DOV WAXMAN (HOST): Welcome to "Israel in Depth," where scholars, authors, artists and leading experts come to discuss topics about Israel in depth. You're listening to a podcast by the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies at UCLA. I'm Dov Waxman, the director of the Nazarian Center and the host of this podcast. On this episode of "Israel in Depth," I'll be discussing what's been happening in Israeli politics since Israel's most recent election - the third in that the past year - which took place on March 2nd. And what the prospects are for the formation of new �government in Israel. To discuss all this, I'm joined from Tel Aviv by my good friend Dahlia Scheindlin. Dahlia holds a Ph.D. in political science from Tel Aviv University. She is a public opinion expert and political consultant and fellow at the Century Foundation and a writer at +972 Magazine. She has advised and conducted research on eight national election campaigns in Israel, including the most recent when she advised the Arab majority Joint List, which won a record number of 15 Knesset seats. So when it comes to explaining Israeli politics, Dahlia is a superb guide. Thank you, Dalia, for joining me on "Israel in Depth."

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DAHLIA SCHEINDLIN: Thank you for having me, Dov. It's a pleasure to be here.

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WAXMAN: We have a lot to cover. Things are changing very rapidly in Israeli politics. There's always a turbulent, fast-changing situation. But right now, it seems to be changing even more rapidly. Let's just take a step back before we get into the latest political dramas and intrigues. In recent weeks, Israel has really been facing, it seems to me, three major overlapping crises. The first crisis is this kind of long-running political crisis that's been happening for the past year caused by the inability to establish a coalition government. And of course, the most recent election didn't resolve that political crisis. On top of that, there has been just in the last few days a constitutional crisis, which has erupted when the now former Knesset speaker Yuri Edelstein, who is a member of the Likud party and close ally of Prime Minister Netanyahu, refused to hold a vote for a new speaker of Israel's parliament, to replace him. And that led to a showdown between him and Israel's High Court of Justice. And on top of this constitutional crisis, Israel is facing - as we all are of course - facing a public health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. So this is really unprecedented times, even for Israel, particularly in a way in which these three political crises interrelate and impact each other. So Dahlia, maybe you can help us make sense of these crises. Let's begin first of all with the political crisis. The last election on March 2nd saw the Likud party - Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party - come out with the most seats: 36 seats, four more than it one in the previous election in September and three more than its nearest rival Blue and White (Kahol Lavan) party, which was led by Benny Gantz...which won the same number of seats as it won last September. Why do you think Likud, despite predictions to the contrary, was do you think Likud was able to actually perform better this time around despite the fact that its leader Mr. Netanyahu was facing multiple criminal indictments.

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SCHEINDLIN: Well, Dov, I mean, you've unraveled the secret of what's going on in Israeli politics by laying out those three crises over the course of the year. The most important one I think is the longest one, as you said. There's been a kind of stalemate all year, so I'll start with that. Ultimately it looks like...it certainly looks like Likud did much better by winning four additional seats. But in fact, if you look over the course of the year, the political system was actually fairly stable. There wasn't that much of a change. Likud and Blue and White had been running neck-and-neck. The different constellations of parties, the kind of coalitions that were expected to go into either a government or an opposition together with one another, barely changed - and that's one of the reasons why the political system kept failing to produce a government. And in fact, if in April - in the April elections of 2019 - the right-wing parties, the ideological right-wing parties, which would include the party of Mr. Avigdor Lieberman, received 65 seats. They theoretically could have formed a government except that Lieberman rebelled and decided not to go into that coalition, leaving them with only 60 out of 120 seats in parliament. Not sufficient to have a voting majority. Well that same ideological bloc, if you were to include Lieberman, also received 65 seats in the most recent elections in March. So in a way in the big picture of right, center, and left in terms of ideology, very little changed. What changed was that Likud could, together with the Netanyahu loyalist parties, in other words, the parties who insisted and committed themselves to going into a coalition only with Netanyahu actually did worse. They only got 58 seats relative to the 60 seats they had in the first election in April. That made it impossible - even harder for them to form a government...a coalition without Lieberman.� Okay, because there's the question of whether you include Lieberman or not because he was refusing to go into a government with the Netanyahu loyalist bloc. In the April elections that pro-Netanyahu bloc just didn't do as well as it did in April. And so as a result, neither party... neither side was able to form a government without Lieberman. Lieberman then threw his endorsement behind Benny Gantz to form the next government. So you're back...Full circle back to your first question: why did Likud do better? Likud may have done better, but it didn't do very differently from the first election in April when they had 35 seats; now they have 36. And the map barely changed. If anything, the pro-Netanyahu map did worse. If you want to know why they did a little bit better, it was primarily because of turnout. They did...They made a huge turnout effort...Likud made a huge turnout effort by the end of the campaign. And that was the first time in the entire you know number of months since the September elections that their numbers started to go up. So that's the short-term reason.

