The Israeli Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments in a landmark case about itself.
At issue is the first law passed in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul package — a new limitation on the court’s ability to overturn decisions made by Netanyahu and his cabinet it finds “extremely unreasonable.” This may sound like a small technocratic dispute, but in fact, the fundamental nature and even survival of Israeli democracy is at stake. There’s a reason Netanyahu’s overhaul has spawned the largest protest in Israeli history: The attack on the court is seen, by millions of Israelis, as an attack on Israeli democracy itself.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and while this government may not abuse its power, when the power is there, it will be used,” Aner Helman, the lawyer representing Israel’s attorney general, said in Tuesday’s hearing while arguing the new law should be overturned. Helman’s argument was notable not only for its seriousness, but also for the fact that he is a government attorney who typically defends its policies in court.
To understand how the judiciary became the policy issue in Israeli politics, one potent enough to turn core state institutions against each other, you need to understand a series of profound and overlapping tensions in Israeli Jewish society — divisions between the religious and the secular, between the right wing and the center left, and between Netanyahu and the country’s traditional political establishment. All of these tensions are connected to perhaps the central philosophical question of Israeli politics: What does Israel’s core legal identity as a “Jewish and democratic” state mean?
For years, it seemed possible that this fundamental issue could be worked out within the confines of the existing political and legal system. But the rise of the Israeli far right in the past two decades, and Netanyahu’s fateful decision to join ranks with them, pushed things well…
Read the full article here