The constitutional revolution in Israel, which began at the end of the 20th century, is moving forward quickly and becoming an anti-democratic one.
For decades, the Supreme Court was a bastion of democracy, and in the past few years it has chipped away at it. Israel, to the best of my knowledge, is the only country in the world in which the danger to democracy comes from functionaries in charge of the systems of law enforcement, the courts, and government ministries. Elected official are not endangering democracy, they have turned into supporting players in the eyes of those who are unwilling to accept the decision the people make in free elections. Most of the judges on the Supreme Court, along with the attorney general. Justice minister, and well-known NGOs who have become close friends of the court, have started to manage the country. They see laws as mere recommendations that need not always be taken into account. Now, following injunctions issued by the Supreme Court, even the Basic Laws aren't really all that important.
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When the socialist parties were in power, there was a hegemony among the appointed functionaries and elected officials. The functionaries were nearly all card-carrying party members, and were appointed through the party mechanisms and equated the good of the country with the good of the party. At that time, even Supreme Court justices took a line that backed the supremacy of the elected government and helped it promote a vision of a return to Zion, under Ben-Gurion the socialist. Socialism and the party are no longer with us, but the representatives of the old-guard elite still rules the courts, the State Attorney's Office, and the Justice Ministry unchallenged, and this time thanks to lofty talk about human dignity, rule of "law," reasonability, proportionality, and correctness.
Back in the mid-1990s, senior judges on the Supreme Court gave themselves the freedom to treat Knesset members like people who were unable to formulate legislation for the purposes they wanted. In the judges' eyes, the legislators could not be smarter than the public who voted for them. The result was that the court moved away from the letter of the law and decided for itself what norms the laws should express. On important matters, the court interpreted laws in ways that were completely different from what the legislators had intended. MKs became a platform the justices could use to promote their own agenda.
The Supreme Court walked injudiciously into a political arena that was already hot, and got badly burned. Most of the public lost faith in the Supreme Court and were left with about as much trust for it as they had in the left-wing media. No one in Israel elected the Supreme Court justices to run the state, cancel or change Basic Laws, or lead legal processes that would result in a new election. The ruling by a panel of nine justices and hints coming out of the court continue to hammer away at the rule of law and detract from faith in the court. I have suggested to the judges that if the future of democracy is important to them, they should step away from political questions, and if any of them still want to involve themselves, please, let them run in a democratic election, and then we'll know just how much public support their opinions have.
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