MK threatens that judges ‘playing hardball’ will lead to resumption of judicial overhaul

The government’s decision on whether to revive its frozen efforts to overhaul the judiciary depends largely on the conduct of the Supreme Court justices on the Judicial Selection Committee, Religious Zionism MK Simcha Rothman warned this week, accusing the senior jurists of “playing hardball” on the matter of the next chief justice.

“They don’t want to compromise. They don’t want to negotiate,” Rothman, the chairman of the powerful Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee and one of the overhaul’s chief architects, alleged during a telephone interview with The Times of Israel on Wednesday.

Slamming the court for rejecting Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s proposal for conservative justice Yosef Elron to serve as its top judge for a year, Rothman accused the High Court of trying to spark “a constitutional crisis during a war.”

The top court’s previous interim chief justice, Uzi Vogelman, spoke out harshly against Levin’s proposal in August, stating that the current seniority method — which Elron’s appointment would undercut by having him leapfrog now-acting President Isaac Amit for the top job — is meant to “protect judicial independence and prevent politicization of the High Court justices and chief justices.”

Last Saturday, Levin once again threatened to revive the overhaul, following a High Court ruling ordering him to hold a vote in the Judicial Selection Committee on a new Supreme Court president by January 16.

The decision was issued in response to a request for a contempt of court order against Levin for failing to hold such a vote, after the court ordered him to do so in September.

The controversial package of proposals comprising the overhaul, which seeks to increase government control over the judiciary and limit the High Court’s power of judicial review, prompted mass protests last year before being paused in the wake of Hamas’s devastating October 2023 attack.

Levin’s threat was widely understood as pertaining to the coalition’s bill to change the makeup of the committee, effectively giving the government control over the selection of judges. That bill passed its first Knesset plenum reading in February 2023, meaning the proposal could be swiftly passed into law if the coalition schedules the second and third plenum readings it must clear.

“I don’t think during war it’s the best time to promote it,” said Rothman, speaking in English, but “we cannot allow the judiciary to use the war as an excuse to take more and more ground.”

“If we will have to fight, we will fight,” he declared.

As the chief justice is a member of the panel that selects the Supreme Court president, influencing the choice of the court’s next head could significantly aid Levin in his quest to gain control of the committee.

Levin’s critics, such as former court president Dorit Beinisch, have argued that his refusal to “appoint a chief justice or any judges in cases where [he] is in the minority…amounts to an illegitimate veto” that “obstructs the majority’s will as prescribed by law, effectively creating a dictatorship led solely by the justice minister.”

Axing the AG

Asked about recent arguments within the government for firing Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, one of the most potent checks on the government’s power, Rothman insisted that there was a “consensus” on the issue.

“There is no one in the coalition who does not think that it’s time to remove the attorney general from her position and to appoint a new one,” he asserted.

There appears to be less consensus on the issue than Rothman stated, however, with Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar telling reporters on Monday that he believes “it’s better to go for a process of splitting the powers of this position [of the attorney general] than a process of splitting the people.”

In addition, a planned meeting of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s senior coalition allies on the topic was canceled earlier this week after four coalition party chiefs reportedly declined to attend the gathering.

Hebrew media reported that Baharav-Miara will instead be summoned to a hearing before the full cabinet to defend her record sometime in the coming weeks — a meeting that will not be part of an official impeachment proceeding.

Even without reviving the bills frozen last year, other legislation being advanced by the coalition has caused concern among some Israelis, including President Isaac Herzog, about the future of Israeli democracy.

Critics have pointed to a number of controversial initiatives by the coalition — including moves to allow the Knesset to appoint the state ombudsman for judges, fire ministerial legal advisers and allow the justice minister to determine the rate of bar association membership dues — as evidence that it seeks to revive the judicial overhaul agenda.

According to data from the Israel Democracy Institute’s annual Democracy Index, Israelis’ sense that democratic rule in the country is under threat is near all-time highs, while trust in its major institutions — including all three branches of government — is at record lows.

The index found that fully 58 percent of Israelis believe democracy is under threat, a figure surpassed only in 2022 when the rate stood at 59%.

While only 39 percent of Israelis expressed faith in the Supreme Court, that figure is significantly higher than for either the Knesset (13%) or the government (19%), a finding cited by Amit, the acting chief justice, to argue the claims the justices are working against “the will of the people” are “inconsistent with reality.”

“I share the concern. I am very worried about the future and also about the present of Israeli democracy,” Rothman responded when questioned about the survey, claiming that the country’s democratic system was imperiled by “unelected officials like the attorney general and the Supreme Court.”

Such officials are “very dangerous for Israeli democracy,” he said. “If you elect a government, and the government that you elected cannot act according to the values and the principles that you chose them for, then it’s a problem with Israeli democracy [that] needs to be changed and fixed.”

Dismisses far-right storming of IDF base

While Rothman was heavily critical of the courts and attorney general, he took a decidedly different tone regarding a group of far-right activists and lawmakers who broke into the Sde Teiman and Beit Lid military bases over the summer.

Dozens of activists broke into the Sde Teiman military base on July 29, after military police arrived at the site to detain 10 reservist soldiers suspected of abusing a Palestinian security prisoner held at the base’s detention center. Around 1,200 activists turned up a short while later at the Beit Lid military base, where the arrested reservists had been brought for a remand hearing at a military court.

Among those who entered the Sde Teiman base without authorization were MK Nissim Vaturi of the ruling Likud party, MK Zvi Sukkot of Rothman’s Religious Zionism party, and National Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu of Otzma Yehudit.

During a hearing in the committee on Tuesday, Rothman dismissed the attack on Sde Teiman as “the most marginal event of all the dangers and threats,” charging instead that the leak of footage purporting to show IDF servicemen sexually abusing a Palestinian security prisoner “caused much, much greater damage to the State of Israel.”

Elaborating on this position, Rothman leveled harsh criticism at military advocate general Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi instead of the rioters.

“The main problem in Sde Teiman was that someone with very poor judgment sent military police officers to arrest heroes in the middle of a base with their faces covered as if they were operating in the middle of Gaza,” he said, arguing that while the protest “was 100% justified,” the leak of the video was an “irresponsible” action “hurting the state of Israel.”

Asked if a lawmaker forcing his way into a closed military installation was also justified, he replied that he “didn’t see anyone forcing [his] way into the base.”

“I saw a member of Knesset that has all the right to get into the base who was illegally stopped from getting into the base and [who then] got in,” he said.

Jeremy Sharon contributed to this report.