Uncategorized
A law professor worries Israel could become the next Hungary
(JTA) — Israel’s new governing coalition has been called the “most right-wing” in the nation’s history. That’s heartening to supporters who want the country to get tough on crime and secure Jewish rights to live in the West Bank, and dismaying to critics who see a government bent on denying rights to Israel’s minorities and undermining any hope for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
While the far-right politics of new government ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have drawn much of the world’s attention, a series of proposed changes to Israel’s judicial system has also been raising hopes and alarms. On Wednesday, new Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced an overhaul that would limit the authority of the High Court of Justice, Israel’s Supreme Court. It would put more politicians on the selection committee that picks judges, restrict the High Court’s ability to strike down laws and government decisions and enact an “override clause” enabling the Knesset to rewrite court decisions with a simple majority.
Levin and his supporters on the right justify these changes as a way to restore balance to a system that he says puts too much control in the hands of (lately) left-leaning judges: “We go to the polls, vote, elect, and time after time, people we didn’t elect choose for us. Many sectors of the public look to the judicial system and do not find their voices heard,” he asserted. “That is not democracy.”
Critics of the changes call them a power grab, one that will hand more leverage to the haredi Orthodox parties, remove checks on the settlement movement and limit civil society groups’ ability to litigate on behalf of Israeli minorities.
To help me make sense of the claims on both sides, I turned to Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, where he is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, which gathers and analyzes the constitutions of all independent nation-states. He’s also a Jew who has transformed a former synagogue on the South Side of Chicago into a cutting-edge arts space, and says what’s happening with Israel’s new governing coalition “raises my complicated relationship with the country.”
We spoke on Friday. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You have written about law in Israel, which lacks a constitution but relies on a series of “basic laws” to define its fundamental institutions. You’ve written that the Israeli judiciary had become “extremely powerful” — maybe too powerful — in imbuing the basic laws with a constitutional character, but worry that the current reforms will politicize the court in ways that will undermine Israeli democracy.
Tom Ginsburg: The proposed reforms were a campaign promise of certain elements of this coalition who have had longstanding grievances against the Israeli judiciary. The Israeli judiciary over the last decades has indeed become extremely powerful and important in writing or rewriting a constitution for Israel, promoting human rights and serving as a check and balance in a unicameral parliamentary system where the legislature can do anything it wants as a formal matter. A lot of people have had problems with that at the level of theory and practice. So there have been some reforms, and the court has, in my view, cut back on its activism in recent decades and in some sense has been more responsive to the center of the country. But there’s longstanding grievances from the political right, and that’s the context of these proposals.
A lot of the concerns about the new government in Israel are coming from the American Jewish left. But in an American context, the American Jewish left also has a big problem with the United States Supreme Court, because they see it as being too activist on the right. So in some ways isn’t the new Israeli government looking to do what American Jewish liberals dream of doing in this country?
Isn’t that funny? But the context is really different. The basic point is that judicial independence is a really good thing. Judicial accountability is a really good thing. And if you study high courts around the world, as I do, you see that there’s kind of a calibration, a balancing of institutional factors which lead towards more independence or more accountability and sometimes things switch around over time.
Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin holds a press conference at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, Jan. 4, 2023. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
You mean “accountability” in the sense that courts should be accountable to the public.
Right. The Israeli promoters of these plans are pointing to the United States, in particular, for the proposals for more political involvement in the appointment process. On the other hand, in the United States once you’re appointed politically, you’re serving for life. There’s literally no check on your power. And so maybe some people think we have too much independence. If these proposals go through in Israel, there will be a front-end politicization of the court [in terms of the selection commission], but also back-end checks on the court [with the override clause that would allow a simple majority to reinstate laws struck down by the Supreme Court]. So in some sense, it moves the pendulum very far away from independence and very much towards accountability to the point of possible politicization.
And accountability in that case is too much of a good thing.
Again, you don’t want courts that can just make up rules. They should be responsive to society. On the other hand, you don’t want judges who are so responsive to society that there’s no protection for the basic rights of unpopular minorities.
What makes Israel either unique or different from some of the other countries you study, and certainly the United States? Part of it, I would guess, is the fact that it does not have a constitution. Is that a useful distinction?
