Israeli Battle for True Democracy

 

A war of a different kind is brewing to come to a head in Israel. It will be billed as the valiant confrontation to save democracy. This is actually a very accurate summation but who is attempting to save democracy and who is simply vying for power over the future of Israel is to be determined. Another angle to decide this battle is one of political views, the old socialists attempt at a last-ditch effort to retain their stranglehold over all decisions of the realm against the Zionist and nationalist struggle to break that stranglehold and return the rule of law to all the people with the elected representatives deciding the nation’s fates. The rumors over the unfolding coalition agreements has made some strong inferences that included within is a rough sketch for judicial reform and an end to the Supreme Court’s ability to override any decision be they made by the Knesset or even military commanders during a conflict. Part and parcel of this conflict is the method by which justices are chosen. Let us start there.

 

Currently a committee is selected to choose new justices for the Supreme Court as well as the lower courts. This committee had an unassailable makeup giving the sitting Supreme Court Justices along with the Attorney General and a member of the Lawyers Guild sufficient votes to block any nominee of which they have political differences. This had continued the leftward leanings of the Supreme Court solidly entrenched. The next Knesset is set to complete the transformation begun under Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked during the past government. The new selection process being proposed would place the Knesset, the elected Israeli legislature, the power for approving judges plus there will be a twelve year term for judges such that the court will never again be stranded in the politics of two or more decades ago and always being refreshed with new judges chosen by the elected representatives. This will allow the courts to more represent the ideals and aspirations of the people and not become an elite which has fallen out of touch with the people and the government. They also are going to attempt to draft laws which will permit the Knesset to overrule any overturning of a law passed by the Knesset by the Supreme Court, something which has prevented advancement of Israel and galled many Knesset Ministers who sat helplessly being unable to get laws which the people demanded past Supreme Court vetoes. Things had reached a point a few years ago where the Supreme Court flexed their assumed control which was never enacted through legislation but was simply a usurpation of power by Chief Justice Aharon Barak, who postulated that all things are adjudicable. Through this expansion of judicial power, the Supreme Court intervened in any area they believed that their desires were not being met. This led to Israel living under a black robed form of tyranny which the justices, with the blessings of the Europeans who sided with these left-leaning justices, claiming that to limit their power or alter their monopoly on choosing their replacements was an attack on democracy. Accordingly, Israel was often beaten into submission when the United States joined the Europeans in their pressuring of Israel to simply sit back and allow their betters to dictate their laws and lives. Now that battle is about to be waged for real.

 

Chief Justice Aharon Barak

 

Already we are hearing the screams that Israeli democracy is planning on being assailed and destroyed if the court’s powers are curtailed in any way and the method for choosing Justices has any modification from their beloved system. Where we are confused is how anybody can confuse allowing unelected Supreme Court Justices to override the elected government, counter orders given by military officers and generally dictate to every entity of the government what their marching orders are and stand over even the Prime Minister making the entire elected governance impotent under the overview of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is already smarting from the change made whereby they can no longer decide who gets to reside on lands which are contested without requiring a proof of the claims against the placement of Jewish homes; the court never found claims against Arabs to be founded, only Jews. This was removed from their dockets and placed in the lower courts ending the practice where a largely European funded NGO would come before the Supreme Court claiming their Arab client, who preferred not to appear out of fear of reprisals, once owned an area in which Jewish communities were built, and they often did not produce any deed of ownership and yet the court nearly always evicted the Jews destroying communities. Now with these cases in the lower courts a new procedure is in place whereby such claims will require the Arab making the claim to appear unless the court can be convinced such is impractical with reason, and the producing of a deed or bill of sale which will stand up to review before such decisions are reached. Further alterations allow the courts to order reparations rather than eviction, something the Supreme Court refused to consider as they appeared to have been operating under the concept that the Jews required being removed such that the Two State Solution could be enacted using the pre-Six Day War borders. The Supreme Court appeared loath to move beyond this idea and spent far too much energy in their crusade to make this happen. Now their screams of the death of democracy echo hollow as the people largely see this as the rescue of democracy from judicial tyranny.

 

The coalition will be formed within the ensuing few weeks and a new Knesset will be seated with very much the same breakdown as the last Knesset, sixty-five nationalist-Zionist-religious-economic capitalist or, as the media calls them, right-wing Ministers and fifty-five socialist-Arabist-two state solution supporting liberal or, as the media calls them, centrist or left-wing Ministers. Isn’t it simply amazing that almost anywhere one goes on this globe, those who are even slightly right of true center are called extreme-right-wing-fanatics, and we do not even want to know what they call true right-wing-fanatics, hint, their name is Nazis or fascists, and left of center is often referred to as centrist and far left are left-leaning. There really is only a true leftist in the more conservative news, the minority of the media, while the rest of the media are often far left and see old-style liberals as right-wing fanatics as they are not even left enough to be called centrist. As some have said, often with remorse, I did not leave the left-wing as a liberal, the left-wing left me and went places I do not care to visit. We will hear the caterwauling from the leftist media in Europe and the plethora of leftist politicians all echoing the same mantra that Israel is having the basis of democracy attacked by fascists in the government. We are confused as to how the elected government which can be changed by the people in any election are fascist while unelected Supreme Court Justices ruling by judicial fiat is democracy. If these definitions are correct, then perhaps I do support fascism as at least it comes with elections, but we all know deep down that those definitions are backwards. Even the Supreme Court Justices realize they are selling a bag of rotten to the core goods and stand against democracy. Anyway, who ever said Israel was a democracy? Israel is a Parliamentary Democracy under the rule of law as stated in the Basic Laws.

