Why Israel Is Bitterly Split Over a Judiciary Overhaul

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, a coalition of right-wing and religious parties that came to power in December, has made overhauling the country’s judicial system a top priority. The steps it has taken and plan have sparked massive protests mostly by secular Israelis in the center and on the left who argue that the changes undermine the country’s democracy. The fight over the issue provoked Israeli President Isaac Herzog to warn that a civil war is “within touching distance.”

The government complains that the Supreme Court has become overly interventionist, such that judges are usurping powers that rightfully belong to elected officials. In recent decades, as the right triumphed politically, the court — a last bastion of progressivism — has waded increasingly into political matters by expanding the kinds of cases it takes on. It lowered so-called threshold requirements that had previously filtered out cases — for example those that weren’t tangible disputes between two parties. And for the first time in 1995, it declared that it had the power to strike down legislation it found incompatible with rights established by Israel’s Basic Laws, which together form the closest thing the country has to a constitution. In reviewing actions by the executive branch, critics say the court has applied the test of reasonableness — would a reasonable public authority make such a decision? — in a way that goes beyond that typically used in other common law countries.