BREITBART
Israel’s Next Judicial Reform: Democratize Selection of Judges
Joel Pollak
July 26, 2023

Currently, judges are chosen by a committee that includes judges, members of the Israeli bar association, and a number of members of the parliament, or Knesset. In practice, the judges and the bar association form a bloc that allows the judiciary and the legal profession to control the process. The result has been a judiciary that is left-leaning and ethnically skewed toward the secular, Ashkenazi elite, which damages the courts’ credibility. As the Jerusalem Post notes, Netanyahu’s proposal, which he suspended in the spring to allow for negotiations, “would have removed the Bar Association representatives and introduced an expanded panel with more elected officials.” Critics complained that the proposal “would have created an automatic majority for any coalition” in parliament. That might surprise observers in the U.S., where elected politicians control every aspect of judicial selection. READ MORE