On April 15th, when the complaint against Ben-Gvir by the Attorney General, Baharav-Miara, finally came before the Supreme Court, the attorney for the government, David Peter, issued a not-so-veiled threat against the Court. Peter invoked Actaeon, the hunter from Greek mythology who angered the gods by overstepping his boundaries, and who was, he said, “hunted down by his own dogs, his body torn to pieces.” The court subsequently declined to issue a decision, but sent Ben-Gvir and Baharav-Miara back into negotiations for a deal to curb the former’s undue influence over the police, though he has blatantly violated such deals in the past.
Not coincidentally, Netanyahu’s coalition—which dominates the Knesset with a majority of sixty-four seats, out of a hundred and twenty—has renewed its legislative assault on the court. There are fifteen Supreme Court justices, who serve until the age of seventy, and are appointed by an appointments committee. This group has historically been composed of three justices and two Cabinet ministers, including the Justice Minister—currently Yariv Levin, a member of Likud—two Knesset members (including one from the opposition), and two Bar Association representatives. Seven votes were needed for an appointment. A year ago, the Knesset enacted a law to change the composition of the committee, swapping the Bar Association representatives for two lawyers nominated by the Knesset, one of whom is appointed by the government coalition, and lowering the number of votes needed to seat a justice to five—giving mainly coalition politicians, not jurists, what Baharav-Miara tactfully calls “precedence.” There are currently four vacant seats on the court, but they cannot be filled, because the government has retained a veto until the new law kicks in, after the elections.
The Attorney General herself has come under attack. The Religious Zionist Party, which is part of the coalition, submitted a bill, which the Knesset approved in a preliminary vote, to dismantle the Attorney General’s power, separating her role as the cabinet’s legal adviser from her role as chief prosecutor—and making the Attorney General only the government’s in-house counsel, not its watchdog. Last summer, the Cabinet held an unprecedented vote to fire her. The Supreme Court unanimously annulled the firing in December, but this has sunk the country only further into a constitutional crisis.
Such threats to the judiciary mirror others to the media and academia. Netanyahu’s administration has tried to close down the army radio, Galatz, which offers nonpartisan programming; it continues to broadcast only because of a court injunction. The coalition is advancing bills that appear aimed at shuttering or privatizing Kan, the public TV and radio broadcaster, and it is pushing a bill to put all broadcast-news sites and other media under a new regulatory council, with a majority of members chosen by the Communications Minister. At the same time, Netanyahu’s government is advancing a bill to put the Council of Higher Education—and its five-billion-dollar budget—under the direction of the Education Minister. The council manages university accreditation, authorizes programs, and controls academic salaries. The law would, in the words of the presidents of all nine of Israel’s public research universities, who signed a letter of protest, place oversight “into political hands.”
Finally, there is the general election, which must be held by the end of October, perhaps sooner if ultra-Orthodox leaders in Netanyahu’s coalition follow through on a threat to vote for the dissolution of the Knesset later this week. Since the founding of Israel, in 1948, ultra-Orthodox youth have been effectively exempt from the military draft. The Supreme Court had long ruled their exemption to be unconstitutional; and in 2024 it unanimously ruled that the Army must begin conscripting them. But Netanyahu’s coalition, supported by ultra-Orthodox parties, has tapped only small numbers of willing men, and has been promising to advance a bill—one opposed by more than four-fifths of Israelis—that would supersede the court’s ruling. Indeed, Netanyahu’s Likud is itself divided on the question; so Netanyahu, apparently reluctant to go to an election as the exemption’s champion, first delayed, then tried and failed to fast-track the bill. In any case, it is to the delay that ultra-Orthodox parties have been responding, but they would have nowhere to go other than to a notional Likud coalition after the next election, and Likud, in turn, will need them. All the major opposition parties are united on the need to spike Netanyahu’s authoritarianism and to democratize the draft. Current polls show that Netanyahu’s bloc is not likely to win many more than fifty seats.
