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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.
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In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026
The first hint that Reunion is an unusual kind of Holocaust film comes from a music cue.
An older man has traveled from New York City to Stuttgart, a trip that has clearly brought him immense psychological pain. His flashbacks to Nazi marches lead us to assume he lived in the German city during Adolf Hitler’s rise — but he doesn’t seem to know any German, opening every conversation by asking if the other party speaks English. Then he arrives at a warehouse, presumably to filter through belongings left to fester for decades after World War II, and begins a journey down a hallway that seems almost infinitely long.
As he walks the path back toward his past, the music marking his steps, composed by Philippe Sarde, is buoyant and lilting. The tune comes as a surprise. What’s this tripping sense of joy doing, following this man toward what we have every reason to assume is a museum of miseries?
Reunion, a 1989 film by director Jerry Schatzberg, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter based on a novel by Fred Uhlman, barely made a splash when it premiered in the United States, despite a largely positive European reception. Now, it’s being re-released, beginning with a two-week run at Manhattan’s Film Forum that opens this weekend. It’s almost a perfect Holocaust movie for our times — because it chronicles a moment much like our own, in which the gradual dissolution of society began to make itself known through the gradual dissolution of personal relationships. (Spoilers follow.)
The old man is Henry Strauss (Jason Robards) — who was once Hans (Christien Anholt), a lonely Jewish teenager at an elite all-boys Stuttgart school. The trip to Germany is his first since before the Holocaust. And the music, we quickly learn, is the soundtrack of what seems to have been the one great friendship of his life: it recurs at moments of particular meaning or joy during his brief, almost romantic engagement with an aristocratic boy called Count Konradin von Lohenburg (Samuel West).
The story of that adolescent friendship is the core of the film, an extended flashback to a time of great happiness as well as great peril, threaded through with that same uplifting melody.
Konradin is a bright, brave boy — ready to defend Hans to an antisemitic relative, or join his friend in striking back at Nazi youth who bully those without swastika armbands. But it’s also clear that he’s destined to get sucked into the Nazi machine: everything about his heritage, not to mention his prototypically Aryan looks, foreshadows that future. So from the first moment of his friendship with Hans, when the two connect over a shared love of collecting — with Konradin’s choice of companion clearly shocking a school in which Hans, as a Jew, resides somewhere far below the bottom of the social ladder — there’s a dominating sense of an invisible clock, counting down.
But oh, the halcyon days of this doomed duo.
They walk one another home from school, giggling in the age-old manner of teenagers for whom political upheavals are not yet real. They practice archery. They bicycle through the Black Forest, staying overnight at inns without the oppressive presence of their parents, whom both boys find embarrassing. (Konradin’s mother hates Jews, and Hans’ father is painfully enamored of Konradin’s elevated status.) When Konradin confesses that Hans is his first true friend, and Hans grins with quiet glee, it’s impossible not to hope that, somehow, they’ll stay this way — lovely, young and unchanged by the times in which they live.
For months, the Nazi threat only hovers around the edges of their relationship. Then it overtakes them. Rapid ruptures follow. And then it’s the 1980s, and Hans is back in Germany, seeking to figure out what happened to his old friend.
What prompts him to make the trip? There’s never a clear explanation. But it’s hinted that Hans has come to feel that he needs, at long last, some resolution to this passionate, formative relationship. He’s willing to risk his sense of self — the identity of the man who escaped to the U.S., and refused to ever speak a word of German again — to close that loop.
The sense that Hans’ whole life has turned on the events that marked his friendship with Konradin makes Reunion a profound watch, one that I suspect will be more effective for audiences in 2026 than it proved in 1989. Many of us have had once-close relationships begin to crack under the pressure of extreme polarization, and the insidious tensions of a political environment characterized by conspiratorial suspicion. Many of us love people we can no longer talk to, at least not freely.
It’s tempting to write these rifts off as personal. Reunion‘s terse message: don’t. A society doesn’t collapse all at once. It succumbs to hairline fractures; provoking a critical number of them is a strategy.
A Holocaust movie that spends so much of its runtime on a period of real contentment is an odd object. The break between its heroes comes late, meaning much of Reunion is a pleasure to watch. That is the point: under authoritarianism, life is still good until it’s not. Citizens have freedom, until they don’t. Friendship is trustworthy, until human weakness interferes. Liberal values are easy to hold onto, until you shake the demagogue’s hand.
But what makes Reunion most timely isn’t its somber portrayal of the connection between the minor tragedy of Hans and Konradin and the major one of World War II and the Holocaust. It’s that the film is hopeful.
