Justices Refuse to Meet with Levin’s Jurists on Electing Court President

Photo Credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90

Acting Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit vs. Justice Minister Yariv Levin.

Supreme Court Justices Yitzhak Amit, Dafna Barak-Erez, and Noam Solberg, who are also members of the Judicial Selection Committee, on Wednesday, wrote Justice Minister Yariv Levin that they oppose bringing external experts to the committee’s hearing Thursday at noon.

Minister Levin invited MKs Simcha Rothman, world-renowned constitutional expert Prof. Talia Einhorn, Law Prof. Gideon Sapir, Political Scientist Prof. Abraham Diskin, and Law Prof. Shuki Segev as experts to appear before the committee.

The three judges stated that “the committee does not invite external parties. It has always been that way.”

And so, the stalemate between the high court and the justice minister over the appointment of a new court president has entered its next phase.

Levin is determined to deny Justice Amit the post of court president as part of the justice minister’s effort to eliminate the court’s seniority system whereby the justice who served as an outgoing court president’s deputy inherits the throne. This is part of Levin’s effort to do away with the court’s incestuous system which has been serving the judges’ efforts to reject candidates who do not match their social and even racial DNA.

The war over appointing the next Supreme Court president has become the line in the sand for the justices and Levin, leading to purely political decisions on the part of the court, intended to wound Netanyahu’s coalition government. Two of the victims of this battle were Benjamin Netanyahu’s military affairs spokesman, Eli Feldstein, and an undisclosed NCO. After several lower courts had ruled that the two men should be sent to house arrest, the high court refused to let them go. Few in Israel doubt that the decision to imprison for 45 days two career officers who sent the prime minister information he had been denied access to by the clandestine police – was pure revenge and a stern warning to other officers.

Justice Yitzhak Amit, currently the Acting Supreme Court President, on Monday sent a letter to Minister Levin, asking him to hold regular working meetings with him to discuss the appointment of an ombudsman for complaints against judges, and the appointment of judges and presidents to the various courts and parole committees.

“The time has come to establish common communication and working channels between us and return to an organized and professional work format,” Amit wrote. “This is in light of the common goal: promoting the good of the system and providing essential legal service to the public.”

In response, Levin said that “Judge Amit can send the letter to himself by return mail,” noting sarcastically that “the time has indeed come to work without orders and by agreement. There’s no such thing as joint work where it is convenient and dropping orders where that’s convenient.”

A lot of bad blood in that river.

In response to Levin’s announcement that he was assembling the committee to elect judges on Thursday at 1 PM, with Rothman, Einhorn et al, the high court sent a response saying, “The committee does not invite external parties to its meetings. This has always been the case, and our position is that these discussion arrangements should not be changed. This practice is consistent with the fact that all committee discussions are held on the basis of written materials, and on the basis of the assumption that members prepare properly for the meetings. It is also obliged by the need to make efficient use of the committee’s time for discussions, which have many issues on its table.”

As was to be expected, the high court was aiming to score on the justice minister rather than conduct a reasonable debate. It’s been the court’s approach since January 2023, when Levin introduced his judicial reform and the judges went on a political attack that likely disqualified the whole bunch from sitting in judgment on the price of a baklawa after killing a Hamas terrorist.

Levin threatened at the hearing of the Judicial Selection Committee last week that “without agreements on the appointment of a Supreme Court president and judges, I will promote legislation for changes to the judicial system.”

Levin also threatened that if the court’s personal injunction against him regarding the selection committee was not removed, he would not remove his bill to change the composition of the committee.

Unfortunately, not every member of Netanyahu’s coalition is a Braveheart, many of them are proven cowards, so, consequently, the coalition does not have a majority to promote the bill to change the judicial selection committee, which has been submitted in the early days of the judicial reform and continues to collect dust on the shelf.