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| Former President of the court Aharon Barak (Mishpacha) |
Let me be clear. All the anger expressed by protests in Israel is not really over the proposed judicial reform. Although that certainly precipitated them. I just think these protests are spillover from the anger over losing so badly to the right. Which has given increased power to the religious parties. The left sees this as the beginning of the end of values sacred to them.
For example Israel’s largest city, Tel Aviv advertises itself as the friendliest city to gay people in the world. The left would like to keep that title. This is not to say that Israel should treat its gay citizens badly. God forbid. It’s more about taking pride in Tel Aviv hosting people whose lives often entail intimate relationships they consider perfectly fine - even though those relationships are considered immoral and sinful to religious Jews. The left desires to maintain that image. Religious Jews are appalled by it.
How angry is the left? It is shocking to hear what they are talking about doing to overturn a free and fair democratic election. From JNS:
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday called for the protest movement against the government’s judicial reform proposal to move to the next stage, one fueled by violent confrontation.
“What is needed is to move to the next stage, the stage of war, and war is not waged with speeches. War is waged in a face-to-face battle, head-to-head and hand-to-hand, and that is what will happen here,” he said in an interview with DemocraTV, according to Israel National News.
“It’s good to see 100,000 people, but that’s not what will lead the real fight. The real fight will break through these fences and enter into a real war,” he added...
(Former Prime Mister Yair Lapid said) We will fight in the streets, we’ll fight until we win,”
Those comments, in turn, came after Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai warned of “bloodshed.”
“This is the history of the world. Countries become dictatorships through the use of democratic tools…. Countries do not become democratic again except with bloodshed,” he said.
So much for peaceful protest the left is so fond of touting. If they follow up these words with action, it will by contrast make the violent extremist Charedi protests in Meah Shearim and Bet Shemesh look like a trip to Disneyland.
This did not have to happen. But when the more extreme members of the ruling coalition start doing the things that the left fears most, reactions like this are inevitable.
One of the things that precipitated this incitement to violence was an attempt by Shas party leader Aryeh Deri to criminalize mixed prayer or immodest dress at the Kotel.
Now observant Jews are supposed to dress modestly all the time. And we are forbidden to participate in a mixed prayer service. A bill criminalizing that might seem like the right thing to do if one is observant. But in my view it was exactly the wrong thing to do.
It might surprise people that as an observant Jew I oppose legislation that would require more observance among secular Jews in Israel. Of course I would prefer if all of my coreligionists were observant since I believe that this is what God requires of all of His people. However, getting there by means of coercion is not the way to go about it. That will not make anyone more observant. It will make them more hostile to observance and to religious Jews.
Secular Jews want to be left alone – and dress they way they choose. This is not being anti Orthodox. It is only a desire to dress comfortably of fashionably. Their intent in dressing that way is not to be provocative. But if you outlaw it you will only make them angry and resentful.
That anger was expressed by one very misguided young woman who decided to protest that proposed law by stripping down to her underwear at the Kotel. (She was arrested for indecent exposure). This is what religious coercion looks like. The more religious government officials try to force religion down people’s throats, the more you will see the kind of desecration of God’s name.
There is a reason the Chazon Ish signed onto a compromise agreement with the leaders of the fledgling Jewish state when it came to religious observance. He knew that forcing secular Jews to be observant would be counter-productive if not impossible. But he also wanted to protect the rights of religious Jews to continue their way of life. That resulted in what came to be known as the status quo agreement that I have referred to many times. It is a sort of unofficial state policy which is more or less honored to this day. (Not, however, for the lack of one side or the other trying to alter it in ways that would favor them.)
What Shas did was an attempt to violate this agreement and the reaction by one woman was to do the opposite of the bill’s intent.
The reason this happened is because of the newfound power of religious Jews by virtue of the last election. What Shas tried to do is exactly what many secular Jews feared.
This brings me back to the controversy over the Judicial Reform bill proposed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin. Which is the ostensible reason for all the protests and violent rhetoric:
The Constitution, Law and Justice Committee earlier on Monday voted to send the first bill in the government’s judicial reform package for its first reading in the full plenum, which is likely to take place next week.
The bill has been formulated as an amendment to Basic Law: Judiciary and would give the government control over the Judicial Selection Committee with five of the panel’s nine members, and only a simple majority needed to appoint judges.
A while back I expressed mixed feeling about a proposal by the new government to make rulings of Israel’s high court subject to a veto by a simple majority vote by the Knesset. As this bill was just described, it is not about that. If that’s right, I don’t see what al the fuss is about. Although the bill might need some tweaking, the way justices would be chosen would be similar to the way they are chosen here in the US. The executive branch chooses candidates which are subject to the approval of the Senate. Depending on which party is in office, justices can be either liberal or conservative.
If the proposed legislation might give the Knesset more power over judicial choices than the USd does to the Senate - that could be fixed. This is probably the kind of compromise suggested by Israeli President Isaac Herzog. That would make Israel’s democracy look more like ours. But judicial reform is necessary. That’s because the way the Israel’s judiciary is set up now is anything but democratic. Here is how Jonathan Rosenblum describes it:
In a critical 2007 review of A Judge in a Democracy by Aharon Barak, who as Court president single-handedly established Israel’s High Court as the most powerful in the world, Judge Richard Posner, one of America’s leading legal thinkers as a professor and judge, concurred with the earlier judgment of Judge Robert Bork that Barak had established “a world record for judicial hubris.”
In Barak’s view, the world is filled with law — i.e., there is no human action that is not subject to a legal norm, and judges are empowered to determine those norms...
As a consequence, no government action or failure to act was beyond the purview of the Barak Court. The late Professor Ruth Gavison charged that no high court in the world set out to determine every societal norm to the extent that the Barak Court did... setting itself up as the supreme moral authority...
Barak, however, does not view morality and legality as separate realms. It is the judge’s duty, he argues, to give expression to the values of the “enlightened” and “progressive” members of the public. The standard of “reasonability” wielded by the ideal Barakian judge (i.e., Barak himself) is precisely what accords with the views of the enlightened public. Government actions that are unreasonable by those lights would be, according to Barak, illegal.
Not surprisingly, what the High Court deems “reasonable” trends heavily left...
Not surprisingly, Barak ardently defended Israel’s unique method of picking new judges for the High Court, according to which the three sitting judges on the nine-member selection committee, exercise a de facto veto over potential new colleagues. The result of that system, charged Gavison, is that the Court becomes a “self-perpetuating sect” of like-minded individuals drawn from the same narrow societal stratum. But what was a bug in Israeli democracy, for her, was a feature for Barak, a means of ensuring that progressive values prevail and the lower orders are kept in place.
I wonder if the vast majority of Israeli protesters even realize how undemocratic their judicial system is. Same thing world leaders who are suggesting that Israel's democracy is at stake if judicial reform proceeds.
Truth is - if they want the status quo to remain they are in essence supporting a leftist judicial dictatorship whose perpetual power will supersede the will of the people whenever they feels like it. Without regard to any conservative or religious principles they do not share.
Do Olmert, Lapid, Huldai and their fellow travelers really want a democracy? Or do they want to perpetuate the exiting leftist judicial dictatorship and pretend it’s a democracy? I think we know the answer to that.
Problem is - they have the rest of the world fooled. Thankfully Israel’s liberal president realizes that a compromise is the best solution. If done along the lines I suggested, it will be a much stronger democracy that it has been since Aharon Barak took charge over two decades ago.
