‘Don’t you dare’: Herzog warns against reviving judicial overhaul, pleads for unity
In speech to Israel Bar Association, president warns against fractures in society that weaken country’s resolve
Lazar Berman is The Times of Israel's diplomatic reporter
President Isaac Herzog cautioned the government on Tuesday against resurrecting its highly divisive judicial overhaul legislation from last year, issuing a strident call for unity.
“Don’t you dare,” said Herzog, speaking to the Israel Bar Association. “Let us recover and heal after the terrible break. We must not make fateful decisions regarding the country’s core values without a broad consensus, and an in-depth and shared dialogue.”
Referencing the bitter fight over the sweeping reform that gripped Israel in 2023, Herzog said the “fracture that weakened our resilience and strength is beginning to return to our lives” and declared that “the soul and future of the nation are at stake.”
Herzog’s speech came weeks after Justice Minister Yariv Levin reportedly pushed for the renewal of the government’s legal overhaul, which has been frozen since October 7.
“I hear the voices and initiatives of those who seek to send us back months, to the same arena where it all began, I recognize the dangerous fumes in the air and I warn against them here and honestly ask: Is this what Israeli society needs now?” continued Herzog.
“Is this what thousands of bereaved families need? This is what tens of thousands of families are asking for who don’t sleep at night out of worry for their loved ones at the front, because they are evacuated, or God forbid because their loved ones are kidnapped and held by brutal murderers? Is this what the wounded in body and soul are shouting to us? I say clearly — No!”
The controversial package of proposals, which sought to increase government control over the judiciary and limit the High Court’s power of judicial review, prompted mass protests last year, and was briefly paused after a general strike brought the country to a standstill in March 2023.
Last July, the government managed to pass a component of the overhaul, prohibiting courts from rejecting government decisions on the basis of “reasonableness.”
That law was overturned in December, however, by which time the overhaul’s legislative agenda had already been frozen in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught that starting the ongoing war.
“It is time for us to decide on whether to pursue this with all of our strength,” the Kan broadcaster quoted Levin, one of the primary architects of the overhaul, as saying at an August cabinet meeting: “The time has come to make the change that is needed in the judicial system.”
Earlier this week, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets demanding a hostage-ceasefire deal in response to the army’s recovery of six bodies of hostages executed by the Hamas terror organization.
The president urged all sides of the political spectrum to leave their echo chambers.
“It won’t help us if everyone climbs barricades on every issue,” he said. “Listen for a moment to other parts of the nation, to your sisters and brothers, to whole communities in Israel that think a little differently.”
Herzog, who spoke at the funeral of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin on Monday, also said that Israel’s leaders have “an urgent and immediate task — to act to the best of their ability to save those who can still be saved, and to return all our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters to their homes in peace. This is a supreme moral, Jewish and humanitarian imperative of the State of Israel to its citizens.”
Mass demonstrations that swept the country on Sunday and Monday after the news of the execution of the six hostages were the largest show of support for a hostage deal since October 7, when some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border into Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.
Ninety-seven of the 251 hostages abducted by Hamas on October 7 remain in Gaza, including the bodies of at least 33 confirmed dead by the IDF.
Throughout the war, critics have claimed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put his political survival above all else, including the fate of the hostages.
