‘A very, very dangerous situation’: An Israeli journalist’s key takeaways from recent protests
Amir Tibon of Haaretz explains Netanyahu’s judicial reform and recent protests
Israeli protesters hold the Israeli flag as Israeli police use a water cannon to evacuate protesters from a main highway during a rally against the Israeli government’s judiciary overhaul on March 23, 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images
By Laura E. Adkins, Benyamin CohenMarch 24, 2023
This interview with Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon has been excerpted from the Forward’s weekly Jewish news show. It was conducted by news director Benyamin Cohen and opinion editor Laura E. Adkins, and it has been edited for length and clarity. You can watch the full interview here.
Anyone who’s been following news out of Israel has heard of something called judicial overhaul.
There have been massive protests. Some half a million people in Israel and many in the United States. We’ve seen stories of IDF reservists who don’t want to report for duty. Our guest today, Haaretz journalist Amir Tibon, will hopefully help us wrap our heads around exactly what’s going on there.
Thank you so much for inviting me.
I’m going to stay up very late today. We are waiting for Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak in about 30 minutes. He’s supposed to give a statement, and nobody knows what he’s planning to say.
But we do know that earlier this evening — see, I’m really breaking news here with you guys — Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who is himself from the Likud party, approached Prime Minister Netanyahu and said, I’m asking you to stop this legislation immediately. The legislation to weaken the judicial system and give the government control over judicial appointments.
Defense Minister Gallant says to Prime Minister Netanyahu, please stop, because this is tearing apart the military. And if it continues, and becomes law in a couple of weeks, before the Knesset goes on Passover break, the defense minister believes that this will cause a serious crisis within the military, that will actually hurt its capability to carry out security missions.
And how will Netanyahu respond to that? We don’t know. But we’re gonna have a long night here in Israel. There’s going to be a lot of action.
Let’s take a step back. Why are people out in the streets? Why is everyone protesting? What are the larger issues at play here beyond these specific proposed legislative changes?
This new government that Prime Minister Netanyahu is leading, since the beginning of the year when they took office, came right out with a very dramatic plan to remake the balance of power between the different authorities in Israel, weakening the judicial branch and giving a lot more power to the government.
This plan they call a reform; others call it a judicial overhaul or even a coup. But the basis of it are several laws that, when you look at them combined, will create a reality where there will no longer be judicial review in Israel.
One law gives the government the power to appoint judges, basically on its own terms. Today in Israel, judicial appointments are made in a committee where there is equal representation for politicians, sitting judges, and the lawyer’s bar.
That committee is far from perfect. There has been a lot of criticism of it. And I actually think there is a place for reform and change. But what the government wants to do is to change the makeup of the committee, basically giving itself an automatic majority and full control of all appointments.
This is a bit like the White House appointing justices in America without having to go through the Senate whenever the Senate is controlled by the opposition party, which happens sometimes in your country. So that’s one example.
The other component is the override clause. On top of choosing the judges and the justices of the Supreme Court, they want the smallest possible majority in the Israeli parliament in the Knesset to have the power to override Supreme Court decisions and basically nullify them.
And finally, they want to dramatically raise the bar of what will be required for the Supreme Court to strike down legislation and governmental decisions in the first place. They want it to be 80% of the sitting justices rather than just a majority. Even after that, still the smallest possible majority in the Knesset can override their decision.
And this is why so many people are protesting. There is a sense that this would completely change Israel from the liberal democracy, flawed as it is, that we have today into a different kind of country.
So these proposed changes would basically neuter the Supreme Court and remove checks and balances.
In Israel, we have a parliamentary system where the government always has a majority in the Knesset. If it loses that majority, it falls apart. The only real power that can balance the government and play some role of restricting and restraining it is the Supreme Court.
There definitely is valid criticism of the Supreme Court, and that the whole issue of judicial review is not clearly defined by legislation. We don’t have a constitution in this country, and we don’t have a basic law that dictates the exact responsibilities of the Supreme Court. So there definitely is a place for some changes and some reforms. But what this government is proposing is extreme.
And that’s why you’re seeing even people who, over the years, have themselves called for judicial reform, joining the protests.
There are experts in Israel who, for 20-something years, have been speaking about the need to restrain the Supreme Court. And now, when the government is actually trying to do it, they are joining the protests.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is embroiled in several corruption scandals. There’s been a lot of talk that this is all just a ploy by Netanyahu to avoid accountability.
But there also seems to be a very significant push from the right wing of his coalition that is about something deeper. How much of this is about Netanyahu’s personal problems, and how much of this is deeper-seated issues that have been boiling for a while?
This is the million dollar question.
If you go back 10 or even five years ago, before Benjamin Netanyahu became a suspect, and then a criminal defendant, you will find many speeches and statements and interviews in which Benjamin Netanyahu proudly defended and praised the Supreme Court of Israel. He spoke about the importance of an independent Supreme Court and a strong judicial system.
Initiatives from the Israeli religious right to weaken the Supreme Court have been around for decades. Netanyahu was actually the one blocking it, and he took pride in it.
For the religious parties in the government, weakening the Supreme Court is a decades-long dream come true. They see the Supreme Court as a liberalizing force in Israeli society, and rightly so.
A lot of the progress that we’ve had in Israel over the last decades and that we are so proud of in areas like LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, equality for minorities, actually happened through decisions of the Supreme Court, not through legislation in the country.