 

Now, if people would like a few suggestions for making some needed changes, well, who are we to disappoint. First thing is should they decide that the Knesset can overrule the Supreme Court veto, it should be by some form of super-majority, be that sixty-percent which is seventy-two Ministers, or two-thirds which is eighty Ministers or lastly three-fourths which is ninety Ministers. We would also prefer to see that any legislation require a super-majority for establishing a new Basic Law in place of a simply majority and an even higher bar for the repeal of any Basic Law. Another alteration would require that a quorum be required for any legislation to be voted upon thus making sneaking legislation through would become impossible, a tactic seldom utilized but even once would be too many times. And while we are at making modernizations, how about we make the letters of the law regarding electioneering, elections, term lengths, appointment of judges and Supreme Court Justices by defined methods, qualifications for offices, defining the threshold permanently instead of allowing it to be modified by the whims of each government, removal from office for impeachable and other crimes, and the other definitions required to set straight a framework around which the governing bodies are wrapped including a prescribed method for amending said constitution which would then be presented to the people for ratification. Lets make the Constitution an actual representation of a democracy by allowing the people to have the final say such that they can send the drafts back to the government with a note stating, try again, here are a few suggestions, and eventually the process will produce something we can all get used to and learn to live under. The world is screaming for democracy, how about we give them a real example and a real taste of what a modern democracy can produce and how well we know how to be a democratic country. Perhaps some of those crusted old-school Europeans will be able to learn something from the upstart nation which is over four-thousand years old and has seen all the forms of governance the world has ever produced and found that they all often lacked the protection for the weakest amongst us, and often those weaker ones were us Jews. The world oppressed the Jews for thousands of years and now they demand to tell us how to run our own nation which we finally are returning home after those two thousand years of torment and really have had more than enough of the world telling us what it is we can and cannot do and what we are permitted and how we must listen to them for what is right. We had a code for governance while these upstarts were still living in tribal villages and they want to tell us how to rule Israel. Well, we could simply use the Torah but that would really upset the world, so maybe that would not be such a bad idea, if only to hear the howls.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

At What Point is it Sedition or Treason

 

According to this article, a group of Arab Knesset Ministers from the Joint Arab List are preparing a resolution at the United Nations to condemn the Nationality Law according to reports from Hadashot News. These members of the Joint List met with United Nations officials alongside Palestinian Authority representative Riyad Mansour with other senior Palestinian Authority officials in order to arrange the passing of the anti-Israel resolution claiming that the Nationality Law has numerous Apartheid provisions within. It is still unclear where they plan to submit such a proposal, according to our source for the story, but we are fairly sure that they would present this at least initially in the General Assembly and only after winning a lopsided victory in the General Assembly would they even broach the idea of submitting it to the Security Council. The reasoning is simple, in the General Assembly of the United Nations any condemnation of Israel is all but guaranteed to receive comfortably over ninety votes in favor and only receive about thirty votes against with the rest abstaining or voting present or not casting their vote at all. On average of the one-hundred-ninety-three voting members, only anywhere from one-hundred fifty to one-hundred-seventy-five actually vote on any resolution. This means the guaranteed ninety plus votes any condemnation of Israel would receive is sufficient to guarantee every condemnation of Israel will pass in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). This is why this is the body of preference for condemning Israel in a forum guaranteed world-wide news publications of the content of any such resolution as if it were the gospel truth according to the UNGA. This venue will be blown up by the leftist media whose articles, which are more editorial than straight reporting and we here at BTC do not claim to be anything but opinion and when reporting news stories do our upmost to remain un-opinionated, will have titles such as UNGA strikes down Israeli Nationality Law, which is beyond their power to do but who cares as it sounds ominous.

 

For those interested or needing a refresher in what exactly the Israeli Nationality Law is (also called the Nation-State Law), we have it in its entirety at the bottom of our article Leftists, the Israeli Nationality Law and President Trump. We cordially invite everyone to read the law and attempt to find anywhere in the law, as written and not how some left or far-left news source restates the law injecting their poison pen to add a word or two which completely alters the meaning, word for literal word and realize that it is simply a declarative sentence which defines the Nation State of Israel as the Jewish Homeland having the name of Israel, the symbol of the state is the Menorah with seven branches having olive leaves on each side and the name Israel across the bottom, describes the Israeli flag, states its National Anthem, Jerusalem as her eternal Capital city, its mission to provide protection for the Jewish People wherever they are endangered and the observance of official Holidays being the Jewish holidays and National dates from Israeli history, usage of the Jewish or Hebrew calendar as well as the secular calendar and lastly stating that Hebrew is the official language while Arabic language has a special status in the state and so forth. These were all items accepted as valid and in place before this law was passed and are now to stay in place going forward in time until eternity or a Knesset passes a law countermanding this law or a constitution is established where these items are redefined. All of this brings us to why now did this law become necessary, and that is where it gets far more interesting and explains the reason for near treasonous actions, if not actual treason, by the Ministers of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset.

