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Israeli democracy may not survive a ‘reform’ of its Supreme Court
(JTA) — On Dec. 29, Israel swore in Benjamin Netanyahu’s sixth government. The Likud leader became Israel’s prime minister once more, and one week later, Israel’s long-anticipated judicial counterrevolution began.
In the Knesset Wednesday, newly minted Justice Minister and Netanyahu confidant Yariv Levin unveiled a package of proposed legislation that would alter the balance of power between Israel’s legislature and its Supreme Court.
At the core of this plan is a bill to allow the Knesset to override the Supreme Court. Levin’s proposals — which almost certainly have the immediate support of a Knesset majority, regardless of Levin’s assurances that they would be subject to “thorough debate” — would pave the way for Israel’s new government to pass legislation that curtails rights and undermines the rule of law, dealing a blow to Israeli democracy.
The dire implications of this proposed judicial reform are rooted in key characteristics of the Israeli political system that set it apart from other liberal democracies. Israel has no constitution to determine the balance of power between its various branches of government. In fact, there is no separation between Israel’s executive and legislative branches, given that the government automatically controls a majority in the parliament.
Instead, it has a series of basic laws enacted piecemeal over the course of the state’s history that have a quasi-constitutional status, with the initial intention that they would eventually constitute a de jure constitution.
Through the 1980s, the Knesset passed basic laws that primarily served to define state institutions, such as the country’s legislature and electoral system, capital and military. In the 1990s, there was a paradigm shift with the passage of two basic laws that for the first time concerned individuals’ rights rather than institutions, one on Human Dignity and Liberty (1992) and the other on Freedom of Occupation (1994). These laws enshrined rights to freedom of movement, personal freedom, human dignity and others to all who reside in Israel.
Aharon Barak, the president of Israel’s Supreme Court from 1995 to 2006, argued that these laws constituted a de facto bill of rights, empowering the court to review Knesset legislation and to strike down laws that violate civil liberties, a responsibility not explicitly bestowed upon the court in the basic law pertaining to the judiciary. In 1995, the Supreme Court officially ruled that it could indeed repeal legislation that violates the country’s basic laws, heralding an era of increased judicial activism in Israel in what became known as the “judicial revolution.” The court has struck down 20 laws since, a fairly modest number compared to other democracies.
The judicial revolution of the 1990s shifted the balance of power in Israel’s political system from one of parliamentary sovereignty, in which the Knesset enjoyed ultimate power, to one in which the legislature is restricted from violating the country’s (incomplete) constitution. Israel’s Supreme Court became a check on the legislative branch in a country that lacks other checks and balances and separations of power.
As a result of these characteristics, the Supreme Court currently serves as one of the only checks on the extraordinary power of Israel’s 120-member Knesset — which is why shifting that balance of power would have such a dramatic impact on Israel’s democracy.
Levin’s proposed judicial overhaul includes several elements that would weaken the power and independence of Israel’s Supreme Court. The plan includes forbidding the Supreme Court from deliberating on and striking down basic laws themselves. It would require an unspecified “special majority” of the court to strike down legislation, raising the threshold from where it currently stands.
Levin has also called for altering the composition of the selection committee that appoints top judges to give the government, rather than legal professionals, a majority on the panel. It would allow cabinet ministers to appoint legal advisors to act on their behalf, rather than that of the justice ministry, canceling these advisors’ role as safeguards against government overreach. Should a minister enact a decision that contravenes a basic law, the ministry’s legal advisor would no longer report the violation to the attorney general, and would instead merely offer non-binding legal advice to the minister.
The pièce de résistance is, of course, the override clause that would allow the Knesset to reinstate laws struck down by the Supreme Court by 61 members of Knesset, a simple majority assuming all members are present. The sole restriction on this override would be a provision preventing the Knesset from re-legislating laws struck down unanimously, by all 15 judges, within the same Knesset term.
This plan’s obvious and most immediate result would be the effective annulment of the quasi-constitutional status of Israel’s basic laws. If the Knesset’s power to legislate is no longer bound by basic laws, these de facto constitutional amendments no longer have any teeth. There are no guardrails preventing any Knesset majority from doing as it wishes, including violating basic human rights. The Knesset could pass laws openly curtailing freedom of the press or gender equality, for example, should it choose to do so.
This counterrevolution, in effect, goes further than merely undoing what occurred in the 1990s.
Most crucially, the Knesset that would once again enjoy full parliamentary sovereignty in 2022 is not the Knesset of Israel’s first four decades. Shackling the Supreme Court is essential to the agendas of the new government’s various ultra-right and ultra-religious parties. For example, the haredi Orthodox parties are eager to re-legislate a blanket exemption to the military draft for their community, which the court struck down in 2017 on the grounds that it was discriminatory. They also have their sights on revoking recognition of non-Orthodox conversions for immigrants to Israel, undoing a court decision from 2021.
