Is Israel's judicial crisis part of the Trumpist epoch?

‘Love truth and peace,” said God (Zachariah 8:19), but our judiciary’s enemies detest both. 

That’s why they flatly rejected President Isaac Herzog’s plea to suspend the Levin Plan’s legislation and replace it with dialogue over a consensual alternative. The breadth, depth and intensity of the outcry they have provoked moved none of them, not one inch. 

Two hundred and seventy economists, including current and former governors of the Bank of Israel, who warned of a financial backlash; more than 200 law professors and former Supreme Court justices, including Alan Dershowitz, who warned of the court’s devaluation; a squadron of Nobel laureates, and a battery of former chiefs of the IDF, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), Mossad, and the National Security Council – all mean nothing to Justice Minister Yariv Levin and his sidekick, Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee chairman Simcha Rothman. 

Not only such a juggernaut of gravitas could not move this pair of charging lancers, but also a host of public figures identified with their side of the political map, including former Mossad head Yossi Cohen, who joined a call to halt the legislative process that is creating “a deep social chasm” and thus “harms our national resilience”; former Shin Bet head Yoram Cohen, who said the reform “seems aimed not to improve the judiciary but to neutralize it”; and 70 senior rabbis who called on the government to launch a dialogue based on Herzog’s blueprint for judicial reform by consensus. 

None of this made Levin et al budge, nor did the multitudes flocking to demonstrations week after week, nor did polls indicating that half of Likud voters oppose the reform. It takes no psychologist to suspect that Levin and Rothman lack the ability to feel other people’s pain. 

Maybe that is why this constitutional piracy’s strategy, in the face of the opposition it triggered, is to lie. 

Another day, another lie

EVERY OTHER day, the reform’s sponsors release another lie. One they keep repeating is that Israel’s judges are appointed by other judges. 

In fact, the Judges Selection Committee includes three judges, four politicians and two lawyers; and a Supreme Court justice’s appointment must be backed by at least seven of the nine. 

Another lie is that the Levin Plan’s clauses all exist in other democracies. The most blatant usage of this one was offered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, who claimed on CNN that the plan’s override clause exists “exactly” in the Canadian system. 

In fact, as former Canadian justice minister – and lifelong pro-Israel crusader – Irwin Cotler told KAN TV, Netanyahu’s analogy was “uninformed and misleading.” The Canadian clause is within a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which Israel lacks, and “is evoked, if at all, by provinces.” As for Canada itself, its judges indeed “can, and do, invalidate legislation.” 

Similarly-skewed analogies were made about other countries, repeatedly neglecting to mention that all those countries had either constitutions or bicameral parliaments, or both, and thus had checks and balances that Israel does not have, which is why its judiciary is the only effective check against what philosopher John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of the majority.” 

Similarly untruthful was Netanyahu’s claim, in the face of business circles’ unpredicted opposition, that the plan is designed to ease the courts’ obstruction of entrepreneurship in Israel. In fact, none of the plan’s clauses relates to this issue. 

The anti-judiciary conspirators’ scorn for truth is not only about its substance but also about the revolt it has sparked. 

That’s why the plan’s mouthpieces say the demonstrators are “anarchists,” that’s why Levin himself claimed that Supreme Court President Esther Hayut’s response to his plan constituted “a call to torch the streets,” that’s why Netanyahu has claimed the protest’s leaders are “inciting civil war,” and that’s why he claimed that “the demonstrators who talk about democracy are the ones leading to the end of democracy.” George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth couldn’t have put it better. 

Lying, in short, is an integral part of the Levin Plan. The question is why, and the answer is that it is part of the global war on truth. 

The war on truth

THE WAR on truth, as argued here in the past (“The Second War on Truth,” 22 October 22, 2020), is about the lie’s deployment by governments as a matter of strategy. 

The pincer movement on truth was led by Vladimir Putin, whose agents created social media networks designed to undermine Western democracy; and by Donald Trump, whose tweets from the depth of the free world’s inner sanctum made lying part of civilization’s daily diet. 

Other leaders, from Brazil through Hungary and Poland to Israel, joined. Lying was, and remains, their existential need. 

Putin has to lie about his war; otherwise, the people will know it was his idea, and now is their defeat. Trump has to lie about his electoral defeat and the assault on Capitol Hill; otherwise, people will know he waged war on the American people, and lost. Poland’s reactionaries must lie about their country’s wartime record, or people will know Poles massacred Holocaust survivors. And Netanyahu must lie about the Levin Plan, or the people will know it is designed to bully the judges he faces in court. 

This is the bad news. The good news is that these lie machines ultimately fail. Everyone knows Russia is losing its senseless war, everyone knows what happened in Trump’s America, everyone knows Poles massacred Jews, and everyone will ultimately know that the Levin Plan was not meant to “enhance the separation of powers,” as he claims, but to kill it. 

“Truth springs up from the earth,” sang the Levites in the Temple (Psalms 85:12), and “justice looks down from heaven.” That is why the Levin Plan’s plotters, even if they initially pass it, will ultimately see the emergence, resurgence, and victory of the truth they tried to bury and the justice they set out to twist. 

www.MiddleIsrael.net 

The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.