 

The answer is actually quite simple, there are forces in this wonderful world which are actively undermining Israel as being the Jewish homeland and the State of the Jewish People, strong and powerful forces such as the United Nations and in particular the General Assembly, UNESCO, the Human Rights Council, UNICEF and any number of other United Nations branches, affiliates, agencies, organizations and NGOs. Another group fully intertwined with the attempts to destroy Israel is the European Union and before you call us paranoid delusional, please read this article which will give ample reason for our animus against the European Union. Then there are the efforts of many independent European nations such as Sweden and Ireland and many between. Finally, it should not even require stating, there is the entirety almost of the Arab and Muslim Worlds with very few exceptions and their allies in what is referred to as NAM which stands for non-aligned nations, a voting block of mostly third world and developing nations many of which are allied closely with the Arab states and more often than not ruled by a dictatorial leader whose elections are often appearing to have been rigged or simply there are no elections as such things are for lesser nations according to their dear leader. All of these forces and also a number of leftist NGOs, many of which have the fingerprints of George Soros all over them such as the New Israel Fund, a really non-assuming name implying it is new and desires to assist Israel. The New Israel Fund finances anti-IDF efforts where the Israeli military is defamed often using former soldiers who were and always will be disgruntled and all too often people who are pretending they were soldiers even wearing uniforms to add authenticity telling horrid and gruesome stories about torture, mistreatment of prisoners, and all the same stories we heard back in the 1960’s about American GIs in Viet Nam. Are any of these stories actually verifiable? Well, a small few, and that is to be expected, as any large group will have a few rotten apples, especially when every Jew and Druze is required to serve in the IDF. The Druze leadership insisted that they were part of the Israeli nation and demanded to serve just as the Jews serve and have been a great asset for Israel. The moral here is there are almost uncountable leftists and anti-Zionist, anti-Israelists and anti-Semites and international and national organizations and even entire national governments who all desire for Israel to be stomped out of existence simply because it is the nation-state of the Jewish People. For some it is the idea of the Jew, those little people who they had subjugated and mistreated for centuries now had their own military and were fully capable of taking revenge for the previous mistreatments or they might take over the world or seek a “Greater Israel” or any of a thousand delusional ideas and killing the beast before it does what they fear is their only solution, kill the Jewish State just as they used to kill the Jewish People.

 

But this problem is closer to home as these are actual members of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, and they are claiming that the declarative statements of known facts by the Nationality Law has denied them of equality under the law and is of an Apartheid nature. Did we mention that these are Minister from within the Israeli government who have the full rights and privileges provided to every other Minister of the Knesset including bringing laws to the floor and having them voting to remove Jewish towns and neighborhoods and that these same Ministers of the Knesset have supported exactly these policies allying with the Palestinian Authority and also with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and even Hezballah, a foreign force based in and ruling Lebanon while being financed and directed by Iran. There are but a few of the freest nations of this world where their government representatives could meet with a group which has sworn to destroy the nation and appear with them at the United Nations meeting with officials to find the most effective means of denouncing their home nation of Apartheid and silencing their voice while they bring legislation, file court appeals and speak their minds in national television and radio as well as in the nation’s halls of power. This would be a short list which would include the United States (for the time being), Canada (if they were careful), Britain (they are used to such after their scrapes with northern Ireland and Scotland), France (possibly) and Israel where such happens with regularity. One Minister of the Knesset named Hanin Zoabi was an active participant in the attempt to run the blockade of Gaza by the Mani Marmara and who appeared in a class of an Israeli school telling the children that the IDF troops were murderers who killed the people attacking them for no reason because, as Hanin Zoabi tells the story, the blockade runners were humanitarians against an evil and oppressive Israel, a lesson the children vehemently denied of having even a scintilla of truth. She is also a member of Joint Arab List.

