With Levin overruled, Judicial Selection Committee to vote Sunday on Supreme Court chief
Panel to convene after justices reject justice minister’s latest motion to delay vote; AG accuses him of ‘assault on separation of powers’ in bid to thwart liberal candidate

The High Court on Friday ordered Yariv Levin to convene the Judicial Selection Committee on Sunday to select a Supreme Court chief justice, a day after the justice minister said he would again push off the vote due to allegations of judicial misconduct by the leading candidate, acting Chief Justice Isaac Amit.
Adhering to the court order, the committee’s secretariat announced that members would convene at 14:30 on Sunday, and specified that they would be electing a new Supreme Court justice.
For his part, Levin intends to boycott the meeting, multiple Hebrew media outlets reported.
The High Court decision came shortly after Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara accused Levin of trying to evade the court’s orders on the matter, sparking a harsh rebuke by the justice minister.
The court had ordered Levin to convene the committee on January 26, after granting his request to defer the January 16 deadline amid media reports of construction irregularities in Amit’s home and the judge’s alleged failure to recuse himself from cases concerning his brother and property they own.
Amit, a liberal judge, has called the reports a smear campaign designed to thwart his accession, amid protracted efforts by Levin to install a conservative top judge.
Responding to Levin’s latest bid to delay picking a chief justice, the court said the Judicial Selection Committee was “the authority empowered to discuss challenges related to chief justice candidates,” and could be trusted to delay its meetings if it thought it needed more time for such a discussion.
“As such, the minister should bring his request before the committee, not before us,” wrote the court.

Earlier Friday, the attorney general wrote to Levin that his motion to delay convening the committee was unacceptable.
She accused Levin of taking “parallel and contradictory routes” to derail Amit’s accession: asking and receiving from Amit a response to the allegations; asking the Justice Ministry’s legal adviser to address challenges to Amit’s appointment; and appointing a private attorney to lodge a complaint against Amit based on those challenges.
Levin’s actions “cause serious suspicion that the aim is to avoid fulfilling the decision of the High Court,” said Baharav-Miara.

The complaint against Amit was lodged “in contravention of common practice, in a rushed procedure, without sufficient factual basis,” even though lodging such a complaint is “a most sensitive power,” said Baharav-Miara.
Therefore, she continued, Levin’s decision to again delay convening the Judicial Selection Committee “cannot legally stand.”
She also said Levin’s office had asked the Justice Ministry’s legal adviser to contact the building and planning committee in Amit’s hometown regarding his alleged construction violation. This represented “improper political interference” in the judiciary and “another assault on the separation of powers,” said Baharav-Miara.
The attorney general stressed that the Judicial Selection Committee was the only authority empowered to deliberate challenges in Amit’s case, according to the High Court decision that granted Levin’s previous motion to delay convening the committee. She added that the committee had in its possession “all claims and responses” connected to the case and that Levin can refer to the committee any other material he considers relevant.

Responding to Baharav-Miara, Levin called her letter a “mark of shame on the institution you lead,” accused her of coddling Amit and said she was engaging in “horrible selective enforcement that represents an abuse of your duty toward the public and misuse of the far-reaching powers that are entrusted to you.”
“There is no low to which you won’t bring the institution of the attorney general, and there is no limit to the disgrace of selective enforcement that has become the mark of the institution of the attorney general during your tenure,” wrote Levin.
The Supreme Court, in its capacity as the High Court, has ordered Levin three times to convene the committee to appoint a new president.
Levin has resisted filling the position for 15 months since the previous chief justice retired. Under the so-called seniority method, Amit, the longest-serving justice, is all but certain to be confirmed, and Levin does not have the votes in the Judicial Selection Committee to get a conservative candidate confirmed instead.
The bid to subvert the seniority method is one of the measures in Levin’s plan to overhaul the judiciary, which polarized the country and sparked mass weekly protests throughout 2023.

The allegations against Amit emerged after the justice minister earlier this month agreed with Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, a former opposition figure, on changes to the Judicial Selection Committee. The agreement would have seen Amit made chief justice.
The chief justice selects the members of the bench who adjudicate High Court cases and appoints members to state commissions of inquiry.
The latter authority would give the next chief justice outsize power over a potential state commission of inquiry into the failures leading up to October 7, 2023, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel to kill some 1,200 people and take 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.