Four members of the majority that supports Benjamin Netanyahu, in Israel, they voted in secret to support the nomination of an opposition candidate as a delegate to the commission that selects the country’s judges. The composition of the commission is one of the central points of the judicial reform desired by the prime minister and which has been under discussion for months. For Netanyahu, who has led the most right-wing government in the country’s history since last December, yesterday’s vote represents a significant political defeat, which also shows the divisions within his own coalition.
The vote to choose the delegates of parliament in the commission that appoints the judges was considered a kind of referendum on the reform of the judicial system proposed by Netanyahu and which has been protested for months. The reform removes control powers from the Supreme Court to entrust them to the government and for the protesters and the opposition it is a danger to Israeli democracy, because it effectively eliminates any counterweight to the power of the current government. In addition to weakening the Supreme Court, the reform would give greater guarantees to the figure of the prime minister (who would no longer risk being removed due to the judicial proceedings against him) and would entrust some powers to the rabbinical courts (i.e. the Jewish religious courts), which they could settle certain civil proceedings if both parties agreed.
One of the main elements of the reform concerns the method of appointing judges. Currently all the judges of the country, both those of the Supreme Court and those of the lower courts, are selected by a commission composed of nine members of which only four, ie the minority, are chosen by the government. The members of the commission are: three judges of the Supreme Court itself, two representatives of the Israeli Bar Association, two government ministers and two members of parliament.
The government would like to bring the members of the commission to 11, eight of whom are political appointees. In this way, the government would have total control over the appointments of both Supreme Court judges and lower court judges.
On Wednesday, June 14, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, was scheduled to vote to choose the two parliament delegates on the committee. Traditionally the government appoints a representative of the majority and one of the opposition, but the far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties that are part of the majority had asked for both positions to be filled by their representatives.
Netanyahu seemed tended to be in favor of electing one member of the coalition and one of the opposition, which would have given him greater leverage in the ongoing negotiations on judicial reform. But the right wing of his government opposed him. At the last moment, the prime minister had therefore decided to ask his deputies to vote against all the candidates in order to buy time for internal negotiations: in fact, not electing anyone would have led to a new vote in the next few days. And he had also asked the candidate of his own party, Tally Gotliv, of the Likud but very close to the extreme right, to withdraw her candidacy.
However, four members of the majority did not follow the prime minister’s instructions and used the secret ballot to support the opposition candidate Karine Elharrar, of the centrist Yesh Atid party, who was elected with 58 votes out of 115. The second candidate, Tally Gotliv, refused to withdraw her candidacy, but did not get enough votes to be elected.
After the vote, Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, the leaders of the two main opposition parties, decided to suspend talks on judicial reform, explaining that Netanyahu has lost control of his government and is being held hostage by extremists. The prime minister replied that the opposition representative was elected, but that the opposition still took advantage of it to blow up the negotiations on the reform of the justice system, demonstrating how little it is seriously pursuing the negotiations.
Within thirty days, the Knesset will have to vote again to choose the second delegate in the committee that selects the judges.
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