Supreme Court chief: Fake news being used to attack judiciary, justify disobeying rulings

Supreme Court President Isaac Amit deplores the erosion of truth in Israeli society, and says elements in the country are using fake news to deliberately undermine the Supreme Court and its rulings, in a speech to the Israel Bar Association.

Amit, who has been boycotted by the government since he was appointed in January 2025, speaks out specifically against false allegations that the court, in its capacity as High Court of Justice, interfered with IDF rules of engagement, with right-wing politicians and organizations wrongly claiming this enabled the October 7 attacks, as well as against claims that he “appointed himself president.”

Amit notes that in the High Court’s 2018 decision on petitions against the IDF’s open-fire regulations, the court upheld the army’s position and did not instruct the IDF “to change even a comma of the open-fire instructions.”

The Supreme Court president also says that allegations by right-wing politicians that he “appointed himself” as president are “fake,” noting that Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who has led the government’s boycott of Amit, convened the Judicial Selection Committee himself, albeit after the High Court ordered him to do so, and that the committee duly elected him in a legal vote.

“The spread of fake [information] is a direct danger to democracy and social cohesion,” says Amit.

“When the public sphere is flooded with false information, it is very difficult to distinguish between truth and fiction,” he continues, adding that many of those who spread false information do so in order to “erode the value of truth” deliberately.

“From here it is a short path to rejecting binding rulings, ignoring obligations under the law, and even to ‘resolving’ disputes by force and violence, God forbid,” he says. “This is how spreading fake [information] becomes a complementary strategy for radicalizing the discourse against the justice system. The ‘fakeness’ prepares the ground; divisiveness sows the seeds; and violence grows wild.”

Amit notes that several years ago, Justice Uzi Fogelman, then chairman of the Central Elections Committee, warned that fake content “may undermine the public’s belief that there is truth in elections at all: if anything can be forged, why believe anything?”

Adds Amit: “The concern highlighted by Justice Vogelman, years before artificial intelligence became available at the click of a button, is no longer science fiction.”