In most of the conversations that I have on this broadcast, I focus on a specific subject.

We might discuss a new book or an old book.

We might discuss a work of writing, or history, or theology, or else some question of national security,

diplomacy, or the deployment of military force. This week I bring you a different kind of

conversation altogether. For the past three months or so, each Saturday night has, with the

end of Shabbat, seen popular protests in various cities in Israel, with no protest

site being more energetic than its epicenter in Tel Aviv. Now, the immediate cause of the

protests has to do with the government's proposed judicial reforms. But their scale and intensity

and the civic passions that they stir suggest that the protests

are not merely about a policy proposal, even if that policy proposal does, its true, envision

significant changes to the way that Israelis govern themselves. Even so, with active elected

members of the Knesset opposition, as well as former prime ministers,

and any number of military officers and business leaders so enthusiastically joining in,

it feels like the immediate cause of the protest, the judicial reforms, is not the whole and

entire reason for the protest. It seems instead that the judicial reforms are

a symbol or a token of a deeper, more fundamental disagreement that strikes at the very heart

of Israeli society. And that deeper, more fundamental disagreement is in fact exposing a fault

line that can be traced back to the earliest moments of the Jewish state.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. To understand the tone and tenor

of Israeli politics at this moment requires not only an understanding of how the Knesset passes laws

and the purview of those laws, and who decides how they are applied.

It requires, in other words, a more capacious understanding than Israel's present legal affairs alone.

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