Why Israel Is Fighting Over Its Supreme Court

Edited for clarity. Cuts are marked […]: tap one to read what was cut. Words in [brackets] were added for readability. Nothing else was added or changed. Fillers and speech-recognition errors are fixed without a mark.

1. DDavidAI voice clone0:00

   [I] think I need a little bit more context. Can you explain why all these people are fighting over the court? Like, what are the coalitions? What do they want? What [do] the Basic Laws have to do with it? Like, what is reasonableness?

2. EEveAI voice0:15

   Israel has no constitution. Instead it has Basic Laws — fourteen of them passed piecemeal since nineteen fifty-eight, each one functioning like a constitutional chapter. Together they define the Knesset, the government, the judiciary, human dignity and liberty, and so on. The Supreme Court treats them as supreme, which is why it can strike down regular legislation that contradicts them. That's the entire basis of judicial review in Israel.

   Reasonableness is a doctrine the court invented in the eighties. It lets judges invalidate government decisions that are "extremely unreasonable" — not illegal, not unconstitutional, just so disproportionate or arbitrary that no reasonable authority would have made them. It was mostly used against ministers firing officials or approving absurd appointments. Critics on the right called it judicial legislation: unelected judges substituting their judgment for elected ones. Levin's twenty twenty-three amendment tried to strip the court of that power entirely.≈Overstated The eight-to-seven ruling killed it.

   So the fight is really about who has the final word. The right's coalition wants a sovereign Knesset — majorities decide, and if sixty-one members pass a law, that's it. The left and center want an independent judiciary as the backstop, because in a country with no constitution and no second chamber, the court is the only check on a majority that might trample minorities. Add in that Netanyahu is on trial and you see why his side suddenly cares so much about who appoints the judges who'd eventually hear his appeals.

   Want me to walk through how a Basic Law actually gets passed, or dig into what the override clause would change in practice?

   ≈ Overstated The July 2023 amendment (Basic Law: The Judiciary, Amendment No. 3) barred reasonableness review only of decisions by the government, the prime minister and ministers. Review of other authorities was left in place.

   ≈ OverstatedThe July 2023 amendment (Basic Law: The Judiciary, Amendment No. 3) barred reasonableness review only of decisions by the government, the prime minister and ministers. Review of other authorities was left in place.

   What Eve said: Levin's twenty twenty-three amendment tried to strip the court of that power entirely.

   'Entirely' overstates the scope of the law the court struck down.

   Eve's responseBelief: unchanged

   'Entirely' was too strong: the 2023 law barred reasonableness review only of decisions by the cabinet, the prime minister and ministers, not of every authority.

   • Reasonableness standard bill approved in final readings in the Knesset Plenum ↗ — Knesset, 2023-07-24
   • Israel: Legislation Abolishes Reasonableness as a Standard for Judicial Review of Government's Decisions ↗ — Library of Congress (Global Legal Monitor), 2023-10-24

   ▶ Play this momentLink to this correctionReviewed by Honesty DeskClose
3. DDavidAI voice clone1:53

   Yeah, what would be the changes?

4. EEveAI voice1:56

   If the overhaul fully lands, ministers could ignore the attorney general's legal opinions, the selection committee would be stacked with political appointees choosing the next nine justices, and any law sixty-one Knesset members pass could override a court strike-down. In practice that means no independent legal brake on the executive — Netanyahu's trial, the settler outposts, the Iran decision, all of it moves without a court that can say no. The left's counter is that you'd get a majoritarian system where a narrow coalition governs without limits, which is exactly what they say October seventh exposed as dangerous.

5. DDavidAI voice clone2:31

   What's your take on this? What do you think?

6. EEveAI voice2:34

   My honest read: the overhaul is overcorrecting a real problem with a dangerous cure. Judicial activism in Israel was real — reasonableness had no textual anchor, and the court did wander into territory elected officials could reasonably claim. But the fix assumes a stable, moderate majority that Israel structurally cannot produce. Proportional representation means every government is a fragile bargain between parties that hate each other, and the overhaul hands that bargain unchecked power. You don't fix a court that occasionally oversteps by deleting the only institution that can say no to a coalition that includes people who want to transfer Palestinians.

   The motivated-reasoning part is hard to miss. This package got urgent the moment Netanyahu's trial got serious. If it were purely about democratic principle, it would've looked different — more consultation, more compromise, a real constitution as the destination instead of a destination-less power grab.

   The part that worries me most isn't any single law. It's that once you normalize ignoring or packing the court, the norm doesn't come back. Israel's whole system runs on unwritten conventions and a culture of restraint that took decades to build. You can burn that in one term.

   One thing I'd want to pressure-test: whether Eisenkot's repeal pledge is actually credible once he's in coalition with parties that benefit from the new appointments. That's where the podcast could get uncomfortable — watching whether the opposition's anti-overhaul stance survives contact with power.

7. DDavidAI voice clone4:02

   That's interesting. How do you think we could track that into the future?

8. EEveAI voice4:06

   Three signals. First, who gets the Justice Ministry and the coalition math around it — if Smotrich or Ben-Gvir hold veto power over legislation, repeal dies quietly. Second, the first Supreme Court nominee after the election: if it's Levin's pick going through the new committee, the overhaul is functionally locked in regardless of what anyone says. Third, speed — a repeal bill tabled in the opening weeks versus one that keeps getting "reviewed" tells you everything about whether the pledge was real or a campaign artifact.

   The sharpest version of this is watching not what Eisenkot says but what his finance minister does with settlement budgets, because money moves faster than legislation and reveals the actual coalition much earlier.

9. DDavidAI voice clone4:52

   Is that something you could make a prediction about now and then set up a scheduled check to come back to and monitor?

10. EEveAI voice4:59

    Yes — I can schedule a recurring prompt for myself to re-run that three-signal check.

    […] Done. It's called israel-judicial-overhaul-tracker, runs every Monday at nine AM Pacific starting November second, and it'll search the web each time for the Justice Ministry, the first court nominee, repeal-bill speed, and settlement budgets, then report back with sources on whether Eisenkot's pledge is holding up. You can pause or kill it anytime from your Automations list.

    Cut (tool narration)

    Setting it up as a weekly Monday check.

11. DDavidAI voice clone5:29

    So if it was you, what do you think you would try to get past, or how would you settle this situation?

12. EEveAI voice5:36

    If I were in that chair, I'd skip the override clause and the committee rewrite entirely. Those two are the ones that turn a legitimate grievance into a power grab, and they're also the ones that make repeal politically impossible later. What I'd do instead is three things. One, codify reasonableness in a Basic Law with narrow, defined triggers — so the court keeps a brake but it's written down and bounded, which answers the "judicial legislation" critique without deleting the institution. Two, add a formal constitutional dialogue mechanism: if the Knesset passes a law the court strikes, there's a fast-track re-passage with a supermajority, say seventy votes, not sixty-one. That gives the majority a real path without making it routine. Three, finish the constitution. Israel has been "almost done" since the fifties. A completed Basic Law on legislation would settle the supremacy question once and for all instead of leaving it as a permanent knife fight.

    The hard part is that none of this gets Netanyahu out of his trial, which is the actual engine under all of it. So the honest move is separating the two: pass the structural package as a cross-party constitutional project with a sunset on the political appointees clause, and let the courts handle the personal case on its own timeline. The reason that won't happen is that every actor's incentive is to keep the fight alive — it mobilizes voters, it justifies emergency powers, it distracts from October seventh. A settlement requires someone to stop benefiting from the conflict, and right now nobody does.