The far-right, Jewish supremacist parties of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, meanwhile, see an opportunity to deal a decisive blow to an institution that has long served as a check on the settlement movement. They hope to tie the court’s hands in the face of oncoming legislation to retroactively legalize settlements built on private Palestinian land, which are illegal under Israeli law. But this is only the beginning: Neutering the authority of the court could pave the way for legal discrimination against Israel’s Arab minority, such as Ben-Gvir’s proposal to deport minorities who show insufficient loyalty.
The timing of Levin’s announcement Wednesday could not be more germane. The Knesset recently amended the basic law to legalize the appointment of Aryeh Deri, the Shas party leader who is serving a suspended sentence for tax fraud, as a minister in the new government. The Supreme Court convened Thursday morning to hear petitions against his appointment from those arguing that it is “unreasonable” to rehabilitate Deri given his multiple criminal convictions, a view shared by Israel’s attorney general. Levin’s proposals would bar the court from using this “reasonability” standard.
The Israeli right has long chafed at the power of the Supreme Court, which it accuses of having a left-wing bias. But a judicial overhaul like this has never enjoyed the full support of the government, nor was Netanyahu previously in favor of it. Now, with a uniformly right-wing government and Netanyahu on trial for corruption, the prime minister’s foremost interest is appeasing his political partners and securing their support for future legislation to shield him from prosecution.
In a system where the majority rules, there need to be mechanisms in place to protect the rights of minorities — political, ethnic and religious. Liberal democracy requires respect for the rule of law and human rights. Yariv Levin’s proposals to fully subordinate the Supreme Court to the Knesset will concentrate virtually unchecked power in the hands of a few individuals — government ministers and party leaders within the coalition who effectively control what the Knesset does. That those individuals were elected in free and fair elections is no guarantee that the changes they make will be democratic.
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This Georgia Democrat stood by Israel and criticized her party. She is expected to win another term.
Esther Panitch spent Tuesday evening the way she spends every election night since holding office: on her couch at home in an Atlanta suburb, watching The Campaign, the 2012 comedy in which Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis play rival candidates for Congress who will stoop to anything to win.
It looks likely that the Georgia Democrat will have a third term in the state Georgia House of Representatives, where Panitch has been the only Jewish member since 2023. With 72% of precincts reporting, she is leading 67%-33% over her Republican challenger, Keith Gettmann. She may be joined in the state legislature by some additional Jewish members after Tuesday night’s vote.
Panitch is a pro-Israel Democrat in a party where support for Israel is increasingly contested. She has built her time in office on issues around antisemitism and Holocaust education, and she has criticized her own senator, Jon Ossoff, in public over Israel. Ossoff endorsed her this fall anyway.
Panitch has been warning for years that her party is drifting away from Israel, and she said she’s grateful Georgia’s Democratic leaders haven’t gone along. This summer she felt the pull at home. A local Democratic youth group told her to “mind her own business” after she asked a county party to move a fundraiser from Rosh Hashanah to another date. The Jewish Council of the Democratic Party of Georgia, where she’s first vice chair, condemned the group, and Panitch says the state and county parties did too.
She also survived a primary challenge from her left this spring. Aaron Baker, a fellow Jewish Democrat and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, called her a “DINO,” or Democrat in name only. Panitch won by a 13% margin.
Her complaint about Ossoff goes back to 2024, when he voted for resolutions to block some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel, and Panitch criticized him publicly at the time. But she still voted for him in the midterms. “I’m not going to bite my nose to spite my face,” she said.
Ossoff’s Republican opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, is a “non-starter,” she said. Collins has faced scrutiny over a son-in-law who posted antisemitic videos and a former staffer who posted Nazi imagery. He has said he doesn’t share those views. Ossoff was reelected Tuesday.
Laws she’s passed
Much of Panitch’s record in office has been a response to Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Georgia already had a hate crime law, she said, but it didn’t define antisemitism. She co-sponsored the bill that did — adopting a widely used, though controversial, definition — which the governor signed into law. She had been arguing for it before Oct. 7, but her colleagues, she said, “really couldn’t understand that until they saw it on Oct. 8.”
This past session, she co-sponsored a first-in-the-nation measure requiring public schools to disclose foreign funding, which she said grew out of research showing Qatar had funded Fulton County Public Schools and Georgia State University. She also backed a requirement that the state monitor complaints of antisemitism and other discrimination, from public schools through colleges. Previously, she said, parents had complained about incidents, but whether anything happened depended on the principal. A separate bill she led, creating one-stop family justice centers for victims of domestic violence and trafficking, passed unanimously and was signed into law.