 

Anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian and Islamist-Christian Knesset Minister Hanin Zoabi

 

As for what Israel can and should do and what Israel will do are entirely different choices. Israel can and should revoke these Ministers of their Ministerial Immunity and then charge them in a court with treason, collusion and every other charge which the Democrats wish to charge President Trump. An investigation should be conducted in the Knesset and if these Ministers are found to have committed acts of treason, sedition or other forms of perfidy, they should be tried immediately for impeachment from the Knesset. Once they are free of their privileged positions in the Knesset, then they can be tried in civil court for their actual criminal actions and potentially be stripped of their citizenship and deported leaving them as people without a nation and persona non grata in Israel, which would also bar them from reentry. These are the kind of people who have such a hatred for the fact that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People. They claim that this land was stolen from its indigenous inhabitants, and they are correct there. The problem is they refuse to allow that the Jewish People ever resided within this area, despite all the archeological evidence, and claim that the Arab People are the original people. Never mind that the Arabs conquered this region from the Byzantines who became its rulers when Rome fell getting it from the Romans who took it from the Greeks who took it from the Persians who conquered the Babylonians who took the lands of the Assyrians who had conquered the Ten Tribes of Israel but not Judea which was conquered eventually by the Babylonians and the Israelites conquered these lands from various city-states ruled by minor Kings who owed their protection to the Egyptians who were defeated at the Red Sea by Hashem in the well known Biblical accounting.

 

The first nation to make the region their home were the Israelites whose remnants were mostly from the tribe of Judah and lived in Judea and were called Judeans and when the Romans came through, well, they got lazy and careless with the name Judeans as three syllables is rough when your nation is Rome and you are a Roman which all together is three syllables, so they shortened Judean to Judan, two syllables, and finally to Ju which is today written as Jew. So the Israelite whose surviving remnants are called Jews were the first nation to make this region home. Before that, the region was fought over between the Egyptians and the Hittites. The kings of the city-states in the region paid homage and allegiance to whichever of these super states controlled the region. The Egyptians were the controlling power when Joshua brought the Israelites into Canaan where the kings of the several cities allied against him and lost in a great battle told of in the Book of Joshua. These Kings represented the remainder of that which was Egypt which was a beaten nation after the slaves left around 1500 BCE. That makes the Israelites the indigenous people and when Israel broke into two kingdoms, then Israel and Judea were the indigenous nations with Judea being the southern one which retained Jerusalem as it capital city.

 

But these Arab Ministers of the Knesset scream that they have no rights as Arabs in Israel and are not given any voice in Israel despite their very presence in the Israeli Knesset. The first thing you need understand is what they define as having no rights or voice in Israel. They define their having rights as the Arabs having rights and all else serving them as Dhimmis, and for them to have a voice, that voice must be unopposed and simply become law. They also believe that once the Arabs conquered these lands that it could never be taken or ruled by anyone other than an Arab. In the case of Hanin Zoabi is somewhat more difficult to understand. She is a Christian and if those she claims should possess these lands were to retake them, it would be Arab Muslims, followers of Islam and the Quran under which Hanin Zoabi would be considered an apostate and potentially sentenced to death. She is aware of this but her hatred of the Jewish People is so engrained into her body and mind that she would sacrifice herself and her entire family just to deny the Jews the right to self-determination. And that is what the entirety of opposition to Israel is about, the Jews having the right of self-determination. Every other peoples in the world are mostly allowed to rule themselves and practice self-determination with a few unfortunate exceptions, the Kurdish People, the Berber People, the Uyghur People, the Zulu People, the Baloch People, the Catalans People, the Kashmiri People, the Walloon People, the Assyrian People, the Basque People, the Sahrawi People, the Yazidi People, the nations making up Great Britain, the many Native American Tribes from the United States and Canada including Eskimo, plains Indians and others, those of the Russian Federation, the Tibetans who are held throughout China as a dispersal to destroy their peoplehood, and numerous others on the list in the middle of this page. There are so many people who remain stateless and facing the degeneration and dilution of their culture and ability to remain as a people that perhaps the time wasted trying to add to this list should instead be used to shorten the list and give these others justice they deserve.

 

The world is losing these peoples through assimilation which was the one thing which held the Jews separate until the twentieth century. Had Germany not fallen into the iron grip of the National Socialists, Nazis, the Jews were very close to becoming another footnote in history and the majority had completely assimilated and Judaism had become merely a religious choice. The Jews in the United States, outside of a few Orthodox communities which will continue to practice Judaism, are assimilating at such a pace as has never been witnessed before. There is an odd thing about the Jewish People assimilating as it always backfires. The first recorded case was with the Persian Empire where the Jews were so assimilated that Queen Esther married to King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) was a Jewess. You do not get much more assimilated than somebody from your people becoming Queen. Then there was Haman and his sons who really desired ridding Persia of its Jews. King Ahasuerus obliged Haman and gave an order for the Jews to all be slaughtered on a single day. Queen Esther informed that if this royal decree were to be carried out, he could start with her first as she then revealed herself as a Jewess. King Ahasuerus had decreed the slaughter to take place and thus could not rescind any decree, as he was a perfect human, so he issued a decree that the Jews were permitted to resist and even murder those attempting to take their lives on this particular day allowing the Jews the right to self-defense. There was a rather large slaughter that day and most were not the Jews, but the Jews learned that no matter how much they had become part of Persian culture, they would still be viewed as Jews, as outsiders or even usurpers. Jews became Hellenized under Greek rule until there was a Jewish rebellion and the Hellenized Jews learned that the Greeks still saw them as those people. Romans, same story, different rebellion, pick any of three, all of which threw off Roman rule for a short period. The final one ended brutally with the Jews dispersed throughout the Kingdom and even sold outside the kingdom as slaves just as the Romans had done with the Carthaginians after the Third Punic War. Has anybody met a Carthaginian lately? Then how did the Jews remain a people despite the most severe Roman treatment used only to rid Rome of a menace permanently. (A short aside, Hannibal who crossed the Alps with elephants to attack the Romans was a Carthaginian, so you likely have at least heard of one Carthaginian.) The Jews have another form of land that defines us more so than the land, we have Torah. Torah teaches us everything we need to be Jews and remain a people. Torah also tells us that we need to live in the lands that Hashem desires that we reside within so as to take good care of the lands which Hashem gave for us to tend.

