Behind the riots in Israel
Melanie Phillips writes:
The focus of opposition [and riots] is [Netanyahu’s] proposed judicial reforms. The protests are also fueled, however, by fear of the nationalist and religious ultras in the governing coalition and by hatred of Netanyahu, who for some people has achieved near-demonic status.
Netanyahu has some similarities to Trump in that regard, and the split in Israeli society, although certainly not the same as in the US, has some similarities to it.
Phillips continues:
Significant as these factors are, a convulsion of this magnitude suggests that something even more fundamental is at play. What is striking about the protests is the irrationality at their core. Although there are legitimate concerns about aspects of the reform package, the overwrought opposition to it is out of all proportion.
The place of the judicial system in Israel is different than in the US, however. Phillips explains the history:
The protesters claim, for example, that giving politicians a decisive role in selecting new judges, as is being proposed, will destroy the rule of law and an independent judiciary.
They say the changes, which would stop the courts from overturning laws made by the Knesset, end the power of legal advisers to prevent government ministers from enacting the policy programs for which they were elected and end the slippery concept of “reasonableness” through which the judges have substituted politics and ideology for law, would herald the end of democracy and the abolition of civil rights.
Yet as law professor Avi Bell has pointed out, for many decades after the State of Israel was founded, only the Knesset could legislate and no court could overturn legislation for any reason. Attorneys-general and all other legal advisers could be dismissed and their legal opinions bound no one. No government action could be reversed by the Supreme Court simply because the Court considered it “unreasonable.”
In other words, the reforms will largely return Israel to the situation that prevailed before 1993, when Supreme Court President Aharon Barak launched his revolutionary campaign of judicial activism.
You can learn much more about the Israeli court system and how judges are chosen here. A quote:
“The system today gives the entirety of the public in Israel a minority in the committee, which is unheard of. It’s really unheard of for unelected officials to have this kind of power, to have a self-perpetuating court. In almost every other democratic country, the system gives the power to the ruling majority to appoint judges,” said Rothman.
There are also issues involving the fact that Israel has no written constitution, and therefore judges are not ruling on new laws in terms of a written document.
Phillips contnues:
Democracy is rooted in [the following] core principle: The laws governing the people are founded upon the consent of the people. That consent is demonstrated by the people’s election of representatives in parliament who pass those laws. That’s why, although government needs checks and balances, the elected parliament in a Western nation is supreme.
But now, the very idea of the Western nation itself is under sustained assault. The progressive narrative, so dominant in Western culture, holds that the Western nation is exclusive, racist and oppressive.
National laws must therefore be superseded by universal “human rights” laws promulgated by international judges, as well as domestic judges who prioritize those laws over the laws of their own nation. The democratic process by which those national laws are formed and passed is disdained.
That process is what is now under attack in Israel by those protesting against the judicial reforms. The agenda of the politicians who have been elected by the people conflicts with the liberal universalism of man-made human rights that prioritizes approved minorities over the majority and is promulgated by Israel’s activist Supreme Court.
As the American foreign-policy specialist David Wurmser has observed, the “illiberal” left no longer believes that elections matter. They believe instead that there is a moral objective to policy matters that the left has the power to divine and define…
…[W]hat all the protesters have in common is that, at base, they would prefer rule by judges to rule by an elected government. Although one might recoil from some members of the government or despair of Israel’s dysfunctional political system, this is a dangerous tipping point—and one that has a baleful resonance far beyond Israel.
For this is the West’s post-democracy moment, in which a dominant mindset is prioritizing universal laws over national ones, elevating the legitimacy of street protests and appointing politically activist judges as the shock troops of the progressive assault on traditional values.
You may indeed recognize this as a process going on in the entire Western world today. Israel is just another example.
Robert Bork and Christopher Lasch were delineating the phenomenon a generation ago.
The Jews are doing stupid Jew things. Again. Read the OT, the Torah. Of course it’s really humans doing stupid human things as usual.
Politically activist judges will destroy nations if they can, in Israel and here.
Gosh, wouldn’t you think a tiny nation surrounded by enemies would be more united? Are they so unconcerned about the Muslims that want to wipe them off the map, hat they can afford to quarrel violent y among themselves?
What happens in nations that achieve high standards of living? Do people suddenly forget the disciplines and good sense that got them there? Apparently so.