To spoil the ending would be a shame. It is enough to know that Hans’ searching leads him to unexpected places, and while some are miserable and vicious, others are not. To let things stay broken, or assume that humans can’t change for good as well as for ill, is a choice. So is hearing and following the better music — the call to connect, and to resist being persuaded of something you know is wrong.
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3 more men arrested in London arson of ambulances owned by Jewish emergency service
(JTA) — Three more men have been arrested in London in connection with a series of fires on ambulances owned by the Jewish emergency service corps Hatzola, London’s Metropolitan Police Service announced on Wednesday.
Two British men, ages 20 and 19, and a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani citizen were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson. The men were arrested at three different addresses, which were being searched, the police said.
The arrests follow the arrest last week of two British men, ages 45 and 47, in connection with the arson. Those two suspects were released on bail and are being closely monitored while they await a hearing, police said, and their identities have not been made public.
The ambulance arson, which occurred in London’s Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green, is being treated by law enforcement as an antisemitic crime, but authorities have not labeled it as terrorism even as the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit is leading the investigation.
“Since this appalling attack last week, we have been working continuously to investigate and identify those responsible,” the unit’s commander, Helen Flanagan, said in a statement. “We know concern among the Jewish community remains high, but I hope these arrests show that we are doing everything we can to bring those responsible to justice.”
A group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
French authorities announced Wednesday they suspect that the same group is also behind an attempted bomb Saturday on a Bank of America building in Paris. The group has has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks throughout Europe in recent weeks, all of them up to now on Jewish institutions. Security analysts know little about the group, which was unheard of until early March, but say it may be tied to pro-Iranian cells based in Europe.
The London ambulance arson has given rise to a new set of antisemitic conspiracy theories. On Monday, the mayor of Bath, England, resigned from his position after drawing criticism for sharing social media posts amplifying claims that the ambulance fires were a “false flag” attack staged by Jews or Israelis.
Police in London said they would deploy drones to monitor security in Jewish neighborhoods during the Passover holiday, with concerns about additional attacks running high.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Influencer Myron Gaines performs Nazi salute, denies Holocaust death toll at Ohio University event
(JTA) — The influencer Myron Gaines visited Ohio University last Thursday as part of a national campus tour, performing a Nazi salute and claiming that the Holocaust’s death toll had been purposefully distorted.
Seated at a table on the campus of Ohio University wearing a hoodie that read “Let Em Cook – Oy Vey,” a meme mocking Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, Gaines greeted the students gathered with a Nazi salute before saying, “Number one, women are stupid, Jews control America and Blacks are criminals.”
Later during the event, Gaines, whose real name is Amrou Fudl, was asked by a Jewish attendee how many people he believed had been killed by the Holocaust, to which he replied “271,000 at best.”
During the ensuing debate, Gaines attempted to cut off the student, saying “hold on one sec, Jew,” claimed that Israel had propagated lies about the Holocaust’s death toll to serve its “victim narrative” and denied evidence that rape occurred during Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Referring to the war in Gaza, Gaines said, “If they could deny a genocide in 2023 all the way to 2026 with 1080p footage, what makes you think they won’t lie about a tragic event from World War II, from which they derive their victim narrative.”
Gaines’ visit to the school follows a series of incendiary campus appearances, including at the University of Florida and the University of South Carolina.
Best known for co-hosting the popular podcast “Fresh and Fit,” which centers on misogynistic views about dating and gender roles, Gaines has increasingly embraced antisemitic conspiracy theories since the summer of 2023, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In October, Gaines defended a leaked group chat where Young Republicans operatives praised Adolf Hitler, writing on social media, “Yeah we like Hitler. No one gives a f–k what you woke jews think anymore.” In January, Gaines was among a host of far-right influencers including Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate who drew outcry for singing along to Ye’s “Heil Hitler” at a Miami nightclub.
The Hillel chapter of Ohio University decried Gaines’ appearance on campus in a post on Instagram and hosted a lunch during the time period that he was slated to speak to offer students an alternative to his program, according to the Cleveland Jewish News.
“We are deeply troubled by the decision of our fellow Bobcats to invite a podcaster with a long and horrible track record of antisemitic, misogynistic, and homophobic content,” the Ohio University Hillel wrote. “At a time when our students are feeling especially vulnerable due to rising antisemitism, this choice is especially concerning.”
The editorial board of the school’s student newspaper, The Post, criticized the university administration for not releasing a statement denouncing Gaines’ appearance in an op-ed published on Tuesday. Ohio University did not immediately respond to a request for comment from JTA.
“A man who promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories, claims Jewish people control the world — as evident by the shirt reading ‘The Great Noticing’ worn by one of Gaines’ lackeys — and performs a Nazi salute on a college campus is not engaging in meaningful dialogue,” the op-ed read. “That is not a thoughtful debate, it is hate made into spectacle.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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