 

With the Jewish People, it is all about three things, the Torah and all that encompasses, the Land of Israel and Jerusalem, the gem that sits atop, except for Torah and Hashem. This is actually lands belonging to Hashem and we may only retain this land if we follow Torah and are in good standing with Hashem; this we learned even more deeply once here. Another fact has been proven that this land will only become productive when the Jewish People reside here. This may seem like it is impossible, so allow us to quote what an Arab farmer in Gaza told his son, he reputedly stated, “Son I could not grow anything on our farm and then the Jews returned and rain returned right behind them and the land would grow crops.” We are the land and the land is us and together this works. A Jew can practice his religion all he desires outside of Israel, but here being a Jew is different. We do not want superior rights or anything other than to live here in peace and security having each Jew by his fig tree or with his flock or their choice of occupation and as he follows Torah he will be rewarded with success. We do not desire to take away land from people and are only seeking in some means of being treated with respect and for the nations who have signed the agreements over the many treaties and such which formatted the Mandate System, including Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, would simply fulfill their promises and allow the Jordan River to be our eastern border and the Arabs residing there may remain as legal alien residents which means they can only vote in local elections and not in national elections, and we would also offer a bonus plus above market value for properties you can prove you have ownership, if you wish to leave. These are the rational choices, reside here in peace signing a non-belligerence pledge or take money and leave permanently. But if any chose to remain and engage against Israel, this would be a choice you would soon regret. This time if you choose war, it will be total war just as in the Bible, so perhaps you should read about Jericho before deciding that violence against Israel is your preference.

 

The same will go for those who decide to take the money and then turn around and fight Israel from across the border. This too would be an unadvisable choice. We will welcome those who wish to build a future with us but we will spare no mercy on those who choose to oppose us. That will apply to every Arab in the Shomron and will also apply to those nations which desire our erasure because once we have a solution which is workable to the Arab situation; these nations had best mind their own business. Each nation will choose whether or not they prefer to trade with Israel. Should they not desire our products, so be it, but that does include quite a number of things we invent and ideas we have along with discoveries in medicine, physics, chemistry and computer sciences just to name a few. We lead the world in agriculture technology and growth potentials through breeding healthier foods without the requirement of genetically modified grains, plants and animals. We would prefer to have wonderful relations with all nations and to provide them with knowledge and the means by which to utilize the knowledge. These are the desires of most Israelis, to be able to realize all which was promised since we survived when the United States and the major European powers placed arms embargos on Israel in 1948-9 and many aided the Arab cause with weapons and in a few cases with actual military advisers. We survived due to a few exceptions such as Czechoslovakia who provided Israel with World War II fighters from all the sides, American, British, Russian and Nazi plus armor and rifles. As a final note, the United Nations General Assembly Resolution partitioning Israel though accepted by Israel was rejected outright by the Arab League making it null and void and thus it has no bearing on reality and this also left our border as the Jordan River once again becoming the only legal border for the Jewish State as defined in the Mandate Map dividing the lands between the Arab state of Transjordan (Jordan) and the Jewish State (Israel).

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Israel is the Nation in Need of a Constitution

 

Israel is not going to change all that soon as the thirty to fifty people who run the nation are quite happy to fiddle while things slowly burn down. Part of the problem, and it is a large share, is that over half of those who run the government are not elected but all but self-appointed. There are the Justices who sit on the Supreme Court and the Attorney General, The Supreme Court selection for replacing a retiring Justice is one of, if not the, item which should top the list of systems which require change. Currently the Supreme Court Justices are chosen by a committee consisting of nine members. These are the Justice Minister who acts as the Chairman, a Cabinet Member chosen by the Cabinet, a Pair of Knesset Ministers usually one from the coalition and one from the opposition, two members of the Bar Association and finally the Chief Justice and two other Supreme Court Justices who are often chosen due to seniority. This starts to look like a conspiracy to continue the same policies with no real ability to alter the path when one additionally looks at the committee for selection of the Attorney General which consists of five members; a retired Supreme Court Judge, a former Justice Minister or Attorney General, a Knesset Minister tapped by the Constitutional Affairs committee of the Knesset, an attorney chosen by the Israeli Bar Association, and one legal expert chosen in the subjects of civil and criminal law chosen by the heads of the university law schools in Israel. When all it takes to select a Supreme Court Judge is five votes and three are cast by current Justices, one vote from the current Attorney General who is themselves appointed on the advice partly of a retired Supreme Court Judge, a former Justice Minister and an attorney from the Bar Association and you have what can be conveniently called an echo chamber and it becomes sufficiently evident why the Supreme Court votes almost to the Justice exactly the same as the Supreme Court has since its inception. Add to that the interpretation of the law such that the Justices operate under the auspices of the concept that everything and anything may be brought before the Supreme Court for a final decision.

