Former justice minister: Israel no longer has a Zionist majority, democracy under threat

At the Table: Because he is widely regarded as a figure of integrity, Meridor is frequently interviewed by local and international media on legal and ethical issues.

By GREER FAY CASHMAN, ERICA SCHACHNE NOVEMBER 17, 2024 19:30

Dan Meridor. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)

Our meeting with former cabinet minister Dan Meridor is not in some neutral coffee shop or hotel lounge but in the home in Rehavia that his grandfather purchased 90 years ago.

It is the home in which he and his three siblings were raised, and Meridor is one of the few people whose family lived in the area before the establishment of the state who still resides there.

Many of the friends of his youth have moved to Tel Aviv and beyond or to other parts of Jerusalem.

While there are some new buildings on the street, his home remains in many respects as it was when Meridor was a boy. The decor is classic Israeli – warm wood and filled with books.

Like many well-known Jerusalemites, Meridor is an alumnus of the Gymnasia Rehavia, as are former president Reuven Rivlin, former minister and MK Nahman Shai, and former politician and ambassador to China Matan Vilnai.

Meeting with Dan Meridor in his Rehavia home: Writer Greer Fay Cashman (L) and ‘In Jerusalem’ Editor Erica Schachne. (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)

Others, now deceased, included Uzi Narkiss, a general who fought in the War of Independence and the Six Day War; Israel’s fourth president, Ephrain Katzir; Supreme Court president Miriam Naor; famous writers Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua; archaeologist, politician and former IDF chief of staff Yigal Yadin; and Yoni Netanyahu, the current premier’s brother, who commanded the Entebbe rescue operation and lost his life doing so. Meridor and Netanyahu served together in the school’s students’ union but did not socialize with each other.

At that time, Rehavia was a garden neighborhood populated by Israel’s cultural, judicial, and political elite.

Although most of the residents were Mapainiks, there were also quite a few Herutniks, Mapai and Herut being the predecessors of today’s Labor and Likud parties. But they all lived in harmony and mutual respect for one another. Meridor has no recollection of ever having been harassed because of his political views or those of his family.

Jerusalem was small at the time, and everyone knew everyone else.

The Rivlin family lived directly across the road, while friends and neighbors included highly esteemed judges such as Haim Cohen and Moshe Landau.

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Many of the inhabitants of Rehavia in those days were traditional Jews, making Kiddush on Friday night and going to synagogue, but also attending Saturday soccer games.

Many more Orthodox Jews now live in Rehavia, Meridor says.

Building the state

Meridor’s grandfather, who had settled in Jerusalem in 1935, came from an ultra-Orthodox family, and in his student days had been considered a genius. But at 18 or 19, he stepped back from religion and became totally secular.

Nonetheless, it was he who taught his grandson for his bar mitzvah. In relating this, Meridor implies that whether one is religious or not, it is important to be familiar with one’s heritage, and his grandfather was certainly knowledgeable.

The Meridor family were ardent Zionists on both his mother’s and father’s sides.

His maternal grandfather, a journalist with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), was personally acquainted with Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

Meridor’s father, Eliyahu, a Russian-born Polish-educated lawyer, was a member of the Polish branch of Betar (the Revisionist youth movement) before moving from Warsaw to Jerusalem in 1936. He joined the Irgun, the clandestine paramilitary organization that fought against British rule, and was arrested and deported to a detention camp in Africa together with other members of the group. He returned to Jerusalem in 1948 – the year after Dan was born – and was wounded fighting in the War of Independence.

Eliyahu Meridor was among the founders of the right-wing political party Herut, and chaired its Jerusalem branch. The key founding fathers of Herut were Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, each of whom eventually became prime minister, after a very long struggle against the long ruling Labor Party and its affiliates.

The elder Meridor was elected to the Knesset in 1959, and re-elected in 1961 and again in 1965. He died in 1966, during his third term, at the age of 52.

A year later, during the Six Day War, his eldest son, Dan, served as a tank commander in the Sinai. When Mordechai Gur, who commanded the forces that entered Jerusalem’s Old City, famously announced “The Temple Mount is in our hands,” Meridor was in the southern desert and not in Jerusalem. Though thrilled like all other Israelis at the time, he was also upset and angry at having missed out on participating in such a momentous event in Israel’s history.

Like many other Jerusalemites, he had been eager to visit the Western Wall, but this was impossible before 1967. However, Mount Zion, which is outside the Old City walls, was accessible, and Meridor remembers going there with his father every Tisha B’Av.

When he did eventually make his way to the Western Wall, it was not as impressive as it is today. The area was small and minus the grandiose surroundings which have been added over the years.

For all that, there was a certain feeling of awe, and to this very day, whenever he passes through the Jaffa Gate, Meridor has the sense of leaving the lower Jerusalem and entering the higher, holy Jerusalem.