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WAXMAN: So outside, I want to pick up on the way you classify these two blocs, and particularly because outside observers have often presented Israeli politics and viewed Israeli politics through the lens of having a right-wing bloc and a kind of center-left bloc. And often, in the media you hear about the Blue and White party being described as the leader of the center-left bloc. In many ways, that's really not an accurate framing of Israeli politics today. I mean these last three elections, as you point out, haven't moved Israel's ideological map in any way. Essentially there's the same..The right-wing...The number of parties that adhere to a right-wing ideology, at least when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have remained the same. So what's changed then is that maybe ideological... ideology is less important in shaping or determining these political blocs now; it's really been about a pro-Netanyahu bloc and an anti-Netanyahu bloc. In other words, rather than these elections being shaped by ideological disagreements, they've really been shaped by the question of whether Prime Minister Netanyahu should remain in office. Is that accurate?

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SCHEINDLIN: I only partly agree with that in the sense that when the Israeli voter categorizes herself or himself as right, left, or center, first and foremost, this is an ideological categorization. And ideology in Israel is first and foremost about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli Arab affairs, the question of Jewish identity versus a more universalist civic national identity in Israel. Those are the main issues by which, first of all, a voter consciously or unconsciously defines him or herself. And the reason I say unconsciously is not to condescend in any way; it's just that if you ask Israeli voters what's on their mind, first of all, they may say things like cost of living, healthcare, education or possibly you know corruption issues like Netanyahu's cases. But when you look at their positions in survey research, what really, really is most closely correlated with those definitions of left, right and center are their positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and everything to do with Jewish identity in Israel. So it's always there, and that hangs over everything else. And so when you look at what...at the breakdown that I mentioned before, which you are challenging - the 65 seats that went to ideologically right-wing parties. You're right to say that it was not so much about that breakdown, but not in terms of the elections. The people certainly voted based on those breakdowns. They voted for parties that correlate with their ideology of right, left, or center. But it's the next stage of forming the coalition government that is no longer strictly about ideology primarily because of Avigdor Lieberman, who runs a very nationalist right-wing party. You might even call it ultra-nationalist, and not exactly a party that you know is deeply committed to democratic or progressive democratic or anything like a left-wing set of ideas. That party broke in terms of coalition formation from the right-wing bloc. It doesn't mean they are no longer right-wing. And as to whether Blue and White itself is ideologically you know center or left, Israeli society views Blue and White as a center party. But the center is a murky concept in Israel, and at times they have tried to appear more right-wing. They certainly have had right-wing figures inside the party, so they could look right-wing, peel off some right-wing voters sufficiently to balance those different coalition-building blocks while still sucking up most of the votes that used to go to Israeli Jewish left-wing parties like Labor, which saw a historic low in the last elections. So you have to distinguish between the election results and the coalition-building process to understand the role of ideology.

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WAXMAN: Right, thank you. That's a very important distinction I think for listeners to recognize that, unlike say in an American election where you know whoever receives the most votes will, or typically wins the electoral college at least, you know emerges as the winner and is able to run the government. Of course, in Israel, you have a two-step process. First of all, you have the elections, and maybe underlying the electoral arithmetic, nothing really changed. But then you have the coalition-building process, and that's where the log jam has existed for so long. Despite the fact that the underlying ideological divisions, if you like in Israeli society, had remained constant.

