8 Comments

Honestly, it is hard to have an honest debate when one side is saying Israel is turning into "Nazi Germany", constantly fan the flames of a (desired?) civil war and already say Bibi should be considered unfit. I detest Maoz, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, but the judicial reform itself has many valid points, and the kind of judicial activism the Israeli Supreme Court has been engaging in in the last decades is terrible. I doubt this coalition will last long (Bibi will probably get in conflict with the extremist wing), but to see as an alternative someone as pathetic as Lapid is tragic.

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There is no question that the judicial system needs reform. If the judges, etc. keep insisting that everything is great and nothing can change you end up with the current situation.

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Mr. Gordis-

After railing against "extremists" and suggesting we all need to be "nuanced" in our positions, it turns out it is you yourself who has trouble with such "nuance"! To complain that the new government has "unleashed rhetoric, hatred, and divisiveness" hardly lends itself to your vaunted "nuance"! You top this all off with telling us that there can be no "forgiveness" (of whom?! for what?!).This reminds me of the many years of hearing the wails of "לא נשכח ולא נסלח" regarding Rabin's assassination- yes, Mr. Gordis, the "rhetoric, hatred, and divisiveness" that those on the left cast upon (in particular) the observant Jewish community and those who were not enamored of the Oslo accords. It is a pity you have fallen into this trap.

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Imagine how farcical it would be if a proper democracy even spent a second arguing it wasn’t like Iran. Tells you something

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We in Israel spend so much time and energy using tortuous arguments to prove what we’re not that slowly but surely we become those things. We are not a proper or even a conditional democracy for a multitude of reasons; we are an Apartheid State for a multitude of reasons; we are even lie Iran -not identical but more religious control than any vaguely democratic country on earth (including Iran).

A little admission will go a lot further than denial. You can’t destroy a robust democracy in a few days with a simple majority in Parliament. You can if there has been a State of Emergency in our country since its inception! You can if the ‘constitution’ contains racist laws but never mentions the word Equality of Democracy.

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Actually, Judicial Review is the best thing that happened to the United States. The Bill of Rights was meant to be a restraint on government. It was meant to stop popular majorities from trampling on the rights of the minority.

Without Judicial Review, we would have never had Brown v Board of Education in 1954, in which the Supreme Court struck down racially segregated public schools. Without Judicial Review, we would have never had the 1962 and 1963 decisions that ended the practice of public schools formally composing prayers for student recitation.

We need jurists who won't face public accountability to render these decisions. If popular majorities can overrule these decisions, popular majorities can trample on minority rights.

As Justice Robert Jackson said in writing the majority opinion in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943), "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." This was a case in which the Court struck a state's mandatory flag salute requirement.

With the new coalition government in Israel wanting to cut back on LGBTQ rights and the rights of the non orthodox, unelected arbiters of personal liberty are necessary in order to prevent a greater loss of civil liberties.

While it would be ideal for Israel to have a written Constitution, or at least a written form of a Bill of Rights, in the absence of any such written documents, Israeli judges must be free to enforce the type of rights that a constitution would or should provide.

Eddie Tabash

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Haven't read it yet but just wanted to say Judicial Review is the worst abuse of power the United States has. Tovia Singer says something about how the Christian "Trinity" was the worst thing to ever happen to Christianity, something to the effect of a scar Christianity could never recover from... the same could be said for Judicial Review.

Judicial Review is not detailed in the Constitution of the U.S. (perhaps it's in Israel's constitution?), it is an assumed power. It also, ironically tramples the rights of all Americans as Article 1 states the power of the people is in the legislature. It was never intended that a body of 5-9 *unelected, lifetime* judges would make decisions that affect the entire country. That was NOT how the US was supposed to be and it's a travesty, a miscarriage of justice (as they say), that it ever happened and that it continues to happen. The supreme court needs to go back to what its duties are...deciding guilt for the highest cases, NOT deciding which laws come and go.

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Israel doesn’t even have a constitution. The court took a law passed by 32 MKs and declared it had constitutional status.

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