Puts Bibi in the corner: Israel’s protests

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Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

A spat between Google and Canadian authorities is just the thin end of what is set to become a huge battle. Artificial intelligence is changing the nature of search, adding weight to news publishers' longstanding argument that they're getting ripped off.

And our British listeners will no doubt have noticed the absence, or if they're lucky, the rationing of fresh tomatoes. It turns out that pizza's favorite fruit has become the latest victim of soaring energy costs.

But first, Next month, Israel will celebrate its 75th anniversary as a state. It should be celebrations all round, but many in the country are far from jubilant. [MUSIC] On Saturday, around half a million people took to the streets protesting against a package of reforms designed to weaken the country's Supreme Court and expand the power of the Knesset, Israel's parliament. This morning, more disruption. Protests began at dawn and hundreds of thousands of people are expected to demonstrate by sundown.

We are here to protect our democracy, our country, because we feel that our country is under a brutal attack of the government, the Israeli government.

In the face of all this, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bullish. Just yesterday, he rejected a compromise proposal from the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, who warned that the country should be wary of a possible civil war and that the abyss, as he put it, was within arm's reach. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Mr. Netanyahu has spent plenty of time, plenty of times at the top of Israel's politics. But with the tiny majority he's cobbled together to get there this time with far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, this standoff has put Bibi in the corner.

So Israel is currently facing probably the widest protests in its history, and it's It's been going on now for about 10 weeks.

Anshul Pfeffer writes about Israel for The Economist.

Every weekend, hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets, and quite often also during the week, there are major protests, road blockings, gathering around the homes of cabinet ministers. And it's not stopping. It's only increasing in ferocity and in number.

The most serious protests in its history. Let's wind back. What are these protests about?

At the beginning of January, just a few days after the new Netanyahu government was inaugurated, it presented what they call a legal reform plan, which basically means weakening the Supreme Court and limiting the grounds on which the Supreme Court can rule against the government, basically taking away most of the systems of checks and balances that the Israeli democracy has. The sections of Netanyahu's coalition which are really pushing these changes are mainly the religious or ultra-Orthodox parties who see the Supreme Court as having imposed its own values on their way of life in various rulings, as being too powerful, as being basically a group of liberal-leaning judges who feel that they have the right to impose their will on the elected government's policies. They see it as a form of judicial dictatorship, while at least half, if not more, of the Israeli public seem to be in favor of keeping an independent and powerful corps. This is why hundreds of thousands of Israelis are now taking to the streets, claiming that the government's plan amounts to dictatorship.

So this is really about checks and balances and who different factions within the society think ought to have them.

Well, it's actually a much bigger debate than the checks and balances. It's about a large part of Israeli society, the more secular, more liberal part of Israeli society, which is most heavily represented both in the armed forces and in the economy, feeling that the communities represented by the Netanyahu government, which are much more religious and nationalist than the Israeli mainstream, have basically forced Netanyahu to pass this so they can overturn the court when they pursue their own agenda. And this really is what the Israelis are protesting or afraid of, not so much the actual constitutional changes, but what will come after, what policies it will allow this coalition to pursue.

But a lot of these divisions have existed for a while in Israeli society. Why is this so dangerous to Israel right now?

What has surprised many, both in the government and amongst the protesters themselves, is that two critical communities, we could call them, in Israeli society have mobilized and joined the protest. One is the tech sector, which is responsible for most of Israel's exports. They've never been involved in protest movements, and are suddenly saying now, we don't feel we'll be able to continue operating in this country if there isn't a democratic environment, if there isn't the kind of stability that the courts have given us until now. And they're basically saying that they may be forced to relocate abroad. And that's a huge threat to the Israeli economy. And then the other group is thousands of officers and pilots in Israel's reserve units. Now, the Israeli army is based very much on its reserve forces who both train and operate regularly. And we're seeing now an unprecedented number of them saying, well, if these rules go through, if the legislation passes the Knesset, we'll refuse to serve in what we will see then as a dictatorship. And this is also a threat to Israel's very security. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has been stung. He's very surprised by this outcome. And he understands that this makes it much harder for him to portray the protesters as being unpatriotic anarchists. Netanyahu has tried to be conciliatory towards the reservists, saying that there's room for disagreement and protest, but there's no room for refusal in the armed forces. And this is a bit of a climb down from his previous, much tougher response to the protests.

And given that this has exposed such rifts in Israeli society, what about the rift that we've most often spoken about with Palestinians?

