A friend of mine in Australia recently sent me this article and asked me about what was going on in Israel regarding Judicial Reform and the protests against it.
This is my response:
It always seems worse from far away.
I remember being overseas during bushfires in Australia.
While there are protests and some strikes and refusals to serve, it is a small but vocal and influential minority (who controls the press) who refuses to accept the democratic will of the Israeli people to correct major problems in the judicial system that are way out of line with the Australian, UK or US legal systems.
The current government holds the largest majority ever of a right wing government and specifically campaigned on judicial reform.
They have a mandate to carry it through.
As a lawyer I have been aware of the extremely problematic aspects of the current system for a long time.
These include:
- No written Constitution or Bill of Rights and a “Basic Law” that can be changed with a simple majority in the Knesset;
- Judges just making things up as they go along (eg the reasonableness test) without any legal basis to protect the “rights” of certain classes considered worth by the left (eg Muslims and LGBTQ people) while discriminating against others (Ultra-Orthodox);
- Attorney Generals who refuse to represent the Government in Court leaving them with no legal representation and the Court with two sets of lawyers on the side of opposing the government and none supporting it;
- A Supreme Court has lost the confidence of the majority of the citizens.
I support the right to peaceful protest (a right that does not exist in Australia as shown over COVID-19) but I do not support sabotage of the economy or blocking of major roads, ports or airports. The police are finally acting on these extremists.
There is no real danger to the State of Israel or of civil war. Elites who are in the minority do not engage in civil wars because they invariably would lose.
A recent large scale IDF exercise call up was hugely over subscribed by reservists and many had to be sent home.
I suspect many who would have stayed home in normal circumstances for prosaic, non-political reasons made a point of turning up for the call up to show they do not support those refusing to serve.
In any case the IDF has way more people than it needs because of Israel’s very high birth rate over the last 25 years.
The way I see it, these are the growing pains a country must deal with (like puberty) that are common in countries about the 75 year mark.
I note that Australia did not gain full sovereignty from the UK until The Australia Act of 1986 that inter alia, abolished appeals from the High Court to the UK Privy Council (House of Lords).
There are many unresolved issues from the early years of the State that could not be dealt with until Israel was sufficiently secure against external enemies to address them.
Israel needs a Constitution with a proper Bill of Rights created by THE PEOPLE (not politicians) that a Court can interpret and enforce equally for all Israelis, rather than just making human rights up as they go along.