What Israelis should learn from Paris about protests

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undreds of thousands of demonstrators jam the streets of the nation’s largest cities, blocking major thoroughfares, committing acts of violence and vandalism, and stripping away any façade of national unity.

Police apply force to disperse the protestors, to no avail. Week after week, the demonstrations build in size and intensity, triggering economic chaos and threatening the stability of a shaky governing coalition.

Finally, when the head of state realizes he lacks a parliamentary majority for his linchpin legislation, he resorts to a technical maneuver to bypass parliament and ram his plan through.

You would be excused for thinking this is an almost perfect description of Israel for the last three months, but it’s not.

All this is happening in France over a controversial and divisive proposal to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. French president Emmanuel Macron deemed this measure essential to keep the country’s pension system solvent. Keeping in mind Charles de Gaulle’s quip that it’s impossible to govern a country with 262 types of cheese, Macron resorted to brutal political force to get his way. And unlike Israel, whose High Court intervenes in almost every major government decision, France’s highest legal body, the Constitutional Council, upheld Macron.

From a vantage point in Jerusalem, it’s eye-opening, considering that just last year, Israel passed a similar law to raise the retirement age for women from 62 to 65 without fanfare, protests, or even a lawsuit before the High Court alleging discrimination against women.

That’s only one small irony worth noting.

Nowhere do you find Denise Campbell Bauer, the US ambassador to France, weighing in with her government’s views on an internal French matter, as we saw with Tom Nides, the US ambassador to Israel, who warned Israel to pump the brakes on judicial reform.

Nowhere do we see President Biden or Secretary of State Blinken admonishing Macron that he was destroying French democracy and undermining the shared values of the longstanding NATO allies. Biden and Macron have argued over China and Ukraine, leading Macron to declare that European nations are not American vassal states, but nary a word from America’s oldest president about retirement age.

Nowhere did we see the wagging fingers of the international investment community that political turmoil would force them to withdraw money from the Fifth Republic — perhaps placing their funds in safer institutions such as Silicon Valley Bank or Credit Suisse — or dire warnings about drying up interest from overseas investors.

Nor did we even see Moody’s credit rating agency downgrade the outlook for the French economy, as it just did over the past weekend with Israel. While reaffirming its A1 rating on Israel’s government debt, it reduced its outlook from positive to stable, noting a “deterioration of governance” in Israel while also praising it for its proven resilience in the face of economic and geopolitical shocks.

A credit downgrade can harm an economy if investors begin demanding the government pay them higher interest rates to compensate for any greater risk.

The only one seemingly shaken by Moody’s move was opposition leader Yair Lapid, who called it an “economic earthquake” and blamed the Netanyahu government for ruining the economy that he labored to build during his illustrious six months as interim prime minister, in which his chief accomplishment was to yield to American pressure to cede Israeli territorial waters and unexplored undersea gas reserves to the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government.

If it was an earthquake, it didn’t register at all on the Richter scale. When trading began on the Tel Aviv bourse on Sunday, all major stock indices were up, and bond yields were steady, although both ended the trading day with small losses.

Ideology Matters

Perhaps investors were relieved that Moody’s sufficed with reducing their outlook rather than downgrading the actual debt rating, but it’s just as likely that investors don’t put much stock in Moody’s.

Moody’s had Silicon Valley Bank’s debt rated as A3, or low investment grade, from 2013, only slashing it to a C-rating, or junk status, after it went bankrupt.

Andrew Smith, a senior lecturer in International Business at the University of Liverpool Management School, once wrote that “rating agencies have had a spectacularly bad track record of predicting defaults by sovereign and other major borrowers.”

Smith spreads the blame, saying that decisions from credit-rating agencies are made by relatively small teams of people; since there are so few players in the field, there is little competition, and therefore no price to pay for missing even obvious calls. And last but not least, political bias can also influence a rating agency’s call.

The Polish news website Interia would concur. Interia published an op-ed last month claiming EU authorities are constantly denouncing the Polish model because it’s shaped by the political right, when in fact it’s the French system that’s structured in such a way that the government can do almost anything, and the parliament almost nothing. “The systems of the old EU countries seem to be considered above suspicion, while those of the new members are seen as inherently suspect, and even more so when they are governed by formations that disagree with the Eurocrats in terms of ideology,” said the Interia op-ed.

Israel has been forced to fend off unfair comparisons with Poland ever since the Netanyahu government introduced judicial reform, but if any aspect of the comparison is fair, it’s that it’s not the proposed solution that’s the problem — it’s who’s doing the proposing.

If the past months of demonstrations have proven anything in Israel, it’s that the left wing is entrenched in the highest positions in the IDF, the Mossad (recently accused in the leaked US intelligence documents of supporting the street demonstrations in Israel), the judiciary, high-tech financial institutions, and labor unions. They won’t cede their power to any right-wing government without a fight.

Macron read the political tea leaves and was willing to sacrifice his political career for what he believes is right, even at the risk of a downgrade in his approval ratings, now barely hovering above 30 percent. He’s on somewhat safe ground, as France’s next presidential election is in 2027.

Netanyahu is faring even worse. A recent Channel 13 survey shows just 20 percent of Israelis feel Bibi is doing a good job.

Analyzing how Macron got away with his bold move, the French website L’Opinion wrote that while “reacting in the storm of battle is not his forte, and all governments dread having their actions dictated by events… he had to run the risk to at least defend his positions, validate his reform and gain the support of French people who are alarmed by the violence on the streets and the blockades of the strikers. These silent and worried people are now his best allies.”

If Netanyahu is going to reassert his leadership, he too must rally the silent and worried people about the anarchy in our streets and the defeatist attitudes that are disheartening the citizenry and emboldening our enemies. Netanyahu doesn’t have the luxury of waiting it out until 2027 as Macron does. The next Israeli election is always lurking around the corner.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 957)