The Reform of Israel’s Judiciary Is an Urgent, and Trans-Partisan, Issue

Now that the votes have been tallied, it seems almost certain that the next Israeli prime minister will be Benjamin Netanyahu, leading a coalition of rightwing and religious parties. A key item on the platform of several members of this prospective coalition is reform of the judiciary, which has enormous power that it has largely granted to itself. Aylana Meisel-Diament and Yonatan Green explain what is at stake:

Though it might seem a modern partisan power struggle, the judicial-reform debate has much older roots. Founded 74 years ago, Israel developed its system of law and governance in an ad-hoc fashion, and generally in crisis periods. Political fragmentation, defense against constant existential threats, and the lack of a written constitution left a power vacuum that the Israeli court system has slowly and intentionally filled without a popular mandate to do so.

The Israeli Supreme Court, not a popular-representative body, unilaterally declared a written constitution in the 1990s, a surprise to the lawmakers who had passed the statutes the Court decided to “constitutionalize.” The Court then endowed itself with the power of judicial review of parliamentary legislation despite the absence of a duly ratified constitutional document. And the Court departed from its own tradition of restraint effectively to eliminate any limitation on standing and subject-matter jurisdiction in constitutional cases. These are just a few elements of a long and continuing appropriation of policy-making power by the judiciary.

Within Israel, demand for judicial reform—including revising the method of judicial selection and limiting the Court’s vast authority—is bipartisan and extends back nearly 40 years. While the cause is more popular on Israel’s right than its left today, the foremost advocates of these reforms have often been legal luminaries affiliated with Israel’s left or political center.

As for the more specific legal reforms endorsed by right-leaning Israeli politicians, these too are far less partisan than some observers have claimed:

[C]onsider the proposed abolition of Israel’s “Breach of Trust” criminal offense (for which Netanyahu has been indicted) and a proposed grant of revocable criminal immunity to legislators. The substance of the proposal is certainly worthy of debate, but it is incorrectly portrayed . . . as a “blatant attempt to place Netanyahu above the law.” In fact, this particular proposal is intended to apply only prospectively, and not to Netanyahu’s ongoing case. Looking at the relevant history here is illuminating. The “Breach of Trust” offense has been severely criticized by legal scholars since the 1990s, decades before the Netanyahu indictments.

Read more at National Review

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli politics, Supreme Court of Israel

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF