Shaked urges compromise: Are we going to throw Israel away over ‘reasonableness’?

Former justice minister Ayelet Shaked pleads for a compromise on the judicial overhaul, telling Channel 12: “This country is a miracle. Are we going to throw it all away on [an argument over] ‘reasonableness’?”

Shaked notes that Shas leader Aryeh Deri was blocked from serving as a minister in the current coalition not only because the High Court found his appointment “unreasonable,” given his criminal past, but also because of the legal concept of estoppel — since he was adjudged to have misled the courts about leaving public life.

The case of Deri shows that there are numerous other measures beyond reasonableness that the courts can use to guard against untenable government and ministerial decisions, she says.

She also argues that Deri, who is very close to Prime Minister Netanyahu, is uniquely capable of helping to find a way out of the crisis.

Shaked, whose husband is a pilot, stresses that “the IDF has to be sacred,” and must be kept out of the political debate.

She says people in the IAF, some of them 50-year-olds who get up at 5 a.m. once a week to serve in the reserves, “are being torn apart from within” and “it’s heartbreaking.”

“Something more calibrated can be done” regarding the legislation, she says.

She says Justice Minister Yariv Levin “can appoint conservative judges without tearing the country apart,” using the current judicial selection committee. She says she was able to do so during the four years that she served as justice minister.

She says the package of reform legislation, as it was first presented by Levin in early January, “was extreme; it terrified a large part of the public.”