The monitoring requirement puts her in the middle of the debate over where criticism of Israel ends and antisemitism begins. Asked whether she considers anti-Zionism antisemitism, Panitch said, “Not all of it. But there’s enough crossover that any of it should be examined.” Her line is a legal one. “They can hate Israel and Jews all they want,” she said. The issue is “if they commit a crime because of it.”
A tree for every critic
She’s also been targeted. On the morning the antisemitism bill was signed into law in January 2024, she discovered a threatening postcard in her mailbox containing antisemitic slurs, including a reference to “gassing the Jews.” A local rabbi who had backed the bill received a similar postcard. The man who sent the cards, Ariel Collazo Ramos, was convicted last fall and sentenced in February to five years in prison, the maximum. Panitch testified at his trial and sentencing.
“Jews have a right to participate in civic life in the United States, just as any other American,” she said, “and I’m not going to allow anybody to stop that.”
She has a lighter response to online critics. In 2024, she was at the University of Georgia for Israel Week, walking a student in a yarmulke to another building so he wouldn’t be alone, when protesters followed and chanted at her. “Esther, Esther, you can’t hide,” she recalled. “We charge you with genocide.”
Her response: Donate a Jewish National Fund tree in Israel in the name of the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and post the receipt online. She has since sent trees in the names of individual trolls and other pro-Palestinian activists. “Okay, you get a tree! You get a tree!” she recalled in her best Oprah Winfrey impersonation. The harassment, she said, “really stopped bothering me after that.”
Her Jewish roots
Panitch grew up in a Jewish household in Miami, where she went to a JCC day camp and later spent a couple of summers at Camp Ramah in Massachusetts. She’s a lifelong member of Hadassah, the third generation of her family in the organization. Her daughter is the fourth. She met her husband on a 1997 trip to Israel organized by the Jewish Federation of Miami, and they married the next year. Their three children went through Camp Judaea in North Carolina.
This summer she toured Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka with a group of teachers on a trip to concentration camps in Poland. They also visited Kielce, a city where survivors who had returned after the war were attacked by a mob in 1946 after a rumor that a Christian boy had been kidnapped. Dozens of Jews were killed.
What stunned her was how deep the roots went. “Jews had been there for 1,000 years before the war,” she said, “and were turned on in the blink of an eye. They were always othered, so I’m not going to allow that to happen in my country.”
She wants to bring that message home. Panitch is a legislative liaison for the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust and plans to push mandatory Holocaust education in her next term, especially given foreign money she believes has been used to create anti-Israel sentiment.
“I want to be able to show students what happens when mobs go after Jews, which is what is starting to happen now,” she said. “Everybody needs to know their history, Jews and non-Jews, and the ugly parts too, because we have to figure out how not to repeat them.”
Criticize Israel as much as you want, she said, but when it’s singled out for criticism “that they wouldn’t hold any other place to,” it can cross into antisemitism. “The result of antisemitism, unchecked, turns into atrocities.”
The post This Georgia Democrat stood by Israel and criticized her party. She is expected to win another term. appeared first on The Forward.
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Republican Israel supporter Ashley Moody projected to beat DSA candidate Angie Nixon
(JTA) — Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, a supporter of Israel, is projected to beat Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialist of America member, in a special election on Tuesday that could help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.
With 96% of the vote counted, Moody won by a 2.7 percentage points. according to Associated Press.
The incumbent, Moody, was formerly the state attorney general, and was appointed to the Senate by Gov. Ron DeSantis in January 2025 after Marco Rubio vacated the seat to become secretary of state.
She was endorsed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC and President Donald Trump. She is a staunch supporter of Israel who has said she wants the U.S. to be “the most pro-Israel country in the world.” She also said that she “worked to make Florida the most pro-Israel state in the nation” as attorney general.
She has been critical of pro-Palestinian campus protests, and introduced a bill last year that would “claw back federal funds” when universities “violate students’ civil rights.” Too many “woke schools prioritize support for Hamas over their duty to protect the civil rights of ALL students,” she added.
Moody supported Trump and Rubio’s move to deport green card holders for their activism last year. “It is time for Hamas agitators to go,” she wrote.
Nixon is a progressive state legislator, with a campaign focused on universal healthcare and free childcare. She became a DSA member this year, but was not endorsed by the left-wing political organization. She did draw endorsements from a number of major progressive figures and campaigned alongside Vermont independent Bernie Sanders and former President Barack Obama.
She accuses Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza and opposes sending military aid or American weapons to Israel “at this moment.” In November 2023, she introduced a statewide bill advocating for “de-escalation and cease-fire in the state of Israel and occupied Palestine,” which was defeated 104-2 in the Florida House. She has condemned Hamas and the “violent terrorist attacks” that it committed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Nixon’s Israel stance raised questions over whether it would affect her performance among the state’s substantial Jewish minority. Some Jewish Democrats and independents in the state said they were hung up on her Israel views, while others said they are counting on the Democrats flipping the Senate and that Nixon has toned down her harsher talk about Israel.
