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

The Purim Libel Returns, This Time from the Pens of Jews

March 14 2025

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.

Read more at JNS

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Book of Esther, Nazi Germany, Purim