Despite ongoing, widespread demonstrations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government on Monday passed the first piece of legislation of a radical overhaul to Israel’s judiciary.
The bill eliminates a doctrine within administrative law that currently empowers Israel’s High Court of Justice to strike down government decisions that don’t pass a reasonability standard. It’s a seemingly technical though important standard for judicial review in a country that lacks a constitution. But if the new law is implemented, it will have destructive effects on Israelis and on Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Its passing may also encourage Netanyahu to advance other parts of the judicial overhaul that would further deteriorate the Court’s authority.
It’s important to note that the High Court has been no reliable supporter of Palestinian rights. Legal and human rights experts told me that anti-Palestinian policies have been passed with no opposition from the judiciary. And even the anti-judicial overhaul protests have been more concerned with Israeli politics than the impact on Palestinians. But in some situations, the court has slowed or stopped Israeli government actions, and served as a check on the extreme right-wing government.
“This is not going to be a dramatic overnight shift,” says Yair Wallach, a senior lecturer in Israeli studies at SOAS University of London. “The general agenda is to to weaken the courts in a very significant way.”
To regain the prime ministership after a brief stint out of power, Netanyahu built his current coalition with extreme-right parties. The more than 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are a key constituency of this government. The parties representing settlers in the parliament are pushing the country toward the further annexation of Palestinian land and, as they’ve said in their own words, the expulsion or transfer of Palestinians out of the…
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