CONSIDERED OPINION

FERN REISS

We need to incentivise the Israeli prime minister to ensure changes to the Basic Laws require a super-majority – for the sake of the country.

Everyone knows the scene in Fiddler on the Roof when someone says, “He’s right, and he’s right? They can’t both be right!” and Tevye strokes his beard and says, “You know, you are also right.”

That’s where we are right now with judicial reform in Israel: everyone is right.

The right wing is right. It’s no coincidence that it was about 30 years ago, when the Israeli Left began to lose elections, that the (appointed, not elected) judiciary began to expand beyond their formerly acknowledged boundaries. No one really empowered the courts with the authority to transform “advising” the Knesset, to ”ordering” the Knesset, effectively cancelling new legislation before it was even introduced. Right-wingers accurately saw this as a Left-wing power grab. Nor are they wrong to think the self-perpetuation of letting the current court appoint new court members is far from ideal.

The Left wing is also right. Because Ben Gurion avoided creating a proper constitution, because the executive and legislative branches here are effectively the same, because there is no Federalist power, Israel doesn’t have the checks and balances that protect citizens in most democracies. If the Israeli judiciary doesn’t have a way to overrule the executive branch, then a very thin veneer of Knesset good-will is all that protects Israeli citizens from possible excesses. The Left doesn’t want things like religious coercion. They don’t want a ruling coalition that can change election law and stay in power forever. They don’t want a Knesset that can overrule the High Court with just the slimmest of 61 votes.

So, everyone is right. And recent polls prove it: we’re agreed. Seventy percent