 

One interesting thing is the Israeli Supreme Court consists of fifteen Justices where one could fairly say that the majority, vast majority, are left leaning or so far left the middle ground cannot be seen through the fog and rose colored glasses. The Supreme Court may appoint any number of judges to hear cases often with as few as three to as many as all fifteen for the most serious of cases brought to the court. Further, for the decade from 2000 through 2010 the Israeli Supreme court heard over 11,000 cases each year. The Israeli Supreme Court can be petitioned directly to hear a case without having it first heard in a lower court. This process is abused by NGOs, often NGOs registered in Israel but primarily funded by foreign governments. Quite often if an NGO states as its aim to serve the support and importance of human rights and/or the rights of minority and oppressed peoples, then you can bet that NGO is financed by the European Union, European governments and foreign NGOs so as to conceal their actual financiers. In any other Western Democratic or Republic such NGOs are required by law to be registered as foreign agents and are not granted official standing as an NGO representing that nation. Israel has twice passed such legislation only to have these very same NGOs bring suit in the Supreme Court where the laws were shot down and nullified. One need keep in mind that the Knesset input in selecting Supreme Court Judges is minimal when one remembers that should the opposition Knesset Minister vote with the Chief Justice and two other Supreme Court Justices and any one of the Bar Association lawyers that makes five votes and the judge has been appointed. The Prime Minister gets no real input and the Knesset does not need to ratify the choice, or simply put, the people have little if any influence on the Justices sitting on a court which has ruled that it can strike down any law, rewrite any law and all but, and possibly including, write laws they feel are necessary or would further empower the Judiciary over the remainder of the government and the people. We have also seen instances where the heads of the Police forces have banned people from visiting areas of the country including the currently extended ban forbidding Ministers of the Knesset from ascending to the Temple Mount. There was a recent case where the Security Shin Bet under the guise of investigating a crime rounded up teens and young men as young as twelve and held them without legal counsel at a secretive location refusing to allow their parents information about their child and used what in many nations would be considered at the least coercive measures and at the extreme torture to try a force confessions from youths they knew were innocent but whose suspected political leanings were not to the head of the Shin Bet’s liking.

 

One young man was held for almost ten months, refused to be permitted to attend his first son’s birth, ritual bris (circumcision), and whose major crime was supporting the Hilltop Youth, a group of youths who support nationalist and Zionist policies and desire a return to Davidic Rule, have never committed an act against the government, most serious offense they commit is camping out and building rudimentary outposts on hilltops overlooking trouble spots which are less dangerous when being surveyed by these youths. The young man in question though had committed a grievous crime, Meir Ettinger committed the crime of being the grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, a Zionist and Nationalist Rabbi who argued for his causes and predicted the future extremely accurately before being struck down in New York City after giving a talk. His murderer was acquitted as his act of assassination was seen by the Jury as justifiable as the Rabbi had “extremist views” deserving of being shot. These “extremist views” were best expressed as “Am Yisroel Chai” (עם ישראל חי) , the People of Israel Are Alive, and he also continued the cry of “Never Again” which is a chanting that means the Jews will not go silently to their deaths ever again and murdering Jews will have a price. As was known by even the average Israeli who pays attention to anything political, Meir Ettinger and his friends in the Hilltop Youth were innocent of any wrongdoing and they were hauled in, denied council, denied parental access, held in a secretive location, arranged orders to allow stressful interrogation and extreme interrogation techniques and were sleep deprived for up to three days until their bodies shut down from exhaustion, placed in uncomfortable position, stripped of clothing and made to sit in metal chairs and even denied to have showers or change of undergarments. This was beyond anything used on actual terrorists who when denying and refusing to cooperate have been released for lack of evidence while here their evidence was they knew these kids were guilty of something even if it was not what was being investigated.

 

Another problem are the Basic Laws, laws passed by a simple majority just as any other legislation but deemed special and thus take their place as part of an ever growing excuse for a Constitution. Most of the Basic Laws were passed from 1948 through the early 1960s when Israel was an agricultural socialist society with many Israelis residing on communal farms. These Basic Laws have their place but as they can be amended, refuted, and new ones passed should the Knesset decide any law passed belongs incorporated into the Basic Laws such that they tend to lose their importance and meaning as they can be rescinded by a simple majority vote. Then there is the problem that the Supreme Court can also decide which ones can be amended, removed, added, deleted, twisted, beaded, braded, twisted, spindled and mutilated at will by a majority vote of the Knesset or orders from the Supreme Court. This again placed the judges of the Supreme Court as the ultimate rulers of the land and the Supreme Court had granted the Supreme Court absolute authority over all parts of everyday life including silencing us if they so choose to do so as it was Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak (August 13, 1995 to September 14, 2006) stated that all things are in his writings some of the following:

 

Aharon Barak, “Judicial Philosophy,” pp. 477 and 485

In my eyes, the world is filled with law. Every human behavior is subject to a legal norm. Even when a certain type of activity-such as friendship or subjective thoughts-is ruled by the autonomy of the individual will, this autonomy exists, because it is recognized by the law…. Wherever there are living human beings, law is there. There are no areas in life which are outside of law.

