Israel’s Government Looks at Next Steps in Judicial Overhaul

TEL AVIV—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition scored a major victory this week when it passed the first part of a package of legislation aimed at remaking the country’s judiciary. Now, it is ready for more.

High on the list is giving elected officials control of the committee that selects judges, one of the most contentious parts of the judicial overhaul. Netanyahu shelved a bill in March that would have given the government majority control of the committee in the face of mass protests and threats by military reservists to stop reporting for duty if it passed. 

Protests and threats from reservists didn’t dissuade Netanyahu from moving ahead with the first part of the plan, which was passed into law Monday without any support from the opposition. In an interview Thursday with ABC News, Netanyahu indicated he is prepared to continue unilaterally passing the judicial overhaul if the opposition won’t compromise with the government. 

“Now that they can see we’re prepared to move without them—we have the majority—maybe we’ll be able to move with them,” Netanyahu said. He said he would give the opposition until mid-November to work on a compromise. 

Following two failed rounds of talks, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid said he would reject entering negotiations that aren’t serious. “The opposition won’t be part of talks that are just an empty show,” he said Monday.  

Israelis have been protesting for nearly 30 weeks against a judicial overhaul plan that seeks to limit the powers of the Supreme Court and hand more control to lawmakers. On Thursday night, tens of thousands of people came out to protest the government’s efforts to remake the judiciary. 

Proponents of the plan say the changes are necessary to rein in a liberal, activist court that too easily overturns the will of elected officials. Opponents say the plan undermines the system of checks and balances and will allow Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing, ultranationalist and religiously conservative parties to pass legislation that the court would normally find unconstitutional. 

Israel’s Parliament, or Knesset, heads into summer recess on July 30 and won’t return until mid-October, meaning there will be a pause before any legislation comes back for debate. 

Simcha Rothman, one of the lawmakers leading the judicial overhaul, said the coalition wants to move ahead with changing the way judges are appointed and “continuing the correction of the justice system in a responsible way.” He said he hopes to do so while working with the opposition. 

The nine-member judicial appointment committee is currently made up of a group of sitting justices, members of the Israeli bar association, representatives from the governing coalition and, traditionally, a member of the opposition. Votes are divided so that no one group has a majority say on the committee. 

No new bill has been advanced and Netanyahu and Rothman say they will be considering how to revise the legislation in the coming weeks. 

But a version of the bill advanced in the Knesset in February, but put on hold in March, would change the judicial selection committee so that the governing coalition would be permitted to appoint the first two Supreme Court justices in its term unopposed. After that, Supreme Court appointments would require support from one opposition member and one judge. The Supreme Court president would also be appointed by the committee, rather than on the basis of seniority, as it currently works, and there would be no more members of the bar on the committee. 

Netanyahu told The Wall Street Journal in an interview last month that he doesn’t see a problem with giving lawmakers the decisive say on the committee. 

The criticism that “endures right now is that you cannot have elected officials choosing judges because that is the end of democracy. Well, in that case, the United States isn’t a democracy,” Netanyahu said.  

Amir Fuchs, a legal scholar with the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank, said the current system for appointing judges is set up so that both the judges and politicians have a veto over each other. He said that there are conservative justices in line to join the committee. 

“I think the system provides a really good and diverse Supreme Court, and in time it becomes more equal,” he said. 

Israel’s Justice Minister Yariv Levin, one of the architects of the government’s plan, has refused to convene the committee to appoint judges until he can change its current makeup. 

The Supreme Court is slated in September to hear a petition from the centrist Yesh Atid party, headed by Lapid, to demand the committee be convened to fill empty positions on the court. Some legal scholars say the committee cannot be changed after a recent vote passed to place two new lawmakers on the committee, one from the opposition and one from the coalition.  

Aside from changing the way judges are appointed, the coalition has other legislation it hopes to pursue. This includes making the opinions of the attorney general and legal adviser to ministers advisory rather than binding as it currently stands. The coalition also wants to prevent the Supreme Court from being able to strike down Israel’s quasi-constitutional laws, known as basic laws, and limit what cases the court can hear. 

Netanyahu told The Wall Street Journal that he wasn’t going to pursue a bill that would allow the Knesset to override Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority of lawmakers. Some in his coalition have since said Netanyahu told them he would bring the bill back but in a different form. 

Abraham Diskin, a political scientist with the Kohelet Forum, a Jerusalem-based think tank that helped craft the government legislation, said that right-wing governments that have been in power since the late 1970s have never been able to fully carry out their vision because the Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down major legislative priorities. 

“De facto, the real decisions on all issues was out of their hands,” he said. “The court is the single and most powerful of all factors in policy and decision making.”

Write to Dov Lieber at [email protected]

—Ari Flanzraich contributed to this article.