Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that his government will pass one more part of his proposed judicial reforms and then postpone the rest of the proposals, a compromise offer that was instantly rejected by the country’s opposition.
Netanyahu, speaking to Bloomberg News, said that he would seek to change the country’s method of selecting judges, under which current judges have an effective veto and can maintain left-wing ideological and socioeconomic conformity on the bench.
This would be the second of four major reforms, most of which parallel existing practice in the U.S. and other democracies. The Netanyahu government passed the first reform, limiting the courts’ power to overturn government policies on the basis of their own determination of “reasonableness,” last month. Other reforms, such as allowing the legislature to override decisions by the Supreme Court, have been more controversial and have drawn criticism even from some of Netanyahu’s conservative supporters.
Netanyahu said: “I don’t think we should move from the one extreme, where we have perhaps the most activist judicial court on the planet, to getting to a point where the legislature, our Knesset, can just knock out any decision that the court makes. There has to be a balance. That’s what we’re trying to restore.”
Netanyahu had previously offered to negotiate with the opposition through November on future judicial reforms, but his overture was rejected immediately.
The same reaction greeted his apparent willingness to compromise unilaterally. The Times of Israel noted: “Reacting to his interview with Bloomberg, the opposition Yesh Atid party said in a statement Sunday that ‘we recommend that Netanyahu not lie in English or Hebrew,’ calling his comments ‘yet another display of weakness and lies.’”
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has opposed Israel’s judicial reforms, despite entertaining far more radical proposals by Democrats to pack the U.S. Supreme Court.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.