Kohelet’s Moshe Koppel reflects on the judicial reforms a year later

The Jerusalem Post last sat down with Prof. Moshe Koppel, chairman of the Kohelet Policy Forum, almost exactly one year ago.

At the time, controversy over a set of laws backed by the government known as the judicial reforms was nearing its peak. The government was intent on pushing forward with the reform, while its opponents were taking to the streets in growing numbers and in increasingly stormy protests. 

Emotions were running extremely high, and Israel was in the midst of a social rift of historic proportions.

Much has changed since then, and the Post interviewed him in his home on a rainy day in Efrat, over six months after Hamas’s murderous attack on October 7 and Israel’s ensuing invasion of Gaza.

 A changed perspective

Kohelet is a think tank, and from a policy standpoint Koppel hasn’t changed his views. He believes that Israel’s judicial system assumed excessive power over the years, which should be given back to the executive and legislature. But what has changed, Koppel said, is his perspective.

“Think of it as a couple that’s having a fight. They’re arguing, and both of them think that the issue is really, really important, and they’re just so upset with each other, and then there’s some family crisis.

They just say, ‘Wow I can’t believe we were fighting about that nonsense,’ and they come together as a couple because they need to deal with this crisis,” Koppel said during the interview.

“I don’t think I was wrong, but it wasn’t that important. I’m sorry that we’ve thought about it that way, I’m sorry that we got to that point. In that sense my perspective has completely changed,” he said.

“I don’t want to speak in the name of the people who opposed the reform. They had perfectly good reasons. The reform was by no means perfect. There is plenty of blame to go around and how the political process worked, and I take my fair share of the blame for that,” Koppel said.

“Since then, war broke out. We have seen what’s at stake, and we see the important things we have in common. We all want to be good Israelis and good Jews; we have dangerous enemies to fight together. 

My son and son-in-law were in Gaza for months fighting; most of Kohelet’s senior staff was in Gaza, fighting; and I think we just need to appreciate what a wonderful country we have, and how much we all have in common, and get past all the old historical resentments in both directions – those who feel reasonably that they built this country and it is being taken away from them, and those who feel that their vote doesn’t count and that they are second-class citizens, so that we can move forward, solve the many problems we have that are solvable together, and with the kind of unity that we’ve seen in this war we should be able to move forward and build this country to be the really great country that it already is, and the even greater country that it can be,” Koppel said.

Despite the war, Israeli politicians have yet to announce that the reform is officially over, and opponents of the reform have argued that it could return once the war is over.

For example, the Judicial Selection Committee led by Justice Minister Yariv Levin has yet to appoint a permanent Supreme Court chief justice, and has yet to replace two former Supreme Court justices who retired in October. 

One of the most controversial aspects of the reform was a plan to alter the makeup of the committee such that the governing coalition would either fill or appoint a majority of its members, thus giving it the power to appoint justices without the consent of the judicial system or members of the opposition.

Opponents of the reform have argued that the delay in the appointments stems from Levin’s wish to follow through with altering the makeup of the committee at a later stage.

The Post requested a response to this claim from a spokesman for Levin, but did not receive one on time.To Koppel, however, it is clear that the judicial reforms are over. He argued that at war’s end, Israel will enter a “national discussion about how we can move forward in a united way, with moving things along that there’s a broad consensus for.”

Still, the fact that they became a major public debate was in and of itself a success for a think tank such as Kohelet, he said.

“You need to understand something. Think tanks don’t always measure victory in the sense, ‘Okay yes, we had a law and it got passed, we had a government decision and it got passed’.... You write papers, you put it out there, you get it into the newspapers, you speak to the politicians, etcetera, and the real achievement is [that] you create an issue that wasn’t an issue.... The judicial reform was just a nonissue, and we made it an issue, so that’s a win,” Koppel said.

The interview, which Kohelet initiated, came on the backdrop of a financial crunch, after American billionaire Arthur Dantchik, who according to a number of publications is the think tank’s central donor, announced in August that he was halting his funding, citing Israel’s social rift.

Dantchik explained in a statement at the time that “when a society becomes dangerously fragmented, people must come together to preserve democracy,” and that “what is most critical at this time is for Israel to focus on healing and national unity.”

Kohelet as a result told most of its employees last month that they should start searching for alternative employment, in case it cannot come up with sufficient alternative funding.

Koppel did not mention Dantchik by name as being the central donor. However, asked about his ceasing to donate, Koppel claimed that Dantchik had been harassed by protesters in his Philadelphia neighborhood, most of them Israeli expats.

“I completely understand that he does not want to pay money in order to be harassed by people,” Koppel said.

Koppel argued that many of the protesters said they represented Israel, but did not return to the country to support it during wartime, and that they had no right to demonize him (Koppel) and accuse him of being a “foreign agent destroying their country.”

ALONGSIDE KOPPEL’S conciliatory tone, he did not hold back from criticizing the conduct of leaders of the opposition and of the protest movements during the months following the launch of the judicial reforms in January last year.

