Editorial Board
WSJ, Mar. 12, 2023
“Shrewd thinkers on Israel’s right understand that compromise is needed to lower the stakes, regain the public’s confidence and pass something durable. The opposition, however, sees Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing on a ledge and has no desire to let him off lightly.”
Opposition to Israeli judicial reform has reached the “resistance” stage. That’s when media say democracy is dying, officials refuse to remain impartial, activists block key roads, barricade think tanks and harass politicians’ families, and investors muse about pulling capital. Air Force pilots are even shirking reserve duty. This is bad for the country, but it’s good opposition politics: Sow chaos, then shout, “Look how chaotic Israel has become.”
We try to keep our heads: Israeli democracy isn’t dying. Even if the reforms were to abolish judicial review of legislation, leaving the Knesset supreme, this would drag Israel all the way back to . . . 1995. It was a democracy then, and no aberration. A sovereign parliament is the norm in parliamentary democracies that lack a written constitution for courts to enforce.
President Biden says Israel needs consensus, but there was no consensus for the “judicial revolution” in which Israel’s high court, starting in the 1980s, made itself the final arbiter on all things. “Everything is justiciable,” declared a former chief justice. The court has reviewed cabinet appointments, budget allocations, combat decisions and even whether the Prime Minister is “unfit” for office. It also empowers the attorney general, a civil servant, to pre-veto government policies with legally binding opinions.
Most Israelis now accept that the judiciary needs reform—a major achievement by the right. But the Netanyahu government hasn’t convinced Israelis that its reform plan is the right one. Rather than provide room to negotiate, its most aggressive proposals have hardened the opposition and alienated voters.
Mostly the reforms are sensible: The government has to be free to argue its own legal positions. The court’s “reasonableness” standard for striking down actions it doesn’t like has been unreasonable. The government is right to remove the court’s power over selection of new justices, which has been abused to exclude qualified, dissenting jurists. …Source
