Is the current Israeli government truly on the verge of an authoritarian turn? No, of course not.

The mass protests and over-the-top rhetoric from Israel’s domestic opposition, Joe Biden’s warnings that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reform agenda will curtail minority rights, gleeful announcements by the U.S. ambassador about his right to interfere in domestic Israeli politics, the financing of Palestinian groups with terror links, public harassment of Netanyahu’s wife: These are among the details of a single blueprint. The fact that this blueprint is designed in Washington, D.C., gives courage and direction to the demonstrators acting on the ground in Tel Aviv.

And it’s evidence that Bibi is in Washington’s crosshairs, for regime change has come to Israel.

The issue then is not that Bibi’s reform agenda endangers the rights of its citizens, Jews and Arabs alike. Rather, it attenuates the vast powers of the judiciary, a corps of lawyers tapped by their professional colleagues to serve lifetime terms in posts where they are unaccountable to the electorate at large. Instead, they represent the interests of a political, corporate, and media establishment determined to impose its will on the country.

In Israel the judiciary fills the role of the national security establishment in the United States. As American elites revere domestic U.S. intelligence services for waging an unlawful and ongoing campaign to ruin Trump and his supporters in order to, in their words, “save our democracy,” the anti-Bibi rebels esteem the judiciary as the thumb tilting the scales of justice against those they detest.

The world has learned a lot watching America’s Middle East freedom agenda. The first of these lessons is that when U.S. policymakers selectively deploy the rhetoric of democracy and human rights against target governments, their words are typically accompanied by practical measures to destabilize those governments, including U.S. allies.

By the time the Arab Spring rolled around, democracy promotion became cover for an arsenal of techniques deployed by U.S. intelligence services and NGOs to undermine governments that the White House, the State Department, and the CIA didn’t like.

Perhaps most famously, the Barack Obama administration’s pro-democracy campaign helped push out Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in favor of a government run by the Muslim Brotherhood, hardly an exemplary force for universal human rights.

A similar operation is now underway in Israel, where the Biden administration has departed from diplomatic protocol by repeatedly advertising its meetings with the political faction seeking to undo Israel’s newly elected right-wing government.

By publicly putting its prestige and money behind the coalition that lost the latest Israeli election, Washington is openly advertising its desire to bring down Netanyahu.

The maritime agreement was just the latest in a series of initiatives to realign U.S. interests with those of the terror regime in Tehran.

Accordingly, Yair Lapid, who wanted to ingratiate himself with the Obama-Biden faction by integrating Israel into its pro-Iran security architecture that augments Hezbollah’s power, was indeed a friend of the current White House.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/biden-sets-israel-on-fire