Koppel claimed that while he was able to reach compromises on nearly every issue in the reform with parallel think tanks that advised the opposition, the opposition’s politicians quickly understood that the reform was a losing cause, and never actually wanted to reach an agreement.

“Do I think the politicians did a perfect job in rolling this out and selling it? No, they obviously didn’t. They had their own considerations.... This could have been done differently, but very early on it became clear that the opposition was not interested in reaching compromise. I know this from firsthand experience,” Koppel said.

According to Koppel, the real negotiations behind the scenes occurred prior to the prime minister’s agreement in late March to freeze the reforms and enter talks hosted by the president. For the opposition, the talks at the President’s Residence, which continued until July, were just for show, he claimed.

Koppel added that Kohelet was demonized during the battle over the reforms “principally because we got caught in the crossfire, and we were the convenient target.

“I don’t see myself as the aggressor in the story that needs to come out and make a confession,” he added.Koppel argued that the core problem was that the reforms quickly shifted from a policy argument to what he called a “tribal” argument between what he called the “Orange Tribe” and the “Blue Tribe.”

In an op-ed in the Post in January, Koppel explained that the “Blue Tribe” evolved from the legacy of Labor Zionism. Its members “tend to cosmopolitanism and identify less with a continuous Jewish religious tradition with ancient roots, than with a modern Israeli ethos that seeks to overcome what they see as the flaws of tradition: piety, passivism, and bigotry.”

Koppel added in the op-ed that “‘Blues’ played a central role in laying the groundwork for the state and still dominate the upper echelons of Israel’s unelected institutions – the army and other security branches, state-licensed media, the justice system, state-funded universities, professional guilds, and public labor unions.”

Orange was the color that defined protest movements against the Disengagement from Gaza in 2005, and the “Orange Tribe” was a blend of “many small tribes that are not part of the “Blue Tribe” – Revisionists, Mizrahim, religious Zionists, haredim, and others – each distinct from the “Blue Tribe” in its own ways. 

Members of this tribe “share a deep respect for Jewish tradition and conservatism generally, and an abiding resentment of the “Blues.” The “Orange Tribe” is increasingly defined by traditionalism, hawkishness, communitarianism, and populism.”

“Roughly speaking, the ‘Blues’ control Israel’s institutions, but the ‘Oranges’ win elections,” Koppel wrote in the op-ed.

He referenced this theory in the current interview, and argued that rather than a struggle for the correct distribution of power in Israeli democracy, there “unfortunately” was a “small but extremely influential group of people in the country, who are people who are accustomed to having power either because they were very senior in the security branches, or because they’re very powerful in industry and they have a lot of money,” Koppel said.

These people had “personal animus” toward Koppel, and what “really bothered them” was that “the person who’s running the country is not them, and not somebody who cares about them in particular and consults with them. 

They just feel dissed, they feel that the amount of influence that they have a right to because they’re part of the old establishment they’re not getting – they don’t have the influence that they ought to have,” Koppel said.

“The unfortunate thing is that with people like that, there is really no way that you could reach a compromise” via rational discussion, Koppel said. “Conveniently, they are a very, very, very small fraction of the country. Inconveniently, they have a tremendous amount of power and influence,” Koppel said.

Having said this, in his op-ed in January Koppel wrote that “even during the most contentious battles over judicial reform, most Israelis wanted a compromise. The war has clarified just how great is the need for unity – or at least sane public discourse. The appetite for doctrinal purity, ‘Orange’ or ‘Blue,’ has greatly diminished.”

He ended the op-ed by expressing that “the war will usher in a generational transition; the generation of the soldiers who united in battle will gradually begin to lead our country. The current ‘Orange’ government will be succeeded by a new coalition with fresh faces. 

This new coalition’s central challenge will be to rebuild Israel’s old institutions, freeing them from stale ‘Blue’ groupthink. Less ‘Blue’ entitlement; less ‘Orange’ resentment. One nation united.”

THE POST asked for and received the following responses:

Shani Granot-Lubaton, a New York-based leader of protests against the judicial reforms, and one of the leaders of the protest against Dantchik:

“The people of Israel are ‘concerned’ [‘matrid’ in Hebrew, which also means ‘harass’] that Koppel is explicitly trying to harm Israeli democracy and harm the rights of women, LGBT, minorities, and the entire Israeli public. Dantchik faced legitimate, legal, and, most importantly, determined and effective protest, to Koppel’s chagrin. There was no act that was not within the limits of legal protest.

“It is amazing that the delicate-minded Koppel was not bothered by the disturbing ‘traitor’ style campaign against senior [members of] liberal organizations in Israel, and comparisons between leaders of the protests for democracy to leaders of murderous terror organizations, or that his friend Dantchik owns 20% of TikTok – one of the leading antisemitism-instigators in the US. The irony commits suicide when it hears Koppel speak.

“We are proud of our fight and will continue defending Israeli democracy – for Koppel’s children as well.”A source in the opposition who preferred to remain anonymous said:

“Kohelet played a significant role in pushing the attempted judicial overhaul which tore apart Israeli society and weakened the country. Rather than seeking to blame the opposition, they should reflect on their own destructive role and the catastrophic failures of the government they so eagerly support.”