The Supreme Court interprets the basic laws of the State of Israel, which are a temporary and flawed replacement for a Constitution. But it interpreted them in ways that enlarged civil and human rights in Israel. For the religious parties that want less equality for women and less equality for LGBTQ+ Israelis, and more religious coercion and religious legislation in the public sphere, this has been a problem.
And so what has changed? Why is the man who blocked all these initiatives for many years suddenly supporting and leading them? Sadly, it’s hard to avoid the thought that perhaps this is because of his own legal turmoil.
When we talk about the idea of the government appointing Supreme Court justices, remember that no matter what happens in Netanyahu’s trial before the Jerusalem District Court, which is still happening right now, there is going to be an appeal to the Supreme Court.
So basically, they want to draw a situation where Netanyahu can be involved in choosing the justices that will hear his own case. Even in the new and supposedly softened version of the legislation that was proposed last week, they will have the power to appoint at least the next two Supreme Court justices, including the next chief justice. And the chief justice has the ability to choose the justices that will sit and hear specific cases.
So this is really giving Netanyahu the power to influence who will be the justices that will hear the appeal in his own trial when it gets to the Supreme Court, maybe two or three years from now. That’s a very problematic situation, to say the least.
Couldn’t the next prime minister just put in new judges?
Well, it’s true that if you want to politicize the judicial system today, it would serve the right-wing religious government now and another in the future. What you would have then here in Israel is a scenario where justices are seen, a bit like you guys have in America, as political actors. I don’t know if that’s been working so great for you guys.
When this started about two months ago, I interviewed Alan Dershowitz. He spoke about his opposition to the judicial branch, and to some of the writing in Haaretz that characterized the changes as destroying Israeli democracy. But he said that he’s strongly opposed to these measures, and specifically, the issue of judicial appointments.
He said, why would Israel want to copy from the United States the one thing that is so terrible in our current political constitutional system, the complete politicization of the Supreme Court and the view of justices as political actors? He said, please, please don’t do it. It’s been a disaster for the United States.
At least in your system, the entire Senate has to vote on every judicial appointment. And that matters. Because sometimes it only takes one or two rebels from the party with the majority to vote against an unqualified or inappropriate nominee.
As usually happens when there’s a flare-up in Israel, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing in the United States Jewish community. JFNA sent a major delegation to try to rally against the judicial reform-slash-overhaul. Do you think that American attempts at intervention are helping or hurting the chances of an outcome that’s beneficial for the country?
I don’t think it has much of an influence either way right now. I think It is one of many vectors and pressure points that are operating, and that Netanyahu is watching.
President Biden has come out strongly against this. He spoke on the phone with the prime minister earlier this week, and basically gave him a civics class.
We’re hearing senators and members of Congress warning that this will change the way Israel is viewed in Washington. Today, Israel is viewed as a close American ally that shares America’s liberal democratic values. And tomorrow, that might not be the case anymore.
We’re hearing from members of Congress who are Israel’s strongest supporters, at least on the Democratic side.
I think, frankly, that the Jewish establishment organizations are way behind. They don’t understand what’s happening in their own community. I’ve heard people speaking in such emotional and sometimes even extreme terms about what is happening right now. And then you hear the statements of the legacy organizations, which is kind of like this old classic, “we love Israel so much, we really hope there can be a compromise, it’s for the best interests of everyone,” and they’re just a bit behind.
But still, there is an understanding that something is changing in the Jewish community. I mean, we’ve done a lot of reporting about it in Haaretz, you guys are writing about it at the Forward, and Netanyahu has people that read and report and bring this to his desk.
There are other pressure points as well. We spoke earlier about the military, and the option of a disintegration of Israel’s reserve forces, which is a huge problem. The economic situation here is also something that’s, I think, a very high risk associated with this plan.
When the first reports came out that Defense Minister Gallant was going to speak out against the plan, the main indexes on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange shot way up and closed like 2% or 3% higher, just because of an initial leak about a potential statement.
The markets want this to go away.
All of these pressures combined are in front of Netanyahu. But he’s also facing a different set of pressures from within his own party.
There are very extreme people who are committed to this plan, who have been dreaming for a long time about weakening the Supreme Court.
And also inside his own house. His own son, Yair Netanyahu, is himself a political actor, and a very powerful one.
He’s been pushing very hard to do this, against the advice of all the experts, and against the warnings from the security chiefs and the governor of the Bank of Israel. Netanyahu is facing pressures from many different directions. I don’t know what he will eventually choose.
President Herzog said there’s a chance of civil war if these reforms pass. Do you think there’s a chance of that?
I think he believes it. I’ve been seeing a lot of disturbing things in the streets covering these protests.
Where I live in the Gaza border area of Israel, there was a demonstration by residents. They had a convoy of cars with Israeli flags to protest the judicial plan. People who are supportive of the plan were stopping their cars and saying, “I hope rockets fall on your houses. I hope Hamas kills your children.” Using very, very extreme language.
When people tell you something like that, that shows where the discussion is headed. It’s not heading in a good direction right now. There is a sense of great tension in the air.
I think Herzog really wanted his plan to be the diffuser, and to begin a process of calming down the situation. So far, I don’t see it happening. I think with every passing day, the tension is rising.
There was a really beautiful initiative of people that welcomed demonstrators in one ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, who are mostly secular Israelis from other parts of the country. They came to demonstrate here because the ultra-orthodox leadership is very supportive of the judicial plan. But residents organized to welcome the protesters with the food and water, and invite them for dialogue.
I don’t want to paint a picture that is only negative. But the energy that exists out there that is negative and violent, and it is growing. It’s a very, very dangerous situation.
Watch the full interview here:
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