Israel’s Other Tyranny of the Minority

I was happy to read Evelyn Gordon’s essay on the need to reform the Israeli judiciary, one of the best explorations of the issues at stake in a perhaps unprecedented moment. Beginning with her seminal articles in Azure in the 1990s, Gordon has been one of the foremost analysts not only of the comings and goings of Israel’s politics but of the fundamental characteristics of its regime. This latest essay lives up to her own very high standard.

There’s much I agree with—and disagree with—in Gordon’s essay, though I should state frankly that I oppose the proposals for reform currently before the Knesset. But I’ll leave reflection on the nuts and bolts to legal scholars. I would like instead to focus on the politics of judicial reform, for the story of how Israel arrived at the current impasse illuminates the ways in which this impasse is the result of a deeper crisis of the political system itself.

Gordon does an excellent job tracing the outsized role of Israel’s Supreme Court since Aharon Barak’s judicial revolution of the 1990s, and the discontent with the court that has been growing on the right since then. But why now? After all, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has been in power since 2009, excluding the interregnum of last year. During that time, Netanyahu, fanatically reformist on the diplomatic and economic fronts, showed no appetite for any major social or constitutional reform, and paid no political price for it. Indeed, Netanyahu fundamentally accepted the status quo on social and constitutional issues—wisely, in my view, since sometimes it’s better to leave bad enough alone if the alternative is worse.