They couldn’t agree on a single written constitution at the outset of the country, but they have built one through what you might call a “common law method”: norms and practices over time as well as the system of “basic laws,” which are passed by an absolute majority of the Knesset, where a majority of 61 votes can change any of those. But while they’re not formally entrenched, they have a kind of political status because of that term: basic law.
By the way, the Germans are in the same boat. The German constitution is called the Basic Law. And it was always meant to be a provisional constitution until they got together and reunified.
If you don’t have a written constitution, what’s the source of the legitimacy of judicial power? What is to prevent a Knesset from just passing literally any law, including ones that violate all kinds of rights, or installing a dictator? It has been political norms. And because Israel has relied on political norms, that means that this current conflict is going to have extremely high stakes for Israeli governance for many decades to come.
Can you give me a couple of examples? What are the high stakes in terms of democratic governance?
First of all, let me just say in principle that I don’t oppose reforms to make the judiciary more independent or accountable in any particular country. But then you obviously have to look at the local context. What’s a little worrying about this particular example is that several members of this coalition are themselves about to be subject to judicial proceedings.
Including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Right. And for example, they need to change the rules so that [Shas Party chairman] Aryeh Deri can sit in the cabinet despite his prior convictions. That indicates to me that maybe this isn’t a good-faith argument about the proper structure of the Israeli, uncodified constitution, but instead a mechanism of expediency.
Any one of these reforms might look okay, and you can find other countries that have done them. The combination, however, renders the judiciary extremely weak. Right now, it’s a multi-stakeholder commission that nominates and appoints judges in Israel, and the new coalition wants to propose that the commission be made up of a majority of politicians. We know that when you change the appointments mechanism to put more politicians on those committees, the more politicized they become.
Think about the United States process of appointing our Supreme Court judges: It’s highly politicized, and obviously the legitimacy of the court has taken a big hit in recent years. In Israel, you’d have politicized appointments under these reforms, but then you also have the ability of the Knesset to override any particular ruling that it wanted. Again, you can find countries which have that. It’s called the “new commonwealth model” of constitutionalism, in which courts don’t have the final say on constitutional matters, and the legislature can overrule them on particular rulings. But I think the combination is very dangerous because you could have a situation where the Knesset — which currently has a role in protecting human rights — can pick out and override specific cases, which really to me goes against the idea of the rule of law.
You mentioned other countries. Are there other countries where these kinds of changes were enacted and we saw how the experiment turned out?
The two most prominent recently are Hungary and Poland, which are not necessarily countries that you want to compare yourself to.
Certainly not if you are Israel.
Right. There’s so much irony here. When the new Polish government came in in 2015, they immediately manipulated the appointment system for the Constitutional Court and appointed their own majority, which then allowed them to pass legislation which probably would have been ruled unconstitutional. They basically set up a system where they were going to replace lower judges and so they were going to grow themselves into a majority of the court. And that’s led to controversy and rulings outside the mainstream that have led to protests, while the European Union is withholding funds and such from Poland because of this manipulation of the court.
In Hungary, Victor Orban was a really radical leader, and when he had a bare majority to change the constitution he wiped out all the previous jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. I don’t think the Israeli government would do that. But still there is this kind of worrying sense that they’re able to manipulate interpretation of law for their own particular political interest.
Another thing I want to raise is the potential for a constitutional crisis now. Suppose they pass these laws and the Israeli Supreme Court says, “Well, wait a minute, that interferes with our common law rules that we are bound by, going back to the British Mandate.” It conflicts with the basic law and they invoke what legal scholars call the “doctrine of unconstitutional constitutional amendments,” which is basically saying that an amendment goes against the core of our democratic system and violates, for example, Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic society. Israel has never done this, but it is a kind of tool that one sees deployed around the world in these crises. And if that happened, then I think you would have a full constitutional crisis on your hands in Israel.
Supreme Court President Aharon Barak speaks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a ceremony in the Supreme Court marking 50 years of law, Sept. 15, 1998. (Avi Ohayon)
What does a constitutional crisis look like?
Suppose you have sitting justices in Israel who say, “You know, this Knesset law violates the basic law and therefore it’s invalid.” And then, would the Knesset try to impeach those judges? Would they cut the budget of the judiciary? Would they back down?
