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THIS MORNING, THE Israeli parliament passed a highly controversial law despite enormous public opposition and accusations of subverting democracy.
In effect, the law gives politicians influence over the process of appointing judges for the first time in the country’s history by overhauling the committee that appoints them.
The law, which will curb the supreme court’s power and eliminate the role of the country’s bar association in appointing judges, is widely seen as a move by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to expand the power of his historically right-wing government and sure up his own position in the face of corruption allegations. It also aligns with the political strategies of Israel’s far-right allies abroad.
The overhaul is one of the judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu that spurred hundreds of thousands to protest across the country in 2023, before the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the resulting war on Gaza.
Those protests have grown and shrunk in size since then but never fully dissipated, while coinciding with demonstrations calling for the return of Israeli hostages from Gaza.
Today’s move has been denounced as authoritarian and antidemocratic by members of the opposition in the Knesset (Israeli parliament), who boycotted the vote, while Israeli newspaper Haaretz described it as “Netanyahu’s judicial coup”.
“Moments ago, the Israeli government passed a law that has one objective – to ensure that judges are subjected to the will of politicians,” the Knesset’s opposition leaders said today.
Yair Lapid, who leads of the centre-right Yesh Atid party, said he had filed an appeal with the supreme court against the law on behalf of several opposition parties, just minutes after the parliamentary vote.
Israel’s justice minister Yariv Levin, who sponsored the bill, characterised the new law as a way to “restore balance” between the judicial and legislative branches of government.
He said the law was “opening a new page” and launched an attack on the supreme court, claiming it had “effectively nullified the Knesset” and “placed itself above the government”.
Levin said it was “hypocrisy and one-sided to say that the Knesset is forbidden to act while the court is allowed to act in the middle of a war”.
The law is not set to come into effect until Israel’s next general election, scheduled for October next year, but Levin has said he will continue to prevent the appointment of new judges between now and then.
Netanyahu’s Likud party is currently heading a coalition government that holds 67 of the Knesset’s 120 seats. The make-up of the coalition has changed a number of times during the war in Gaza.
Today’s vote comes on the heels of Netanyahu firing his attorney general and the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, which the premier’s critics say are part of an effort to protect him from investigations into alleged payments he received from the government of Qatar – dubbed ‘Qatargate’ by Israeli media – and other allegations of corruption and fraud for which he has been on trial since 2020.
He is also wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the war on Gaza.
Placing the appointment of judges under the control of politicians is the latest example of the persistent rightward shift in Israeli politics led by the Netanyahu government, and rhymes with the approaches of his political allies abroad, like US President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who have both sought to strong-arm their countries’ judicial branches.
The Netanyahu government has also developed friendly relations with the right outside the US and Europe, most notably with former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro – who is currently charged with attempting a coup.
Yesterday, Netanyahu railed against the opposition, using rhetoric that bore similarities to that of Trump.
“You recycle the same worn-out and ridiculous slogans about ‘the end of democracy’. Well, once and for all: Democracy is not in danger, it is the power of the bureaucrats that is in danger. The deep state is in danger,” he told the Knesset.
“Perhaps you could stop putting spanners in the works of the government in the middle of a war. Perhaps you could stop fuelling the sedition, hatred and anarchy in the streets.”
Another sign that Netanyahu’s government is taking inspiration from and courting the far-right in Europe is the antisemitism conference in Jerusalem this week that invited several high-profile far-right figures.
Among those in attendance were a member of Orban’s Fidesz party and the president of France’s National Rally, Jordan Bardella.
The National Rally (RN) was originally called the National Front and founded by party leader Marine Le Pen’s father, Jen Marie Le Pen, who repeatedly minimised the horrors of the Holocaust and described the Nazi occupation of France as “not particularly inhumane”.
Thousands of Jews were deported from France to death camps elsewhere in Europe under the Vichy regime.
Orban meanwhile, is a proponent of the ethnonationalist “great replacement” theory and in 2022, after making a speech against “race mixing”, a Jewish member of his staff quit the government.
Netanyahu is expected to visit Hungary in the next week or so, despite the ICC warrant for his arrest.
While far-right politicians in Europe may seem like unlikely allies of the Israeli government, many in white supremacist and ethnonationalist circles in the West actually see Israel as an example to follow because of its ethnocentric identity as a Jewish state, which multiple human rights groups have called an apartheid regime.
A number of mainstream Jewish leaders pulled out of the conference, calling the invitation of far-right figures “a stab in the back”.
Analysts say the invitation to parties that have themselves been accused of antisemitism in the past demonstrates the willingness of Israel’s right – under pressure from some traditional allies over the war in Gaza – to cultivate new relationships with unlikely supporters.
“The current Israeli government sees the world in black and white,” said Denis Charbit, a political scientist at the Open University of Israel.
Some in Israel feel the country is currently isolated, and needs “new friends”, even if it deems them distasteful, he added.
“Just three generations after the Holocaust, Europe’s far right are welcomed as bedfellows in Jerusalem,” wrote journalist Em Hilton in an opinion column in Haaretz this morning.
With reporting from AFP
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