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SCHEINDLIN: Well, I'd like to add something. It would be inaccurate to say that there was no ideology behind that. It just isn't the typical left-right ideology as I described it before. It has to do with rejecting Netanyahu's leadership, and even that should not be understood as a matter of personal antipathy for Netanyahu or sort of cult of personality for or against him. It is a rejection of what he has come to stand for in Israeli society. Many of the things that he now represents, having been in power for 11 years, you know through 14 years cumulatively. Too much in the eyes of some people. And of course, being a prime minister who is now formally under indictment. Lieberman would say that's no longer healthy for democracy; that is a form of ideology as well. And those things lie behind his decision in part not to go into a government with him. So I think it will be unfair to characterize even the coalition-building stage as completely non-ideological. I don't want anybody to read that into what I'm saying. It's just a slightly different kind of ideology because, in many ways, Lieberman and even parts of Blue and White agree with other policies of Netanyahu. In some ways they're not that distinguished from the right-wing ideology, which is another confusing part of the situation.

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WAXMAN: Right. So it's another reason to bear in mind why we shouldn't just view Israeli politics through the lens of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although that still predominantly determines ideological cleavages. It is not the only issue through which or it's not the only issue that shapes Israeli ideological views.

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SCHEINDLIN: Absolutely.

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WAXMAN: Similarly, over the last year or so particularly...Even in terms of Israeli public opinion, the issue of Israeli democracy and democratic practice and procedures and particularly the role of the High Court of Justice of the Supreme Court, has also become a big political and ideological issue.

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SCHEINDLIN: Yes.

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WAXMAN: And it really seems to just in the last few days reached a crescendo in terms of this kind of...another long-running crisis over Israeli democracy in many ways, which has come to a head over the actions taken by Netanyahu's ally, former Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein. Can you just explain how this...how this crisis came into being...This constitutional crisis. Do you see it, did you see it as a crisis? I mean some suggested, some observers suggested that you know the warnings of a constitutional coup taking place were overblown. That Israeli democracy was safe, and there was no real threat to it. Did you see this as really a serious challenge to Israeli democracy?

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SCHEINDLIN: I think it was one of the most severe challenges to the democratic institutions of Israel ever. And I do think that for a very limited time there were actions that can be considered a coup. What kind of coup? I wouldn't necessarily venture to say. I don't think it's a coup d'etat. It's not state capture. Is it a constitutional crisis? Absolutely and maybe even a constitutional coup, if I could say so. The word 'coup' has been you know...we've been kind of banding it around and trying to figure out exactly where it matches. But you know, even if we don't know exactly, it's like we know when we see it. When you have the speaker of the parliament effectively shutting down the parliament in a situation where we don't have a permanent executive power, only an interim government. In other words, Netanyahu's interim government was not the one that was elected. So we have an unelected interim government. The courts have been suspended because of the coronavirus health crisis. And then the speaker of the Knesset simply decided to disband the Knesset after only three minutes of the opening session because he didn't want to hold a vote not only on replacing himself, which is already a severe conflict of interest - and a very obvious one. But also did not want to even allow the parties to establish the Knesset committees, the parliamentary committees that are the real you know wheels of the functioning of government and provide the only remaining sort of check and supervision on the power of the executive at a time like this. Like at when as I said almost the entire judiciary was shut down, save for the Supreme Court. Luckily for the State of Israel. And so that situation is in so many ways a violation of Israeli law, any sort of democratic principle. It was essentially a reflection of a rejection of the election results.� Because the reason why, and the basic laws of the game...I mean in...Many legal scholars interpreted as a violation of the basic law of Knesset, even though there's a legal dispute over that, because the bylaws of the Knesset itself may have. You know Edelstein insists that he was within the bounds of the law because the bylaws of the Knesset seemingly allow for what he did. But you know great number - dozens of jurists in Israel - disagreed and petitioned. And this is why there were petitions to the Supreme Court. Eventually, the Supreme Court, even though it was reluctant to rule at first on forcing the speaker of the parliament to reopen the Knesset...you know at first simply asked him to say whether he would of his own accord hold the vote over choosing a new speaker of Knesset, which is part of the process that is stipulated by the basic law after elections. And so that they could avoid ruling on it. But he then refused to even do that, and so the finally the Supreme Court then ruled that he had hold the vote within two days - and that was yesterday (March 25, 2020). And so when the speaker decided yesterday instead of actually fulfilling the ruling of the Supreme Court and holding the vote, instead, he decided to resign. Then he stood in direct violation not only of the basic law, which you know there was a legal battle over whether that was really a violation or not. But he stood in direct violation of a Supreme Court ruling. And so when you have the head of ... one of the most senior figures in government...in public authority...and well not only potential successor to Netanyahu but he was even being considered somebody who might have one day run for president in Israel, which is a ceremonial position. But still somebody who was in fact quite well respected not only on the right side of the map. But a very senior figure in public office openly, brazenly rejecting a ruling of the Supreme Court. It really throws the entire kind of institutional basis of the functioning of the state into total chaos and disarray. So the Supreme Court was... you know not only a Supreme Court, everybody - many people in Israel, the public commentators, political leaders, retired Supreme Court judges (including the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) were scandalized and terrified by this. Because of course, the fear that the precedent of simply ignoring the rule of law as interpreted by the judiciary is a terribly dangerous precedent at a time when people are already on edge. And it's a dangerous time with you know lots of rules being remade. In fact, the president of the country, Reuven Rivlin, went on national television last night and essentially begged citizens to continue obeying the courts and the rule of law, which he obviously felt the need to do in light of this unprecedented flouting of the court decision.

