Benjamin Netanyahu has put two bills before the Knesset that would curb some of the outsized power of Israel’s supreme court. The first would give elected officials greater say in the appointment of new justices. The second would place limits on the court’s ability to overturn laws passed by the Knesset. Some prominent Israelis have criticized these proposals as limits on the independence of the judiciary or even assaults on democracy itself. They are neither, writes Evelyn Gordon:

[The second] bill would . . . bar the court from overturning a law . . . unless at least nine justices—a mere 60 percent of the court’s complement of fifteen—deem the law unconstitutional. And that’s excellent policy. . . .

[I]if the court itself is almost evenly split over a law’s constitutionality, there’s clearly more than one plausible legal interpretation. And if there’s more than one plausible interpretation, it makes sense to prefer the one chosen by the Knesset, the body that actually wrote the Basic Laws that the court (wrongly) treats as Israel’s constitution. When serious doubt exists about the “correct” interpretation—which it clearly does if less than 60 percent of the court concurs—the lawmakers should get the benefit of this doubt. . . .

This brings us back to the straw man of the court’s independence. Judicial independence is indisputably essential; a country where courts merely obey government dictates is a dictatorship, not a democracy. Hence by claiming that Netanyahu’s proposals would undermine judicial independence, his critics seek to tar them as something no democracy could countenance.

But what these critics are really trying to protect isn’t the court’s independence but its excessive power—a power, without parallel in any other democracy, by which justices first choose their own successors to create an ideologically uniform court, then seek to impose this ideology on the country by asserting a right to overturn government decisions and/or [Knesset] legislation on virtually every important policy issue. . . . All the proposed reforms would do is return a tiny fraction of this power to the people’s elected representatives. And Israel’s democracy would be the greatest beneficiary.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.