Where to, Israel? – UCA News

On April 26, 2023, the State of Israel celebrated seventy-five years since its establishment.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog addressed the Diplomatic Corps that day as follows: “The modern State of Israel is a true miracle. And it is one that we have had to work terribly hard to achieve. When our founders declared the establishment of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948 – a state founded on the prophetic visions of a world of freedom, justice and peace – many believed that the newborn country would not survive. Few would have predicted the course of our improbable story. Today, we are a country on the front lines of the efforts to make it a better world for us all, in the spirit of our founding vision.”

Judicial reform crisis

However, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the state was marked by profound divisions within Israel around proposed judicial reform. Massive demonstrations in the big cities were held each week to protest the government’s determination to change the judicial system, in effect reducing judicial oversight of government decision-making.

Three months later, on July 24, 2023, the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) passed an amendment to the 1984 Basic Law on the judiciary, which prohibited judges from using the so-called “reasonableness standard” in reviewing governmental administrative decisions.

The Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, presented the amendment as the first phase of a legal revision that, according to him, would restore Israel’s democracy, which was being restricted by judges, who although not elected, interfered in the way the elected government administered the country.

Fifty-six opposition members left the Knesset chamber, so that the sixty-four who remained voted in the amendment unanimously.

Demonstrations of tens of thousands of Israelis continued, calling for a halt to judicial “reform.” In September, an unprecedented thirteen-hour-long Supreme Court hearing debated the amendment, asking whether the amendment wrought such damage to democracy in Israel that it would be justified in striking it down.

The debate revealed not only the disagreements among the judges, between the judges and the government, between the government and the opposition, but also the passions this issue aroused.

Apparent was a deep schism within mainstream Israeli society between two visions of the state. To what extent should Israel be a Jewish state, conceived of as a homeland for all Jews in the world, or be a democratic state, conceived of as the country of all its citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish (predominantly Arab).

Israel does not have a constitution that clearly enunciates the values and principles that the state seeks to embody.

The 1948 Declaration of Independence has served as the anchor for these values and principles. Due to the fact that the word “democracy” appears nowhere in this declaration, in 1985, the Basic Law on the Knesset ruled that no political party could deny Israel’s status “as a democratic state.”

In 2018, the Knesset passed another basic law that promoted the Jewish character of the state, the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People, arousing a ferocious public debate, underlining again the tension between these two basic attributes of the state: Jewish and democratic.

Despite the clash, both camps share the Zionist vision of a state being both Jewish and democratic, the debate being about the proportion of each component. Both sides of the struggle were identified by their use of traditional Zionist discourse, promoted within the context of national education and military service, the two most potent socializing milieus in Israel.

However, the past two decades have seen a radicalization on both sides of the divide.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s decision to build a ruling coalition with the extreme right, including individuals opposed to the democratic character of the state, has empowered those who agitate for Israel to be distinguished as a Jewish rather than a democratic state.

The erosion of democratic values has led to changing attitudes to the judiciary as well. The judges are caricatured as elitist, clinging to a ruling status that their class lost in democratic elections, as well as being too liberal and too pro-Arab to boot.