Who turns over the overturners?
As a new Jewish Home bill says the High Court’s power to overturn laws — which had been in overdrive — is over, local papers turn in their own takes
Joshua Davidovich is The Times of Israel's Deputy Editor
Justice is blind, they say, but can she read between the lines? A proposed Knesset bill that would limit the High Court’s ability to overturn legislation is front-page news in all three major dailies Friday morning — but coverage is anything but identical, with papers split along ideological lines, using words in headlines freighted with meaning to telegraph their support or opposition to the plan.
For instance it doesn’t take a literature major to realize the headlines “Basic Law against the High Court” and “The State vs. the High Court” show Yedioth Ahronoth thinks the court is under attack. The same goes for the headline “The legal way to go around the High Court,” signaling Israel Hayom’s backing for the measure as legitimate.
But where they do come together is their lack of surprise at the timing of the legislation.
Yedioth gives a laundry list of the laws overturned by the court recently and writes that such a Knesset measure was only a matter of time. “In the last month the coalition heads watched as High Court justices overturned again and again decisions and laws they passed — and their anger knew no bounds. Yesterday, the answer came in the form of an amendment to the Basic Law on legislation proposed by Jewish Home leaders Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked,” the paper reports.
With the law allowing for a court decision to be overruled with the support of just 61-65 Knesset members, down from 70, the paper quotes the justice system (yes the whole thing) as saying it won’t go down without a fight.
“The Supreme Court is a bastion of democracy and its judges will continue to rule independently according to the law and standards,” the justice system is quoted saying.
The paper also says coalition partner Moshe Kahlon and his Kulanu party may not support the measure, but Israel Hayom gets Bennett on the line saying he “expects that all coalition members will help pass the historic measure to return balance to the court system. In the coming days I’ll have conversations with all coalition parties.”
Giving more than a taste of the right-wing anger that sparked the proposal, columnist Moti Tuchfeld commends Bennett and Shaked for excellent timing, coming out with the law just as everyone in the coalition has a reason to be unhappy with the bench, even Kahlon.
“The High Court didn’t only hurt the national-religious or conservative Israelis, whose values don’t match up with theirs, but they also gnashed their teeth at each member of the coalition: Likud with Amona and the two-year budget, Jewish Home with the Regulation Bill being frozen; the ultra-Orthodox with the law allowing draft exemptions being struck down; Shas with the law against [African migrants] and Kahlon with the third apartment tax,” he writes.
In what’s likely a case of poor timing, Haaretz, which almost certainly does not support the right-wing effort to weaken the court, nonetheless uses its lead editorial to whack the justices for a ruling forcing the words “gay marriage” to be struck from a public service announcement about civil and human rights.
“Human rights are not conditional on the will of the majority, and even if there is disagreement about how they should be interpreted, the fact that some people object to equal rights cannot negate them,” the editorial reads, poking holes in the court’s reasoning that supporting gay marriage constitutes political advocacy. “This is a deceptive and unnecessary ruling.”
The broadsheet’s top story on its front page is about a dispute of a different kind, between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on one side and all of Israel’s intelligence and military brass on the other, over whether to push for the US to dismantle the Iran nuclear deal.
“While Netanyahu and Lieberman are aspiring to see [US President Donald] Trump take action that would lead to the United States’ withdrawal from the agreement, the senior ranks of the Israeli security establishment, intelligence community and Foreign Ministry believe that even though the agreement is bad for Israel, an American withdrawal from it would be even worse,” the paper writes. “The professional ranks of Israeli statecraft think that if America withdraws from the agreement, the other world powers will not follow through, and thus Iran will not become isolated nor face new international sanctions. Instead, the international community will be divided and the monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program could suffer a setback.”
The paper notes that the Israeli leaders think the international community is already divided, and that can be clearly seen given Russia’s support for Iran in Syria. Israel Hayom joins the various other outlets reporting that Moscow turned down Israel’s request to keep Iranian-backed forces far from the border with Israel, reporting that Russia only agreed to a buffer zone of “just” 5 kilometers.
It’s missiles more than troops which seem to have Israel in a tizzy though, and the paper notes that Israelis are ”seeing Iranian actions they’ve never seen before,” including getting pinpoint missile technology to terror groups.
“The meaning of ‘pinpoint’ by the IDF lexicon is accuracy to a distance of a few meters. Until now terror groups have not managed to achieve this ability and the IDF sees Hezbollah reaching the capability as a threat of ‘strategic severity,’ since these missiles can make direct hits on strategic sites, such as air force bases, IDF headquarters, and other sensitive locations,” the paper reports. ‘It’s important to remember that no Israeli air defense system — Iron Dome or David’s Sling — can knock down 100 percent of missiles.”
Security stories rarely have the ability to be personal and heartbreaking, but Yedioth’s publication of parts of a journal from Gil-ad Shaer, one of three teens killed in by Hamas kidnappers in 2014, is just that. The paper displays pictures of the half-burnt pages, noting that the family kept the journal, found in the burnt car where he was killed, secret, but are now releasing passages from it.
Like many teen diaries, the writing doesn’t offer any great insights, but rather displays the hopes, fears and desires of a normal 16-year-old boy. By including the commentary of Shaer’s mother Bat-Galim, with which the passages are being released in a book, the diary goes from mundane to moving.
“Your diary is so personal, so innocent,” the paper quotes from the mother’s writings. “This is not the diary of some soldier who went off to war and assumed other eyes would see it if he did not come back from battle. This is the diary of a kid, free from slogans, a youth standing at the beginning of his journey of finding his special inner self. A kid who searched alone for the good, for happiness.”
The Times of Israel Community.