Israel’s Supreme Court strikes down Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary

The decision could catapult Israel into a constitutional and political crisis during a time of war

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Knesset on May 23, 2023. Photo by Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images

By Benyamin Cohen January 1, 2024

Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday struck down a controversial law passed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government that limited some of the power of the high court and had sparked months of protests across the nation. The landmark decision could catapult Israel into a constitutional and political crisis, in a time when it is already waging a deadly war with Hamas.

The court ruled 8-7, with all 15 justices present for the first time in Israel’s history. In a summary of the case, the Supreme Court said it “held that the amendment causes severe and unprecedented harm to the core characteristics of Israel as a democratic state.”

Netanyahu’s Likud party denounced the decision, in particular its timing, when Israeli soldiers are “fighting and endangering themselves in battle.”

Yair Lapid, the leader of the opposition and a chief rival of Netanyahu, said the High Court’s ruling “ends a difficult year of conflict that tore us apart from within and led to the worst disaster in our history.”

The decision moves Israel closer to a potential constitutional crisis, a scenario in which a country experiences an unsolvable dispute between two branches of government, at a delicate moment. Ahead of the court decision, Netanyahu had not said explicitly that his government would obey a court ruling striking down the law.

As soon as Netanyahu took office on Dec. 29, 2022, for his sixth term as prime minister, he introduced plans for a judicial overhaul that aimed to limit the power of the Supreme Court. The plan divided the nation and led to 40 weeks of protests, with hundreds of thousands coming out every Saturday night since January, 2023.

Those protests abruptly stopped on Oct. 7, when Hamas killed around 1,200 people and abducted around 250.

Watch: Back in September, Daniel Gordis and Dahlia Scheindlin joined the Forward’s opinion editor, Laura E. Adkins, in a wide-ranging conversation about what was expected as the Israeli Supreme Court and government contemplated their next moves.

JTA contributed to this report.

Benyamin Cohen is news director at the Forward. He is the author of two books, My Jesus Year and The Einstein Effect, and has written for The New York Times and The Washington Post. He lives with his wife in West Virginia with their three dogs, a cat and a flock of chickens known as the Co-Hens.

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