{"id":316004,"date":"2026-03-01T08:23:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T08:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/316004\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T08:23:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T08:23:07","slug":"exploring-how-israels-court-turned-into-a-political-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/316004\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring how Israel\u2019s court turned into a political force"},"content":{"rendered":"

In easily comprehensible form, Israeli-American attorney Yonatan Green has produced a closely reasoned work on one of the most divisive domestic issues facing contemporary Israel: the appropriate balance of power between the Knesset and the Supreme Court<\/a>.\u200b<\/p>\n

Green believes that for some 40 years, power in the State of Israel<\/a> has been deliberately, consistently, and illegally usurped by the judiciary.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In his detailed, rigorous, meticulous, and insightful work, Rogue Justice: The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel, he scrutinizes how the Supreme Court has misled itself into unbalancing the proper relationship between the judiciary and the government.<\/p>\n

Green explains, issue by issue, how Israel\u2019s judiciary has, as he puts it, \u201cgone rogue,\u201d with judges and courts \u201cabandoning law in the most profound, systematic and comprehensive way\u2026 The Supreme Court\u2019s experiment with unbridled judicial supremacy has yielded results which can only be described as catastrophic.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Hamas launched its bloody attack on Israel on October 7, 2023<\/a>, it struck a nation torn apart politically by a domestic issue that had tens of thousands participating in anti-government street protests, day after day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AA view of Israel\u2019s Supreme Court justices during a hearing. (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)’Reasonableness’ doctrine used to overturn government decisions<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court had been using a \u201creasonableness\u201d doctrine to review and, in some cases, overturn decisions of the government and its ministers. As a result, the Knesset had passed an amendment to limit the Court\u2019s use of \u201creasonableness\u201d in reviewing government decisions.<\/p>\n

Green begins his analysis of Israel\u2019s judicial system with the meeting of the full Supreme Court in September 2023 to consider whether it would invalidate the legislation explicitly designed to curtail its powers. By an admittedly narrow majority (8-7), the Court did strike it down.\u200b For Green, this episode was the clearest proof that the Court now believed that its power over Israel\u2019s governance was absolute and could not be challenged.\u200b<\/p>\n

In his book, he demonstrates, step-by-step, how, over the last 40 years, the Supreme Court slowly turned itself into the most powerful court in any democracy in the world, usurping powers that were never given to it.<\/p>\n

He demonstrates how the Court has methodically taken more and more political power from the Knesset and the government until now, he says, it is \u201cthe central arbiter\u201d of almost all important political and social disputes in Israel.<\/p>\n

He describes this as \u201cjudicial supremacy,\u201d with unelected judges having the final say over many questions that in other democracies are decided by elected bodies.<\/p>\n

The author also points out that Israel is one of a small number of Western-type democracies in which trial by jury is completely absent. Instead of being judged by one\u2019s peers, defendants in criminal and civil cases are declared innocent or guilty by professional judges.<\/p>\n

This structure, inherited from the courts of the British Mandate, handed more power to the judiciary at the birth of the state than judges exercised elsewhere \u2013 a first step on the road to virtually unlimited judicial power.<\/p>\n

Green\u2019s purpose in writing Rogue Justice is both to recount how this happened and to warn that such a concentration of power in judges is unhealthy for a democracy, especially one without a formal written constitution.<\/p>\n

Instead of a constitution, Israel has \u201cBasic Laws\u201d passed at different times. But without a constitution, there is no clear public agreement on the powers of the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

Green points out that while the UK also lacks a written constitution, \u201cparliamentary supremacy\u201d is its basic constitutional premise. The fundamental principle is that parliament makes law and the courts administer it. In Israel, the courts can overturn it.<\/p>\n

The fact that Israel\u2019s Supreme Court and senior judges are chosen by a committee in which sitting judges play a strong role is, says Green, also an affront to democracy. Sitting judges have an effective veto power over new appointments.\u200b<\/p>\n

When a small group of judges chooses their own successors, thus keeping control of the system, the result, says Green, is a \u201cjudicial oligarchy.\u201d<\/p>\n

These structural \u201coddities\u201d have allowed the Supreme Court, once it chose to expand its role, to do so without any serious checks.\u200b<\/p>\n

The key period of change began mainly in the 1980s and was associated above all with Chief Justice Aharon Barak, whom the author dubs \u201cthe indomitable driving force behind judicial supremacy.\u201d Green quotes Barak\u2019s official biographer, Nomi Levitsky: \u201cFrom the moment he set foot in the Supreme Court, he began leading a profound transformation of Israel\u2019s legal landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

Green argues that the Court presided over a constitutional revolution without any democratically adopted constitution to justify it.<\/p>\n

The judges used the Basic Laws to give themselves a strong power of judicial review over Knesset laws.\u200b\u00a0
In most developed countries, Green points out, either courts cannot strike down laws at all, or the judges who can do so are clearly chosen by elected representatives.\u200b Israel, however, combines very strong judicial review with weak democratic control over who sits on the Court.\u200b<\/p>\n

The \u201creasonableness\u201d doctrine gave the Court enormous discretion. It allowed judges to cancel government decisions they consider extremely unreasonable, even when those decisions were lawful and within the government\u2019s authority.\u200b It also gave the Court the power to administer what Green calls \u201cjudicial impeachment,\u201d forcing ministers out of office by ruling that their appointments were unreasonable.\u200b<\/p>\n

Green suggests that these doctrines turned the Court into a kind of \u201csuper-legislature\u201d or \u201cconstitutional overlord,\u201d able to second-guess almost any decision by elected officials on open-ended grounds.\u200b He points to interventions in fields such as welfare policy, military operations, and appointments of senior officials, arguing that the Court now has the final word on questions that in other systems would be mainly political.\u200b<\/p>\n

He stresses that many Israeli judges and prosecutors are competent and patriotic, and that the Court did important work in earlier decades. However, taken together, the changes he describes have produced a form of \u201crogue justice\u201d \u2013 a court that has left the classic judicial role and assumed a dominant, political one, with too little democratic control.<\/p>\n

Green ends on a positive note, providing a range of what he terms \u201cpotential avenues for reconciliation and progress.\u201d One is to foster a much wider understanding of the proper function of a judiciary in a Western-style democracy. Another is to revive an idea that existed briefly in Israel\u2019s early days \u2013 a constitutional assembly.<\/p>\n

Green is a law graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem<\/a>, and has practiced in Israel and in the United States, privately and for a major American tech firm. His published work on legal issues has been cited by the Supreme Court. Rogue Justice is required reading for as broad a public as possible and will surely have a profound effect on the nation\u2019s perception of the issue.<\/p>\n

ROGUE JUSTICE
THE RISE OF JUDICIAL SUPREMACY IN ISRAEL\u00a0
By Yonatan Green
Academica Press
698 pages; $38<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In easily comprehensible form, Israeli-American attorney Yonatan Green has produced a closely reasoned work on one of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":316005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2056,412,835,85,46,425,1619,43,238,4320],"class_list":{"0":"post-316004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-book-review","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-high-court-of-justice","11":"tag-il","12":"tag-israel","13":"tag-literature","14":"tag-magazine","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-politics","17":"tag-supreme-court"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}