The Woman at the Center of the Struggle for Israel’s Soul

Israel's attorney-general, a thorn in the side of Netanyahu's authoritarian overhaul, faces an explosive dismissal effort. For Women's History Month, we look at a woman making history in her way.

Israel’s independent-minded Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara finds herself at the epicenter of a political firestorm rocking Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. On Sunday Cabinet ministers met to commence an unprecedented procedure to fire her amid growing protests in the streets, cementing her status as a symbol of Israel’s fragile and besieged democracy.

Netanyahu did not attend the meeting — which he convened — because he is in a conflict of interest due to his ongoing bribery trial, and believes you can fool enough of the people enough of the time. Baharav-Miara herself stayed away as well because, as she wrote to the ministers, the discussion has "no legal validity." In a scathing letter that elevates this fracas above local politics and into a chapter of the global populist drama actually led by Donald Trump, she wrote that Israel’s "government wants to be above the law" and is trying to promote "not governance, but unlimited authoritarian power."

In Israel’s corner of the global drama, the government is trying to reboot Netanyahu’s stalled authoritarian overhaul project under the long shadow of national trauma following the October 7 Hamas massacre. To enable this reboot, it is trying to replace both the head of the Shin Bet security agency and Baharav-Miara with compliant loyalists. So as Women’s History Month winds down, we devote this article to a women making a mark on history.

To set up the story, let’s zoom out for a second.