The Chairman of the Religious Zionist Party, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, on Monday night, said in an interview on the right-leaning Channel 14 regarding President Yitzhak Herzog’s statement about the blown-up negotiations, that the President is lying.
Herzog argued on Monday that, contrary to the coalition’s claims, no agreements were reached between the two sides in the talks at the President’s Residence.
The president, who at the beginning of the negotiations promised to point out the guilty party should anyone walk away from the table, insisted on Monday, after the opposition, whose demands for the committee to appoint judges had been met, walked anyway: “I need to emphasize that no binding drafts were passed in the talks that took place under my auspices … and of course, no full agreements were reached on any issue. I recommend that the fairness and integrity of the process not be compromised.”
It was the second time the president sided with the left––his political birthplace––against his historic enemies on the right. In Israel, water boils at 100 degrees Celsius and President Yitzhak Herzog is biased against the Netanyahu government (which has defeated and humiliated him several times).
Speaking on Channel 14’s news hour, Minister Smotrich said Herzog “is a leftist and unfortunately he fails at being a fair mediator.”
“We’re done being suckers,” Smotrich said. “We showed much more than goodwill to the other side.”
He used the word “fra’yerim” which means those who are being taken advantage of. In Israeli culture, the desire not to be someone’s fra’yer is a central motif.
“There are elements on the left, the opponents of the reform, who are ready to burn down the country and damage its security and economy. Irresponsible players like [Ehud] Olmert and {Danny] Halutz are crazy and ready to dismantle everything. We will lead the changes with responsibility and discretion.”
With that in mind, Smotrich later issued a statement saying: “In the last week we’ve seen the rampage of the opposition. We’ve seen that no matter what happens and what the outcome of the democratic game is – the opposition continues to be an opposition against the state, lacking responsibility and restraint, and seeking to drag us into chaos.
“I instructed the chairman of the Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee and our faction chairman, MK Simcha Rothman, to advance in his committee the law to restrict the reasonableness doctrine, along the lines of ‘Solberg’s Reasonableness.’ On this issue there were agreements in the President’s Residence and the opposition also understands that this amendment is necessary.”
Supreme Court Justice Noam Solberg wrote (Ha’Shiloah, 2020) that the reasonableness argument, as it is applied [by the Israeli courts], constitutes an intrusion of the judicial authority into the domain of the executive authority:
“The difficulty that the argument of substantial reasonableness raises lies in the fact that it authorizes the court to intervene in the administrative discretion in a sweeping manner, even concerning non-judicial aspects of considerations.
“The meaning of this is that when the court examines an administrative decision of this kind, ‘it examines reasonableness outside the context of a legal norm, a reasonableness that does not concern the legality of the act, but its content, and this is an exception to recognized administrative law.’
“In other words, the court deviates from the natural role it is meant to fulfill, and falls within the domain of the executive authority.”
Solberg called for the reasonableness argument to be restricted and to be used only against the professional echelon, and to avoid using it against elected officials. As far as administrative actions that violate human rights are concerned, Solberg proposed to increase the use of the proportionality argument to replace the use of the reasonableness argument.
It would be a nice relief, but as we have come to expect, the Supreme Court will embrace the proportionality argument and ride it to town so that in a matter of days, they’d start calling “disproportionate” what they originally said was unreasonable. Because the goal of the court is not to resolve disputes but to run the country by any means necessary, including urging Israelis to burn it down.
