Op-ed: Day 439 of the war

The justice minister is bent on tearing Israel apart from within. Again

Yariv Levin appears to have learned nothing from Israel’s recent calamities. And his boss continues to recklessly encourage him

David Horovitz

David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Justice Minister Yariv Levin at the Knesset during a discussion and a vote on the state budget in Jerusalem, December 14, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with Justice Minister Yariv Levin at the Knesset during a discussion and a vote on the state budget in Jerusalem, December 14, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

A rather underappreciated statistic in this week’s annual Israel Democracy Institute survey showed that almost half of respondents now consider friction between right and left to be by far the most “acute social tension in Israel today.”

As recently as two years ago, by contrast, around the time of deadly violence in mixed Jewish-Arab cities, the same survey found respondents most concerned by social tension between Jews and Arabs, and in previous years they were most worried by tensions between religious and secular Jews.

The survey also found that 58 percent of Israelis believe our democracy is under threat, and showed that trust in the Knesset and the government has plunged to record lows over the past year. Faith in the Supreme Court is also falling, although nowhere near as low as faith in the political leadership.

Manifestly, these findings are tied to the coalition’s attempts to radically constrain the powers of, and exert near-absolute political control over, the judiciary — a gambit obsessively advanced through most of last year by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, to the accompaniment of relentless attacks on the ostensible unrepresentative nature and purported anti-government bias of the justice system in general and the Supreme Court in particular.

Israel Democracy Institute

You might have thought that the imperative to protect Israel more effectively from outside enemies, as underlined by the political and military failure to predict and thwart Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre, would have been a sufficient deterrent to again tearing the nation apart from within by reviving the key judicial overhaul legislation. If so, you would have been mistaken.

Horrified that the justices last week ordered him to take the ordinarily routine step of convening the Judicial Selection Committee to elect a new Supreme Court president after over a year of footdragging — because his preferred candidate would not be chosen — Levin last weekend declared that the court had left him “no choice” but to return to the business of its subjugation.

While Levin didn’t specify which part of the overhaul legislative package he’d seek to pass first, multiple Hebrew media outlets cited a bill that would 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, and could, therefore, quickly be passed into law via its second and third readings.

Related: Israel’s justice minister is creating a dictatorship in the judicial system

Levin’s boss, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, earlier last week added fuel to the fire by asserting at a press conference that he would not allow the establishment of a state commission of inquiry, typically headed by a retired Supreme Court justice, into the catastrophe of October 7, because, he asserted, “A state commission is not acceptable to a considerable portion of the people.”

In fact, surveys have shown repeatedly that a vast proportion of the electorate certainly does want a state commission — the only body with the statutory powers to fully expose what went wrong and thus protect against a recurrence — to investigate October 7; those that don’t can only have been influenced by the constant assaults on the judiciary by Levin and many of his coalition colleagues.

The justice minister’s determination to defenestrate Israel’s independent judiciary — the sole institution capable of protecting Israelis from abuse by the political leadership — was unforgivable before the Hamas invasion and subsequent multifront war. His renewed effort to do so, recklessly backed by a prime minister who is also discrediting and pushing for the ouster of the attorney general, is as acutely dangerous to the nation’s well-being as ever.

Related: Minister behind overhaul admits it would end democracy, falsely claims he’s fixed it

The war in Gaza has subsided but not ended, with soldiers still falling and 100 hostages still unthinkably held there. Hezbollah is massively degraded but not destroyed, and the vast challenge of rebuilding the north has yet to begin. Syria under its jihadist leadership is an unknowable quantity. The speed and success of the anti-Assad insurrection should be giving Jordan’s leadership cause for concern, with potential security implications for Israel. The Palestinian Authority may share such worries about its future, and has been stepping up actions against terror groups in Jenin. The Houthis have yet to be silenced.

But most importantly, the ayatollahs in Iran are cornered, deprived of their most potent proxies and, in the assessment of Israel, the US, and indeed the UN’s own nuclear weapons watchdog, positioning themselves to break out to the bomb. Having significantly increased its stockpiles of 60% enriched uranium, the Islamic Republic is practically a nuclear threshold state, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned this week — to the point where attempting to revive the 2015 deal intended to keep it from the bomb is “no longer useful.”

Instead, the Israel Air Force, now enjoying full air supremacy across a route taking in Syria, has declared that it’s increasing its readiness and preparations for a potential strike on Iranian nuclear targets.

What since October 7, 2023, turned into a strategic battle by Israel to face down a regime in Tehran bent on our destruction is, in other words, now entering its climactic stage. Only an anti-Zionist pyromaniac would choose this moment to plunge Israel back into the depths of internal division. Step forward, Yariv Levin.

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