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WAXMAN: So, as an expert on Israeli public opinion, how do you think the Israeli public views these actions. I mean, did they see it as a serious threat? Do we know what Israeli public opinion made of this unprecedented refusal to respect a Supreme Court ruling?

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SCHEINDLIN: Yeah, you're talking to a pollster who feels been quoting yeah well I mean you're crippled right now because there have been no public new polls you know that are capable of keeping up with the issues at hand. And the only public polls that have come out in recent weeks have to do with you know attitudes towards different kinds of governments that might be formed. So I'm working with a little bit of a handicap. But I can tell you based on when we don't have public opinion surveys and actual data to work with; we have other cues. We look at you know opinion articles in a range of newspapers, and you know from left and right and try to figure this out. And try to talk to individuals and just get anecdotal input. And then there are things like public expressions of sentiment. And I can tell you that there seems to be typically a kind of split within the Israeli public, which reflects the ideological split that I told you about before. The right-wing papers are I think a little bit divided amongst themselves, in general, insisting on you know towing a very heavily pro-Netanyahu and right-wing line. But also a little bit nervous about what it really means to be defying the Supreme Court. We can see that some of the right-wing figures even within the Likud were made...were uncomfortable about this and called on Edelstein, at the very least, to obey the Supreme Court ruling. The same goes for some of the senior political commentators and legal commentators in the right-wing media. So there was some discomfort around that and I think that all of this is compounded of course by the health crisis. The other thing I should mention is that on the other on the left-wing side of the map there was...what for me was an unprecedented virtual demonstration, which was an online initiative held that started with a very grassroots effort of just some citizens deciding that they could no longer tolerate the situation. And the organizers claimed...I mean I logged in like many other people through Facebook. There were also Zoom participants. The �organizers claimed that there were 150,000 people watching the speeches of that demonstration, which were held in a hall with one speaker after another. Nobody crowding into the same room. And so that's also an expression of support. In addition to people who even within the confinement rules, because of the health crisis, held several days� worth of driving convoys. People, individuals getting into their car one at a time (because we're not allowed to have more than one person in a car driving to the Knesset) to express their protests by hanging black flags out of their car windows. And so those are indications that this is extremely disturbing to the Israeli public as well, even as people are desperately trying to adjust themselves to you really extraordinary measures of isolation which the whole world is dealing with at the same time.

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WAXMAN: What's interesting in that as you know as a political scientist, the famous rally round the flag effect.

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SCHEINDLIN: Yes.

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WAXMAN: When there's a major emergency or crisis situation, typically, the reaction of the general public is to rally around the leader, to at least seek stability, to in fact, even yearn for more kind of an authoritarian leader in order to create a sense of stability.

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SCHEINDLIN: Yeah.

