Israel Under Netanyahu can charitably be described as silly, less so as hopelessly ill-informed and blatantly contrived—an echo chamber for the jaundiced prattle of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political adversaries.

If Oren displays unbridled bias throughout the book toward Netanyahu, she also displays profound disrespect for the Israeli electorate, which time and time again has re-elected him over three decades in free and fair elections. She bemoans the fact that the current government is the most “nationalistic government in the country’s history,” without bothering to explain how this came about. Perhaps serial failures on the part of the Left explain it?

Moreover, nowhere does Oren explain that the “ultra-right-wing” members of the coalition, such as Itamar Ben Gvir, were effectively imposed on Netanyahu because other potential partners refused to join his coalition.

Amazingly, Oren describes the 2023 judicial reform initiative as undermining Israeli democracy. In other words, she alleges that the attempt to shift the decision-making process from a narrow, unelected forum, not answerable to the public, is somehow more democratic than decision-making in a broadly elected forum regularly answerable to the public. She gushingly reports that 20 percent of the public came out to protest the judicial reform initiative but blithely ignores that four times that number did not.

Astonishingly, she berates Israeli democracy for not extending equal rights to Palestinian residents in the West Bank, ignoring their hostility to the very existence of a Jewish state. Thus, her criticisms of Israeli democracy, if heeded, would sound the death knell for democracy of any kind.

Perplexingly, while the author speaks disparagingly of the government as “right-wing,” she wails in protest when the coalition dubs the opposition “left-wing,” as though this were somehow a pejorative epithet. It seems that the use of the label “right” is legitimate so long as it undermines Netanyahu.

However, the author is right in one respect: Israeli democracy is indeed under threat. But that threat stems not from free and fair elections; it stems from the tyranny of an unrestrained judiciary—one that wields absolute authority while bearing no responsibility or accountability for the consequences of its decisions.

Martin Sherman
Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv