Some 200 million television viewers around the world watched Israel put its best foot forward on May 18 as reflected in numerous media reports on the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest and the clips accompanying the competitors’ performances. Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s best efforts to put a spoke in the wheels of Israel’s Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC), the company managed to defeat the anti-Israel BDS movement. The world saw that Israel was not just a country full of masked settlers beating up elderly Palestinians and Israeli children seeking shelter from Hamas rockets. Just hours after Israel was presented with a priceless boost to its beleaguered image, however, the government took the opportunity to present the state’s ugly face at its weekly Cabinet meeting the following morning.

After offering brief congratulations to the singer Kobi Marimi, Israel’s Eurovision contender and 19th-place finisher, but not a single word of praise for the IPBC, Netanyahu went on to discuss efforts to assemble his fifth government. He expressed his hope that his potential coalition partners would soon “come to their senses,” meaning they would agree to settle for fewer senior ministerial positions than they were demanding in return for entering the coalition.

With the Eurovision stardust having settled, the old agenda began returning to the light, as reflected in world headlines and on leading television networks. Even the daily review of Israeli editorials issued by the Foreign Ministry in English as a service to foreign diplomats and media outlets included the following from the summary of an opinion piece in the widely read tabloid Yediot Ahronoth: “[The writer] wonders where all the Likud members who spoke out against an immunity law before the elections have gone.… They have been taken hostage by Netanyahu who can grant or withhold ministerial portfolios from them in his new government. They are running scared.”

Likud members have obviously been too afraid to criticize the campaign to limit the authority of the Supreme Court and to reject Netanyahu’s push for an immunity law amendment that would save him from possible indictment. There are several jurists, however, who are not afraid. More so, criticism by leading jurists against proposed government legislation designed to neuter the Supreme Court and turn the Knesset into an asylum for criminal suspects does not stop at Israel’s borders. Chief Justice Esther Hayut lashed out against such proposed laws at a conference she was attending in Germany. Maybe it was the lies that Netanyahu has been spreading in his bid to evade punishment for suspected corruption that led the judge to take off her gloves.