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WAXMAN: What you're suggesting in fact ... obviously we don't know as yet what...how the coronavirus pandemic is going to impact Israeli public opinion. But it seems to suggest that in fact, Israelis didn't suddenly shift to wanting Netanyahu to remain in power,� to demanding an emergency national unity government, but rather that the pre-existing divisions within Israeli public opinion have continued despite this coronavirus pandemic.

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SCHEINDLIN: Well, I think that you are right in some sense. I have seen surveys showing that people think that Netanyahu's handling of this crisis has been very good. He's got a lot of support for that. And I would certainly feel confident saying that it exceeds his vote no question, and even probably exceeds the vote for his loyalist bloc.

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WAXMAN: He has garnered some more public support?

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SCHEINDLIN: For his handling of the crisis. In other words, people think he's doing a very good job on the crisis and I think that there is a skittishness in the public about having some sort of drastic, new change of government. But of course, we have we have a change of government anyway. In other words, it was clear that we weren't going to continue with the same government based on the election results. And there has always been high support within the public for the concept of a unity government, meaning in this case unity between Likud and Blue and White - the two biggest parties who would have a majority on their own, even without bringing in any other parties. That's always been the case. The only thing is that that support from the public for unity breaks down when you specify which party would be leading the unity government.

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WAXMAN: Right.

SCHEINDLIN: So the question is whether that has changed - and again, I don't have new data on it, but Mike but my sense of just feeling the kind of environment and reading that other wonderful forum for public expression - social media - is that that really hasn't changed. People still think unity is the best option because it sounds good, especially in a time of crisis and including, as you know, a remedy for the year-long political crisis. Unity makes people feel good, but they still don't like the idea of unity when it comes to the other side, whether you're on the center or left, if the idea is that Netanyahu would lead the unity government. Or if you're a right-winger, you may support the idea of unity but not if Blue and White through Benny Gantz leads it. In fact, we are seeing over the last few hours before we've had this call, a complete outburst of very intense anger on the part of everybody on the center and left (who at least everybody who expresses themselves on social media and in media headlines) against what looks to be like the likely formation of a unity government in which Gantz actually breaks Blue and White apart or you could say that Yesh Atid or Lapid and��are breaking away. But in any case, it looks like we are more likely now to have just such a unity government in which Netanyahu continues to be Prime Minister. And I can tell you no question (even without a poll), all the voters of the opposition bloc are extremely angry about it right now.

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WAXMAN: In that respect, the political deadlock that we mentioned earlier that was caused by various political parties to form a coalition. Many wondered what could break this ongoing political deadlock. It seems that the coronavirus pandemic and the emergency regulations that have resulted from that have been the kind of deus ex machina, if you will, that has shifted at least Benny Gantz to now be apparently willing to sit in a unity government led by Prime Minister Netanyahu.

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Scheindlin: Well, I think that is a sort of counterfactual characterization in which we imagined that if there had never been, you know the global health pandemic that Benny Gantz would never have done this. And I'm not sure if we can go that far. There was always a possibility that he might go into a unity government with him. It was one of the three or four only possible scenarios after the last election.

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WAXMAN: But he didn't ...option before.

SCHEINDLIN: Sorry?

WAXMAN: He had that option before and passed it up.

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SCHEINDLIN: Absolutely, but after this election, he had the option again - all the options were back on the table. And it was certainly one that the analysts thought was a likely possibility. The main question being would he agree to go in with Netanyahu as Prime Minister - as the first you know in a rotation of prime ministers under the unity government. And you know, we won't know what he would have done without the global health pandemic. However, I do think that it's fair to say that the corona crisis had an indirect effect because the combination of this sense of emergency and the fact that Likud came in the biggest party empowered them I think to take extreme actions, such as Edelstein's really....Again, sorry to keep using the word unprecedented, but it really is unprecedented in Israeli history. I think that he would never have taken such actions to strong-arm Gantz into moving towards a unity government if he hadn't felt like this is a situation of emergency and if he hadn't been empowered by Netanyahu already leveraging emergency powers to advance the kinds of restrictions needed and things like telephone surveillance of corona patients. I think that in that situation Edelstein said, you know this is absolutely the most emergency you know urgent situation we can possibly be in. We must have a unity government. And that was the reason he himself gave for taking these actions. In other words, Edelstein himself said that I'm doing this because I want to pressure Gantz to form a unity government.

