Israel Approves Key Part of Netanyahu’s Controversial Judicial Overhaul

JERUSALEM—Israel’s Parliament on Monday passed a divisive judicial overhaul bill that triggered mass protests and exposed rifts over the country’s identity.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s entire coalition of 64 lawmakers voted in favor of the legislation, after efforts to reach a compromise collapsed. The opposition lawmakers in the 120-seat parliament, known as the Knesset, walked out of the room.

“With this government, it’s impossible to get an agreement that safeguards Israeli democracy,” opposition leader Yair Lapid said earlier over the failed efforts to reach a compromise.

Netanyahu, who was released from hospital Monday after being fitted for a pacemaker, has come under intense pressure at home and abroad to reach a compromise over the planned changes.

Late Sunday, President Biden urged Netanyahu to focus on “pulling people together and finding consensus.” Biden has been outspoken since March in urging Netanyahu to slow the judicial reform process, an unusual intervention in the legislative affairs of another country—particularly a longtime ally.

The government and opposition leaders had been in marathon talks about a compromise solution for two days. The negotiations collapsed after the opposition demanded several changes to the bill and the passing of a law that would halt all other judicial overhaul legislation for up to 18 months, according to an official involved in the negotiations.

The bill is the first part of a broader judicial overhaul that seeks to limit the power of the top court and hand more control to lawmakers. The bill that passed Monday aims to restrict the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down government or executive decisions on the basis of reasonability, which critics say will open the way for government corruption by preventing the court from stopping the appointment of corrupt officials or allowing the government to fire people who oppose its policies. Supporters say the reasonableness standard is too nebulous and allows the courts to overrule the will of elected officials for political purposes.

The anger over the legislation reflects a societal divide over what it means to be both a Jewish and a democratic state. The state was founded and controlled in its early decades by secular socialists of largely Eastern European descent. They envisioned a culturally Jewish but socially liberal democratic state. Over recent decades, an alliance between various segments that have come to represent the Israeli right—religious Zionists, settlers, the ultraorthodox and Jews of Middle Eastern descent—has grown in both numbers and power. Netanyahu’s Likud party, which is itself secular, has united those segments on the right into a political powerhouse.

Netanyahu’s coalition today is widely viewed as the most right-wing, nationalist and religious since the country’s founding and includes ministers once considered on the fringes of Israeli society. Those opposed to the overhaul fear that this government intends to weaken the judicial system so it can wield unimpeded power in enacting an ethno-religious state that would include annexing parts or the whole of the occupied West Bank, having religion play a greater role in public life and elevating the status of Jews above other citizens.

Those in favor of the legislation say despite their growing political power they have been repeatedly thwarted in attempts to pass legislation because of an activist and liberal Supreme Court. They argue that the legislation seeks to properly balance the power of the judiciary and the legislative and executive branches.

“This is a clash between the Israelis and the Jews,” said Gideon Rahat, chair of the political science department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Israelis, he said, represent the founders who envisioned a secular Zionist state while the Jews are those who want to rebuild the Jewish kingdom that reigned over the land 2,000 years ago. “It’s a clash between a more civil identity and a more religious identity.”

In compromise negotiations, the opposition conceded to discarding the reasonableness standard for some executive or government decisions. But they also demanded that the reasonableness standard continue to protect certain officials, such as the attorney general or the heads of security services, to ensure that the government couldn’t fire officials for political reasons. They also proposed that decisions by ministers could continue to be scrutinized by the court under the doctrine.

An official said “the prime minister has made all efforts, including from his hospital room, to find compromise.”

Another part of the overhaul that the coalition aims to pass in the future would give the Knesset a majority say in appointing new judges. That power is currently entrusted to a committee jointly appointed by sitting justices, the government coalition, opposition parties and the Israeli bar association.

David Kozlovsky, 31, from Jerusalem, attended a pro-overhaul protest in Tel Aviv on Sunday. He said he thinks the opponents of judicial reform have overstated the threat to democracy. “I think it will become clear to the public that these fear-campaigns were baseless, which will remove their suspicions about the remaining parts of the proposed reform,” he said.

It is, in part, Netanyahu’s legal troubles that have brought the country to this point. Throughout most of his two decades in power, Netanyahu built coalitions with segments on the right, center and the left. After his 2019 indictment on bribery and fraud—which he denies—his former centrist partners and even some on the right refused to sit in a government with him, leading him to briefly lose power for a little over a year. When he returned to power late last year, he built a coalition that included two ultraorthodox political parties and an alliance of ultranationalists.

The debate underlying the legislation also centers around what democracy means. To the opponents of the judicial legislation, democracy includes a robust system of checks and balances and protections for minorities. Israel’s courts have long served as a strong defender of individual liberties, upholding the rights of Israel’s Arab citizens, women and LGBTQ people.

For some proponents of the legislation, democracy means majority rule. They also want to see the state defined more by its Jewishness—both culturally and religiously—than by universal humanist values.

This includes Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews, a fast-growing and potent political bloc, who hope to expand the influence of religion in the public sphere and enshrine a permanent exemption from military service. Past attempts have repeatedly been foiled by Israel’s Supreme Court.

It is also the view of many in the religious Zionist movement, which is the political and religious philosophy of the settler movement that seeks to cement Israeli authority over the occupied West Bank. This group, in particular, bears anger at the courts for allowing the destruction of Jewish settlements in Gaza in 2005 when Israel pulled out of the territory.

Yedidia Stern, president of the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem, says many settlers hope to one day annex the West Bank without giving full equality to the Palestinians who live there.

The courts, as protectors of civil rights, would be an obstacle to that vision. The judicial overhaul “might be one way of pushing forward their ultimate agenda by eliminating the power of the courts.”

It is also a power struggle between a group on the right who feel disenfranchised by what they perceive to be a liberal elite that controls the court.

Shlomit Ravitsky Tur-Paz, a legal and Jewish studies scholar with the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, said that even though the right-wing has been in power for decades, it still feels as if the country is ruled by secular elites.

“They still feel they are the ones who don’t have the power,” she said. “So that’s what they are trying to change now.”

—Ari Flanzraich contributed to this article.

Write to Dov Lieber at [email protected] and Shayndi Raice at [email protected]