Its a mistake to view the Israeli supreme court in the same way as one might the US Supreme Court. The Israeli high court has more power and less accountability, making its role in shaping public policy far greater than other democracies. In the same way its not clear all Americans understand the nuance of US Supreme Court influence (not as great as many think), its similarly unclear the Israeli electorate appreciates how unique its Court's authority is. Setting the polarization and crusading aside, some reform makes sense - but certainly not as much as the right initially demanded. As with most things the truth lies in the middle and not at the edges.
No it doesn't. Israel doesn't have a constitution. It doesn't separate the senate and congress so there's no oversight other than the supreme court.
Removing that power of oversight would effectively eliminate democracy.
There's no "middle" here. The PM driving this is undergoing a criminal trial and is using this to get out of his legal troubles. His coalition are using it to completely eliminate human rights in the occupied territories.
It's one of those very clear black and white situations.
The "basic laws" have been granted the status of a constitution by the courts themselves, as well as being accepted as such by the knesset and army.
> It's one of those very clear black and white situations.
Agreed. The courts power must be curbed.
The court in Israel has set itself up as a monarchy - they are in power for life, they choose their successors, they assume control over every branch of the government - including eg. who can be the speaker of the Knesset, and they do not require precedent, written law, or even logic - they use regularly use "reasonable" (in their eyes) as a reason to repeal laws of the government, change them, or make up their own.
Every party, from left to right, has spoken out about the dangers of such a setup, but being as it is a strongly leftist court there is more howling from the right.
A democracy needs to prevent dictatorship - whether from the President (a la El Salvador), from the head of the army (a la Niger) or from the head of the courts (a la Israel).
The democracy part of Israel has been fading as the court has assumed these powers, and whether or not it helps Netanyahu is an aside.
[All that the current law said was that the court needs to base law on precedent, reproducible logic, or written law, and cannot just use a hand-wavy - "it is reasonable for the president to go to jail". There are many countries, such as the U.S. that state the same. If that will help Netanyahu than he deserves it - it means they have nothing on him and want to hit him for political reasons only.]
> The "basic laws" have been granted the status of a constitution by the courts themselves, as well as being accepted as such by the knesset and army.
That isn't true. There's no alternative to them and they currently can be enacted by a simple majority. This is the perfect example of such a simple majority enacting something that's clearly not within the public consensus.
> The courts power must be curbed.
Even if this is the case. There needs to be an alternative, you can't give all the power to one legislative body which is what the current law does.
> Every party, from left to right, has spoken out about the dangers of such a setup, but being as it is a strongly leftist court there is more howling from the right.
This is absolute nonsense. The right likes to yell that because they need a scarecrow. But this isn't the case by any measure. The court has two settler judges despite their weight in the population being 5% hence they should have no judge. Arabs are 21 percent (excluding the occupied territories) which should give them 3 seats but there's only one justice.
About the decisions, the court lets them enact things like blowing up houses of families of terrorists (collective punishment isn't legal internationally). It gave extra monetary compensation to people cleared from Gaza (against the governments wishes). It enforced laws blocking Jews from working on the sabath and essentially did what the government asked when it was LEGAL!!!
But think about this clearly. If they were so bad why did they just attack them now? Why not go after them before?
Because the court lets Israel show to the world that it's a democracy while it still keeps 3 million people under military rule. It's a facade that the right has used for decades as part of the "occupied territories" trick. To the Israelis they say "the court is liberal". To the west they say "we're a democracy".
The courts enable the right to have its cake and eat it. The people driving Bibi are the idiots who don't understand that trick. Once the courts are weakened there's no protection against international sanctions.
> All that the current law said was that the court needs to base law on precedent, reproducible logic, or written law, and cannot just use a hand-wavy
No.
This is the first part in many different laws they plan to past. So pointing at that is very disingenuous.
That ignores the cases where the law was used. E.g. this was used to protect a woman (who was living in a settlement btw) whose electric power was disconnected despite her poverty and the fact that her child depends on machines to live.
This was used to stop terrible appointments.
One of the excuses for the law was the desire to appoint a person who was convicted TWICE of crimes while in office. Who testified in front of the court that he will leave public life (and was granted clemency), he then made a 180 and only one year later demanded a ministerial position in the government.
This wasn't used much but every single use of this ruling is against VERY extreme circumstances. Judges should have some ability to use a bit of common sense when faced with the level of corruption we're already seeing from the current government.
Just so we're clear, the opposition was OK with a law that required a greater majority of the judges to agree to that. But the coalition refused a reasonable compromise.
>But think about this clearly. If they were so bad why did they just attack them now? Why not go after them before?
The MKs like Rothman and Levin who have pushed judicial reform the hardest have, in fact, been pushing this since Aharon Barak's Judicial Revolution in the 1990s. Given the circumstances I disagree with their push, but obviously they've been at it for a long time for both principled and political reasons.
Isn’t it being pushed through by ultra religious and right wing groups? While I admit I don’t understand the Israeli high courts I do understand the impact of zealous right wing groups forcing unpopular changes to the basic function of the government.
Wow, even while merely critiquing a change in legislative policy this congresman felt the need to affirm his belief that "Israel is a friend and ally."
How many other nations do our politicians feel compelled to make such remarks about? Maybe Ukraine?
I wish people went back accusing people of the real evil, being racist, instead of a term which scares anyone away from making legitimate criticisms...like accusing Israel of racist policies.
>How many other nations do our politicians feel compelled to make such remarks about? Maybe Ukraine?
Most of them that you take for granted? Biden made fairly similar mouth-noises when he went on over to Europe to bemoan that the Germans would rather plunge Europe into a depression and trigger a turn to the far-right than deficit-spend for a minute... and then Biden reassured everyone about the solidity of the US-EU relationship eternal friendship special relationship etc etc.