When you compare Israel’s judicial system to other countries’ over the years, how does it stack up? Is it up there among the very strong systems or is it known for flaws that might have maybe hobbled its effectiveness?
It’s always been seen around the world as a very strong judiciary. Under the leadership of Aharon Barak [president of Israel’s Supreme Court from 1995 to 2006] it became extremely activist. And this provoked backlash in Israeli politics. That led to a kind of recalibration of the court where it is still doing its traditional role of defending fundamental rights and ensuring the integrity of the political process, but it’s not making up norms left and right, in the way that it used to. This is my perception. But it’s certainly seen as one of the leading courts around the world, its decisions are cited by others, and because of the quality of the judges and the complex issues that Israel faces it’s seen as a strong court and an effective court and to me a balanced court.
But, you know, I’m not in Israel, and ultimately, they’re going to figure out the question how balanced it is or where it’s going to go. I do worry that an unchecked majoritarian system, especially with a pure proportional representation model like Israel, has the potential for the capture of government by some minorities to wield power against other minorities. And that’s a problem for democracies — to some degree, that’s a problem we face in the United States.
How correctable are these reforms? I am thinking of someone who says, “These are democratically elected representatives who now want to change a system. If you want to change the system, elect your own majority.” Is the ship of state like this really hard to turn around once you go in a certain direction?
This is an area in which I think Israel and the United States have a lot of similarities. For several decades now, the judiciary has been a major issue for those on the political right. They thought the Warren Court was too left-leaning and they started the Federalist Society to create a whole cadre of people to staff the courts. They’ve done that and now the federal courts are certainly much more conservative than the country probably. But the left didn’t really have a theory of judicial power in the United States. And I think that’s kind of true in Israel: It’s a big issue for the political right, but the political left, besides just being not very cohesive at the moment, isn’t able to articulate what’s good about having an independent judiciary. It is correctable in theory, but that would require the rule of law to become a politically salient issue, which it generally isn’t in that many countries.
How do you relate to what is happening in Israel as a Jew, and not just a legal scholar?
That’s a great question, because it really raises my complicated relationship with the country. You know, I find it to be a very interesting democracy. I like going to Israel because it’s a society in which there’s a lot of argument, a lot of good court cases and a lot of good legal scholars. On one level, I connect with my colleagues and friends there who seem very demoralized about this current moment. And I honestly worry about whether this society will remain a Jewish and democratic one with the current coalition.
The rule of law is a part of democracy. You need the rule of law in order to have democracy function. And I know others would respond and say, “Oh, you’re just being hysterical.” And, “This isn’t Sweden, it’s the Middle East.” But the ethno-nationalist direction of the country bothers me as a Jew, and I hope that the court remains there to prevent it from deepening further.
—
The post A law professor worries Israel could become the next Hungary appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
VIDEO: A song about a Jewish girl, Khaye, who died in Treblinka
One of the most renowned poems by the Yiddish poet Binem Heller is one he wrote for his older sister Khaye who perished in the Treblinka concentration camp.
In the poem, “Mayn shvester Khaye” (“My sister, Khaye”) he describes how, before the war, she would look after him and his brothers as their mother worked:
And Khaye remained at home with her brothers
She fed them and looked after them
And she’d sing them beautiful songs often sung in the evening
As little children grow sleepy.
After the war, Heller returned to Poland, hoping to help revive its Jewish cultural life, but he became disillusioned and moved, first to Paris and then to Brussels. In 1956, he visited Israel, which was then a hotbed of Yiddish creativity, thanks to a number of poets who, having survived the Holocaust, had settled there. Heller was warmly received and ended up staying in Israel until his death in 1998.
The acclaimed Israeli singer Chava Alberstein befriended him and other Yiddish poets in Israel, and in 1995, she and film director Nadav Levitan released a documentary film about them. The film, Too Early to Be Quiet, Too Late to Sing, includes a moving video clip of Heller’s wife Hadassah Kestin reciting “My Sister Khaye,” as Heller sits in the background, listening solemnly:
In 2001, Alberstein set the poem to music and recorded it with The Klezmatics, bringing Heller’s words to a much wider audience.
Musicologist Jane Peppler also performed it on the album “Rag Faire,” accompanied by English subtitles.
