Episode 7 - Judicial Reform: Is tribalism eating Israeli democracy alive?

Ask Haviv Anything

Haviv Rettig Gur

History

4.9 • 640 Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if everybody is right on judicial reform? Israel's highest court is immensely and unreasonably powerful. But if it is weakened, what other checks stand in the way of the tyranny of the majority, that great Achilles' heel of democracy since the dawn of Western civilization?

This question is especially urgent for Israel, whose politics are more Middle Eastern than Western, more tribal than ideological.

It's not unreasonable to weaken the court, but it would be disastrous to do so without broad trust and buy-in, and without addressing the desperate lack of other checks and balances in the country's constitutional order.

It's time for a more serious left-wing critique and a more responsible right-wing reform. Anything less will only cause harm.

Thank you to Jason and Lauriel Klinghoffer for sponsoring this episode.

Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠ www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠

If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at ⁠[email protected]⁠.

A podcast by Haviv Rettig Gur

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to episode seven of Ask Aviv Anything. Thank you to Jason and L'Oreal Klinghofer for sponsoring this episode.
0:14.9	This was going to be a quick extra bonus episode in which we just tell you something about the judicial reform that just passed.
0:21.6	It's major.
0:22.4	It's big.
0:23.2	It happened.
0:24.2	Two years of back and forth, of fighting of street demonstrations, of protests, and the key
0:29.0	signature part of the reform, which has many, many moving parts.
0:32.4	But the signature main part was the changes to the judicial selection committee to how Supreme Court justices are
0:39.3	appointed. That passed into law after a 17-hour filibuster early this morning on Thursday morning.
0:46.0	So what does it mean? What just happened? Why are some people terrified for Israeli democracy
0:52.2	and some people thrilled that Israel finally
0:55.7	has a democracy?
0:57.8	The rhetoric is a little over the top on all sides, but nobody here is stupid.
1:02.2	Everybody here has a deep argument, and to really understand it, we have to dig in.
1:06.6	And so this kind of balloon from a simple comment to a deep dive into the Israeli judiciary, its history, the sociology that surrounds this debate, which is more important, I think, than the legal actual questions, which are not the fundamental things being debated in the streets.
1:21.7	Let's get into it.
1:23.7	First of all, thank you to J. This is, I have to mention a question that a lot of paid
1:28.2	subscribers on the Patreon to this, for this podcast, have been asking for a while. And I've tried
1:36.3	to stick to history and avoid politics. Politics keeps overpowering us. That's fine. That's great.
1:41.9	Deep dives into politics are inevitably also deep dives into history.
1:45.8	And so we're going to tackle it now. The political system has just given us a wonderful opportunity.
1:52.4	Things are both not as bad as they look and also much worse. And the left is correct in its criticism.
	...

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