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(JULY 24, 2023 / JNS) The same day that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was released from the hospital after pacemaker surgery, the Knesset passed a key piece of the coalition’s judicial reform legislation on Monday. The law bars judges from using “reasonableness” as the standard with which to reverse laws passed by elected officials.
Sam Markstein, national political director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JNS that the group joins David Friedman, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, in “hoping and praying that efforts continue—and succeed—to find a consensus.”
“Like other Jewish Americans, Jewish Republicans have varying views about Israel’s difficult judicial reform debate,” Markstein told JNS. “But we’ve been consistent in saying that Americans should respect Israel’s sovereign right to set its own course through its own democratic institutions.”
Mort Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, told JNS that ZOA “strongly supports and praises Israel for ending the unelected Supreme Court’s regular use of abrogating a Knesset-passed law by merely claiming that they believe the law is ‘unreasonable.’”
Klein said such a standard is subjective. “What’s ‘unreasonable’ to one is ‘reasonable’ to another. There is no criteria as to how to judge ‘reasonableness’ — it’s simply the judge’s personal opinion and worldview,” he said. “This is an absurd basis and power the Supreme Court has arrogated to itself, which is nothing short of judicial tyranny and judicial dictatorship.”
Klein told JNS that the bill’s passage “made the judicial system more democratic, not less democratic, by putting back power in the hands of elected officials accountable to the people and out of the hands of unelected judges.”
Mitchell Bard, executive director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, told JNS that elections have consequences. “Netanyahu won, and it was democratic for his government to fulfill the promises to its constituents,” he said.
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