Back on the ground, the heroes of the air have more pedestrian concerns namely, their potential exposure to prosecution at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). This they see as a real possibility if the Netanyahu-led government pursues its proposed judicial reforms, the overall affect of which would be to give the government of the day the power to undo even Supreme Court Judgments, along with other measures, for example, giving politicians a decisive voice in judicial appointments. Together, the measures would call into question Israel’s commitment to an independent judiciary and the rule of law. Though in practice this ‘commitment’ is nothing more than lip service, a fig leaf barely concealing its own hypocrisy, the danger the pilots, and no doubt other wielders of Israel’s war machine, see is that, as an article in Ha’aretz put it:
‘…new laws may make reserve pilots more vulnerable to legal action abroad. The pilots and navigators understand well remarks made this week by top defense [sic] establishment legal advisers in the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee. If the judiciary is weakened, the lawyers said, the state’s claim to robust investigatory and legal mechanism that make external intervention unnecessary will also be weakened. In that case, the pilots could be first in the sights of the court in The Hague.’
Not heroic
Many reserve Israeli air force pilots have been strenuous in their opposition to the proposed judicial reforms, even threatening to not attend training sessions. But this is hardly a heroic stance, governed as it is by the pilots’ need to protect themselves from formal, legal accountability for alleged war crimes.
We need also always to keep in mind that the ‘democracy’ the demonstrating thousands seek to secure is a democracy for Jews, not meaningfully for Palestinian Israeli-citizens; and not at all for the 4.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip who are assailed daily by an overweening, militarised, Israeli state.
There is a sense in which pro-democracy proponents are in a self-induced, yet willed, delusionary state. Vast numbers, likely as not a majority of Israeli Jewish opinion, believe they are living in an authentic democratic state. In the light of this, the question arises: Does Israel have the internal resources – values and ethics, capacity for self-critique, political will – to unshackle themselves from the racist Zionist ideology that underpins, and furthers the interests of, a Jewish-supremacist Israeli state? The bleak answer, one that will find evidence aplenty to support the assessment is that, no, Israel does not currently have the internal resources to drag itself out of the ethical quagmire that it has so assiduously created for itself.
And yet, and yet.
There are ethically-anchored, Israeli-Jewish dissenting voices that despise and oppose what is done in their name. They do not, however, constitute one camp united by a shared and articulated vision of the future. Some, for the present at least, focus pretty well exclusively on opposing the Occupation, which they do with vigour, courage and consistency. But, formally at least, they do not question the Zionist foundations of the state, at least not at present.
Then there are others, notably the One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) and its allies, who address the heart of the matter: that ethically, politically, practically the future lies in the formation of one democratic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. A state with equal political, social, human rights for all: Palestinians and Jews alike.
The ODSC is a partnership of Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis, itself a micro-example, an intimation, of a more optimistic future. But the ODSC is, at present, a minnow in the Israeli, and indeed Palestinian, political ocean.
But oceans are vast, and in one aspect daunting. In another, the vastness represents the space within which growth can flourish.
Bernard Spiegal 
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