On Tuesday in various cities of Israel there were large mass demonstrations after the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) gave its preliminary approval on Monday evening a central part of the justice reform wanted by the conservative government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The protests were mostly peaceful, but there were still some clashes between protesters and police, resulting in more than 80 people being arrested.
The approval – the first of the three necessary for the law to enter into force – concerns the elimination of the so-called “reasonableness clause”, i.e. the possibility of the Supreme Court to intervene on the administrative provisions approved by the government and abolish them if it deems them in any way “unreasonable”.
The Supreme Court has an exceptionally important role in Israel’s political life because the country does not have a constitution (it does, however, have a number of Fundamental laws which enshrine individual rights and the relationship between citizen and state) and has relatively few counterweights to the power of the incumbent government. With the reform of the judiciary, which in recent months had already caused very well-attended protests, the government would like to limit the intervention capacity of the Supreme Court, leaving it only with the task of examining exclusively whether or not a law adheres to the principles expressed by the Fundamental laws.