On January 4, 2023, the newly elected government led by longtime Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, unveiled its “judicial reform”: a plan to legislate four constitutional amendments that would effectively dismantle the existing checks on the power of the executive.

Despite having a solid majority in parliament, just one of these amendments passed into law — and was quickly struck down by the Supreme Court. The four amendments were introduced as the reform’s “first phase;” a second phase was never announced.

At the core of this achievement was a small, ad-hoc group of concerned former public servants and activists. Under the group's leadership, initial anti-government protests quickly metastasized into the largest protest movement in Israel’s history. The small leadership group became the Protest Headquarters — a well-oiled protest machine with a full-time staff and thousands of volunteers from 200 organizations. At its peak, the movement had 400,000 people marching in the streets of a country with a population of 10 million.

What were the keys to the Protest Headquarters’ success? In this panel, we ask this of three key members of the Protest Headquarters. We will discuss the mechanisms that enabled its growth, the challenges and lessons learned from the movement, and the future prospects for Israeli democracy, with attention to dilemmas as Israelis return to the polls in late 2026.
 

More About the Speakers:

Yossi Kucik previously held several senior positions in the Israeli public sector, including Director-General of the Prime Minister’s Office, Commissioner of Wages at the Ministry of Finance, and Director-General of the Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption, among other key roles. Following his public service career, Kucik transitioned into the private sector. He currently serves as Chairman of Direct Insurance Group, one of Israel’s leading financial groups. In addition, he owns two consulting firms: one specializing in Media strategy and the other focused on compensation and wage consulting. Kucik is also extensively involved in public and social initiatives. He serves as Chairman of Beit Yigal Allon and is a member of the Presidium of the Israel Democracy Institute, among several other public leadership roles. In January 2023, Kucik, together with Orni Petruschka, Dan Halutz, and Yehuda Eder, established the headquarters of the protest movement opposing the Netanyahu government’s proposed judicial overhaul, which they viewed as a threat to Israeli democratic institutions. Joined by additional public figures and activists, the headquarters played a pivotal role in the movement, bringing millions of Israelis to the streets in protest and successfully halting significant parts of the proposed legislation affecting Israel’s democratic framework. Kucik holds an MBA from the Hebrew University, is married to Nirit, a father of three, and a grandfather of four.

Orni Petruschka works to make Israel an open, liberal, and democratic society for all its citizens. In recent years, Orni has been a social entrepreneur. He co-founded the Resistance Headquarters against the current Israeli government; initiated several activities to promote philanthropy, especially for supporting liberal-democracy causes; and was involved in activities for advancing a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In addition, Orni co-chairs the Abraham Initiatives, an NGO which promotes equality and inclusion for Israel’s Arab citizens, and serves as Chairman of the Board of Molad — the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy. Previously, Orni served as a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, studied electrical engineering at the Technion and at Cornell University, and had a career as a technology entrepreneur, having started and managed two successful telecom equipment companies that were successfully acquired, one of which was considered a landmark transaction for Israeli high tech. Orni lives in Ramat Gan; he is married and a father of 3 daughters.

Adv. Dina Zilber, former Deputy Attorney General of Israel, is regarded as one of the country’s leading jurists. During her eight-year tenure as Deputy Attorney General (2012–2020), Adv. Zilber was responsible for providing ongoing legal counsel to the government and its various ministries on a wide range of complex, sensitive, and highly consequential matters, and for shaping the Attorney General’s positions across many areas within her responsibility. Prior to this appointment, Adv. Zilber served for 16 years as a senior attorney in the High Court of Justice Department at the State Attorney’s Office, where she represented the State before the Israeli Supreme Court in more than 1,600 petitions concerning major public importance. Adv. Zilber has authored two books: Bureaucracy as Politics (2006) and In the Name of the Law: The Attorney General and the Affairs that Shook the State (2012). She also initiated and edited an additional volume titled Roots in Law, published in honor of Israel’s 70th anniversary — a panoramic collection surveying the development of Israeli legal practice from the founding of the state to the present day, written by legal professionals from across all generations and departments of the Ministry of Justice. Adv. Zilber has received numerous public honors and awards, including the “Women at the Forefront” Award in the Government and Politics category (2017); the Leon Charney Award of Recognition from the Deborah Forum – Women in Foreign Policy and National Security (2018); the Transparency Shield Award from Transparency International Israel (2019); the Gorny Award for Public Sector Jurists (2020); and the Knight of Quality Government Award in the Executive Branch category (2020). Adv. Zilber holds an LL.M. with honors from Tel Aviv University. Over the years, she has taught undergraduate and graduate law students at various academic institutions. She lectures extensively in public and professional forums, and regularly publishes both legal scholarship and opinion articles in the press. Since the onset of Israel's judicial overhaul, she has also served as a key member of the Protest Headquarters Advisory Board.
 

The Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law invites you to a seminar with Yossi Melman, one of Israel's most prominent intelligence journalists and a New York Times bestselling author, for a conversation on the lessons emerging from Israel's recent intelligence challenges. Melman will draw on decades of reporting on Mossad, Shin Bet, and Military Intelligence while exploring the failures, adaptations, and ongoing dilemmas facing Israel's intelligence community in the wake of the Gaza war, the confrontation with Iran, and the conflict in Lebanon.

The structured conversation — led by Or Rabinowitz and introduced by Amichai Magen — will be followed by a Q&A, offering participants the opportunity to engage directly with one of the foremost analysts of Israeli security.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Yossi Melman is one of his country's leading investigative reporters, as well as a security and intelligence commentator for the daily newspaper Haaretz.

He has written 10 books on his subject matters. One of them, Every Spy a Prince, was a New York Times bestseller. His book Spies Against Armageddon, a history of Israel's intelligence community, was published in the US in 2012. (Read his tips for writing about espionage and military intelligence in How To Write a History of Something Secret).

He is the recipient of the Sokolov Award, Israel's most prestigious journalism gong, and a few other Jewish American awards. He has also created and written Hebrew and English scripts for film documentaries. One of them, Inside the Mossad, is a four-part Netflix series.

On Wednesday, May 13, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Matthew Levitt — an expert on counterterrorism and intelligence — to discuss the war with Iran and the aftermath in the Middle East.

On Wednesday, May 6, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Hoover Institution's Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on the Middle East and the Islamic World are pleased to welcome Izabella Tabarovsky for a talk titled From Soviet Antisemitism to Contemporary Antizionism.

Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary antisemitism, a sought-after speaker and lecturer, and the author of Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide (Wicked Son). She is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC; senior fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities in Palo Alto; and a fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa.

A contributing writer at Tablet, she has also published in Newsweek, Sapir, Quillette, The National Interest, Fathom, The Forward, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Her essays have appeared in several edited volumes, including October 7: The Wars over Words and Deeds (Academic Studies Press); The Rebirth of Antisemitism in the 21st Century: From the Academic Boycott Campaign into the Mainstream (Routledge); Mapping the New Left Antisemitism: The Fathom Essays(Routledge); Sionismo y antisionismo: Un debate necesario (RiL editores); and Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People (Wicked Son). Her work has been translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Polish, Russian, Czech, and other languages.

Follow her on X @IzaTabaro

On Wednesday, February 25, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Judea Pearl to present the 2026 Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture. He will discuss his latest book, Coexistence and Other Fighting Words: Selected Writings of Judea Pearl.

The Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture honors the life of Daniel Pearl (Class of '85), who was a journalist, musician, and family man dedicated to the ideals of peace and humanity. In 2002, Daniel was kidnapped and killed by terrorists in Pakistan while working as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

The 2026 Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture is presented by the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program in partnership with Hillel at Stanford.
 

On Wednesday, January 14, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is pleased to welcome Ambassador Dennis Ross — a veteran U.S. negotiator in Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and advisor on Middle East policy — to discuss his latest book, Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World. The discussion will be in conversation with Michael McFaul and moderated by Amichai Magen.

About the Book

In a world that is multipolar and America has less relative power, the United States no longer has the luxury to practice statecraft badly.