Though not religious, he is traditional, and finds it slightly uncomfortable when attending services in non-Orthodox, non-Ashkenazi congregations. He sees nothing wrong with them – it’s just not part of how he grew up.

Throughout his youth, Meridor accompanied his father to Shabbat services at the Hanassi Synagogue in Rehavia, and it was there that he had his bar mitzvah and his children had theirs.

Dedicated public servant

After completing his mandatory army service with the rank of captain, which he continued to hold as a reservist, Dan Meridor studied law at the Hebrew University, and later joined the law firm of Haim Zadok, where his father had worked. Zadok was a Mapai politician who held several ministerial portfolios, including that of justice minister, and it did not bother him at all to have die-hard Herutniks working in his office.

In retrospect, Meridor says that he became a lawyer because his father was a lawyer. He views the legal profession as a mission, as a means of doing public service. “It’s something I grew up with, and to this day, I love law.”

The Hebrew University, where Meridor studied law, was also where his Vienna-born mother, Ra’anana, who died a year ago at the age of 100, was professor emerita of Greek language and classical Greek culture, having published books and essays about the wealth and beauty of the Greek language.

After Menachem Begin became Israel’s first right-wing prime minister in 1977, he appointed Meridor as cabinet secretary. Meridor said that there was no special reason for the choice – it was simply that “he knew me.” Likud had been formed four years earlier through an alliance of various right-wing parties, which in 1988 merged into a single party – the Likud.

The original Likud was very different and had a different set of values compared to today’s party, he reminisces. Meridor declines to elaborate on this except for the issue of judicial reform, which comes into the conversation at a much later stage.

Although he missed out on the initial entry into the Old City at the end of the Six Day War, he did participate in or witness other historic moments. In 1978, he accompanied Begin to Camp David and was present when the prime minister signed the Camp David Accords along with US president Jimmy Carter and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

Knowing from a historical standpoint that aliyah in the late 19th and early 20th century was spurred by the pogroms in Russia and antisemitic incidents throughout Eastern Europe, Meridor several decades later used to go to the airport to welcome planeloads of Jews from the Soviet Union who had come to the national homeland to make new and free lives for themselves. “It was very moving,” he recalls.

After Begin, Meridor also served as cabinet secretary to Yitzhak Shamir. The two prime ministers had distinct personalities, so it was not quite the same for Meridor to work with Shamir after having held the same position with Begin.

“Begin was an impressive leader with charisma, and a full democrat; Shamir was much more practical, but both respected the balance of powers,” he says, referring to the judiciary, which is independent of the government (cabinet) and the Knesset. “Begin had the courage to go for peace immediately; Shamir took a tougher stance.”

As an example of Begin’s democratic character, Meridor cites the prime minister’s reaction to the demonstrations against him after he agreed to Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai. Yosef Burg, who was internal affairs minister, offered to have the demonstrators moved away from the Prime Minister’s Residence. Begin wouldn’t hear of it, declaring that it was their right to demonstrate.

It was not like the demonstrations of today where barriers are put up outside the official residences of the president and the prime minister, and demonstrators are kept some distance away. At that time, demonstrators stood quite close to the house, assembling on Balfour Road and Smolenskin Street. No matter how much they might have disturbed him, Begin refused to trample on their rights.

Many ministerial, Knesset roles

In 1984, Meridor became a legislator, and four years later was appointed justice minister in Shamir’s national unity government.

Later in a series of administrations led by Benjamin Netanyahu, he served as finance minister, minister without portfolio in the Prime Minister’s Office – responsible for national defense and diplomatic strategy – deputy prime minister, and minister of intelligence and atomic energy.

Netanyahu’s appetite for controlling power was obvious even in his early days as prime minister. The two were frequently at loggerheads over the Finance Ministry’s policy and decisions, until Meridor, fed up by Netanyahu’s constant interference, resigned in 1997 and left the cabinet.

He also left Likud soon after that, but he returned some years later.

Other than his ministerial portfolios, Meridor held various Knesset positions. The ones closest to his heart were being chairman of the foreign affairs and defense committee, as well as being a member of the Constitution Law and Justice Committee, and the Ethics Committee.

He has a genuine love for law, believes that it is imperative for Israel to draft and implement a constitution, and is a stickler for ethical conduct.

Because he is widely regarded as a figure of integrity, Meridor is frequently interviewed by local and international media on legal and ethical issues.

During a six-year stint outside the Knesset, he served in executive positions in various prestigious organizations, and did so again after concluding his Knesset career in 2013.

Private citizen

At this point, Meridor was again approached by a number of organizations to serve as president or chairman. He was also approached by various political parties with offers to join, but he declined because he did not want to betray his own conscience.

His personal interests are many and varied, and are reflected in the positions that he has accepted.

Aside from that, public service is in his blood, and public service on educational, cultural, and diplomatic levels is the keystone to all the positions he has accepted. One of the most recent such posts was as president of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations (ICFR), a non-partisan body under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress, in which active and retired local and foreign diplomats, scholars, government officials, leading businesspeople, and journalists come together to discuss foreign policies of Israel and other countries, with particular emphasis on Israel and Jewish affairs.