So while the protests haven't focused on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, this is also part of the debate here, that there is the threat to Israel's Arab citizens, a minority which could be impacted if there isn't a Supreme Court with the powers to protect their rights. And there's wider implications in the West Bank, which is already seeing an escalation in violence in recent months. So Netanyahu has at the same time to face this growing unrest within Israel and a growing security crisis in the West Bank when some of those people who will be called upon to serve in the military if there is a major escalation in the West Bank already saying now they're not going to turn up under these current circumstances.

So there are implications here for the economy, perhaps the military, certainly the Palestinian question as ever. What is all of this instability looking like for Israel's allies?

Israel's Western allies, especially the United States, have been surprisingly vocal on this matter. Countries don't usually want to intervene in the internal affairs of their allies. But we've heard both from President Joe Biden and other senior members of administration some quite pointed remarks on the need for Israel to keep its democratic institutions strong and independent. And there's another type of ally here who's very, very worried. And I'm talking about the Jewish diaspora, especially in the United States and in Britain, where we've seen surprisingly large demonstrations of Jews who are usually very pro-Israel saying that they don't feel comfortable anymore with supporting an Israel which is less democratic and where the Supreme Court has basically been suppressed. One way in which both the US administration and the Jewish community has voiced its displeasure was basically boycotting last week the far-right finance minister, Vitali Smotrich, who made a visit to Washington. He didn't get any meetings with the administration. Most Jewish organizations shunned him.

Push out!

Push out! Push out! In the one appearance he did have, there were protesters outside. And this is not something you've ever seen before with a senior Israeli cabinet minister visiting Washington.

So if this legislation, these protests pose something of an existential threat to the country, as you say, shouldn't Mr. Netanyahu just back down?

Well, Netanyahu is trapped. He doesn't have an alternative coalition. The other parties in the Knesset will not join his government because he's indicted for corruption charges. And their position is that their prime minister can't be someone who is currently in court. So he only has the parties of his current coalition, and they are dead set on taking down the Supreme Court. Netanyahu, of course, strenuously denies any wrongdoing. On the other hand, Netanyahu, I think, fully understands the implications of what's happening, both when it comes to reservists refusing to turn up for military service, when it comes to the impact on Israel's economy. And we're hearing that he does want to somehow try and delay or suspend the legislation process. But his coalition are basically saying to him, if you want to remain in office, you've got to continue with this. And right now, the two sides seem on a collision course.

If Mr. Netanyahu is stuck, then what next?

The next two weeks, which are the last weeks of the Knesset's winter session, are going to be the crucial period because this is when the coalition is planning to pass the various laws of the first tranche of the reform in their second and third readings, which will make them final. We can expect both the protesters to take it up a few more notches and really try and bring the country to a standstill. The police may become more violent. We could see implications both in the economy and within the army. And Netanyahu is trying somehow to put out olive branches and say, you know, let's have some kind of a dialogue. But none of this seems to be of interest to the protesters. They want the whole package of legislation removed from the Knesset agenda, and only then they're prepared to talk.

And Joel, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you for having me, Jason.

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News finds us everywhere these days. Television, radio, online, through social media. But what if one day it all just went silent? On an admittedly small scale, that's essentially what Google has been experimenting with in Canada this month. Searchers have had news content filtered out from their results for weeks. It's the result of a long-running argument between news publishers and tech giants, and the arrival of artificial intelligence is about to aggravate the dispute.

Today marks the end of a pilot program that Google began in Canada last month. Now, this went on for about 5 weeks. It affected about 4% of Google users in Canada. That's about a million people.

Tom Wainwright is The Economist's tech and media editor.

And some of them weren't aware that it was going on, and so not surprisingly, some people are rather unhappy.

Well, why was Google doing this?

This is Google's response to a bill that Canada's parliament is currently considering, which would compel digital platforms, including Google and also Facebook, to pay news publishers for their content when those stories show up in Google search results or in the Facebook news feed.

The bill is a moving target. and we don't know if we will continue to be able to link to news as we do today.

And Google has said— its public policy manager Jason Key said recently that if this bill goes ahead, the company may have to simply stop showing news sites in its search results.

I want to underline, these are just tests. No decisions have been made about product changes.

Now, not surprisingly, this didn't go down all that well with Canadian politicians, and in fact, last week they hauled a load of digital executives before a committee to explain themselves.

Their democratic right has been put to the side, wouldn't you say?

And as MPs, including Kevin Waugh, highlighted, one of the problems was that these changes that Google did went on without the knowledge of some internet users.

So is this a tempest in a teacup then, if it only affected a small number of users?

