Amazingly, President Biden is warning Israel that allowing politicians to be involved in nominating judges is going to perhaps affect or share democratic values.

Well, of course, in America, politicians do exactly that.

Eugene Conturovich is a scholar of international law, an expert in the Israeli Arab conflict and a professor at George Washington University's Scalia School of Law.

At a time when many have lost faith in international organizations, I sat down with them to discuss what role they should actually play.

With all international institutions, the trade-off is how to be able to rely on them for small things and not put faith in them for important things.

We also discuss the current protests in Israel, the US State Department's role in supporting some of them, and whether judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu's coalition are, in fact, a threat to democracy.

In Israel, the court picks its own successors, so what you essentially have is the supreme power in the state, is held by a self-selecting group of people, completely insulated from any democratic process.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellett.

Professor Eugene Conturovich, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Great pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Well, so we've been planning this interview for quite some time, and, you know, lo and behold, as you come sitting at the Capitol, these protests have erupted in Israel, ostensibly about democracy, democracy in Israel is being threatened.

That is the mantra that we keep hearing. This is something that you have deep knowledge about, so I think this is where we have to start. So what's happening there?

So what's happening there is, as sometimes happens, almost the opposite of what you would conclude by reading the mainstream media.

There are serious challenges to democracy in Israel, but there are challenges that come from the almost all-encompassing power of the court and government bureaucrats.

And in the absence of the Constitution, the Supreme Court has taken for itself, and for a cadre of government lawyers, massive powers.

For example, the Supreme Court has said that it can strike down statutes, then they went on, and even beyond that, and said that they can block any government action that they don't think is a good idea.

So they can set refugee quotas, they can control military tactics, and now, most shockingly, they've said they can even remove a sitting prime minister, absent any statutory impeachment provisions or anything like that.

And they've gone on to say that if the Knesset were to pass laws, to pass a Constitution, they could strike down the Constitutional laws as being against some higher Constitution known only to them.

In short, they have said that they are the absolute final power over all government action, and over all matters of public policy in Israel, and what's additionally alarming, and what makes the matters particularly intolerable, is these final judges of every democratic decision, are not picked in any manner that is democratic.

Indeed, they control their own selection. So, unlike in America, the judges are not picked by the prime minister, the president, they're not picked by the legislature, they're picked by a committee that is controlled by judges.

And needless to say, they are not going to pick people who disagree with them, or who think they've wrongly decided any of their cases, they're not going to pick people who believe in judicial restraint.

They're going to pick people who basically are yes men to what they're currently saying.

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