Home » Behind the riots in Israel

Comments

Behind the riots in Israel — 15 Comments

  1. Robert Bork and Christopher Lasch were delineating the phenomenon a generation ago.

  2. The Jews are doing stupid Jew things. Again. Read the OT, the Torah. Of course it’s really humans doing stupid human things as usual.

  3. Gosh, wouldn’t you think a tiny nation surrounded by enemies would be more united? Are they so unconcerned about the Muslims that want to wipe them off the map, hat they can afford to quarrel violent y among themselves?

    What happens in nations that achieve high standards of living? Do people suddenly forget the disciplines and good sense that got them there? Apparently so.

    As Jahaziel Maqqebet comments, “….it’s really humans doing stupid human things as usual.” Yes, it is.

  4. The problem is having politicised judicial systems in the first place.
    Which is sadly very common, and I don’t really know a way to prevent it as judges obviously will have their political beliefs and most people have trouble letting those (and their religious ideology, which for many is the same thing) interfere with their thought processes when they shouldn’t.

    The Netherlands goes some way to prevent this by making judges employees of the courts, rather than political appointees. Judges are also serving for a limited period, after which they are forced to retire from the judiciary and go back to being lawyers.
    Doesn’t prevent political judges (as obviously the hiring process can be and often is biased), but reduces the risk of them gaining too much power.

  5. I found this judicial situation in Israel appeals to the nerd in me, so I took a look at Neo’s link to the post on how the judicial selections are done now, and what would be changed, which was very useful. This is mostly a restatement to test my understanding, so if I get something wrong, someone throw a flag on the play.

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/who-chooses-judges-the-evolution-and-planned-radical-overhaul-of-judicial-selection/#:~:text=Judges%20today%20are%20technically%20appointed,well%20as%20the%20Supreme%20Court.

    Judges today are technically appointed by the president of Israel, in accordance with the choices made by the Judicial Selection Committee. The committee selects judges for all courts in Israel, including the labor, magistrates and district courts, as well as the Supreme Court.

    The committee is comprised of nine members, and the appointment of a judge to all courts other than the Supreme Court requires a simple majority of the committee members present, as long as no less than seven members participate in the vote.

    An appointment to the Supreme Court requires the support of seven out of the nine committee members.

    The nine members include the Supreme Court president; two other Supreme Court justices selected by the justices of the Supreme Court; the justice minister, who chairs the committee, and another cabinet minister; two members of the Knesset chosen by the Knesset in a secret vote (usually, but not always, one MK from the coalition and one from the opposition); and two members of the Israel Bar Association chosen by the association’s national council.

    Apparently, no other body or individual can veto the decisions of the committee, unlike the US system where the President nominates a candidate (without any officially mandated input from anyone else), but the Senate has to confirm the appointment. Even so, the system is not all that different except for the formal procedure of who gets to make the suggestions (1 person or a committee) and who gets to make the final decisions (50 people or — the same committee).

    Under this system, the government and the coalition together usually have three members on the committee (the two ministers and one MK), the judiciary has three members, the Israel Bar Association has two members, and the opposition has one.

    One of the key complaints raised by advocates of the government’s sweeping reforms is that, when choosing judges for the lower courts, the elected officials can easily be ignored by the unelected members of the committee — that is the judges and lawyers.

    This is not the case for appointments to the Supreme Court, which require a majority of seven votes, and therefore a much higher level of consensus. In effect, the judges and the government representatives both have a veto over appointments to the Supreme Court.

    Nevertheless, Justice Minister Yariv Levin, Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee chairman Simcha Rothman and other advocates of the government’s overhaul have insisted that even this power of mutual veto between the government and the judiciary gives too much influence to the latter, to the detriment of the will of the people.

    But it’s only detrimental when the will of the people is conservative.

    Implicit in the author’s presentation is that Israel is at the stage where most of the current judges, including the Supreme Court, are leftists (just like the USA, up until 2016); the lawyers are mostly leftists (at least the ones with political clout are, just as in the USA); and the ideology of the cabinet ministers and the Knesset members depends on who is running the government (just like the US executive and Congress).

    If the Left’s coalition is in charge, then there is only ONE conservative, and that’s assuming the MK for the opposition party is not a CINO just like some of our GOP congress reps.

    If the Right’s coalition is in charge, as it is under Netanyahu, then there are 6 leftists against 3 conservatives — which means the judges appointed to the courts will not support the kinds of policies the public voted for, regardless of whether they are in accord with the Basic Laws (there is no Constitution) or not. (Also sounds a lot like the US.)

    The government’s plans to restructure the committee would see both the Israel Bar Association representatives removed from the panel.

    “The first thing we do,” per Shakespeare, is get rid of the lawyers; always a good way to start.

    The committee would then be comprised of three cabinet ministers, including the justice minister who will serve as committee chair; three MKs — two from the coalition and one from the opposition; the Supreme Court president; and two retired lower court judges to be appointed by the justice minister in agreement with the Supreme Court president.

    A simple majority of five votes would be required for all appointments, including to the Supreme Court.

    This would give the government and coalition an inbuilt, automatic majority of five members on the committee, along with heavy influence over the choice of the two retired lower court judges.

    Presumably, a conservative government would try to get at least a couple of moderate swing votes from the retirees, as the SC president (who we assume to be a leftist for the near future) won’t otherwise approve. I can see some real potential for dead-locks here!

    Again, this only works to the advantage of conservatives if there is a Conservative government in power; otherwise there will again be an 8-1 imbalance favoring the Left.

    A reform supporter quoted later in the article notes that the government-coalition members don’t always vote as a bloc, that is, the leftists always vote together but conservatives are more ideologically divergent; thus, the “automatic majority of five members on the committee” might be less of a conservative surety than is assumed.

