Netanyahu curbs Supreme Court power, defying critics at home and abroad

Defying the largest and most sustained protest movement in the nation’s history, Israel’s parliament passed a bill Monday limiting the Supreme Court’s power to exercise judicial review over government decisions, a move critics say strikes a direct blow at Israel’s democratic checks and balances.

Mere hours after the collapse of last-ditch efforts to reach a compromise with opponents of the legislation, the far-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed the final procedural vote on the bill through the Knesset.

Outside the parliament building, thousands of protesters, many of whom had marched for days from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, clashed with police during the vote.

The government moved ahead despite warnings by security officials of damage the legislation would cause to the military, polls that show a solid majority of Israelis oppose the measure, and repeated public implorations by President Joe Biden to halt the process to allow for consensus.

After the vote the White House said it was “unfortunate that the vote today took place with the slimmest possible majority.”

The legislation is considered the first step in a larger judicial overhaul agenda proposed by Mr. Netanyahu’s government that critics contend would arrogate near-unchecked power to the executive branch and would be fatal for Israel’s democratic foundations.

“Never, in the entire history of the country, has there been such a show ... by the government of irresponsibility as a policy, as a worldview,” opposition leader Yair Lapid thundered in a parliamentary speech ahead of the vote, which the entire opposition boycotted in protest. “The reality is that you are letting the country fall apart. ... We are headed for disaster.”

The vote Monday followed seven months of mass street demonstrations that had successfully stymied a previous legislative push in the spring. This time around, the Netanyahu coalition vowed not to back down in the face of similar weekly protests that drew more than 400,000 people nationwide, some 4% of the population, Saturday night.

A strike action declared Monday by leading private sector firms and tech companies – hinting at the economic fallout from the judicial overhaul – as well as a growing tide of military reservists threatening to refuse volunteer service if the bill passed, also failed to sway the government.

More than 10,000 reservists, including, critically, hundreds of Israel Air Force fighter pilots, had warned in recent days that they would take just such a step after today, putting into question the entire warfighting preparedness of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The Israeli military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevy, had issued an appeal to his troops over the weekend, writing: “If we are not a strong, unified army, if our best people do not serve in the IDF, we won’t be able to exist as a country in this region.”

Later Monday, hundreds of reservists from the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, of which Mr. Netanyahu is a veteran, and Air Force pilots made good on their threats and told their commanders they were not reporting for duty anymore.

President Biden, via a statement Sunday to an Israeli journalist, had said consensus should be found, adding that “given the range of threats and challenges confronting Israel right now, it doesn’t make sense for Israeli leaders to rush this.”

Yet Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition rammed through the most severe version of the bill 64-0 in the 120-member Knesset. Legal experts say it will eliminate the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down government decisions and civil servant appointments on the grounds of “extreme unreasonableness.”

“This is eliminating the most important tool [for legal review] over all those administrative and appointment decisions,” says Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a non-partisan think tank. “How would the system look like if this entire tool and apparatus were not in place? Ministers will have absolute power and absolute judgement.”

Mr. Plesner and other analysts surmise, too, that the government may exploit the lack of effective judicial oversight to fire the attorney general, the country’s top legal official, and thereby usher in a new and more malleable appointment that would then suspend the ongoing corruption trial against Mr. Netanyahu.

The anti-government protesters on the streets understand the stakes, which they have described in existential and biblical terms.

In last Saturday’s now traditional demonstration in Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street – recently re-named “Democracy Square” – giant digital billboards blared: “Stop the destruction of the IDF. Stop the destruction of the home,” the latter a reference to the destruction of the biblical First and Second Jewish Temples.

One Saturday protester, Nir, a married father from Tel Aviv, described the potential passage of this week’s “Reasonableness Bill,” as it’s come to be known, as “the first step toward dictatorship and the dismantling of democracy by a clearly corrupt government.”

“Who wants to live in an autocratic country?” he posed, calling it a “dark sign” for Israel’s future, and by extension, his family’s.

The Israeli Bar Association, among other groups, is already planning to lodge an appeal against the legislation at the Supreme Court. Legal experts are circumspect about predicting how the court will rule, pointing out simply that it has never in its history struck down such a quasi-constitutional piece of legislation, and certainly not one that is meant to curtail its own powers.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” says the Democracy Institute’s Mr. Plesner, a former member of the Knesset from a centrist party, adding that the possibility of a constitutional crisis looms large.

For its part, the protest leadership vowed late Monday, after the bill was passed, to press on with the fight. “We will continue our firm struggle that will only escalate, and in the end Israel will return to being a democracy again,” they wrote to supporters. “Don’t be confused – we’ve only just begun.”

Far from being only a constitutional, security, economic, and political crisis, the domestic unrest surrounding the government’s judicial overhaul push has also exposed deep rifts within Israeli society itself.

Sunday night, on the eve of the controversial vote, government supporters massed in Tel Aviv at the same spot that opponents had the day before. Signs proclaimed: “Judicial Reform – Real Democracy,” and “The People Chose Judicial Reform!”

One supporter, Elisheva, a married mother from a West Bank settlement, said the judicial situation in Israel “wasn’t really democratic,” as to her mind the Supreme Court had gotten more powerful at the expense of the government. She very much wanted the reform to pass, and was puzzled by the anxiety on the other side.

“I understand they didn’t vote for this government. But there were elections … and now they’re trying to change through force what the people chose.

“This isn’t Nazi Germany,” she said, also adding a biblical reference. “This is isn’t the destruction of the third commonwealth. It’s all exaggerated.”

Yet senior government officials who spoke on stage Sunday were clear that passing the “Reasonableness Law” was only the first phase of a much larger program. The Supreme Court, one lawmaker from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party bellowed, “stole the power from the people, stole the power from our parents” – and now the government was going to repair that injustice.

Nevertheless, every poll taken over the past seven months has shown that some 60 to 70 percent of the country – including a sizeable proportion of Likud voters – are opposed to both the substance and method of the government’s judicial overhaul bid. And nearly every retired senior security and economic official (and some currently serving as well) have publicly warned of the danger of pursuing just such an agenda.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who had tried to broker a compromise, did not mince words prior to the bill passing, saying Israel was in a “state of national emergency.” Some in recent months have raised the specter of social breakdown, civil war, and even, as the protesters’ signs warned, biblical destruction, just as Jews this week mark a fast commemorating the demise of the First and Second Temples.

Mr. Netanyahu and his ministers heeded none of the warnings, even indicating they were putting their faith in a higher power.

“We have nothing to fear,” Transportation Minister Miri Regev, from the Likud, told the adoring crowd on Sunday night after calling for the jailing of all protesting military reservists. “We have the creator of the universe.”