The post Republican Israel supporter Ashley Moody projected to beat DSA candidate Angie Nixon appeared first on The Forward.
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What would a Democratic majority mean for Chuck Schumer?
Chuck Schumer has long described himself as a Shomer Yisrael, a guardian of Israel. If Democrats regain control of the Senate in the midterm elections, their leader may find himself playing a different role: guardian of a Democratic Party increasingly divided over Israel.
The highest-ranking Jewish elected official in American history, Schumer is hoping to return to the position of Senate Majority Leader to advance Democratic priorities and challenge President Donald Trump’s agenda after two years in the minority.
Schumer, echoing Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, described his mood Tuesday morning as “nauseously optimistic” about his hopes being fulfilled. “A year ago, no one thought we could do this,” Schumer told reporters, crediting the party’s recruitment of strong candidates in Republican-leaning and swing states. “We don’t want to count our chickens before they hatch,” he added.
A Democratic majority will likely save Schumer from going into retirement. It could also present one of the biggest political challenges of his 52-year career.
Much will depend not just on whether Democrats win enough seats to take back the Senate, but also on who wins. Victories by mainstream Democrats recruited by Schumer — former Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska — would strengthen his position. But his job could become much harder if the new majority includes progressives like Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Troy Jackson of Maine, fierce critics of Israel who he did not recruit and who have challenged the party’s direction.
And a narrow 51-49 Democratic majority would leave Schumer little room for disagreement. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, a staunch supporter of Israel who has often broken with his party, has warned that he could leave the Democratic caucus if it becomes the “anti-Israel party.” If he joined the Republicans, the Senate would be split 50-50, giving Vice President JD Vance the deciding vote.
A changing Democratic Party
Schumer has made his Jewish identity and support for Israel a central part of his political career.
He often notes that his last name comes from the Hebrew word Shomer, meaning guardian, to describe his role in protecting Israel. “I have always tried to be in the Senate ‘Shomer Yisrael’ — someone who guards and watches over America’s critical partnership with Israel,” Schumer said in a 2024 speech to Jewish Democrats. In an interview with the Forward that year, he said that “having a majority leader who’s committed to Israel is vital for Israel’s relationship with the U.S.”
Schumer has become more critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now struggling to form a government after an election that left his opponents with more seats in the Knesset. In a major Senate speech in March 2024, Schumer called for new elections in Israel and said Netanyahu was an obstacle to peace.
Still, Schumer has continued to support U.S. military aid to Israel and opposed efforts by progressives to place broad restrictions on it. He faced online backlash for saying his job as leader is to “fight” for Israel aid.
But he also did not push his fellow Democrats to vote against measures to block certain weapons sales to Israel, which drew support from 36 to 40 Democratic senators.
That balance could become harder to maintain if he becomes majority leader of a changed Democratic caucus. El-Sayed, Jackson and other progressives have called for an end to all military aid to Israel and others support more conditions. Schumer would share congressional leadership with fellow New Yorker Hakeem Jeffries, who would become House speaker if Democrats prevail there. Both have longstanding ties to Jewish organizations.
Trump’s announcement on Tuesday that he and Netanyahu had agreed to end the roughly $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel by the end of this year — two years before the current 10-year memorandum of understanding expires — could dramatically change the debate Schumer would inherit. Trump offered few details about the agreement, and Netanyahu’s office did not immediately confirm it.
Trump has repeatedly mocked the Jewish Democratic leader by calling him a “Palestinian” and “not Jewish anymore.” Schumer took the attack more lightly, telling the Forward, “I say jokingly, don’t tell my mother.”
The two will likely clash on many fronts, including over the Iran war, as a Democratic-controlled Congress may seek to impose restrictions on Trump’s power to strike Tehran.
With Schumer, 75, facing another possible campaign in 2028, his decisions over the next two years could determine whether he faces a primary challenge — potentially from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has also been floated as a possible 2028 presidential candidate. Schumer has seen his popularity decline since he supported a Republican spending bill to avert a shutdown last year. Schumer postponed his book launch events amid controversy and planned protests. A recent survey showed AOC with a 70% approval rating among New York Democrats.
As Senate leader, Schumer would have to adapt a leadership style shaped by an earlier era of the Democratic Party and two years in minority to shape an agenda that fits a party whose views on Israel are changing. That shift was already notable in his pre-election promises. Speaking to Jewish leaders last month, Schumer pledged increased funding for the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program, an issue that has broader support among Democrats.
Schumer’s job could also become easier if Gadi Eisenkot and his allies form a new government in Israel, replacing Netanyahu with a leader more acceptable to most Democrats.
The post What would a Democratic majority mean for Chuck Schumer? appeared first on The Forward.
