Two Knesset Members, one from the Likud and one from the Jewish Home party, are proposing bills to check the powers of the Supreme Court, which has moved Israel towards a judicial state in the past two decades.
The elitist leftist and anti-religious media already have begun fighting the proposals, which are doomed from the start, but the legislative initiative is an important step towards the day when a wider popular demand will require a restoration to some kind of normalcy.
The new bills would change the “clubhouse” system of electing Supreme Court judges and its president and make it easier for the Knesset to circumvent Supreme Court decisions that arbitrarily strike down Knesset laws.
Polls have shown a strong trend towards mistrust of the judicial system, but it is doubtful that nationalists can overcome their image, sometimes deserved and sometimes undeserved, of trying to be just as authoritarian as the left-wing infrastructure of the Israeli establishment.
The judicial “revolution” began in Israel 18 years ago with the Supreme Court presidency of Aharon Barak, whose brilliant legal mind was located mainly on the left side of his head.
The Supreme Court’s function in Israel couldn’t be any further from its counterpart in the United States, where the court handles approximately 100 cases a year. In Israel the number is around 12,000, and that is not a typo.
The U.S. Supreme Court considers a case only when there is a question of interpretation of the law and if someone stands to be harmed by it.
Barak expanded the area of judicial authority to include virtually every social, religious and political issue, regardless of whether an individual could be harmed. He exploited the Knesset’s “Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty” as an excuse to examine every appeal, putting the court in a position of actively shaping the law instead of simply solving disputes.
He wrote in an article in 1992, “There are no areas in life which are outside of law,” a sign of a grab of power that never would have been tolerated had it been expressed by a nationalist or a religious Jew.
Barak’s revolution can been seen by his interference in the Knesset law that once exempted yeshiva students from serving in the IDF. The Supreme Court in the 1970s decided not to rule on a petition again the exemption, stating it was a political question. A similar case reached the court in the 1981, when it decided that the solution to the “public issue” did not rest with the judiciary.
Along came Barak in 1986, when he ruled the issue was within the court’s jurisdiction.
He used the Basic Law as a vehicle to equate a “Jewish state” with a “democratic state,” with a decided emphasis on “democracy” at the expense of Judaism.
Barak anointed himself as a Torah sage and rabbi shortly after the Basic Law was passed and stated in a speech at Haifa University, “The basic values of Judaism are the basic values of the state. I mean the values of love of man, the sanctity of life, social justice, doing what is good and just, protecting human dignity, the rule of law over the legislator and the like, values which Judaism bequeathed to the whole world. Reference to those values is on their universal level of abstraction, which suits Israel’s democratic character, thus one should not identify the values of the state of Israel as a Jewish state with the traditional Jewish civil law. It should not be forgotten that in Israel there is a considerable non-Jewish minority.”
The court, under Barak, struck down Knesset laws based on his interpretation of the Basic Law, which by his wishful thinking often contradicted Jewish Law that previously had served as a cornerstone of decisions.
For example, he decided that Rabbinical Courts must apply the doctrine of joint matrimonial property based on his outlook that a disputes from a divorce are a result of an agreement between a husband and a wife and not a result of the act of marriage.
Backed by a jubilant media under the dominance of the Yediot Acharonot newspaper and the misnamed Voice of Israel radio network, the court has consistently ruled in favor of Peace Now and Palestinian Authority petitions against Jews, putting the burden of evidence on Jewish ownership of land in Judea and Samaria on Jews even if there is no proof of ownership by Arabs.