Justice minister says if he’s reelected, liberal Supreme Court justices ‘will go extinct’

Justice Minister Yariv Levin said liberal Supreme Court justices “will become extinct” if the current hard-right government gets another term, in recorded comments aired by the Kan public broadcaster on Wednesday.

In his remarks, which Kan said he made at a recent meeting with Likud activists, the justice minister said he’d held a conversation with a Supreme Court justice, who said Levin’s preferred candidates for new justices were “not up to our standards.”

“And if you insist, we’ll wait for the next minister after you, and when he’s elected, it will all be a lot easier,” the judge said, according to Levin.

“I told him, and I keep telling the judges all the time, that I believe we will win,” the justice minister said.

And with two-thirds of the Supreme Court justices up for replacement in the next few years, “We won’t need judicial reform anymore,” he said he told the justice. “You will simply go extinct.”

Supreme Court justices are mandated to retire upon turning 70. There are currently four vacant seats on the bench, and six of the remaining justices will age out during the next Knesset term, assuming it runs its full course.

Levin said he planned to make appointments “that will fundamentally alter the court,” naming as examples conservative legal scholar Aviad Bakshi, who is head of the legal department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, and Raphael Bitton, an architect of the government’s highly controversial judicial overhaul program.

Levin’s term in office has been marked by repeated public clashes with the justice system. He refused to convene the Judicial Selection Committee for 16 months starting in October 2023 in order to prevent the election of liberal Isaac Amit as Supreme Court president. Eventually, he was ordered to hold a vote, which resulted in Amit’s election, but he has refused to recognize the result as lawful.

The justice minister has also repeatedly called for the government to violate court rulings. Last month, the cabinet said it did not accept a High Court decision concerning the broadcast regulator, drawing condemnation from all living former presidents of the Supreme Court, who called the statement “the last nail in the coffin of democracy.”

Levin is also the architect of the government’s judicial overhaul effort, which he unveiled on January 4, 2023, days after the coalition took office. The deeply divisive package of legislation drew hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the streets in weekly protests during most of 2023, sparking strikes and a movement among military reservists who said they would suspend their volunteer reserve duty in response to the proposals.

The effort was shelved after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack and subsequent multifront war, but some parts were revived, beginning about a year later.

Last week, Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman — another of the judicial overhaul’s architects — said that if the current coalition is reelected, it will consider establishing an altogether new constitutional court above the Supreme Court.