The Israeli Supreme Court's Role in Constitutional Review

The Israeli Supreme Court—in the middle of the war in Gaza—handed down a decision that amounts to a kind of death blow to Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's judicial reform project. 

Before October 7, judicial overhaul was all that anybody was talking about in Israeli politics—you know, a five-part legislative plan to assert parliamentary control over the judiciary and reduce Israel's checks and balances into a more majoritarian system. Only one part of it passed, and the Supreme Court has now struck it down in a decision that sharply divided the court on some questions and reflected significant unity on others.

To discuss the 700-page ruling, we brought back our Israeli judicial overhaul team: Yuval Shany of Hebrew University and Amichai Cohen of Ono Academic College. Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes spoke with them about what the court did and what the court didn't do, about their doing it in the middle of a war and whether that was truly necessary, and about where the judicial politics of Israel go from here. 

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