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Can someone explain the ongoing crisis in Israel? I have trouble making sense of it.
From what I see described online the leftwing (broadly defined) has made a series of anti-democratic grabs for power through the judiciary since the 90s through abusing the mess that is Israel's legal system.
The rightwing, now dominated by a combination of far rightists and religious extremists are unhappy about this and seeks to curtail the supreme court's ability to prevent legislation from happening based on shit all. The opposition to how the judiciary operates is broader than the current coalition in power but due to polarisation people can't agree on what should be done.
This makes everyone very mad. Both sides sees the conflict as existential and widespread protests are now happening.
The reform by itself isn't really bad on an object level, the issue is that Bibi is a piece of shit and parts of his coalition are extremists and people fear what they might do with the democratic mandate they've won.
People are so hysterical that I have trouble making sense of this and would appreciate for someone more in the know to add context and correct me where necessary. I'm open to having completely misunderstood this.
That's practically what happened several years ago, where anti-orthodox coalition won the majority. Unfortunately for them, they couldn't really handle anything properly, taking Arabs into coalition has been largely a disaster since they didn't gain anything and were seen as being easily blacklmailed, with Arabs seeing this (probably correctly) as not a bridge building opportunity but more like "grab whatever you can, it won't last" opportunity, and covid happened on top of that... so eventually their coalition fell apart and Bibi came back. I feel kinda sad that Israel couldn't find any better solution - I'd feel much better to see Bibi to retire and new generation to take over, but the alternative to Bibi so far has been so clownish it was predictable people would come back to him. My feeling is if some strong right or right-center leader emerges he could displace Bibi, but so far it hasn't happened. The Left right now can't offer much since they bet the house on New Middle East and Peace in Our TIme, and that obviously isn't happening, so their credibility is not exactly spectacular. There's no love lost between orthodox parties and secularist parties, but secularists can't win while being weak on security, especially as terrorists has been quite active recently.
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