Israel's high court kills democracy

Let's look at the latest garbage about Israel from Politico, as it is illustrative of the “reporting” by the corrupt, know-nothing media and their surrogates.

First, read Politico’s headline and the attack on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his judicial reform effort: “Israel’s Supreme Court overturns a key component of Netanyahu’s polarizing judicial overhaul.”

If you know nothing about this subject, the headline alone suggests Netanyahu is undermining Israel's judiciary. “Polarizing”? The truth is that since the 1990s, Israel’s Supreme Court has been seizing power from the elected parts of Israel's government — their Knesset and the prime minister — without any legal authority. That’s polarizing.

Israel does not have a constitution. Therefore, in this void, over time an all-powerful judicial oligarchy or politburo, if you will, has been born. As you can imagine, this judicial politburo is populated with left-wing lawyers.

In fact, so undemocratic and incestuous is this judicial politburo that it has majority control over the appointment authority for its own court, thereby ensuring that the leftists on the court are always in control and can never be displaced with a conservative or even non-leftist majority.

Israel’s judicial tyranny is as bad and pernicious as any other form of governmental tyranny.

So powerful has the judicial politburo become that standing is not even required for any party — person, group, or whatever — to raise any issue. In other words, a party is a legitimate petitioner even if it has no substantive, personal connection to any facts or events in the matter being raised with the court. Nowhere else in the Western world is such a practice permitted because it allows a court to delve into areas of governance where it does not belong.

But for Israel's judicial politburo, this is purposeful because it enables these left-wing judges to pick and choose among tens of thousands of matters brought before it to legislate on any matter they wish. And the people who bring cases to judicial politburo know it.

The only limitation is the judicial politburo's own discretion. In a hilariously absurd justification for its tyranny, the judicial politburo calls this “the reasonableness test.” And they've gotten away with it for the last 25 years or so.

This judicial politburo is so antithetical to enlightened democratic government and republicanism that it has been condemned by several top legal and judicial scholars, including in our country. It is a judicial tyranny as bad and pernicious as any other form of governmental tyranny. In fact, our own hideous Woodrow Wilson wrote often about controlling and lording over the will of the people and the popularly elected parts of our government through the judiciary by secreting like-minded ideologues into judgeships.

After years of tolerating the increasing authoritarianism of the court, and its constant intervention in and overruling of the Knesset, in matters as wide-ranging as national security and military decisions, religious practices, and anything one might imagine, the Likud Party and smaller conservative parties ran, in part, on an agenda of reforming the most egregious abuses of the judicial politburo.

JACK GUEZ/Getty

Having won a significant majority in the election, and after much discussion and negotiation, Prime Minister Netanyahu ultimately endorsed a fairly moderate reform plan that looked much closer to the judicial system in our country. It passed the Knesset but was taken up for review by — you guessed it — the judicial politburo.

Throughout this process, Israel's hard left, supported by groups not only in Israel but in the United States and Europe, worked against any judicial reforms. And they raised millions of dollars, including dark money from overseas, to kill it. They held huge, organized protests, supported by Israel's notoriously leftist and anti-Netanyahu media, and enlisted all parts of Israel's society. In fact, certain military and intelligence groups were urged to participate in the opposition and asked to defy any orders given by Netanyahu as an act of defiance.

The judicial politburo is the only way Israel's hard left can control governance because it represents roughly 25% of the voters. Hence, it brought Israel to a near civil war to protect judicial corruption. And, of course, it positions itself as defending democracy!

The same sort of propaganda is used in our country when Joe Biden and his regime issue dictatorial fiats or a rogue court abuses its power — for example, denying Donald Trump a ballot position or depriving him of attorney-client privilege.

The campaign in Israel has been led, in part, by the likes of Ehud Barak, an unpopular and discredited former prime minister who had negotiated the horrendous deal with Yasser Arafat to surrender nearly 100% of Judea and Samaria, the ancestral Jewish homeland, as well as significant parts of the Jewish capital of Jerusalem, to the PLO.

But for Arafat pulling out, Israel would not be modern-day Israel. It would be a besieged nation with undefendable borders, among other things. Barak is celebrated in American, Israeli, and European media, as well as by Democratic Party politicians (Biden among them) and operatives, as some kind of defender of democracy and judicial independence. At the same time, Netanyahu is smeared as a dictator and an opponent of the people.

Thus, Israel’s judicial politburo, in a monumental act of judicial autocracy — and in the middle of a war for Israel's survival, no less! — has done more to destroy Israel's democracy than any other foe. No wonder it's being celebrated by Israel’s hard left, their media, our hard left, our media (like Politico), and other societal and cultural entities that hate Israel and America.