Yeah, I mean, it's a small thing, but it's kind of representative of a much bigger argument that's been going on for a while now. And it's interesting because it pits these enormous new media companies, Google and Facebook, against some pretty powerful old media companies. And we saw this first of all a couple of years ago in Australia, where Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire came out swinging against Google and Facebook. And through a lot of lobbying, he and others in the media managed to persuade the Australian government to pass a law which is kind of similar to what Canada is proposing to do. It compels digital platforms to pay news publishers for their content. And there was a similar controversy in that case. Actually, it was Facebook. The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has told Facebook his government will will not be intimidated after the social media giant blocked Australian users from sharing or viewing news content in a dispute over a proposed law. And in the first year of this scheme, reportedly those platforms paid upwards of $100 million to news publishers in Australia. So ever since then, Google and Facebook have been trying to get ahead of attempts in other countries to do something similar. And the main way that they've been doing this is by setting up programs whose purpose really is to funnel money to news publishers. So Google has this thing called the News Showcase where it funnels lots of money to publishers for licensing their content. They say they intend to spend about $1 billion between 2020 and 2023. Facebook has something similar called the News Tab, and in fact, The Economist has participated in this, although it's starting to wind that down because news basically matters less to Facebook.

And what do you make of the argument that these news publishers are owed that money by the search companies and by Facebook for the results they get thrown up?

To me, it has the feel of a bit of a shakedown. Over the past decade or two, newspapers and magazines have lost huge amounts of revenue in advertising to Google and Facebook, which have eaten up the online ad market because they're frankly better at it. And the argument of publishers that they are owed money by Google just for displaying their stories in search results has always seemed to me very eccentric. I mean, that's just the way that the internet works. But I do think that things are changing now, and in particular, the way that artificial intelligence is being integrated into search engines means that now I think for the first time you can make a case that the publishers actually have a point.

So wait, why is the advent of artificial intelligence making this argument different?

Well, because it's changing the way that search engines work. And if you think of how it used to be with search engines, you would type in a question into Google or whatever, and it would give you a load of links to outside sources. So it could be to newspaper websites or whatever. Over the years, those search engines have been getting a bit cleverer. And so now if you Google something like, what's Canada's population, it will probably just tell you. You won't necessarily have to click on the link to the Globe and Mail or whatever to find out that information. And what AI is doing is obviously taking that on a step or several steps so that even if you ask a search engine like, say, the new Bing quite a complex question like, can you give me an analysis of Canada's latest elections or something like that, it will just do it. It just gives you an answer. And Bing provides footnotes which can take you on to the Globe and Mail, or, you know, it could be The Economist or whatever. But obviously not all users are going to click on those. In the Google and others could say, well, we're sending you lots of traffic. Increasingly though, they don't do that. They just give you the answer using information harvested from other sites. Publishers now, they're worried about this, but you also, you talk to some of them and they're almost kind of licking their lips really at the prospect of another way in which they may now have a case for forcing some of these digital platforms to pay to license their content rather than sort of piggybacking off it in the way that they've done until now.

But let's take that argument to its logical conclusion. I mean, essentially, if AI, you know, things like ChatGPT and so on are just ingesting the whole of the internet and then spitting it back out on demand, then it's not just news publishers, for example, that are having their stuff used, repurposed, and essentially revenue taken away.

Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, I think we're going to see loads of copyright arguments now about AI. So you see some of these generative AI programs that can make artwork based on text prompts. and they have to get their material from somewhere, right? And it's not at all clear who owns that. Or you get ones that make music. Imagine if you train a generative AI model to make music based on feeding it the collected works of Bob Dylan or something, and now you tell it to make more songs in exactly that style. What do you owe Bob Dylan? Do you owe him anything? I mean, if that's what the model has been trained on, it's sort of his work, but not. You know, these are really, really tough questions. And I think we're going to see more of these questions all over the place. News publishers are possibly in the vanguard of an argument that is going to get bigger and bigger and extend to artwork, music, and who knows what else.

Tom, thanks very much for joining us.

Thank you.

British shoppers have noticed a change on supermarket shelves. Certain produce has been missing. Tomatoes have been especially hard to come by. Recently, large shops that had the fruit in stock limited customers' purchases to just 3 at one time.

Now Tesco has joined Aldi, Asda, and Morrisons in rationing the amount of peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers that customers can buy. Lidl has become the latest major supermarket to limit the number of salad items.

