As part of our coverage of the Battle for Israel's Soul, we're going to be sharing the full interviews we did while prepping the series. Most of these will be for subscribers only, but this first one with Yaniv Rosnai is available here for all.

If you'd like to join us and subscribe today to access all of the full interviews, please visit tabletmag.com/subscribe and use coupon code judicial for a $100 discount off any subscription.

In this installment, Leela is speaking with Yaniv Rosnai. Rosnai is a full professor and vice dean at the Harry Rozner Law School and co-director at the Rubenstein Center for Constitutional Challenges at Reichman University. He holds a PhD and LLM from the London School of Economics. He is also co-chair of the Israeli section of the International Society of Public Law.

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By the summer of 2023, it was clear that judicial reform was never really the story: The real battle was over Israel’s identity. And that battle touched on the deepest fears and disagreements Israelis were too busy surviving to address ever since the nation’s inception.

Can an Israel occupied by a religious majority remain recognizable to the nation’s secular elites? Can its institutions be reformed to better reflect the will of the country’s democratically elected majority? And can Israelis resolve all of these deep and difficult quarrels and still remain one people?

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Early in 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu’s newly elected government announced its intention to embark on sweeping reforms to the country’s judicial system. The announcement was soon met with the biggest wave of popular protests in the nation’s history, dividing Israel like few issues before. But what did the reform actually propose? What were its architects trying to achieve? And what, precisely, did its detractors find objectionable?

In this episode, we hear directly from the thinkers, lawmakers, and activists behind the overhaul, including the people who spent years developing the ideas that eventually became judicial reform. And we emerge with some shockingly unexpected confessions that shine a very different light on the entire conversation.

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The real fight tearing Israel apart these days isn’t against Hamas, Hezbollah, or even Iran. It’s a struggle to answer some very urgent—and very old—questions, the same questions that haunted Zionism’s founding fathers more than a century ago. Should Israel be a state for the Jews, the thoroughly modernized Vienna on the Mediterranean imagined by Theodor Herzl? Or a Jewish State, a vision championed by many of Zionism’s more traditional and religious followers? In this episode, we trace the roots of a conflict that long predates Benjamin Netanyahu, the Supreme Court, or the protests of 2023, and shed light on the historic reasons that drove hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets and protest.

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Early 2023 was a good time in Israel. The attack of October 7 was months in the future, and Israelis were enjoying a period of peace and prosperity. The economy was booming. The country came out fourth in the ranking of the world's happiest nations. You'd expect Israelis to sit back and celebrate their good fortune. Instead, they took to the streets en masse, sending the country into a tailspin that now, three years later, only grows stronger.

The catalyst for these protests was an attempt by Bibi Netanyahu's government to reform the country's judicial system, but, very soon, it became clear that the battle being fought in the streets was about something much bigger. It was about Israel's soul. What did each side want? And which will win? Featuring prominent voices from all sides of the debate, this series explores the ideas and anxieties driving one of the most consequential struggles in modern Israeli history.

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