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Israel finally gets a permanent Supreme Court president; what does he stand for?

Amit has issued rulings striking down key legislation and upholding Palestinian rights, but has deferred to government on some national security issues despite harm to civil rights

Jeremy Sharon

Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter

Supreme Court Justice Isaac Amit leaves the offices of the Israel Courts Administration in Jerusalem after a meeting of the Judicial Selection Committee which appointed him new Supreme Court president, January 26, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
Supreme Court Justice Isaac Amit leaves the offices of the Israel Courts Administration in Jerusalem after a meeting of the Judicial Selection Committee which appointed him new Supreme Court president, January 26, 2025. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

After an unprecedented delay of 16 months and amid highly irregular circumstances, a new Supreme Court president was elected on Sunday. Isaac Amit, who had been serving as acting president, was appointed as the permanent head of the court and of the judiciary.

Former president Esther Hayut retired on October 15, 2023, just a week after the calamity of the October 7 Hamas invasion and atrocities, and Justice Minister Yariv Levin had thwarted Amit’s appointment ever since, using his authority as chairman of the Judicial Selection Committee to block a vote to appoint a new president.

Levin sought the appointment, instead, of Supreme Court Justice Yosef Elron as president due to his strongly conservative views, which the justice minister hoped would steer the court away from what Levin claims is its overly activist intervention in government decisions and Knesset legislation.

Ultimately however, Levin ran out of road. He had to accede to repeated orders by the High Court of Justice instructing him to allow a vote to be held, and the Judicial Selection Committee duly elected Amit president on Sunday evening — albeit in the absence of Levin and the other two representatives of the coalition on the committee.

Israel now has a new Supreme Court president after an unprecedented period without one. But Amit faces considerable challenges — primarily Levin’s declaration that he does not recognize him as the new president and will refuse to work with him on essential business requiring cooperation.

The unprecedented boycott of the head of the judiciary by a justice minister will certainly make the running of the judiciary more difficult and gum up key appointments indefinitely.

Acting Supreme Court President Justice Isaac Amit at a hearing for a petition filed by families of Israelis held hostage in the Gaza Strip against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, October 28, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

But Amit will still be able to make his mark in an especially fraught period, in which critical government decisions and controversial legislation are made and passed almost as a matter of routine amid the war and societal challenges.

Amit’s rulings

So what is the judicial ideology and legal worldview of the new head of the judiciary, whom Levin has so opposed?

Amit is widely seen as a liberal judge who in his rulings has defied the government on numerous issues relating to its efforts to overhaul the judiciary, also ruling frequently to uphold civil and human rights in general.

But the new Supreme Court president has nevertheless been willing to grant leeway to the government and other state institutions, such as the police, in urgent and irregular circumstances, exercising judicial restraint despite the claims of his detractors.

Dr. Nadav Dagan, a senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, was cautious in giving Israeli justices any kind of ideological stamp at all, but said that on such a scale Amit might be seen as a centrist.

Dagan noted in particular that despite his liberal reputation, Amit gave the government significant latitude in using emergency powers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amit wrote in an April 2020 ruling, at the height of the first wave of infections, that the High Court could not in many ways intervene in how the health authorities and the government saw fit to manage the pandemic, even if it violated basic civil rights.

In his rulings, Amit permitted lockdowns imposed by the government on neighborhoods and even entire cities with high infection rates, and allowed communal prayer to be banned, despite the clear impact on civil rights such measures had.

Policemen set up barriers to traffic at a checkpoint in Jerusalem on September 18, 2020, to enforce a new lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic (Ahmad GHARABLI / AFP)

Prof. Barak Medina of Hebrew University’s faculty of law opined that Amit is among the liberal justices on the court, but said it would not be right to characterize him as a leftist, noting the justice’s deference in some situations to issues of national security over civil rights.