It also helps that Meridor is a lover of language. He speaks several, which he says stems from the fact that he studied Latin at school – though when he was growing up, the foreign language heard most frequently in the streets of Rehavia and at conferences was German.

These days, when he goes to conferences almost anywhere in Israel, Hebrew is the prevailing language, but Russian is the most frequently spoken foreign language. Admittedly, visiting heads of state or government who address ICFR gatherings all speak English, but there is an additional icebreaker when Meridor can address them in one of the European languages at his command.

Other organizations of which he is or was the president or chairman or in another senior capacity include: the Jerusalem Foundation, where he served as international chairman; the Institute for National Security Studies, where he was the deputy chairman; Bezalel Academy of Art and Design as chairman of the board; the public council of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he was chairman; the Israel Museum, of which he was chairman of the board; and a board member of the Gesher Theater. He was also a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, and had a finger in the pie in several other places as well.

Meridor refuses to play favorites, saying that each organization or institution demanded a certain activity on his part and that he was happy to do what had to be done.

Defender of democracy

Eventually, the conversation turns to the inevitable – the attempt by the present administration to revive the issue of judicial reform, despite its negative impact on national unity and the damage that it caused to the economy and to relations between friends and even within families.

It seems that Israel is a nation that does not learn from its mistakes.

In principle, Meridor is not averse to change. For instance, he sees the character of Jerusalem changing as urban renewal pervades most of the city’s neighborhoods. There are some things he likes and others he dislikes, but he accepts the fact that change is taking place all the time, saying that it’s less noticeable when it is not radical.

One of the major changes over the course of time has been the demographic one, especially in Jerusalem, which is no longer small and backward but a thriving metropolis.

But from a demographic standpoint, in Meridor’s view Israel no longer has a Zionist majority. The population in Jerusalem is roughly a third haredi, a third Arab, and a third Zionist.

Inasmuch as this is of concern, what worries him more is that Israel’s democracy is under threat.

Judicial reform as presented by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, with the backing of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is definitely radical and goes against the grain of civil liberties, he states.

“They want a government with no barriers,” says Meridor. “They were not able to go all the way, but they haven’t given up. There was an attempt by the government to weaken checks and balances to remove from the judiciary its duty to defend human rights. Democracy is not just what the majority wants.”

IT BOTHERS him that democracy can be used as a tool of abuse. He also finds it disturbing that the government is part of the Knesset, which he attributes to the fact that there is no constitution, even though some of the Basic Laws are already in place for the day when there will be a constitution. In his view, a constitution is central, specifically when it comes to the defense of human rights.

But if the government succeeds in pushing through judicial reform, Meridor, as a lawyer who fights corruption, is fearful that human rights will disappear under the new status quo. “They want to change basic values. I’m sitting at home, and I see the country going down.”

Earlier governments fought with the judiciary, he says, but unlike the present one, no one fought against the role of the judiciary.

Looking back, he says that after 1945, the world went through a corrective change that eventually led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He leaps fast forward to a negative change: “Now you see what’s happening in France and Hungary and other countries.”

It is impossible to have a conversation in Israel these days without mentioning the exemptions from the military for haredi young men, whose leaders will not allow them to contribute their share to national security. Meridor finds it horrifying that the exemption has become an ideology.

The National Religious stream has managed to serve very successfully in the IDF, he notes, pointing as he always does to the onus of morality – for which there is no exception.■

At home with Meridor

The Meridor apartment is a walk-up, which is the only sign of its age. Inside, it is spacious and classically modern, with light-colored furniture and furnishings, beautiful carpets on the floor, paintings on the walls, and a well-stocked, L-shaped library. The private quarters are upstairs.

Frequently interviewed on radio and television and by the local and international print media, Dan Meridor is perfectly at ease, answers questions unhesitatingly, and makes no bones about the subjects about which he doesn’t want to discuss.

He is charmingly frank, and also a good host, offering espresso out of delicate cups only a minute or two after we have settled on the comfortable sofa.

Widowed a year ago, he prepares the coffee himself, and even goes to the extent of asking whether we prefer sugar or sweetener.

When he sits down, it is impossible not to notice the finely striped blue and white socks that he is wearing, and finally the question pops out: Did he get them on an El Al flight?

He grins and responds that he did, and he loves to wear them at home.

Throughout the interview, his cellphone sits within easy reach on the coffee table, and its ringing interrupts the flow of conversation several times.

It’s obvious that Meridor is still a much-in-demand busy individual.

What’s next on the agenda?

More time with family.

“I spend more time with my grandchildren than I ever did with my children,” says the father of four and grandfather of 12, four of whom are currently serving in the IDF – representing the fourth generation of Meridors in service to their country and their people.