The post VIDEO: A song about a Jewish girl, Khaye, who died in Treblinka appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
The Case for Zionism: Jews Must Always Act to Defend Themselves
People stand next to flags on the day the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages, Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, are handed over under the terms of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
As Israel marks tonight the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Day, I found myself returning to a question that is not abstract, not historical, but immediate: what did we learn — and what have we done with that lesson?
I started writing this column after listening to Matti Friedman’s interview by Haviv Rettig Gur about his compelling new book “Out of the Sky” — the story of a small group of young Jewish men and women, most in their twenties and thirties, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe on missions that fused intelligence work with a near-impossible hope: to reach Jews already marked for annihilation.
What stays with you isn’t only their courage. It’s the indictment embedded in the setting. By then, the leading powers of the world knew what was being done to the Jews — not vaguely, not abstractly, but in sufficient detail to understand the scale and intent. And yet the Nazi annihilation machine continued to operate at full capacity. Priorities were elsewhere. Calculations were made. The Jews were not high enough on the list.
In the interview, Friedman describes Zionism as “a call to the heroic impulse of the Jewish people.” That beautifully captures the spirit of those who volunteered. But it does not fully capture the conditions that made such a call necessary. That necessity was forged over centuries in which Jews learned — repeatedly, across continents — that when they did not act on their own behalf, no one else reliably would.
By the time Zionism emerged as a political movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was not a new realization. It was the product of accumulated experience.
In Europe, Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492 — decisions made by sophisticated societies that had benefited from Jewish presence until it became politically or socially convenient to discard them. Across the continent, Jews were confined to ghettos, barred from numerous professions, subjected to forced conversions, and periodically massacred when rulers or mobs required a scapegoat. In Eastern Europe, pogroms were not aberrations; they were recurring events, often tolerated, sometimes encouraged, and routinely administered by authorities.
In the Middle East and North Africa, the legal framework differed, but the condition often did not. Jews lived under dhimmi status — protected, but explicitly inferior. That protection was conditional and revocable. Jewish communities in Fez, Granada, and elsewhere experienced massacres from the 7th through the 19th centuries. In the 20th century, that fragility fused with Nazi ideology and erupted in events like the 1941 Farhud in Baghdad — a pogrom in a modern Arab capital, not medieval Europe, where Jews were murdered in plain view.
The 19th century is often invoked as a European turning point for civilization — a narrative of emancipation and integration. But when it comes to the Jews, that narrative collapses under scrutiny. The Dreyfus Affair did not occur in a backward state. It unfolded in France, a republic that literally defined itself by liberty and equality. Yet the public degradation of a Jewish officer, falsely accused and convicted, revealed how quickly those ideals could be suspended when the subject was a Jew and the society was looking for a scapegoat.
In 19th century Eastern Europe, antisemitic violence intensified rather than receded.
The Holocaust is often framed as a rupture, a singular descent into madness disconnected from what came before. But that framing is wrong. The Holocaust represents continuity taken to its most efficient extreme: the same logic of exclusion, dehumanization, and disposability, now executed with industrial precision — and when the entire world refused to act.
This is the environment in which Friedman’s protagonists took action into their own hands. Figures like Hannah Senesh, 23, and Enzo Sereni, 39, parachuted into occupied Europe under British auspices. They were not naïve. They understood the constraints. They were explicitly made to understand by the British that saving Jews was not the mission’s priority.
They went anyway.
That choice — risking everything to reach other Jews marked for death, in a world that had already decided not to make that even a secondary priority — captures the essence of Zionism more clearly than any political manifesto. It is the refusal to accept passivity in the face of annihilation.
And even after the war ended, the lesson did not soften.
Roughly 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors remained in Displaced Persons camps across Europe for years. Not weeks — years. Stateless. Unwanted. Warehoused in the shadow of a continent that had just attempted to erase them. The world had seen the camps. It had documented the atrocities. It had declared “never again.”
And still, Jews were in DP camps. For years.
That changed only with the establishment of Israel — a state that, from its inception, absorbed those survivors and provided what no one else had: a place where Jewish life was not contingent on the tolerance of others.
This is the record behind Zionism.