He pointed in particular to a ruling following the October 7 Hamas invasion and atrocities, in which Amit presided over a three-justice panel that upheld the police refusal to allow an anti-war demonstration to be staged by the predominantly Arab Hadash political party.

Amit deferred to the police force’s contention that it had too few resources to enable such a demonstration to go ahead when Israel was fighting a multifront war following an unprecedented invasion of its borders.

Amit was also on the 11-justice panel that ruled in 2020 that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could serve as premier despite being under indictment.

The ruling was unanimous, but Medina noted that in his written opinion, Amit emphasized the lack of a legal foundation for the petition, while at the same time excoriating Netanyahu for accepting the highest office in the country while under indictment.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives at the district court in Tel Aviv on December 23, 2024, to attend the fifth day of testimony in his trial on corruption charges. (Debbie Hill/Pool/AFP)

Amit has, however, taken a strident stance against the government’s efforts to curtail the authority of the judiciary and reduce the High Court’s power of judicial review, and has ruled to strike down Knesset legislation in which the legislature seemingly abused its power for the benefit of specific parties within the government.

Amit was one of the justices who, in a historic ruling, struck down the government’s law canceling the use of the reasonableness standard of judicial review over administrative action, on the basis that it would radically curtail the court’s ability to review administrative decisions that rode roughshod over civil rights.

In that case, the court ruled 8-7 to strike down the amendment to Basic Law: The Judiciary banning the use of reasonableness, although as Dagan pointed out, Amit — while voting with the narrow majority — refrained from addressing the more far-reaching issue of whether Israel’s Declaration of Independence had supremacy over its Basic Laws, as some justices did, and “did not provide a conclusive definition of the nature of the Knesset’s constituent power.”

Protesters demonstrate against the government’s judicial overhaul plan on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv, July 1, 2023. (Gilad Furst)

Amit was also on the 6-5 majority that ruled that the implementation of the incapacitation law — passed by the current government to circumvent the possibility that the attorney general or the court itself could order the prime minister to recuse himself — must be delayed, since it appeared specifically designed for a particular individual, the current prime minister.

The new Supreme Court president voted in a similar way over the so-called Tiberias law, which appeared designed specifically to benefit an ally of Shas leader Aryeh Deri, and Amit was on the 10-1 majority that ruled Deri could not serve as a government minister due to his criminal convictions.

Amit has in his rulings also sought to uphold civil rights for Palestinians, which has invoked the ire of right-wing organizations and politicians.

In one notable decision in August last year, Amit wrote a ruling chastising the government and the police for failing to protect rural Palestinian communities from settler violence, and ordered the police and IDF to enable a community that had been displaced due to such violence to return to their homes. In a new hearing this month, Amit was again highly critical of the police for their continued failure to protect the villagers, banging on the table and deploring the lack of police action.

Demolished buildings in the Palestinian village of Khirbet Zanuta, December 4, 2023. (Courtesy Southern Mount Hebron Activists group)

Hardline conservative groups have also lambasted Amit for comments he made during one of several hearings on petitions by human rights groups demanding that humanitarian aid to Gaza be increased.

In a hearing in June last year, Amit said courteously to representatives of the petitioning organization Gisha that “the court is at your service,” a comment that right-wing groups interpreted as the judge siding with left-wing human rights groups against the IDF and in favor of increased aid to Gaza, which they alleged was sustaining the Hamas terror group.

Despite these claims, the panel presiding over the case, including Amit, adopted an extremely cautious approach to the petition. It largely accepted the facts and claims presented by the IDF about its efforts to increase the supply of humanitarian aid to Gaza and has avoided making a ruling on the issue.

Humanitarian aid trucks enter through the Kerem Shalom crossing from Egypt into the Gaza Strip in Rafah, Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

As Supreme Court president, Amit will maintain his judicial ideology pushing back against what he sees as government overreach and any effort to restrain the judiciary, which Levin is once again advancing.

But Amit’s ideology will itself be restrained by the court’s conservative camp, which by some counts could be considered to be in the majority.

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