Calling her “the most charismatic, formidable, and ambitious female political leader to have emerged in Israel (or anywhere else, for that matter) for a long time,” Daniel Johnson examines the Israeli justice minister’s rapid rise to prominence and her ideas for strengthening Israel’s institutions:
In just over a year, [Shaked] has dominated the headlines on several different issues. Most controversially, she has challenged the supreme court, accusing it of usurping the powers of executive and legislature. The court, a bastion of the Israeli liberal establishment, has reined in successive governments of the right. But when the court recently blocked [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s plan to push through the Leviathan offshore gas project—on which the prime minister has staked his reputation—it fell to Shaked to respond. In her view, the court, influenced by the doctrines of its former chief justice Aharon Barak, has cultivated not judicial independence but judicial activism, and she insists that Israel’s constitutional balance now needs to be redressed. . . .
Shaked has provoked the international community, too. She wants to force NGOs that receive most of their funds from “foreign government entities” to be identified as such. . . . She also wants to reintroduce a law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, opposition to which brought down the last coalition. Most controversially, she wants Israel to abandon the two-state solution, annex the borderlands of the West Bank (“Area C”), which are home to 400,000 Jewish settlers, and offer Israeli citizenship to the 90,000 Palestinians there. Eventually, she envisages a confederation between the remaining Palestinian territories and Jordan. Both Jews and Palestinians would finally obtain security, prosperity, and peace.
Read more on Standpoint: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/6457/full