This week, according to sources ranging from the Biden White House to Moody’s to The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, Israel entered into a period of serious existential danger. What prompted this crisis? Not a potential Iranian nuclear attack; not the presence of violent terrorist groups embedded in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. No, according to our foreign policy elite, the breaking point is the Israeli government’s passage of a mild version of a judicial reform. That reform curbs the overweening power of the Israeli Supreme Court, which declared in the 1990s that it had the unilateral ability to strike down executive actions by simply declaring them “unreasonable.” Now, the Israeli Supreme Court will still be able to strike down executive actions – but they’ll have to ground their rationale in actual law, rather than simple political disagreement.
This judicial reform has prompted spasms of apoplexy in Israel among those who voted against the current coalition government. That isn’t so much about the actual content of the judicial reform – many of those in the center of the Israeli political spectrum fully acknowledge that the judiciary has arrogated too much power to itself. It’s more about the realization by many secular Israelis that the state of Israel is growing more religious on a demographic level. Right now, according to Pew Research data from May 2015, approximately 40% of Israelis identified as hiloni (secular); another 23% identified as traditional; 10% identified as religious Zionists; and 8% were ultra-Orthodox. Since then, the imbalance in favor of those with stronger religious ties has grown.
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