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WAXMAN: Right, so both... So all of these politicians ... have been reacting to the coronavirus or the state of emergency, and essentially that's shifted their behavior in such ways to have created the conditions now for a national unity government. Conditions that previously didn't quite exist to create one in the past well.

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SCHEINDLIN: Well, I think that's true for the right-wing because they held the interim government that was able to undertake these actions. The opposition parties weren't able to do very much except for they were eventually able to force the Knesset to reopen and establish the committees with a majority of the opposition figures on the committees because that's how the committees are formed in Israeli politics. And so yeah, I mean I think that... it's true what you're saying about the right-wing more than it is the opposition. In fact, some people were surprised; I was even a little surprised that the opposition didn't capitulate earlier, given the corona crisis. They held out for this long. You know the question is how surprised we all are. And I want to also be clear about something else. Let me translate when we say unity government in Israel - the meaning that it has come to adopt over the last few weeks since the Israeli elections is a Netanyahu-led government. Let's not be fuzzy about this. When Netanyahu talked about a unity government, he meant a government by Netanyahu. When Edelstein talked about a unity government, he meant the government led by Netanyahu - and apparently, that is what we are about to see. So it seems from the developments over the last few hours.

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WAXMAN: On the side of the opposition, one of the significant things I think that that came in the last week or so was Benny Gantz's initial demand that a national unity government includes the predominately Arab Joint List. And this would have been ...this was a game-changer in Israeli politics. Historically and as you mentioned even today in many people's minds, national unity basically means unity of Jewish majority parties and is always excluded the Joint List. But it seemed that these crisis conditions also led at least momentarily the Blue and White party and Gantz himself to say, no, in fact, the Arab parties should be part of the government. Was that an important precedent? Is that going matter going forward? Was that just a brief moment, or do we see attitude shifting in terms of the willingness now to consider the Joint List - at least the willingness not across the Israeli political spectrum, but among the opposition parties to consider the Joint List now a legitimate partner.

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SCHEINDLIN: Yeah, let me clarify something. Blue and White never went so far as to say we will bring the Joint List into our government after the March elections. What they did was hold negotiations with the Joint List over we think something like that after the previous elections in September. They held a negotiation. They had a photo-op. It was a photo of Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, and Ahmad Tibi, negotiating in a room with Benny Gantz, which was then subsequently used as a weapon by Netanyahu. They seem to have pulled back from that somewhat after the March election by never even proposing the idea that the Joint List would go into a government. However, what you're referring to is the groundbreaking idea that that Blue and White would form a government and not a unity government but a minority government with those members of the opposition who would go into a government - this kind of a government - and that that government would be sworn in based on a vote of confidence with the Joint List. And even that would have been unprecedented. Now it's true also that for a brief moment it...Blue and White was rumored at least to have to have insisted that as a condition for considering a unity government (and this gets to your point with Netanyahu) that they might demand that at the very least Joint List representatives would be given high positions, possibly even placed as the heads of committees, of specific committees, that would be influential especially those to help deal with the crisis. And that would be considered also a kind of you know valuable statement for bringing in the Joint List as part of the executive even though it wouldn't be at the level of a full coalition partner.

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WAXMAN: Right. Scheindlin: Since the March election, Blue and White has never gone so far as to break down the incredibly you know long, long-standing taboo of bringing a party that represents the Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel into the executive power. For listeners who aren't clear on that, it means that Arab parties - the parties that represent the Arab Palestinian citizens - sit in the Knesset, which is the legislature, but they never join executive power. There have been times when there was an Arab minister, very few, but not as a representative of their parties. Certainly not as independent parties, though we won't go into the long history of satellite parties of the Arab community, which were part of Labor governments in long , long, long history. They weren't very significant.

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WAXMAN: Right.

