Levin threatens to revive divisive judicial overhaul: High Court ‘left us no choice’
Responding to deadline to tap Supreme Court chief, justice minister signals he’ll unfreeze bill giving coalition control over judge-selecting panel; Lapid pans ‘criminal blackmail’
Sam Sokol is the Times of Israel's political correspondent. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"

Justice Minister Yariv Levin indicated plans to revive the government’s frozen judicial overhaul program on Saturday, posting a lengthy attack on the High Court of Justice to Facebook in which he accused it of usurping the Knesset’s legislative role and the government’s executive powers.
The threat came several days after the High Court of Justice ordered Levin to hold a vote in the Judicial Selection Committee for a new president of the Supreme Court by January 16, a move the justice minister has resisted making for over a year since such a vote with the committee’s current makeup would tap Justice Isaac Amit to the role, a liberal judge viewed as adversarial by Levin and others in the hard-right government.
Under such circumstances, the minister said, the government has “no choice at this time but to act in order to restore its powers.”
“They left us no choice. It cannot continue like this. We too have rights,” he declared.
Levin’s comments, if followed through on, appeared to have the explosive potential to reignite the hugely divisive conflict over the judiciary that tore Israeli society asunder throughout much of 2023, before it was frozen following Hamas’s onslaught of October 7 of that year and the still ongoing multifront war that followed. The fight over the overhaul ignited unprecedented regular mass protests against the government and increasingly hostile rhetoric from both sides of Israel’s political realm.
While Levin didn’t explicitly say what course of action would follow his Saturday statement, multiple Hebrew media outlets understood his threat as pertaining to the coalition’s bill to change the makeup of the Judicial Selection Committee, effectively giving the government control over the selection of judges. That bill passed its first Knesset plenum reading in February 2023, meaning that it is potentially ready to quickly be passed into law via its second and third readings.

Multiple reports said Saturday evening that the heads of the coalition’s constituent parties would meet the following day to discuss the possibility of unfreezing the overhaul, including advancing the bill to change the Judicial Selection Committee’s makeup as well as firing Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, which some ministers have been intensely campaigning for.
However, the coalition’s ultra-Orthodox parties have said they oppose advancing any controversial bill before legislation is passed to formalize the exemption of the vast majority of Haredi men from mandatory military service, an extremely thorny political and legal issue that has gone unresolved for decades. The High Court ruled months ago that the continued exemption cannot go on and that government funding for yeshivas whose students don’t enlist must stop, giving urgency to passing a new law.
On Saturday, the Ynet news site cited unnamed Haredi coalition sources as reiterating the parties would not back overhaul laws before an enlistment law passes, casting doubt on the coalition’s ability to make good on Levin’s threat.

In his Facebook post, Levin said: “Immediately after the outbreak of the war, the coalition announced the freezing of all engagement with legal reform. At the time, I thought it was wrong to engage in controversial issues when the country was in a multifront war.”
However, the High Court has “effectively stripped me of the authority granted to me by law to set the agenda of the Judicial Selection Committee,” he claimed.
Since Hamas’s October 7 attack and throughout the ensuing war, Levin charged, the court has “taken over the powers of the Knesset” by striking down the government’s reasonableness limitation law — a key piece of judicial overhaul legislation. He also assailed the top court for even agreeing to discuss petitions demanding the improvement of conditions of Palestinian security prisoners, the boosting of humanitarian aid to Gaza, and the release of bodies of Palestinian attackers to their families.
“The government acted responsibly and with the outbreak of the war suspended all engagement in reform. The court, with the utmost irresponsibility, decided to take advantage of this to continue to take over the powers of the Knesset and the government,” he continued, arguing that the government has “no choice at this time but to act to order to restore its powers.”

A short while after that post, Levin published a second post urging the Supreme Court justices on the Judicial Selection Committee to take up a proposal he floated in August for choosing its next chief justice, which the court’s then-interim president rejected.
“The fair compromise proposal that I offered the judges is still on the table,” he said. “I once again emphasize what I’ve said the entire way — the way of consent and dialogue is and remains the best and most preferable. At the same time, there will be no acceptance of unilateral diktats that trample the majority of the people.”
If accepted at the time, Levin’s proposal would have delayed now interim Supreme Court President Isaac Amit’s ascension to the post, with Levin instead calling for conservative Justice Yosef Elron to serve as the court’s top judge for a year before Amit, who would then serve another year. It would also have resulted in the appointment of one of two candidates suggested by Levin to the Supreme Court — candidates rejected outright by the judges on the committee.
In response to Levin, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid accused the senior Likud politician of seeking to undermine Israeli democracy.
“Yariv Levin has offered nothing but destruction and devastation. As usual, he is engaging in criminal blackmail with threats to bring people who want to crush Israeli democracy into the High Court,” Lapid tweeted.
Lapid argued that the Knesset, in a secret ballot last year, picked an opposition candidate over a coalition candidate to sit on the Judicial Selection Committee “because even Levin’s coalition members recoil from his blatant destructiveness.” He claimed that since Levin would not win a vote in the committee in favor of his preferred candidate for Supreme Court president, Levin is “suddenly not in favor of ‘the will of the majority’ but is trying to take revenge on the entire system.”
The opposition chief said that if his bloc wins the next elections, he would “repeal all the anti-democratic laws that this government is currently enacting, down to the last one. We will leave nothing of his coup d’état behind.”

Avigdor Liberman, head of the right-wing opposition party Yisrael Beytenu, also condemned Levin, tweeting that “instead of caring for reservists who are collapsing under the burden [of wartime military service] and promoting an equal conscription law, the government is raising the most controversial issues in Israeli society during a time of war, with only one goal: to preserve the coalition, even at the cost of seriously harming the unity of the people and national security.”
Amit Becher, the head of the Israel Bar Association and a member of the Judicial Selection Committee, responded that Levin was “lying to the public — he never acted to calm tensions and didn’t seek agreements. All he wanted was to appoint his loyalists to the Supreme Court and thwart the process to elect the chief justice.”
Becher added: “We will not be deterred or coerced. If Levin goes ahead with his threat to return the bill to change the committee makeup, we will fight him with legal and public tools.”
Levin’s comments came only hours after former state attorney Moshe Lador — who the justice minister singled out for special opprobrium in his Facebook post — encouraged Israeli Air Force pilots to stop volunteering for reserve duty if the government revives the judicial overhaul.

In recent months, Levin has more than once called to revive the overhaul, which sought to curb the High Court of Justice’s power of judicial review.
In this, he has been joined by other members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, such as Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, who in November declared that the government has the right to carry out “regime change” in Israel, and do away with long-established norms and procedures, since it was elected by the public.
Earlier this month, President Isaac Herzog expressed deep concern over the impact of the government’s legislative agenda regarding the judiciary, stating during a speech at a state ceremony in southern Israel that he was “very worried” about several bills being advanced by the coalition that he said signal the resumption of the overhaul efforts.
Jeremy Sharon contributed to this report.