VOICE OF THE JEWISH NEWS: Democracy or democrazy?
Israeli ministers are getting ever closer to ending the Supreme Court’s power to keep them in check. Undemocratic? You be the judge...
Most Jews who live outside Israel think thrice before criticising it – and for good reason. Many, this newspaper included, have deep-rooted ties to the tiny Jewish-led democracy surrounded by oppressive dictatorships that despise it.
As with the central argument against Prince Harry right now, you don’t criticise your own in public, not unless you simply must. In private, fine, but not in public. In public, you show a united front, even if all is far from well behind the scenes.
When Israel’s most revered judge offers himself before a firing squad if it will stop a now-rapid descent into autocracy, as he did this week, you know all is not well in the Jewish state.
Former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak has laid bare the extent to which Israel’s new government is fast dissolving the most fundamentally democratic elements of the state apparatus.
A land’s highest court is there to stop executive overreach. In the UK, it did so when Boris Johnson sought to prorogue parliament over Brexit. In the United States, it did so when Donald Trump tried to ban ‘Muslim’ immigration.
In Israel, too, it has had to step in, hence why Netanyahu’s new government wants to drastically limit its ability to block laws and decisions that Israel’s top judges deem discriminatory and/or undemocratic. Ministers also want to abolish “reasonableness” as a test by which judges weigh a law’s legality, and to give themselves control over judicial selection.
Barak warned that “the rights of everybody – Jew, Arab, ultra-Orthodox – are in grave danger” because “nobody will protect them” from the political majority of the day.
Imagine if Rishi Sunak wanted to bring in discriminatory laws, didn’t like how the courts wouldn’t let him, so brought in laws knee-capping the courts’ ability to do so.
Israel’s parliament cannot resist a majority coalition, Israel has no constitution, no Bill of Rights, no second House, he said, meaning “your right to dignity, to freedom, to life will be gravely harmed… and there will no court to turn to”.
Imagine if that happened here. Imagine if the PM wanted to bring in discriminatory laws, didn’t like how the courts wouldn’t let him/her, so brought in laws knee-capping the courts’ ability to do so.
Absolute power, in other words.
We don’t like criticising Israel for good reason – and because we don’t, it lends our criticism more power when we do. Why, then, would we say nothing now?
A far-right government hates legal oversight so hobbles the judiciary so they can do as they like.
Isn’t it, finally, time for our community leaders to speak out?
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