When executive power operates without effective judicial oversight, the state forfeits its constitutional legitimacy and degenerates into an arbitrary regime of force
The summary of a book Diary of a Crisis: Israel in Turmoil, authored by Saul Friedländer
Noor Muhammed Marri Advocate |Islamabad
Today I share the summary of an important book with my readers. The text under our focus is Diary of a Crisis: Israel in Turmoil, authored by the preeminent historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Saul Friedländer. As a Holocaust survivor and one of the world’s most distinguished scholars of totalitarianism, state fragility, and historical memory, Friedländer brings a rare depth of vision to contemporary political analysis. He does not write as a casual political commentator, but as a chronicler trained to detect the early warnings of institutional collapse, ideological extremism, and national self-destruction.
In Diary of a Crisis, Friedländer provides a profound historical and moral autopsy of a nation undergoing simultaneous internal constitutional decay and external existential trauma. Begun in early 2023 amid massive domestic street demonstrations, his journal records a fateful turning point. The core thesis of his work begins with a meticulous diagnosis of the executive judicial overhaul initiated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Friedländer argues that these proposed executive encroachments upon the bench were not mere technical adjustments to administrative law, but represented a deliberate, ideological campaign to dismantle the state’s sole effective mechanism of institutional oversight. Lacking a formal written constitution, the state relies almost entirely on an independent judiciary to protect fundamental rights, maintain procedural norms, and restrain executive overreach. When executive power attempts to subjugate the bench, legal order is subverted into an instrument of unchecked majoritarian rule. Friedländer demonstrates how this domestic power grab was designed to serve extreme political elements seeking to centralize authority, immunize executive actors from legal accountability, and alter the fundamental democratic character of the state.
However, the defining originality of Friedländer’s thesis lies in his critique of liberal Zionism and what he famously designates as the “elephant in the room”. While hundreds of thousands of citizens flooded the streets throughout 2023 to champion judicial independence and democratic values, Friedländer points out a glaring moral contradiction: the mainstream protest movement fought fiercely to preserve democratic norms for Jewish citizens while maintaining absolute silence regarding the decades-long military occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. Friedländer insists that domestic democracy and military occupation are structurally incompatible. The moral compromises, legal double standards, and authoritarian security practices required to govern millions of disenfranchised non-citizens over decades inevitably leak back into the domestic political architecture. An executive that grows accustomed to operating with absolute, unrestrained discretion in peripheral territories will eventually deploy those exact methods against its own internal democratic safeguards.
Tracing the historical trajectory that led to this impasse, Friedländer draws upon his personal memory to illuminate a broader ideological shift within the state. He recalls a pivotal, historical conversation with former Prime Minister Golda Meir, who once flatly asserted to him that “there is no Palestinian people”. Through this recollection, Friedländer illustrates how long-standing state denial regarding Palestinian self-determination transformed early secular, pragmatic statecraft into an ideological dead end. Over the decades, secular security realism was systematically displaced by religious-messianic nationalism. Unlike secular leaders who view territory through the negotiable matrix of strategic security, religious nationalists view territorial concession as theological treason. This shift rendered rational, long-term foreign policy impossible, replacing pragmatic diplomacy with perpetual settlement expansion and territorial annexation.
When resuming his diary entries following the tragic intelligence and military failure of October 7, 2023, Friedländer frames the security collapse as the direct structural outcome of prolonged internal political decay. The executive branch’s obsessive focus on crippling the judiciary and pursuing ideological battles severely fractured national unity, politicized security institutions, and blinded state leadership to impending external threats. The nation faced its gravest security crisis under an executive that had deliberately systematically weakened its own institutional foundations.
Despite the overwhelming grief and ongoing warfare, Friedländer concludes his central argument with an uncompromising defense of the two-state framework. He firmly rejects the belief that permanent counter-insurgency, military dominance, or status-quo management can deliver lasting peace. Reliance strictly on military force without a political horizon leads only to perpetual warfare, moral degradation, and international isolation. For Friedländer, ending the occupation, establishing equal rights, and securing a negotiated two-state solution are not naive concessions, but the indispensable prerequisites for preserving the state’s democratic identity and strategic survival.
Examining Friedländer’s thesis within a global comparative context yields profound insights into the mechanics of democratic backsliding, particularly in post-colonial state structures where the executive branch deliberately forces the judiciary to its lowest ebb. Across multiple developing and transitional post-colonial states, most prominently in Pakistan, a strikingly similar structural crisis unfolds when executive power systematically neutralizes the judiciary to eliminate institutional friction. In these environments, the subjugation of the bench is rarely achieved solely through formal constitutional amendments; rather, it occurs through a combination of executive coercion, legislative engineering, intelligence oversight, judicial intimidation, and selective patronage.
When an executive succeeds in reducing the judiciary to a rubber-stamp apparatus, the constitutional delicate balance of power collapses entirely. The judiciary, which is intended to stand as the guardian of fundamental rights and the arbiter of state power, becomes an administrative arm of the executive and security apparatus. In Pakistan’s governance history, judicial deference to executive decrees—often rationalized through doctrines of necessity or enforced through political maneuvering—has consistently eroded public trust in legal institutions. Once the bench is rendered helpless or compliant, state accountability vanishes. Executive bodies govern with total immunity, political dissent is criminalized under arbitrary laws, civilian legal protections are bypassed, and political engineering becomes the institutional norm.
Comparing these state trajectories demonstrates that when a judiciary is forced to its lowest ebb, the consequences extend far beyond legal technicalities. It triggers a profound collapse in governance, economic stability, and civil cohesion. In states where executive power reigns supreme over weak courts, investment flees due to the absence of contract enforcement and property rights protection, political polarization intensifies, and non-state actors or peripheral movements lose faith in legal avenues of grievance redressal. Just as Friedländer demonstrates that Israel’s attempt to subordinate courts while maintaining military dominance created internal fragility and strategic blindness, post-colonial states that weaken their judiciaries to serve executive dominance inevitably find themselves trapped in perpetual political instability, severe institutional paralysis, and authoritarian drift.
As my own assessment of this global dynamic—speaking from the perspective of an advocate and mediator who deals daily with the sanctity of law and conflict resolution—it is evident that a strong, unyielding judiciary is not a luxury of consolidated Western democracies, but the absolute life-support system of any constitutional state. When executive power operates without effective judicial oversight, the state forfeits its constitutional legitimacy and degenerates into an arbitrary regime of force. No nation can achieve long-term economic prosperity, national security, or social harmony when its legal system is compromised for executive expediency. True national strength does not reside in an unchecked executive or military apparatus, but in the absolute independence of the bench, the unwavering supremacy of the constitution, and the uncompromising protection of equal rights for every individual subject to state authority.
Read: Dilemma of Modern Intelligentsia
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Noor Muhammad, Advocate and Mediator, Islamabad