Millions of shoppers are facing empty shelves, perhaps for weeks to come, at least Some restrictions are now starting to ease, but questions remain about the shortages. Some people attribute them to Brexit, Britain's departure from the European Union, which disrupted supply chains for many products. But that blame may be misplaced.

To understand why Britain has run out of salad, it's best to think of a tomato less as a fruit and more as a kind of energy storage.

Gavin Jackson is our Britain economics correspondent.

They absorb energy either from the sun's rays or they can get it some other way. The most efficient way of producing it is to put it in a field, let it just get that ambient sunlight hitting it. But the alternative, the one that Britain often has to rely on in winter, is burning fossil fuels to provide the heat, the light, and even the carbon dioxide that these plants love to eat. So there's Canadian scientist Waclyffe Smill who's calculated that a tomato grown in a sunny field requires about 22 kilocalories of additional energy. But grow one in a heated greenhouse and it requires much, much more to produce, about 150 times as much energy as it offers in food is needed to bring that tomato to market.

But Gavin, I presume that growing tomatoes is always energy intensive. What's changed this year that has resulted in these shortages?

Well, what's changed is that Europe is in an energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Natural gas prices are through the roof and electric prices with them. They've come down a bit, but they're still very expensive compared to normal. And that means in Britain, tomatoes are a casualty of the energy crisis.

Tell us more about that. Tomatoes seem an unlikely casualty of the energy crisis.

Yeah, so I guess there's two things to remember. First is they need a lot of carbon dioxide, tomatoes. They absorb it from the ambient air, and that carbon dioxide has to come from somewhere. They also rely on fertilizer, and that fertilizer has to come from somewhere, and that fertilizer typically is made through energy-intensive processes. And then the final thing is they just need heat and light, and all the heat and light has to come from somewhere as well. So when the sun's not shining, all the energy has to come from somewhere else. That often means burning fossil fuels.

So Gavin, in light of rising energy prices, why can't vendors just raise the price of tomatoes accordingly?

So some have raised their prices. By this past January, tomato prices were about 35% higher than 2 years before. But others have just shut up shop completely. We've really seen the effects of this in February because it takes about 3 months to grow a tomato. Back in November, they decided that the energy costs just maybe weren't worth it, and then they didn't plant. And so now we've hit this crunch point.

And so if high energy prices make growing tomatoes in Britain unfeasible, can the market make up for it by importing tomatoes grown elsewhere?

In a normal year, they can, because there'd be more in the Netherlands to import. These Dutch growers who do it in similar heated greenhouse under LED lights. Would have more, but a lot of them have simply said they're not going to take the risk this year that they'll be out of pocket because of energy prices. Then your next option is to go somewhere where it's still warm and sunny. That would be Spain, or in Britain's case, a lot of the time is Morocco. Unfortunately, this year, the weather's not been great. So Spain and Morocco both had bad weather. They've also had a problem of viruses. This brown rugose tomato virus has killed a lot of the production in Morocco and Spain. So it's kind of a perfect storm. Winter tomatoes are much rarer than normal.

And are tomatoes the only casualty of these crises?

It's the same right across salad, basically. If it requires heat, sunshine, and it's winter, then this year there's been a problem. So British supermarkets started rationing tomatoes and some other vegetables. One low-cost supermarket called Lidl announced in February that it was limiting sales to 3 tomatoes, cucumbers, or peppers per person. Britain's Minister for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, Even implied Britain should be swapping their tomatoes for things like turnips that are easier to grow here in the winter. A lot of people would be eating turnips right now rather than thinking necessarily about aspects of lettuce and tomatoes and similar. This is where expats and some continental Europeans who don't have shortages of, say, cucumbers or peppers, they're blaming Brexit. You know, you go on social media and they're sharing photos of fully stocked supermarkets. So they've coined these shortages vegshit, you know, veg Brexit. To illustrate that it's really a British-specific problem.

So is that fair, do you think? Is Brexit the problem?

I don't think it really is, to be honest with you. I mean, Brexit certainly hasn't helped, but it's more kind of the hyper-competitiveness of Britain's supermarkets. So if you go to a small shop, they will have loads of tomatoes on sale, they'll have buckets of cucumbers and loads of peppers, but they're much more expensive than they are normally. The large supermarkets often just don't want to raise their prices. So the option they've chosen is to ration veg instead. The government's food czar, who's advising them on food issues, said there's kind of this weird supermarket culture in Britain that we don't have anywhere else, where the supermarkets are just trying to keep prices low and stable, and they'd rather do other things like rationing than put up prices.

All right, Gavin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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