 

Barak, “The Constitutional Revolution,” p. 30

The basic values of Judaism are the basic values of the state. I mean the values of love of man, the sanctity of life, social justice, doing what is good and just, protecting human dignity, the rule of law over the legislator and the like, values which Judaism bequeathed to the whole world. Reference to those values is on their universal level of abstraction, which suits Israel’s democratic character, thus one should not identify the values of the state of Israel as a Jewish state with the traditional Jewish civil law. It should not be forgotten that in Israel there is a considerable non-Jewish minority. Indeed, the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish state are those universal values common to members of democratic society, which grew from Jewish tradition and history.

 

Barak, “Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation,” p. 208

When the attempt fails, and the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish state cannot be reconciled with its values as a democratic state, there is no escape from the need to decide. This decision must be made, in my opinion, according to the views of the enlightened community in Israel. This is an objective test, which refers the judge to the full set of values which shape the character of the modern Israeli.

 

Barak, “The Constitutional Revolution,” p. 34

If up until now judges were given “conventional weapons” to deal with legislation by way of interpretation and the creation of Israeli common law, now judges have been given “nonconventional weapons,” which allow nullification of legislation which does not observe the Basic Laws’ criteria.

 

This was a definitive part of Aharon Barak’s judicial philosophy which devolved, not developed, as his tenure on the courts and in practice where he gained contempt for the Zionistic, nationalist conservative swing the people of Israel took over his lifetime. The gaining of a distinct and traditional Jewish, and in many cases Israelite, determination and movement from secularist to a religious Zionistic populace where he saw the only way to salvage the utopian leftist dream was for ultimate power to be vested in the Judges which by their manner of selection remained stuck in 1958 Israel with its collectivist society and socialist governance could be maintained even if that required the judges to decide on each law if it should stand or be struck down or even rewrote to the judicial review standards which precluded change. His view of such is further described as we continue.

 

United Mizrahi Bank, p. 352

With legislation of [the new Basic Laws] a substantial change occurred in the status of human rights in Israel. They have turned into constitutional rights. They have been given supra-legal constitutional status. A “regular” law of the Knesset cannot change them. Regular legislation cannot infringe a protected human right unless the demands set out in the Basic Laws are met. Nonobservance of the constitutional demands turns the regular statute into an unconstitutional statute. This is a statute which bears a constitutional flaw. The court can declare its invalidity.

 

There is this infamous quote often attributed to Barak is that “everything is adjudicable,” which was often presumably the motivation and empowering ideal through which the meaning was taken that the High Court should be able to rule on any matter, including cases involving Israeli military activity in Judea and Samaria and breaches of civil liberties, and not just on issues relating to national laws. Even if Aharon Barak had not stated such, the courts in Israel today, and especially the Supreme Court, are acting as such and seldom refuse a case where they are the sole practitioner of whether legislation passed duly by the representatives of the people who instructed the members of the Knesset with their support to produce legislation as an unwritten contract bound in the ballot box now sits beneath the raised gavel which determines whether or not the people and their elected officials are capable of self-governing or are they merely children who have no right to address the issues of the day as they see fit. This is why it is long past time for the Knesset to appoint a select committee, they may wish to make sure the Supreme Court does not get wind of this as they would strike down the committee as a threat to the state and its omnipotent judiciary, and direct them to draft a Constitution based on the theories of limiting the power for a King such that he collects no amassed wealth and must serve the people faithfully and beyond their best abilities. A solid Constitution which places all before the people’s elected officials to decide and limits judges except in the most drastic and obvious of errant departures into forbidden grounds protected by the constitution and not the will of the adjudicator, are left to apply the law faithfully and with the intents of the people. A Constitution which places the police, military and secret services under civilian control and where any officers or enlistee speaks out defaming the state or its elected and appointed individuals which are empowered by the people is punished under codes of proper conduct for military personnel in uniform or representing the State. The Knesset should remain as the house which appoints the Prime Minister but the second half of the legislature should be directly elected by the people. The nation of Israel could be divided into proper districts. These Israeli Voting Precincts for Upper House might be considered as the Negev, Jerusalem & Area, Coastal Plain & Dead Sea, Tel Aviv, Sharon Valley, Western Galilee & Mt. Carmel, Sea of Galilee & Valleys, and Upper Galilee & Golan with each receiving with Five Seats Each for forty seats plus, Three Super Districts; The North (Western Galilee & Mt. Carmel, Sea of Galilee & Valleys, and Upper Galilee & Golan), Central (Jerusalem, Sharon Valley and Tel Aviv), and the South (, Coastal Plain & Dead Sea with the Negev) with Five Seats Each for a Total of Fifty Five.