The post-Zionist claim — that Jews were better off without sovereignty, that Israel somehow makes Jews less safe — requires the erasure of everything that came before. It requires ignoring expulsions, pogroms, legal subjugation, and ultimately industrialized extermination. It requires treating the Holocaust as a complete anomaly instead of a culmination. It requires believing that a world that refused to absorb Jewish refugees before, during, and after that catastrophe would somehow behave differently in the absence of a Jewish state.
Strip away the rhetoric, and the “post-Zionist” expectation is unmistakable. Jews are being asked — again — to place their survival in the hands of others.
History has already tested that proposition.
If Jews do not secure their own survival, no one else will do it for them.
And when they finally did — when a sovereign Jewish state took in 250,000 survivors who had nowhere else to go, when it replaced statelessness with citizenship and dependence with agency — that was not merely refuge.
It was justice.
Justice that had been denied for centuries — finally asserted.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.
Uncategorized
Iran Has Been America’s Enemy for 47 Years, Yet Critics Claim It’s Israel’s War
Illustrative: Members of the United Nations Security Council vote against a resolution by Russia and China to delay by six months the reimposition of sanctions on Iran during the 80th UN General Assembly in New York City, US, Sept. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
In light of President Trump’s decision to attack Iran, enemies on the right, left, and in mainstream media, accuse him of breaking his promise to put “America first” — with the slanderous footnote that the US started the Iran war solely at Israel’s behest.
In fact, the Iran war is very much an “America first” war — launched to neutralize one of the longest-standing, most dangerous threats to the US, its allies, and the Western world.
Notable critics on the right have slammed Trump’s attack on Iran, including former head of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, who said Iran, “posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Hard-leftists have similarly condemned the President for attacking Iran on Israel’s behalf. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), for example, accused Trump of “acting on the violent fantasies of the American political elite and the Israeli apartheid government.”
Legacy media, which take every opportunity to bash Trump or the Jewish State, have also accused the President of reneging on his “America first” promise and launching a war for Israel’s sake. An article in The New York Times, for instance, asserted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “determined to keep the American president on the path to war.”
Against all evidence, Israel’s enemies have managed to convince many that the Iran war is Israel’s war, not America’s.
This “blame Israel” movement corresponds with another major spike in antisemitism. In just the first week of the conflict, global antisemitism surged 34%, rekindling the age-old practice of blaming the world’s tiny (0.2%) Jewish population for its gargantuan troubles.
For decades, Iran has attacked Americans and US interests, all the way back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Notable attacks include the 1983 Beirut Marine Barracks bombing, which killed 241 American forces, and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US airmen and wounded about 500 more.
Iran was also responsible for the death of scores of US soldiers in the Iraq war, through its aid to terrorist groups there, and construction of IEDs and similar devices.
Iran has also consistently lied about its nuclear program, claiming it was peaceful, but steadily enriching uranium to approach weapons-grade levels. No one in the world disputes that Iran is trying to achieve nuclear weapons — the only debate was whether it was worth military action to prevent it.
Iran wanted these weapons so that it could blackmail America and our Middle Eastern allies, and not have to worry about an American military response.
It’s no wonder that before his death, Ayatollah Khamenei repeatedly declared, “Death to America is not just a slogan — it is our policy.” Thus, it’s no surprise that over the last 47 years, all nine successive US administrations, including Trump’s, have made Iran a foreign-policy centerpiece.
After decades of diplomacy and appeasement, one president said “no.” The administrations of Obama, Biden, and Trump (twice) attempted painstaking diplomacy to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program — to no avail. In fact, diplomacy only strengthened Iran and its terrorist network. The 2015 nuclear deal, for example, gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief, which the mullahs used to expand their nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and fund terrorist proxies.
In short, after 47 years of lies, diplomatic failures, terrorism, and the threats of an Islamist regime sworn to America’s destruction, Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons left the US no choice but military force.
Nonetheless, the lie that the Iran war is being fought because of Jewish conniving — primarily for Israel’s sake — continues to spread. The result will be more antisemitism, more violent attacks on Jews, and more generational anti-Jewish hatred.
Our best weapon to fight this is to keep explaining the real reasons for the Iran war — and the very real threat that Iran poses to America, the region, and the entire free world.
Jason Shvili is a Contributing Editor at Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME), which publishes educational messages to correct lies and misperceptions about Israel and its relationship to the United States.