Israel’s Supreme Court strikes down Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset on May 23, 2023. Photo by Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images
By Benyamin Cohen January 1, 2024
Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday struck down a controversial law passed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government that limited some of the power of the high court and had sparked months of protests across the nation. The landmark decision could catapult Israel into a constitutional and political crisis, in a time when it is already waging a deadly war with Hamas.
The court ruled 8-7, with all 15 justices present for the first time in Israel’s history. In a summary of the case, the Supreme Court said it “held that the amendment causes severe and unprecedented harm to the core characteristics of Israel as a democratic state.”
Netanyahu’s Likud party denounced the decision, in particular its timing, when Israeli soldiers are “fighting and endangering themselves in battle.”
Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition and a chief rival of Netanyahu, said the High Court’s ruling “ends a difficult year of conflict that tore us apart from within and led to the worst disaster in our history.”
The decision moves Israel closer to a potential constitutional crisis, a scenario in which a country experiences an unsolvable dispute between two branches of government, at a delicate moment. Ahead of the court decision, Netanyahu had not said explicitly that his government would obey a court ruling striking down the law.
As soon as Netanyahu took office on Dec. 29, 2022, for his sixth term as prime minister, he introduced plans for a judicial overhaul that aimed to limit the power of the Supreme Court. The plan divided the nation and led to 40 weeks of protests, with hundreds of thousands coming out every Saturday night since January, 2023.
Those protests abruptly stopped on Oct. 7, when Hamas killed around 1,200 people and abducted around 250.
Watch: Back in September, Daniel Gordis and Dahlia Scheindlin joined the Forward’s opinion editor, Laura E. Adkins, in a wide-ranging conversation about what was expected as the Israeli Supreme Court and government contemplated their next moves.
JTA contributed to this report.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
