PM said to scrap vote on head for civil service panel amid coalition opposition
Shas and Religious Zionism said they’d vote against appointing retired judge Uri Shoham to chair Senior Appointments Advisory Committee, which vets candidates for top public roles
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly decided that the cabinet would not vote Sunday on the appointment of a retired Supreme Court justice as chairman of a commission that vets candidates for some of the country’s key civil service positions, amid opposition from within the coalition.
Ministers from the far-right Religious Zionism party and the ultra-Orthodox Shas party said they would vote against the appointment of Uri Shoham as chairman of the commission — apparently for different reasons.
Religious Zionism is reportedly unhappy with the entire framework in which the committee can block a government appointment, while Shas had gripes against Shoham over his past efforts to oust Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef.
The cabinet was originally scheduled to vote on Shoham’s appointment during its weekly meeting on Sunday. The position comes with an eight-year term.
The committee has four members, each appointed by the government. Their role is to give an opinion on the integrity and suitability of candidates for seven top public positions: the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces; the chief of police; head of the Shin Bet general security service; director of the Mossad spy agency; the prison service commissioner; and the governor and deputy governor of the Bank of Israel.
The other current members of the committee are Civil Service Commissioner Daniel Hershkowitz, Prof. Talia Einhorn and Moshe Terry.
Right-wing advocacy groups sent a letter to Netanyahu and other ministers on Saturday urging them not to appoint Shoham, whom they accused of “behaving with hypocrisy and partiality” for years, and claiming his appointment would “severely damage public service in general and the appointments of senior officials in the most sensitive positions in particular.”
Among the groups signed on the letter were Btsalmo, Im Tirtzu, and The Movement For Governability And Democracy.
Sources in the Religious Zionism party said they opposed the eight-year term for chair of the committee and the idea that a retired Supreme Court judge should approve government appointments, the Walla news outlet reported.
Right-wing, religious and nationalist groups see the Supreme Court as leaning to the left as well as overreaching its authority to weigh in on government policy.
Shas, which draws most of its voter base from religious, Sephardic Jews, objects to Shoham for his animosity toward Yosef.
In November 2021, Shoham recommended the potential removal of Yosef from the Great Rabbinical Court after the rabbi organized a Rabbinate conference against government reforms that aimed to break up the Haredi monopoly on kashrut certification and conversions to Judaism.
Shoham said the conference, which included rabbis from the state-run Rabbinate as well as municipal rabbis and rabbinical judges, was in contravention of ethical guidelines that prohibit public servants from intervening in sensitive partisan issues.
In October 2020, Shoham asked the Selection Committee for Rabbinical Judges to consider removing Yosef over controversial comments he made about women, Reform Judaism, and the High Court of Justice.
And last week, the Movement for Quality Government filed a complaint with Shoham against Yosef, asserting that the alleged politicization of his judicial role warranted his removal from the Great Rabbinical Court of Appeals.
That move came after Yosef had declared that those who study Jewish religious texts in yeshivot must not be drafted into the army “under any circumstances, no matter what” and that if yeshiva students are forcibly enlisted, the Haredim would “go abroad.”
The senior appointments committee has not had a permanent chair since 2022 following the death of the last chair, Eliezer Goldberg.
The previous Bennett-Lapid government, in a period when it was only an interim executive body, appointed Menachem Mazuz as chair but the High Court nixed the move following a petition by the right-wing lobbying group Lavi, which argued that such an appointment was beyond its interim authority.
Shoham served as a Supreme Court judge from 2012 to 2018.