 

Israeli Voting Precincts for Upper House Totaling Fifty-Five

 

The Upper House described above, let’s call it the New Sanhedrin, will ratify appointments to the cabinet and senior appellate judges including the Supreme Court. The Knesset (lower House) as stated will appoint the Prime Minister. This method allows the Parties to make their coalition and the Knesset would run exactly as it does now with elections when their term ends after four years while the New Sanhedrin terms will not be dissolved should the Knesset coalition crash and burn, they will serve three year terms with the vote being taken every three years on a set date on the Hebrew Calendar. With the Prime Minister who was appointed as the leader of the coalition and was initially tapped by the President, who will remain being chosen as they are now, after all, we would not want to end the good old party people never change ever and the same problem people show up just in a different Cabinet Ministerial location so that the incompetence gets spread through all of the government. That is why the small adjustment where the Cabinet Ministerial position first have to be validated by both houses thus there will be less if any invent a cabinet post to make this one feel important and receive additional pay while preening around. Then the people placed in these positions must be approved by the New Sanhedrin upper legislature. Hopefully this will lead to placing people from outside the Knesset body into Cabinet posts such that the person responsible for an area of the government actually knows something about the work the department actually performs.

 

The shuffling of the deck chairs on the HMS Knestitanic sailing the icy-waters of incompetent Ministerial appointments will come to an abrupt end. One example is the leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, Avigdor Lieberman, who during his career thus far he has held Minister of National Infrastructure, Minister of Transport, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Strategic Affairs, Minister of Foreign Affairs and currently is Minister of Defense. Either Avigdor Lieberman is one of the most intelligent and diversely capable or he had to be ill-prepared in at least one of his positions. Ehud Barak is another regular Minister having been elected not only to hold many varied positions but also served in cooperation or as a member of a number of parties. Israeli politics can confuse even those familiar with parliamentary systems as politicians make new parties, merge parties and change parties sometimes like they change socks. Tzipi Livni has headed two parties while serving in four, where one was a merged pair of parties. Her Career began and appeared steady and content with Likud but then Ms. Livni got the idea that she was destined for greater things and saw her opportunity with Ariel Sharon and his breakaway party from Likud forming Kadima which has a mixture of numerous Ministers from other parties across the political spectrum from Likud to Labor. Kadima started to fail after Ariel Sharon fell into a coma eventually passing. Rather than bite the bullet and join a party Tzipi Livni founded her very own party with some of the remnants from Kadima and a few others who believed there was opportunity as the signs were right, well, almost. Her party was called Hatnuah, meaning “The Movement.” Then she saw this party sinking fast and she made herself an opportunity to share the Prime Minister position with Labor Leader Isaac Herzog. Then problems began as it was noted she was not bringing the numbers of voters hoped and the Labor rank and file felt they were sacrificing too much to gain too little and the Zionist Union, the merger of Labor and Hatnua which the media wanted to defeat Likud that there found Zionist Union defeating Likud going into election day by a margin of 24 to 21 on average. The election result was slightly different with Likud garnering 30 seats while Zionist Union did receive their 24 but obviously insufficient to lead a coalition. This bode poorly for Livni who if she desires a future may have to simply swallow hard and join Labor and hope to rank sufficiently well enough to gain a seat in the Knesset. Tzipi Livni has been Leader of the Opposition for which she is eminently qualified as she has spent much time opposing everything while sitting in the opposition or in the government. Her other positions is a list of many positions including Minister of Regional Cooperation, Minister Without Portfolio (for which she is eminently qualified), Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Immigrant Absorption, Minister of Housing and Construction, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Justice. She must be a very capable person. The advantage of having a bicameral legislature which divides responsibilities and a Constitution which defines every branch of government with specific capabilities, responsibilities and limitations, and it is the limitations which often are the most important. The described government arrangement for Israel with a bicameral legislature with the Knesset remaining as currently configured but with the courts made at least indirectly controlled by the people rather than controlling the people and everything else it desires while all but replacing its Judges all but by themselves without any limiting factor within the control of the people. The arrangement was just an idea for the sake of offering and starting the discussion and not a serious suggestion unless the Israelis, my fellow Israelis, read and decide that the framework described has potential as an idea with which to start a national conversation. The described system also would encourage the Prime Minister to find some ministers from outside the government or assure that those chosen from within the government actually are competent and not just blindly pretending to manage something they actually do not understand. The real reason for this discussion is to limit the judges, especially the Supreme Court which even cancelled the financial agreement made on order to start production of the offshore gas fields demanding that the profits be invested in welfare and other socialist, virtually communist, programs because the people who invested in the drilling and took all the chances and took the risks should not reap benefit from their venture, not when foreign funded HGOs can petition the Supreme Court to spread the wealth making sure they get a share with which to further attempt to destroy Israel. That should have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

 

Beyond the Cusp