After Israeli leftists spent hours protesting on the streets this week and threatening a civil war, the coalition succeeded in passing a judicial reform bill overnight Wednesday.

No other country in the world has a judicial selection process like Israel, with a leftist echo chamber responsible for electing its judges, shackling the elected government.  And the bill that passed overnight, a watered-down version of the original bill, is not enough to change the composition of the courts and its authoritarian power –  it is only a tiny baby step to correcting what is wrong with the judicial system and restoring autonomy to the government.

All the bill does is slightly change the makeup of the Judicial Selection Committee, which is comprised of three Supreme Court justices, two representatives of the Israel Bar Association (IBA), two ministers, and two MKs. The bill replaces the two IBA members with two public representatives [lawyers],  one appointed by the coalition and one by the opposition. The bill will only go into effect in the next Knesset.

But the leftists don’t allow facts to affect their unbalanced behavior, and the opposition boycotted the vote, walking out of the plenum as it took place. They desperately tried to link the vote to the plight of the hostages, claiming that the coalition is too busy with the bill to worry about bringing the hostages home, and vowed to repeal the bill in the next government.

The Yesh Atid party and the left-wing Movement for Quality of Government promptly submitted petitions against the bill to the Supreme Court minutes after it passed.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar slammed the opposition in a speech from the Knesset plenum, saying: “You’re trying to incite Am Yisrael and threatening a civil war over this?!”

Sa’ar began by condemning the opposition’s lies and hypocrisy, commenting that it’s rare, throughout the world, that the opposition has the right of veto on all judicial selections. “But who is opposing this bill in the Israeli Knesset? The opposition.”

“And not only does it oppose it, it describes this law in apocalyptic terms. What are you screeching about? What are you condemning? The preservation of the status of Supreme Court justices as selectors at the gates of a closed members’ club? You already agreed to this in March 2023.”

“What are you protesting? Against the removal of the Bar Association from the committee? You already agreed to that. You are certainly the first opposition in the entire world that opposes granting power to the opposition to select judges.”

“And for this, you’re seeking to incite Am Yisrael and threatening a civil war!? It’s no wonder that the public isn’t responding and isn’t going out to the streets in the numbers it protested before.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)