Although the Israeli government is in a state of limbo between the election of the Knesset and the formation of a new government, Prime Minister Netanyahu is still required to appoint a justice minister. On Tuesday, he chose a loyalist, Ofir Akunis, for the job—against the legal advice of Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit. The details of the laws at work are obscure, and in any case not easily applied to the current, anomalous situation, so the Supreme Court put a stay on the appointment, after which the prime minister backed down. David Horovitz sums up the outcome:
The “worst constitutional crisis in Israeli history,” as described . . . by an unnamed “senior legal official,” has ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Regardless of whether Mandelblit’s position was correct, Horovitz notes that the episode relates to an underlying constitutional problem, and offers a straightforward solution:
[Netanyahu] has long claimed that the state prosecution, headed by Mandelblit, fabricated the three corruption charges for which he is on trial —and that the High Court is overly interventionist and must be reined in.
For a start, it has never been clearer that the twin roles filled by the attorney general—head of the state prosecution and chief legal adviser to the government—must be separated. Israel’s reality for 25 years has been that its prime ministers wind up under criminal investigation. Time after time, the top official advising the prime minister on what he and his cabinet colleagues should and shouldn’t do, therefore, is also investigating, considering prosecuting, and, in Mandelblit’s case, actually prosecuting the prime minister.
Plainly, that creates a near-impossible situation for both the prime minister and the attorney general. It is a recipe for friction and mistrust, and Tuesday’s cabinet events—when Netanyahu refused to let Mandelblit present his position before the vote, and dismissed his advice after it—was only the latest and worst example of this. There is no good reason why the attorney general’s two jobs should not be performed by two officials. That’s one legal reform that is long overdue and clearly in the national interest.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-worst-constitutional-crisis-until-the-next-one/