    He also conceded that “the [retired] judges who sit on the committee will likely reflect the ideological outlook of the justice minister who appoints them. But he asserted that, unlike the coalition KMs on the panel, they would be more independent since they could not be removed from the committee once appointed.”

    So it appears to be an unlimited appointment for the three justices, unlike the case for the ministers and KMs.

    Five officially-conservative committee members would be facing a head-wind of leftists for a long time unless the government could get a couple of somewhat conservative moderates appointed (depending on just how squishy those justices and the two KMs were).

    If the government later went to the Left, the division would be at least 6L to 3C (depending ditto ditto).

    I’m not sure why the Left is so against these reforms; they aren’t losing a whole lot of control, at least until the SC and lower judicial pipelines run out of Leftists.

    If they are afraid that will happen, then they are also afraid that they won’t be able to unseat the Conservative government soon, or for very long at a time.

    Which is an interesting observation.

  6. The “Claremont Review of Books” arrived yesterday and the lead article is about Netanyahu. The title is “The Churchill of the Middle East.” I will read it this afternoon. It’s by Andrew Roberts, the Churchill biographer.

    The left in this country seems focused on bringing down the current consensus on government and changing to something other than a nation state. For Israel, surrounded by bitter enemies, this would be an order of magnitude more insane.

  7. Not sure I’d call them riots.
    They are more like massive, very loud—drumming and loudspeakers—very obnoxious, self-feeding, seething, self-righteous, verging on the hysterical, in-your-face demonstrations,made of people from all walks of life…with Israeli flags being the iconic symbol and the slogan “democratya” being the more-than-somewhat-ironic mantric chant.
    Problem is that during the several times a week they protest, they block traffic and cause massive transportation problems.
    Depending on the time of day, in many cases, those demonstrating are families with kids of various ages.
    In some cases, the seething demonstrations do get out of control, with police having to assert order, use water canon vehicles and make arrests.
    They are based on a lot of imprecise information and stoked and incited by the usual media and politicians suspects—
    No, not riots.
    At least not yet.
    Could easily get there, though, if the protesters and their organizers become increasingly drunk with power; and as the vector of the movement shifts to toppling the government or, at least, making the country ungovernable.

  8. Why do leftists oppose traditional values? I know, I know. Rhetorical question. They do so because people holding to traditional values do not want to be controlled as lefties want to control people and will resist.

    See the Battle of Sugar Point.

  9. The problem here, though, is that it may well be a huge unforced error of the “better to be smart than right” variety. IOW, perhaps the new government should have waited a bit on this issue.
    (Even Lapid declared several good years back that the court issue was a problem that had to be resolved; though no doubt that he would far prefer to the person trying to resolve it.)
    OTOH, there would have been no coalition, and hence no government, had not Netanyahu agreed with those coalition partners to push this reform, since it was a demand of at least one of the coalition partners; and, in fact, if this issue is NOT pursued, those coalition partners may well decide to leave the coalition, thus toppling the government.
    So, stuck bewteen a rock and a hard place, it looks like a game of chicken on several planes….
    Lurking in the background is the question of whether the current government definitely has a mandate to make such a change, given the split in the electorate. (In principle, yes; but such is the nature of the change that it would have been preferable to have as wide agreement as possible…)
    Having said that, there is a lot of misinformation on the subject being promoted, publicized and magnified by the Left.
    And so, a potentially catastrophic logjam.

  10. Some additional observations:

    The cultural schism goes deep here – the vast majority of Jewish immigrants to modern Israel came from/with deep religious conviction. The hard-core leftie kernel leading this attempted coup are Marxists who elbowed aside these more traditional Jews to grab control of the Zionist project, and to impose their own vision of creating a “New Jew” divorced from history, ready to take their place among their socialist comrades when the Light of Nations shone forth.

    In the meantime these apparatchiks kept religious, Sephardic, and other groups of Jews out of the hallways of power. These excluded groups wound up creating their own schools and universities like the Catholics did in the US.

    And they prospered and increased due to their traditional values, while the children of the socialists…. well, raised on the inherent postmodern contradiction of a nationalist movement that ditched all previous national history and identity, they are confused, bitter, aimless cosmopolitan know-nothings. They reject Zionism, despise the Judeo-Christian West and their fellow Jews, and love terrorist “freedom fighters”. They are now waving signs about “Democracy” without even a basic understanding of what the word means…

    For many many years they have used the courts and “judicial activism” to impose their will on an increasingly restive majority of Israelis. For them “the threat to Israel’s democracy” is basically the fear that they will lose that power. That is what’s bringing them out into the streets. And every poster, chant, and TV interview reveals their elitism and deep racism towards their fellow citizens.

    One salient feature of the protests that American conservatives can identify with is the age of many of the protesters – they are aging hippies.

    And a delicious irony of all this is that they got themselves in this situation by swearing they would never sit in coalition with Netanyahu. By placing an obviously accomplished statesman like Netanyahu and his centrist Likud party beyond the pale, they basically guaranteed that Likud would form a coalition with religious and Sephardic groups more strongly committed to judicial reform and redressing the snubs of the past.

  11. I swear the way the media covers Israel (warts and all) you would think that Israel is the size of Germany and has a population of 80 million people. There is an oversaturation of news on the Jewish state where even a one day Garbage collectors strike in Haifa is considered to be news worthy.

  12. Overall, our garbage elites (h/t Kurt Schlichter) view countries as toys, to fool around with or destroy, as in Israel, El Salvador, Hungary and the good old USA. They may have met their match in India and Japan.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>