Tuesday’s court decision (AEDT) could test the cohesion of the emergency government formed to manage the war against Hamas,which includes hardline proponents like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and critics of the judicial overhaul such as centrist Benny Gantz and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
Smotrich dismissed the decision as “extreme and divisive”,echoing the bitter divisions that marked Israeli politics in the months before the deadly Hamas rampage through southern Israel on October 7.
Justice Minister Yariv Levin,a Netanyahu ally and the architect of the overhaul,lambasted the court’s decision,saying it demonstrated “the opposite of the spirit of unity required these days for the success of our soldiers on the front”.
The ruling “will not discourage us”,Levin said without indicating whether the government would try to revive his plan in the short term. “As the campaigns are continuing on different fronts,we will continue to act with restraint and responsibility,” he said.
The new legislation brought before the court had removed one,but not all,of the tools the Supreme Court has for quashing government and ministers’ decisions. It took away the court’s ability to void such decisions that it deemed “unreasonable”.
Twelve of 15 justices ruled that it was within the court’s parameters to strike down quasi-constitutional “basic laws”. A smaller majority of eight ruled to nullify this specific basic law,which the court said “causes severe and unprecedented harm to the core characteristics of Israel as a democratic state”.