Israel’s Protests Are About Demography

Regarding your editorial “Israel’s Judicial Panic Attack” (July 25): If we strip away all the rhetoric and demagoguery, most everyone in Israel knows that the country’s judicial branch needs rebalancing. Opposition leader Yair Lapid said as much a few years ago.

What is really behind the protests is fear of an autocratic and theocratic government, real or imagined, and the possible loss of power for the first time in the nation’s history of the left-leaning secular elite, with its bureaucratic, media and professional support. A theocracy won’t happen because the overwhelming majority on both sides opposes it, but the shift in the fulcrum of power is real. Demography is the engine of change.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March froze judicial-reform legislation for three months, giving time for negotiations and compromise to take place. It went nowhere. He has now proposed a four-month period of negotiations before the next phase of reform, the selection process for Supreme Court justices, a much thornier issue. If “De-mo-cra-tia!” is the goal of the opposition leadership, there will be real negotiations in this period. If not, then the straw man will be exposed for all to see.

Fred Ehrman

New York