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SCHEINDLIN: So the point is Gantz did not really go so far as to break that down. But it did put on the map the idea that the Joint List is part of the negotiation over how a government will be formed. I do not want to give the credit to the coronavirus.� The coronavirus doesn't deserve it. The Joint List won 15 seats out of 120 all on its own - and that made it the third biggest party for the third time in a row and a very important political player in Israel.

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WAXMAN: So it seems to sort of sum up some of these fast-moving developments. It seems like in many ways some of the long-standing taboos in Israeli politics, the taboo against the inclusion Arab parties in government, the taboo against challenging the Supreme Court in this way and maintaining the Knesset's rule. Some of these long-standing basic rules or ideas or norms, if you will, of Israeli politics, are shifting quite rapidly. And of course, we don't know how long the emergency situation in Israel is going to last or the emergency situation around the world. This could ultimately reshape Israeli politics in very significant ways.

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SCHEINDLIN: Oh yeah, I mean of course it could. The thing is I would say that it's not exactly these things are happening overnight. I mean let's just start with you know the violation of a Supreme Court order and the erosion of the position of the Supreme Court and the general contempt for the Israeli judiciary. This did not start yesterday, and it did not start with the corona crisis. It didn't start with the coalition crisis. And it did not even start with Netanyahu's own broadside attack on the arms of the rule of law in November of 2019, when his indictment was announced, and he responded with a very vicious attack on the police and the state prosecutor and by implication the attorney general and certainly that sort of implied a general understanding that the arms of the judiciary were not straightforward, had lost their integrity, were politically motivated, and all sorts of terrible things that severely you know damaged the public's trust in this vital institution. But even that didn't start in November of 2019. It's been going on for at least a decade. In fact, we shouldn't even give Netanyahu all the credit because some of this sort of undermining or questioning the legitimacy and the role of the rule of law and Israel happened even before Netanyahu came back to power in 2009 and began under the previous justice minister under the Olmert government. I would say there's a distinction between the earliest years of questioning the role of the Supreme Court, which was all about sort of legitimate legal struggle and you know legal argument.

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WAXMAN: Separation of power.

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SCHEINDLIN: Over separation of powers over the issue of separation of and judicial review, which is a complicated issue in Israel because we don't have a constitution. We have very few checks on the power of the legislature, so the Supreme Court plays a particular role. Not that the Israeli Supreme Court is particularly interventionist relative, for example, to the American Supreme Court, which has intervened many times to strike down laws - many more than then in Israel's history. Taking into account the difference of the age of the countries. Having said that, over the course of the last 10 years, this is not just a legal question you know over the kind of political theory of how Israel should run. It's been a concerted effort on the part of many of the right-wing leaders - again political commentators, leaders of parties, political campaigns. All of them have gone on a sort of full-out assault on the identity of the Supreme Court in general, saying that it has too much power, that it is working against the rule of the people, and certainly portraying it as a kind of self-elected elite cabal of people who do not represent the public but are trampling the will of the majority, as if the majority has all the power and is the exclusive power in a democracy. That should not be the case of course in a liberal democracy where we have checks and balance on the rule of law, especially in a situation where Israel's constitutional order involves very few checks on parliamentary power. But there has been a narrative over the last number of years that the right-wing has an interest in promoting, which is that the Supreme Court tramples the will of the people and protects the rights of minorities. And when you're the right-wing, and you think you're going to have a majority forever, that's not very convenient. So that's part of what's driving this assault on the role of the rule of law. But it backfired when all of a sudden, the pro-Netanyahu camp was no longer a majority. And it's amazing that they didn't think about that eventuality until now.

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WAXMAN: So Dahlia, the drawback of insisting upon the untrammeled right of the majority to rule.

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SCHEINDLIN: Exactly, the minor inconvenience.

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WAXMAN: Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. I want to thank you for that very enlightening and fascinating conversation, particularly...

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SCHEINDLIN: No, it can't be over. I didn't get to say enough.

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WAXMAN: It's taken place against such a fast-moving situation in Israel. I'm sure by the time of our conversations ending, who knows what will be the latest machinations in Israeli politics. I want to thank you, Dahlia Scheindlin, for joining us. I want to thank our listeners for listening to this episode of 'Israel in Depth' produced by the UCLA's Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.

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SCHEINDLIN: Thanks for having me.

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