With 86 votes in favor, the Knesset, on Wednesday, elected Otmza Yehudit MK Yitzchak Kroizer to sit on the nine-member Judicial Selection Committee. The committee is responsible for appointing all the judges in the civil court system, including Supreme Court Justices.
There’s only one problem. Despite this being a politically conservative government and conservative-majority Knesset, as of now, of the nine committee seats, only three will belong to politically conservative representatives: MK Kroizer, Justice Minister Yariv Levin and another minister to be named.
The second Knesset MK on the selection committee is the leftwing’s Yesh Atid’s Karine Elharrar. And the remaining five seats will be distributed between three supreme court justices, including the Chief Justice, most likely all of them will be leftwing, and the recently elected head of the Israel Bar Association, also leftwing, and a second lawyer he selects.
As you can imagine, the ideological makeup of the current committee, three conservatives against six progressives, doesn’t make it possible or likely to install any conservative judges, much less, any conservative supreme court justices.
As a result, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Justice Minister Levin hope to replace this committee with one structured completely differently. One idea put forward is to have an equal number of coalition and opposition members on the committee, without any external lawyers or justices. Of course, that still makes the coalition vulnerable to every single opposition veto, and will require some serious compromises, but at least the seating will be evenly distributed, which is better than 3 against 6. It would be more democratic to have the committee distribution reflect the coalition-opposition make up.
Lapid has threatened to go to the Supreme Court if the committee is not convened within 14 days.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir (Otzma Yehudit) congratulated Yitzchak Kroizer, from his own party, on being elected and then added that he too hopes that this committee in its current structure never meets. Ben Gvir added that he is sure that Kroizer will work to appoint judges with a Zionist agenda.
