The judicial reform of the new right-wing conservative coalition of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has entered the first reading in parliament under chaotic conditions.
How violent the argument is can be seen, among other things, in a video from the meeting of the Judiciary Committee on Monday morning, which was distributed on social networks: while four room stewards are trying to remove a member of parliament from the meeting room, another jumps over the table the center of the room and yells, “Shame! Shame!”
Another jumps after them, then a third, half of the hall joins in the chanting, others begin to sing: “I have no other country, even if my earth is burning,” is the text of the poet Ehud Manor. Folders tear a deputy to the ground.
In Israel’s parliamentary culture, turbulent scenes are by no means rare and they do not always mark really important differences. But this Monday, the tumult inside the Knesset, documented in Twitter videos, depicts an upheaval in Israeli society rarely seen in the country’s history.
While the Judiciary Committee passed the first parts of the judicial reform with votes from the coalition in the chaotic session on Monday morning, more than 70,000 people demonstrated against the bill in front of the parliament building – a remarkable number in a country with only nine million inhabitants. The political reactions that the planned judicial reform is provoking at home and abroad are also exceptionally harsh.
Both Israel’s Supreme Court and the country’s Attorney General have expressed serious concerns about the judicial reform. President Yitzchak Herzog of the opposition Labor Party addressed the Israelis in a televised speech on the eve of the deliberations: “We are on the brink of constitutional and social collapse,” said Herzog. Everyone in the country felt “we are on the verge of a clash – even a violent clash.”
Herzog promoted talks between the government and the opposition and a compromise for a watered-down version of the judicial reform, for which he in turn submitted a proposal. US President Joe Biden also called for a compromise. He added that the genius of both Israeli and American democracy is that both are “based on strong institutions, checks and balances and an independent judiciary.”
Biden thus referred to the core of the dispute, because democracy in Israel as such is at the center of the conflict over judicial reform.
According to the government’s proposal, parliament should in future be able to overrule decisions of the Supreme Court with a simple majority. In addition, the chief judges are to be appointed by a body in which the respective government and the parliamentary groups behind it have a majority.
In defense of the reform, Netanyahu said the Supreme Court had often exceeded its powers in recent decades. “The claim that the judicial reform means the end of democracy is baseless,” said the prime minister recently. Coalition officials said the planned changes to the role of the Supreme Court would in fact restore institutional balance. In recent decades, the chamber has pursued a one-sided left-wing agenda.
Critics see the effective disempowerment of the Supreme Court as the goal of the reform. That would also be a serious danger in other democracies. In the Israeli state structure, however, the Supreme Court plays a particularly important role in several respects.
Like some other democracies, such as Britain’s, Israel is a state with no explicit constitution. One of the reasons for this is that the founding fathers and mothers saw Israel as a potential home for all Jews living in the world and did not want to adopt a constitution as long as only a few of them actually lived in Israel.
In addition to some “fundamental laws” passed later, the current jurisprudence of the Supreme Court is the most important source of Israeli constitutional law and the protection of civil and human rights. If this court is subject to changing political majorities, not only can fundamental rights be bent at any time, Israeli democracy as such can theoretically be fundamentally reshaped by any sufficiently powerful political force.
This possibility is also particularly worrying because Prime Minister Netanyahu governs in a coalition with two small ultra-religious parties, which have repeatedly been described as right-wing extremists, and are striving for a purely Jewish society governed by religious laws.
In a Channel 12 poll, less than a quarter of respondents supported the reform, while nearly two-thirds supported a freeze or postponement in favor of a consensus solution. Several tech and financial firms have said they are reducing their operations in Israel over concerns about Israeli democracy.
Former Defense Minister Moshe Jaalon, once a colleague of Netanyahu and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, took up another explosive aspect of judicial reform when he spoke from the podium of the large-scale demonstration in front of the Knesset. Netanyahu is pushing ahead with the judicial reform primarily because he wants to protect himself from corruption processes against him and a ruling from the highest court that could therefore declare him unfit for office.
Because Israel’s Supreme Court not only fulfills the function of a constitutional court, it is also the highest authority in other processes, such as criminal cases. “If you still value the state of Israel and its citizens,” Jaalon Netanyahu called out from the podium, “then don’t wait for the decision of the Supreme Court and don’t rush the court.” Netanyahu should resign.
