RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/was-moshe-landau-a-fascist/

“[I]f the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made…the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers…”

Abraham Lincoln

Moshe Landau was President of Israel’s Supreme Court from 1980 to 1982. In 2000, he wrote of subsequent Supreme Court President Aharon Barak’s record of arrogating more and more power to the Court: “I think that… Barak has not, and does not, accept the rightful place that the court should have among the various authorities in our regime.… [Instead, he is seeking] to interject [into all areas of Israeli life] certain moral values as he deems appropriate. And this amounts to a kind of judicial dictatorship that I find completely inappropriate.”

Was Israel not a democracy during the four and a half decades before Barak’s ascent to the Supreme Court’s presidency and his choreographing what in short order became the court’s unlimited supremacy within Israel’s governmental system? Was Landau’s assessment completely wrong and his criticism of Barak an attempt to perpetuate prior anti-democratic governance? Was it only Barak’s establishing of judicial supremacy that rendered Israel finally a democracy?

This seems to be the conviction of the large numbers of Israelis who oppose judicial reform to rein in the power of the Supreme Court and who not only argue that reform will destroy Israel’s democracy (and not infrequently accuse its supporters of fascism), but who have demonstrated multiple times a week in the hundreds of thousands, closed down highways, blocked access to Ben-Gurion airport, vowed to refuse IDF reserve duty, sought to close the port of Haifa, picketed politicians’ homes and promoted mayhem in other ways, all in the service of blocking reform.

But, in fact, there is little in the Israeli Supreme Court’s present powers and prerogatives that resonates with the concept of democracy.

There is no precedent in Western democracies for a court to assert whatever authority it chooses over any aspect of a nation’s political life without any checks or balances.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/israel-soars-to-fourth-place-in-world-happiness-index/

In the World Happiness Index, Israel has now soared from ninth to fourth place. It’s an astonishing result, given that Israelis must live with the daily threat of terrorism, the massive effort to delegitimize the state through endless UN resolutions, the relentless BDS campaign, and the threat from a state actor – Iran – that is working to acquire nuclear weapons that it intends to use on the Jewish state. More on Israel’s spectacular rise in the Happiness Index can be found here: “Israel soars to 4th place in global happiness list, highest since ranking started,” Times of Israel, March 20, 2023:

The UN-sponsored index, based on data from 2020-2022, predates the government’s divisive judicial overhaul plan. The list is again topped by Finland, with the US 15th, Britain 19th and France 21st.

Israelis are the happiest they’ve been in over a decade, the World Happiness rankings revealed on Monday, though the findings predated the widespread social upheaval over the government’s judicial overhaul program and therefore could not take it into account.

Israel’s 2023 fourth-place ranking, up from ninth last year, is its highest position since the UN-sponsored index began publication in 2012.

https://www.jns.org/whats-to-stop-the-next-government-from-reversing-judicial-reform/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for a “timeout” on judicial reform to give dialogue a chance. He also promised his supporters that reform will get done. If negotiations fail, and the coalition pushes through reform anyway, the opposition has promised to reverse it once it’s at the helm.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid Party has repeatedly said, as he did in February at the Knesset, “On the day we return to power, all these changes will be canceled.… We will fight against all this insanity with all our strength.”

Two analysts JNS spoke with, despite holding opposite views about the reform, said that’s unlikely. Russell Shalev of the Kohelet Policy Forum, who supports the reform, and Amichai Cohen of the Israel Democracy Institute, who opposes it, agree that the opposition will not want to give up the reform’s benefits because the reform takes power away from judges and gives it to elected officials. Politicians would, therefore, have an incentive to uphold the new system.

“The basic idea behind all these reform proposals is democratic accountability—increasing the public’s ability to decide on the policies that influence our faith, our politics, our country,” Shalev told JNS. He noted that the most important proposal advanced so far, up until Netanyahu froze the legislative process on Monday, was a bill to change how judges are selected by nullifying judges’ control over the Judicial Selection Committee.

“The reform gives the public [through its elected officials] the ability to appoint judges. So I have a hard time believing that should this be passed in the future, a left-wing government will give up its newfound power to decide who will be the judges,” he said.

https://nypost.com/2023/03/28/israels-protesters-are-enemies-not-heroes-of-democracy/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu announced Monday night he was temporarily pausing his government’s judicial-reform efforts in the face of strikes by key industries, insubordination in some parts of the military and huge protests.

While many within the international community, as well as on the Israeli left, will attempt to portray the announcement as a triumph of democracy, it is anything but.

The reforms seek to introduce a modicum of checks and balances into Israel’s political system, where the “court” sits as a de facto unelected supreme legislative chamber that can exercise veto power over every single government action.

The assault on the proposals, apart from the telegenic protesters, was actually rooted in the state’s bureaucracy, which remains highly sympathetic to the judiciary.

For 25 years, Israel’s Supreme Court has operated entirely without democratic constraints.

Not only does the court remain unfettered by any written constitution when evaluating a law — it is guided by such nebulous principles as “human dignity” and “liberty” — it’s also seized the ability to block any government act it deems “unreasonable.”

