Comment on this story
comment
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been mired in corruption investigations for years and has long claimed the courts conspired to crush him. Now he is proposing a seditious plan to weaken the country’s judicial system, which he claims would make it more representative of majority views. But his initiative has sparked a national crisis that many have warned could end in bloodshed.
On Monday, according to police estimates, 100,000 Israelis demonstrated in front of the Knesset in Jerusalem against the judiciary reform, shouting “shame!” and “Israel is not a dictatorship!” President Biden has called for a compromise; Economists have warned that investments in Israel, particularly in the technology sector, are at risk; Israel’s president has warned of a “social collapse”.
Here’s what you need to know about the proposed changes to Israel’s judiciary and why they divided the country:
On the table are several bills amending Israel’s “fundamental laws” – legally equivalent to constitutional amendments – that would give Knesset lawmakers control over the appointment of judges, eliminate judicial review of laws, and give parliament the power to vote down Supreme Court decisions.
In fact, these changes mean that “there is no legal boundary with government,” said Aeyal Gross, a professor of constitutional and international law at Tel Aviv University. “A government without borders undermines any notion of democracy.”
In Israel’s parliamentary system, the Supreme Court is considered the sole control of the legislature and prime minister. The Israeli Supreme Court reviews both appeals from lower courts and petitions filed against the government and public institutions. She has struck down laws against Ukrainian refugees and African asylum-seekers and delayed the eviction of Palestinians in a sensitive Jerusalem neighborhood. In other cases, human rights groups say, it has confirmed important violations of Palestinian rights.
On Monday, the Knesset tentatively approved two bills that would allow it to appoint judges and overturn judicial review. A change would alter the composition of the nine-member Judge Selection Committee that appoints judges. The move would effectively give the government an automatic majority when voting on appointments.
A “override clause” will be discussed on Tuesday, a rare mechanism that would allow a simple 61-vote Knesset majority to overturn Supreme Court decisions and potentially remove legal protections for groups disliked by the ruling coalition. The only other country in the world with an override clause is Canada, which has a constitution. Israel has no constitution, only the “Basic Laws”.
“It’s basically taking the worst of every country, but without the other contexts and guarantees in that country,” said law professor Gross.
The three bills will be voted on three times before they come into force. The first vote is expected early next week. If both sides agree to the negotiations, the second and third could only take place several weeks later.
Justice Minister Yariv Levin has also presented the text of several other bills, including one restricting the independence and legal scrutiny of legal advisers to ministers. The final details of other proposals circulating are not yet clear.
Why is Netanyahu doing this?
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving head of state, has frequently quarreled with the judiciary.
Netanyahu returned to power late last year to head the most far-right government in the country’s history. His coalition once includes religious nationalists, Jewish racists and settler activists who have pledged to support his efforts to overturn the judiciary and drop the charges against him in his ongoing corruption trial.
Ending judicial oversight of the legislation would be a major win for Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, whose members have vowed to prioritize Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic one and to annex the occupied West Bank — the land the Palestinians want as part of their future state introduce.
It would also allow Netanyahu to legally protect allies in his coalition, including Aryeh Deri, leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party. Netanyahu was forced last month by the Supreme Court to sack Deri, who was serving as health and safety minister, in part because of his “backlog of criminal convictions.”
In three separate cases, Netanyahu has been accused of abusing his official position to grant favors to wealthy businessmen in exchange for gifts such as champagne, cigars and positive media coverage for his family. As the first Israeli prime minister to be impeached during his tenure, Netanyahu’s trial sparked an ongoing political crisis that has dragged the country through five electoral rounds in less than five years.
Earlier this month, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara sent a letter to Netanyahu urging him to distance himself from the judicial overhaul due to the apparent conflict of interest. Netanyahu said he considered Baharav-Miara’s directive “unacceptable”.
Netanyahu has claimed that the judicial review and his personal legal issues are separate. But Levin, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, told a Knesset plenary session last month that it was “the three charges” that “convinced” him that there was a need to “fix” the system.
Despite pleas from Israeli President Isaac Herzog to halt the process and meet with the opposition to reach a compromise, Levin is moving forward. If the plan goes through – and the government controls the appointment of judges in every court across the country – it could have major repercussions for Netanyahu’s case: the prime minister will be tried in the Jerusalem District Court and would likely appeal to the Supreme Court if that were the case case would be condemned.
Why is this a problem in Israel?
Liberal Israelis see the country’s Supreme Court as the last bastion of its democracy. But members of Netanyahu’s coalition claim that the Supreme Court is populated by left-wing elites and has stifled the will of a country that has quickly swung to the religious and nationalist right
A system without checks and balances, Supreme Court President Esther Hayut warned last month, would result in an Israel that “vainly bears the name of democracy.”
“We can expect that once this reform is passed, Arabs will face discrimination, there will be a segregation between men and women, there will be laws and maybe Supreme Court rulings that will strip the LGBTQ community of their rights. Material democracy is being damaged,” said Amir Fuchs, a senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, who will address Tuesday’s deliberations in the Knesset ahead of the vote on the repeal clause.
In 2021, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the controversial nation-state law that declared Israel the national homeland of the Jewish people and effectively relegated Israel’s Palestinian citizens to second-class status.
But although “the justice system is not favorable to the Arab public,” Palestinian-Israeli lawmaker Ahmed Tibi said said Monday that he would fight the reforms “because the Supreme Court ends up being the sanctuary of the minority”.
Netanyahu and his coalition partners claim they have a mandate to implement the proposals. They point to their clear victory in the November elections, in which they won 64 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. But lawmakers didn’t release their justice plans ahead of the vote. As a quirk of parliamentary mathematics, the coalition parties only accounted for 50.1 percent of the total votes.
The Israeli opposition has so far rejected offers issued Monday night to sit down for negotiations without the preconditions required to stop the process.
“Let’s talk without the whip of ongoing, aggressive and accelerated legislation hanging in the background,” Israeli journalist Ben Caspit wrote in the Maariv newspaper on Tuesday. “People are not ready to accept their democracy being hijacked and move on.”