As Jahaziel Maqqebet comments, “….it’s really humans doing stupid human things as usual.” Yes, it is.
The problem is having politicised judicial systems in the first place.
Which is sadly very common, and I don’t really know a way to prevent it as judges obviously will have their political beliefs and most people have trouble letting those (and their religious ideology, which for many is the same thing) interfere with their thought processes when they shouldn’t.
The Netherlands goes some way to prevent this by making judges employees of the courts, rather than political appointees. Judges are also serving for a limited period, after which they are forced to retire from the judiciary and go back to being lawyers.
Doesn’t prevent political judges (as obviously the hiring process can be and often is biased), but reduces the risk of them gaining too much power.
I found this judicial situation in Israel appeals to the nerd in me, so I took a look at Neo’s link to the post on how the judicial selections are done now, and what would be changed, which was very useful. This is mostly a restatement to test my understanding, so if I get something wrong, someone throw a flag on the play.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/who-chooses-judges-the-evolution-and-planned-radical-overhaul-of-judicial-selection/#:~:text=Judges%20today%20are%20technically%20appointed,well%20as%20the%20Supreme%20Court.
Apparently, no other body or individual can veto the decisions of the committee, unlike the US system where the President nominates a candidate (without any officially mandated input from anyone else), but the Senate has to confirm the appointment. Even so, the system is not all that different except for the formal procedure of who gets to make the suggestions (1 person or a committee) and who gets to make the final decisions (50 people or — the same committee).
But it’s only detrimental when the will of the people is conservative.
Implicit in the author’s presentation is that Israel is at the stage where most of the current judges, including the Supreme Court, are leftists (just like the USA, up until 2016); the lawyers are mostly leftists (at least the ones with political clout are, just as in the USA); and the ideology of the cabinet ministers and the Knesset members depends on who is running the government (just like the US executive and Congress).
If the Left’s coalition is in charge, then there is only ONE conservative, and that’s assuming the MK for the opposition party is not a CINO just like some of our GOP congress reps.
If the Right’s coalition is in charge, as it is under Netanyahu, then there are 6 leftists against 3 conservatives — which means the judges appointed to the courts will not support the kinds of policies the public voted for, regardless of whether they are in accord with the Basic Laws (there is no Constitution) or not. (Also sounds a lot like the US.)
“The first thing we do,” per Shakespeare, is get rid of the lawyers; always a good way to start.
Presumably, a conservative government would try to get at least a couple of moderate swing votes from the retirees, as the SC president (who we assume to be a leftist for the near future) won’t otherwise approve. I can see some real potential for dead-locks here!
Again, this only works to the advantage of conservatives if there is a Conservative government in power; otherwise there will again be an 8-1 imbalance favoring the Left.
A reform supporter quoted later in the article notes that the government-coalition members don’t always vote as a bloc, that is, the leftists always vote together but conservatives are more ideologically divergent; thus, the “automatic majority of five members on the committee” might be less of a conservative surety than is assumed.
He also conceded that “the [retired] judges who sit on the committee will likely reflect the ideological outlook of the justice minister who appoints them. But he asserted that, unlike the coalition KMs on the panel, they would be more independent since they could not be removed from the committee once appointed.”
So it appears to be an unlimited appointment for the three justices, unlike the case for the ministers and KMs.
Five officially-conservative committee members would be facing a head-wind of leftists for a long time unless the government could get a couple of somewhat conservative moderates appointed (depending on just how squishy those justices and the two KMs were).
If the government later went to the Left, the division would be at least 6L to 3C (depending ditto ditto).
I’m not sure why the Left is so against these reforms; they aren’t losing a whole lot of control, at least until the SC and lower judicial pipelines run out of Leftists.
If they are afraid that will happen, then they are also afraid that they won’t be able to unseat the Conservative government soon, or for very long at a time.
Which is an interesting observation.
The “Claremont Review of Books” arrived yesterday and the lead article is about Netanyahu. The title is “The Churchill of the Middle East.” I will read it this afternoon. It’s by Andrew Roberts, the Churchill biographer.
The left in this country seems focused on bringing down the current consensus on government and changing to something other than a nation state. For Israel, surrounded by bitter enemies, this would be an order of magnitude more insane.
Not sure I’d call them riots.
