JNS
A prominent jurist launched the debate by calling for U.S. sanctions against officials whom he said are part of the "global deep state."
Two years after its launch, Israel’s stuttering judicial reform effort has made little progress: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing partners are again facing waves of street protests by the left over a plan to fire civil servants and diversify the judiciary.
Previous waves, as well as the outbreak of war on Oct. 7, 2023, have blocked significant progress on the reform, which would limit the power of Israel’s muscular judiciary and unelected bureaucracy.
But the reform’s promoters have a potential asset that they didn’t have two years ago: U.S. President Donald Trump. Some pro-reform individuals are eying a breakthrough, to be achieved by leveraging Trump’s anti-deep state agenda and deploying it locally to ram the reform through despite the Israeli left’s opposition.
The current round of the reform battle concerns Gali Baharv-Miara and Ronen Bar, the attorney general and the head of the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), respectively.
The Cabinet unanimously voted for their dismissal in two separate debates this month, spurring mass protests and legal challenges that will more than likely lead to High Court reviews—and possibly interventions. Bar was fired but remains in his post due to a High Court of Justice injunction pending a judicial review next month.
On Thursday, the Knesset passed an amendment that, if it survives a review by Israel's interventionist High Court, will give elected politicians a greater say in the judicial selection process. Overall, however, the opposition has effectively blocked the reform from advancing.
A wave of mass protests last March reversed the dismissal of then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, a moderate from Netanyahu’s Likud Party who had issues with the reform. Gallant was eventually fired in November amid fresh protests, but the affair underlined Netanyahu’s limited mandate even over who serves in his own Cabinet.
On the legal front, the High Court has eliminated one of the reform’s main legislative achievements: A law that would have taken away from judges the ability to cite “reasonableness” as grounds for their rulings. Critics of Israel’s judiciary say this power is itself not reasonable as it introduces a nakedly subjective judicial criterion.
To preserve unity amid a multi-front war with Hamas and other Iranian proxies, Israel’s right wing has on numerous junctions averted an internal showdown that could’ve jeopardized the war effort, paralyzed the economy and forced the executive branch to defy the judiciary or vice versa.
But to some prominent intellectuals on the Israeli right, the Trump administration represents a unique tiebreaker that has the potential to offset or mitigate those risks. They hope it could break the impasse that has prevented the government from delivering the reform, a major campaign promise.
Relying on the Trump administration to achieve this, however, is unpalatable to many Israeli right-wingers. They have traditionally opposed foreign intervention in Israel’s internal affairs and resent their left-wing rivals’ penchant for using like-minded U.S. administrations to impose policies from abroad.
Netanyahu, who is defending himself in court against corruption charges in a trial he says is an attempt by the judiciary and others to oust him from power, has tied the judicial reform and the fight against it to the Trump administration’s own issues with unelected bureaucracy.
"In America and Israel, when a strong right-wing leader wins, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people's will. They won't win in either place,” Netanyahu tweeted last week in a post shared by Elon Musk, Trump’s government efficiency czar.
Moshe Cohen-Eliya, a professor of comparative law and a prominent prime-time panelist on Israel’s Channel 14, last week launched the debate about using the Trump administration against what he called the "deep state" in Israel.
“Revoking their U.S. visas, closing their U.S. bank accounts would give them the ultimate reality check, it’d be the end of the world to them,” Cohen-Eliya wrote in a viral post on Friday. He was referring to people he described as “the juristorcats and their cronies in the Israeli deep state.” He called out Bar and Barhav-Miara by name.
Cohen-Eliya also noted in the post that Israeli groups on the left have been using these tactics for decades against Israelis on the right, especially those living in Judea and Samaria.
A massive leak of U.S. State Department documents from 2010 showed that Peace Now was in regular contact with American diplomats, sharing information about Israeli activity in Judea and Samaria with the Obama administration to ensure U.S. pressure.
Breaking the Silence, another Israeli far left group that’s working to inform international players about perceived human rights violations by Israeli troops, last year publicly celebrated the imposition of sanctions on some Israelis in Judea and Samaria by the Biden administration as a “victory.”
To Cohen-Eliya, this is why the right should now adopt similar tactics against Bar and Baharav-Miara, who he says have hamstrung Netanyahu's right-wing government on numerous fronts.
“In the rough neighborhood where I grew up near the Talpiot market in Haifa, I learned that for every punch thrown your way, you throw two back,” Cohen-Eliya wrote in his post.
However, his proposal that the Trump administration be asked to punish the leaders of the fight against the judicial reform has met vocal opposition from some on the ideological right.
David Peter, a prominent Israeli lawyer, rejected the plan outright at a debate that the two men had on Tuesday in Jerusalem.
“These are illusions, which, if they materialized, would have destructive consequences,” Peter, a researcher for the Kohelet Policy Forum, said at the event, organized by the Meshilut Movement for Governance and Democracy. Cohen-Eliya accused Peter of "virtue signaling" as the left used extra-democratic means to subvert the mandate of the elected government.
Yehuda Yifrach, a constitutional jurist and the head legal commentator of the Makor Rishon newspaper, also rejected Cohen-Eliya’s blueprint. “This idea of using the U.S. against the protest would become a moral stain if implemented,” Yifrach told JNS. “But it’s also unnecessary: The judicial reform is on track. There are delays and issues, but there’s also progress. We don’t need to debase ourselves and stoop to snitching on other Israelis. It’s gratuitous. We can achieve the goal while remaining on the high road.”
To Yifrach, Jewish history is a warning against inviting a foreign power to intervene in an internal conflict between Jews. “We don’t burn barns, even if the other side does,” he said.
It was a reference to the Great Jewish Revolt against the Romans, in which warring Jewish militias burned each other’s food silos while fighting the Romans in the first century C.E. Two Jewish factions had invited the Romans to invade to prevent the other from ruling. The revolt ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple, mass displacement and the end to Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel until 1948.
Others, however, see the reluctance to appeal for U.S. sanctions against the leaders of the fight against the judicial reform as symptomatic of the mainstream right’s failures.
“Why do you think the left wing is winning? Not because it’s good at the game but because you don’t even show up,” Ayelet Mitch, a writer for the conservative website Mida and a former editor for Ha'aretz, wrote on Facebook to Peter. “You’ve got to start speaking leftwingese or this never stops.”
Cohen-Eliya, meanwhile, is writing to the Trump administration publicly—and in English—to call for intervention.
“As Elon Musk recently warned, the fight against the unelected bureaucratic class—what many now call the deep state—is a global struggle,” Cohen-Eliya wrote in an op-ed he published Wednesday in Tablet magazine. “What is needed now is not only internal reform, but international solidarity among nations—and citizens—who value representative government over rule by unaccountable institutions.”