Perhaps most confounding, judges exercise veto power over the selection of their successors, resulting in an ideologically homogenous judiciary.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/28/the-problem-with-israels-protests/

Many of those watching the footage of the massive angry protests that have been engulfing Israel since the start of the year are likely to feel inspired. It looks like a sizeable proportion of the Israeli public is demonstrating for democracy against a right-wing coalition government, which includes a significant far-right element.

These protests have developed in response to the government’s judicial-reform package. This includes the controversial override clause, piskat hahitgabrut, which gives the elected Knesset the right to override the powerful Supreme Court’s veto on legislation, with a simple parliamentary majority. Many opponents of the reforms accuse Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, of wanting to overhaul the judiciary for dubious, personal reasons. He is currently standing trial on corruption charges, which he denies.

On Monday, the protests spiralled into a general strike, affecting airports, hospitals, schools and universities. And now, under intense pressure, Netanyahu has announced that he is to pause the legislation until the summer, in order to prevent a ‘rupture among our people’.

It might seem tempting to draw a parallel between the demonstrations in Israel and the recent protests in France against Emmanuel Macron’s pensions-reform package. In both cases, it seems that the public is on the streets protesting against unpopular measures imposed by an authoritarian leader. But such an impression of Israel’s protests would be misleading.

Aside from the obvious differences between Israel and France (no nearby militias or nations have pledged to destroy France, for one thing), the nature of both protest movements is very different. Above all, the protests in Israel are driven principally by the nation’s elites. These include reserve military pilots and senior intelligence officers, who play a prominent role in Israeli society. It also involves the heads of high-tech firms – the richest section of Israeli society.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/27/the-scourge-of-jewish-self-division-or-the-court-jews-are-busy-at-work-n1681976

I have seen these people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people. (Exodus 32:9).

EXCERPTS

The Jewish epic across the wilderness of history may be described as divide and be conquered. Surah 59:14 of the Koran tells us something very true about us Jews: “There is much hostility between them: their hearts are divided…” It seems that the wise counsel of Judaism’s great sage Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah has no resonance for the backsliders: “All of Israel and those who are joined to it are to each other like brothers. If brother shows no compassion to brother, who will show compassion to him?”

Who, indeed? We see the sorry spectacle of division acting itself out today in the violent civil protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to reform a hard-core, self-appointing, Leftist Supreme Court, which regularly thwarts the will of legitimate right-wing governments. It was on this platform that Netanyahu was elected by a massive majority of the vote. But the Left is good at civil disruption. There have been resignations and firings of dissident members of the government and raging animosity against the prime minister for his perceived temerity in trying to overhaul the judicial system and redress a long-festering political sore. The Left is having none of it. Netanyahu’s critics argue that the plan is pushing Israel down a path to autocracy, a path they themselves appear to be treading.

Similarly, Melanie Phillips remarks that Netanyahu is reacting against the anti-democratic rule of an interventionist judicial activism, a system in which “judges have substituted politics and ideology for law,” superseding duly elected parliaments. Seen from a larger perspective, the demonstrations and irruptions express the principle of “liberal universalism that…would prefer rule by judges” who promulgate universal laws determined by the globalist Left over rule by an elected government administering the laws of the nation. Military and security professional Ben Kerido aptly comments in The Western Standard that “Israeli protests against Netanyahu resemble the American radical Left.” What we are observing, in my estimation, is another manifestation of the Court Jews at work.

This history of self-estrangement, political strife, and cultural rupture has been played out from the biblical era through the centuries of religious factionalism and reciprocal ex-communication culminating in our own epoch. The legacy of the celebrated Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the equally acclaimed Jewish political writer Hannah Arendt, who could never forget their German patrimony and were corrosively suspicious of the Zionist project, has been broadly and unambiguously noxious. In the present moment we observe their offspring, that is, left-wing “peace activists,” liberal rabbis, “post-Zionist” intellectuals, power nabobs, social ingratiators — in other words, Court Jews — who strive to erode the Jewish character of the state of Israel and so deprive it of its legitimacy. The Jewish Left, as it dances around the golden calf of a utopian project, represents perhaps the gravest danger to the survival of the country.

Thus, its adherents pursue their fugitive merit, ignoring the rain clouds until they are drenched and catch pneumonia, as the 19th-century Jewish philosopher Max Nordau put it.

These are the “degraded” Jews whom the great Jewish patriot Vladimir Jabotinsky denounced. They are reminiscent of the spies that Moses sent out to reconnoiter enemy territory, ten of whom on returning compared themselves to frail grasshoppers before the fearsome Anakim and recoiled from their destiny (Numbers 13: 33). They do not understand, in the words of Nurit Greenger, that “Israel is the last station in the Jews’ Via Dolorosa” and that “beyond this station is the Jews’ final crucifixion,” nor do they realize how profoundly they themselves are at risk. They have forgotten that the Jewish sense of security is always a false sense of security, that over the past 2,000 years, as Melvin Konner points out in Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Jews have been expelled from 94 countries. They do not think to ask themselves why the future should be any different.