High Court strikes down Basic Law amendment, voiding reasonableness law

By Jeremy Sharon, TOI   1 January 2024

All 15 High Court justices preside over a court hearing on petitions against the government’s ‘reasonableness law’ at the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, September 12, 2023. /Yonatan Sindel

In a monumental, highly controversial decision, the High Court of Justice strikes down legislation passed earlier this year that curtailed judicial oversight of the government, annulling for the first time in Israel’s history an element of one of its quasi-constitutional Basic Laws.

The court split almost down the middle over the highly contentious legislation, which eliminated judicial use of the “reasonableness” standard — the only significant law from the government’s judicial overhaul agenda to have been passed so far. Eight justices vote in favor of striking down the law, while seven vote to uphold it.

The ruling establishes in legal precedent the High Court’s contention that it has, in limited circumstances, the right to annul Basic Laws, despite these being the basis of authority for all state institutions, including the court.

Twelve of the 15 justices agree the court does have the authority to strike down Basic Laws.

The reasonableness law, passed back in July as an amendment to Basic Law: The Judiciary, bars all courts, including the High Court, from deliberating on and ruling against government and ministerial decisions on the basis of the judicial standard of reasonableness.

The petitioners against the law, as well as Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara, argued it removed crucial guardrails protecting Israeli democracy and should therefore be struck down; the government argued that the standard gave the court too broad a scope to intervene in policy decisions which should be the purview of the government alone, and that the court had no authority to strike down Basic Laws in the first place.

Before October 7, some government ministers and coalition MKs indicated they may not respect a decision to annul the legislation, which would lead to a severe constitutional crisis. The ongoing war against Hamas and Hezbollah may temper such reactions, however.

Liberal justices, including Acting Supreme Court President Uzi Vogelman, expressed deep concern during the September hearing on the law that it annulled all effective judicial review over government and ministerial decisions. Conservative justices such as David Mintz and Noam Sohlberg opined, however, that there was no justification within Israel’s constitutional make-up for the High Court to strike down Basic Laws.

January 2, 2024 | 6 Comments »

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  1. @peloni,
    A lot of well said. With the help of the Almighty, I do praying that the people’s will be done. This injustice has gone on long enough.

  2. It’s Weimar sickness all over ; A democratic nation ( please note the double vocable ) which allows the worse ennemies of the nation to run at elections under the cover-blanket of democracy is running to its own suicide . Without this nation – Jewish nation – there is no democracy . Is that so complex to be always skipped ? In that wicked theater the Supreme court plays the part one enacted during Weimar suicide .

  3. I know that some will see this as the ultimate defeat for Judicial Reform, but I would argue that this is not remotely likely to be true. Importantly, it was not the politicians who made Judicial Reform the primary issue in the last election. Do recall that Judicial Reform has been on the lips of the politicians for over twenty years without any meaningful effects. The failure of political leadership to pursue Judicial Reform allowed the judiciary, the High Court really, to take on a role which was altogether iniquitous to a democratic nation. Though Israel is the Jewish State, it was founded as a democratic nation, where the will of the people was to be the deciding vector upon which the nation’s path was to be decided. In the years following the the Barak revolution, the High Court assumed greater and greater power, perverting justice and reason and property rights against the interests of the nation. The resulting friction from this perversion of justice which strongly contrasted with the will of the people is the precise kernel which brought this topic to the fore in the 2022 election. The Court’s pursuit of foreign interests over that of the Israeli people has not changed, and this is made clear as they have now acted to extend their power even further than they previously recognized the limit of that power by striking down a Basic Law.

    This challenge will be met, as I have stated previously, by this government or the next, not because it is the will of the politicians, but because it is the will of the people. A Court which respects the nation over whom its judgements are cast will be made ever more relevantly necessary in the aftermath of the Simchat Torah massacre, and it will be the people of Israel who will demand that the Barak revolution and its international bias be reversed towards a model which provides for the interests of the nation and the citizens which inhabit it. It may take time to counter the court’s belligerent response to being reformed, but in the end, I still contend that it will be justice for the people and not the whims of the Justices which will have the final say in this battle of wills.

  4. The politicization of the Israeli Supreme Court is as catastrophic to Israeli sovereignty as the politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court is to the sovereignty of the United States. The world is at war–––globalism vs. nationalism. The leftist/globalist alliance in Israel is an enemy of the sovereignty of the State of Israel and its identity as a Jewish nation. Likewise, the leftist/globalist alliance in the U.S. is an enemy of the sovereignty of the United States and its identity as a Judeo-Christian nation. Globalism does not recognize national sovereignty or the sovereignty of the individual–––including the individual sovereignty of the foolish leftists who are just useful idiots for the globalist elite. The idiots will all be eliminated as soon as their usefulness expires. There is no place for agitators in globalism managerial Unistate.

  5. Here we go again. We already discussed this act of justice months ago and found that the only purpose to allow the high court to intervene in government decision making was to leave an opening to foreign governments to intervene in ongoing Israeli policy. The high Court should be struck down, at least till it comes to uts senses.