israel as the Jewish state, are already anchored in standing law. . . .
The left opposed the [nation-state bill] because its leaders feared the law would weaken the Supreme Court. . . . The problem with this view—shared by the bill’s right-wing proponents and its left-wing opponents—is that . . . Supreme Court justices have no compunction about ignoring the explicit language of standing laws, including Basic Laws with quasi-constitutional weight. . . .
It is impossible to reform the legal system by passing laws that justices and governmental legal advisers will ignore. The only way to reform the legal system and so strengthen Israeli democracy is to take direct steps to curb the anti-democratic powers that the legal fraternity, led by the court, has arrogated.
Read more on Caroline Glick: http://carolineglick.com/the-urgent-business-of-the-next-government/