They are more like massive, very loud—drumming and loudspeakers—very obnoxious, self-feeding, seething, self-righteous, verging on the hysterical, in-your-face demonstrations,made of people from all walks of life…with Israeli flags being the iconic symbol and the slogan “democratya” being the more-than-somewhat-ironic mantric chant.
Problem is that during the several times a week they protest, they block traffic and cause massive transportation problems.
Depending on the time of day, in many cases, those demonstrating are families with kids of various ages.
In some cases, the seething demonstrations do get out of control, with police having to assert order, use water canon vehicles and make arrests.
They are based on a lot of imprecise information and stoked and incited by the usual media and politicians suspects—
No, not riots.
At least not yet.
Could easily get there, though, if the protesters and their organizers become increasingly drunk with power; and as the vector of the movement shifts to toppling the government or, at least, making the country ungovernable.
Temper tantrum from category error brigade
Why do leftists oppose traditional values? I know, I know. Rhetorical question. They do so because people holding to traditional values do not want to be controlled as lefties want to control people and will resist.
See the Battle of Sugar Point.
The problem here, though, is that it may well be a huge unforced error of the “better to be smart than right” variety. IOW, perhaps the new government should have waited a bit on this issue.
(Even Lapid declared several good years back that the court issue was a problem that had to be resolved; though no doubt that he would far prefer to the person trying to resolve it.)
OTOH, there would have been no coalition, and hence no government, had not Netanyahu agreed with those coalition partners to push this reform, since it was a demand of at least one of the coalition partners; and, in fact, if this issue is NOT pursued, those coalition partners may well decide to leave the coalition, thus toppling the government.
So, stuck bewteen a rock and a hard place, it looks like a game of chicken on several planes….
Lurking in the background is the question of whether the current government definitely has a mandate to make such a change, given the split in the electorate. (In principle, yes; but such is the nature of the change that it would have been preferable to have as wide agreement as possible…)
Having said that, there is a lot of misinformation on the subject being promoted, publicized and magnified by the Left.
And so, a potentially catastrophic logjam.
And so, a potentially catastrophic logjam.
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What logjam? The government won another vote in the Knesset yesterday, with a plurality of 14 votes.
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Caroline Glick discusses the long history of prosecutorial malfeasance:
https://carolineglick.com/what-the-war-against-judicial-reform-is-really-about/
Some additional observations:
The cultural schism goes deep here – the vast majority of Jewish immigrants to modern Israel came from/with deep religious conviction. The hard-core leftie kernel leading this attempted coup are Marxists who elbowed aside these more traditional Jews to grab control of the Zionist project, and to impose their own vision of creating a “New Jew” divorced from history, ready to take their place among their socialist comrades when the Light of Nations shone forth.
In the meantime these apparatchiks kept religious, Sephardic, and other groups of Jews out of the hallways of power. These excluded groups wound up creating their own schools and universities like the Catholics did in the US.
And they prospered and increased due to their traditional values, while the children of the socialists…. well, raised on the inherent postmodern contradiction of a nationalist movement that ditched all previous national history and identity, they are confused, bitter, aimless cosmopolitan know-nothings. They reject Zionism, despise the Judeo-Christian West and their fellow Jews, and love terrorist “freedom fighters”. They are now waving signs about “Democracy” without even a basic understanding of what the word means…
For many many years they have used the courts and “judicial activism” to impose their will on an increasingly restive majority of Israelis. For them “the threat to Israel’s democracy” is basically the fear that they will lose that power. That is what’s bringing them out into the streets. And every poster, chant, and TV interview reveals their elitism and deep racism towards their fellow citizens.
One salient feature of the protests that American conservatives can identify with is the age of many of the protesters – they are aging hippies.
And a delicious irony of all this is that they got themselves in this situation by swearing they would never sit in coalition with Netanyahu. By placing an obviously accomplished statesman like Netanyahu and his centrist Likud party beyond the pale, they basically guaranteed that Likud would form a coalition with religious and Sephardic groups more strongly committed to judicial reform and redressing the snubs of the past.
I swear the way the media covers Israel (warts and all) you would think that Israel is the size of Germany and has a population of 80 million people. There is an oversaturation of news on the Jewish state where even a one day Garbage collectors strike in Haifa is considered to be news worthy.
Overall, our garbage elites (h/t Kurt Schlichter) view countries as toys, to fool around with or destroy, as in Israel, El Salvador, Hungary and the good old USA. They may have met their match in India and Japan.