The United States may still be the world's strongest country, but it now faces real challenges at both a global and regional level. The unipolar world which was dominated by America after the Cold War is gone. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is both a military and economic competitor and it is actively challenging the norms and institutions that the US used to shape an international order during and after the Cold War. Directly and indirectly, it has partners trying to undo the American-dominated order, with Russia seeking to extinguish Ukraine, and Iran trying to undermine American presence, influence, and any set of rules for the Middle East that it does not dominate.

The failures of American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq have weakened the domestic consensus for a US leadership role internationally. Traditions in US foreign policy, especially the American sense of exceptionalism, have at different points justified both withdrawal and international activism. Iraq and Afghanistan fed the instinct to withdraw and to end the "forever wars." But the folly of these US interventions did not necessarily mean that all use of force to back diplomacy or specific political ends was wrong; rather it meant in these cases, the Bush Administration failed in the most basic task of good statecraft: namely, marrying objectives and means. Nothing more clearly defines effective statecraft than identifying well-considered goals and then knowing how to use all the tools of statecraft--diplomatic, economic, military, intelligence, information, cyber, scientific, education--to achieve them. But all too often American presidents have adopted goals that were poorly defined and not thought through.

In Statecraft 2.0, Dennis Ross explains why failing to marry objectives and means has happened so often in American foreign policy. He uses historical examples to illustrate the factors that account for this, including political pressures, weak understanding of the countries where the US has intervened, changing objectives before achieving those that have been established, relying too much on ourselves and too little on allies and partners. To be fair, there have not only been failures, there have been successes as well. Ross uses case studies to look more closely at the circumstances in which Administrations have succeeded and failed in marrying objectives and means. He distills the lessons from good cases of statecraft--German unification in NATO, the first Gulf War, the surge in Iraq 2007-8--and bad cases of statecraft--going to war in Iraq 2003, and the Obama policy toward Syria. Based on those lessons, he develops a framework for applying today a statecraft approach to our policy toward China, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book concludes with how a smart statecraft approach would shape policy toward the new national security challenges of climate, pandemics, and cyber.

Join the Israel Studies Program at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Hoover Institution for the launch of Peter Berkowitz's new book, Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America, at Shultz Auditorium on Wednesday, October 29, from 4:00 - 5:30 PM, followed by a reception from 5:30 - 6:30 PM.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this collection of 40 columns written for RealClearPolitics between 2014 and 2024, Peter Berkowitz explains Israel by reporting events, examining ideas, and placing both in their larger geopolitical context.

The senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution draws on the great Israeli mosaic of people, opinions, and aspirations to illuminate the domestic politics, diplomatic and national security imperatives, and multivalent spirit of the Middle East’s only rights-protecting democracy.

The carefully curated collection of essays in Explaining Israel demonstrates that to understand the Jewish state, it is necessary to appreciate the nation’s accomplishments and setbacks, the sources of its political cohesiveness and the forces dividing it, and the splendid opportunities and grave threats that it confronts.

The essays commence with Israel in 2014 at the height of its prosperity and self-confidence. They explore intensifying schisms inside the country and gathering dangers on its borders and throughout the region. And they culminate in penetrating analyses of the two crises that struck Israel in 2023. In January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sweeping judicial reform proposals set off bitter controversy and months of massive protests. Then on October 7, Iran-backed Hamas jihadists invaded Israel, massacred some 1,200 people, and kidnapped around 250, enmeshing Israel in a seven-front war against Iran and its regional proxies.

Berkowitz’s essays clarify the breathtaking achievements, the heartbreak, and the remarkable resilience of a nation struggling valiantly to be Jewish, free, and democratic in a dangerous region crucial to America’s interests.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a columnist for RealClearPolitics and serves as director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship. From 2019 to 2021, he served as the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior advisor to the secretary of state. Berkowitz is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters and a 2017 recipient of the Bradley Prize. He is the author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation; Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War; Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism; and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist. In addition, Berkowitz is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions and has written hundreds of articles, essays, and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications.