The Dangers Lurking in Israel’s Judicial Counterrevolution

As I write these words, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have spontaneously taken to the streets after news broke that Prime Minister Netanyahu ousted the minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, who had called to halt the government’s judicial reforms. This is a moment of great uncertainty and concern for Israel.

At a moment like this, the details are often neglected for the big picture. But every big picture includes a few details that hold special importance. In my response to Evelyn Gordon’s eloquent and carefully argued essay, I will focus on the most important details of the Levin-Rothman plan—and Gordon’s analysis thereof—and then take a step back to view the big picture.

In her essay, Evelyn Gordon lays out the case against Israel’s Supreme Court as it is currently constituted, and in favor (with some caveats) of the reforms proposed by Simcha Rothman and Yariv Levin. I am in agreement with several of her key arguments, but I’d like to focus here on three of the key points I believe she gets wrong. The first concerns appointments to the Supreme Court; the second concerns the relationship between the appointments and the proposed new rules for judicial review; the third concerns her argument that the Rothman-Levin reforms will set the clock back to the status quo ante 1995. This desire to un-ring the bell—and its disconnect from current reality—is, I believe, why we are facing an unprecedented crisis in Israel.