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As long as Liberal Israeli Jurists have the "reasonableness clause" and can re-elect-their replacements nothing approaching democracy will occur and no matter how Israeli's vote the court will annul the effect. Liberal Israeli judges have turned what they say and believe into a religion.
Israel needs a constitution. Bernie Marcus has spent untold millions trying to get them to enact one.
And:
Ben-Gurion on Judicial Reform
Israel’s founder was skeptical that his country needed a written constitution.
By William A. Galston
Israel does not have a constitution in the way most Americans understand the term. Instead, it has a series of “Basic Laws,” passed by Israel’s unicameral legislature, the Knesset, with a simple majority of members present and voting. In the 1990s, after the Knesset passed two new Basic Laws to protect human rights, Israel’s Supreme Court declared that these laws had constitutional status and could be used as the basis for striking down ordinary legislation.
Many analysts on the right have argued that what proponents have called a “constitutional revolution” was an act of judicial usurpation, and lingering resentment over the alleged judicial coup helped fuel the effort by Israel’s current government to weaken the court’s power.
It may seem odd that Israel has no written constitution. With few exceptions, modern representative democracies have adopted such documents, and Israel’s Declaration of Independence, issued on May 15, 1948, promised that Israel would ratify one by Oct. 1 of that year.
Explanations for the failure to do so usually focus on practicalities: As Israel struggled to survive the invasion by Arab armies and the influx of immigrants and refugees, other matters were more urgent; and besides, the key factions in Israeli politics could not agree on the substance of fundamental law.
While there is something to both these rationales, the most important explanation for the nascent state’s failure to adopt a constitution is that David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and dominant political figure, did not want one. Two years ago, Neil Rogachevsky, a scholar at Yeshiva University, found and translated a speech that Ben-Gurion delivered in 1949 to the Knesset committee responsible for drafting a constitution.
Ben-Gurion began his speech by denying that conventional practice had relevance for the new state: Israel had arisen in “special historical circumstances” and would have “particular tasks that nearly no other nation” had, he said. The only question was whether prevailing practices would be good (or not) for the state of Israel. He reviewed the reasons that led other countries to adopt constitutions—such as the need to delineate powers in a federal system or to draw the line against tyrannical power—and denied their relevance for the Israeli case.
Ben-Gurion then went to the heart of the matter: whether Israel needed a distinction between ordinary laws that can be enacted by simple majority and foundational laws that would be harder to adopt and change. His answer was a resounding no. “Just as I am against special privileges [in politics],” he declared, “I am also against privileged laws.” Even if he found himself in the minority, he would oppose supermajority requirements. “Why would the minority restrict itself?” After all, he continued, “every minority fancies that it will one day be a majority.”
Citing the Lochner era of U.S. Supreme Court opposition to progressive social legislation, Ben-Gurion directly attacked American-style judicial review as a standard for Israel. “In a country such as ours, imagine for yourselves that the nation wants something, and seven people designated with the rank of judge cancel something that the nation wants! . . . This, in our country, would lead to revolution. For the people would say: we will do what we want.” Israel, Ben-Gurion argued, had chosen a parliamentary form of government in which the people’s representatives make and implement laws. In such a system, he bluntly concluded, it’s impossible to “delegate authority to the court to decide whether the laws are kosher or not kosher.”
As Ben-Gurion spoke to the Knesset committee, the new state was experiencing a wave of immigration from Middle Eastern countries, which, he noted, was raising concerns among Israel’s mainly European founding generation that they would be overwhelmed by “savages” who had no regard for the law. To his enduring credit, he pushed back hard against these sentiments, and he warned against efforts to use the law to entrench the beliefs of European Jews against the views of newcomers.
Israelis who have mobilized against the Netanyahu government’s plan to restrict the power of the judiciary do not share Ben-Gurion’s confidence that unrestrained parliamentary majorities can always be trusted to observe democratic norms. In recent decades, attacks on the judiciary around the world have often opened the door to soft authoritarianism with a democratic face. Still, Ben-Gurion was right to emphasize the tensions that judicial review would create in a parliamentary democracy, and many Israelis who reject the current government’s attack on the judiciary believe that the expansion of judicial power in the 1990s went too far. But the quest for a new balance is proving elusive, and the failure to find it could inflict enduring damage.
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Biden's blinders
My mother taught me that one person can make a difference. My father taught me that one person must make the difference.
By Bruce Portnoy
Too many Americans, particularly those in temporary positions of power tend to minimize ramifications of 'weakness' perceptions. Case in point, President Biden’s first 100 days in office, his administration cast a repeated spotlight on Iran and the latter’s incessant demand to become a ‘nuclearized’ nation, even as it was clearly recognized as a prospective threat to America, Israel and Jews worldwide.
The Biden Administration seems to have put on blinders, conveniently ignoring December 1, 2020, when Iran’s parliament passed a bill with a contingency that should the European signatories to the original 2015 nuclear deal not provide it economic relief from the effects of the 2018 oil and banking sanctions; UN inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities will cease. Iran would then also boost uranium enrichment processing to 20% (which it vastly exceeded); well beyond its original 2015 commitment; as it expanded its number of centrifuges at nuclear facilities Natanz and at the underground Fordo site.
The IRNA official news agency relayed that 251 lawmakers of the 290-seated chamber membership voted in favor of the above. After which,”... chanting “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” echoed.
Even allowing for the at-best ‘earlier American naive intentions’ and Iranian inferences that its nuclear weapon capability would be held at bay; the sum total ramifications of President Obama’s JCPOA, 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal to date; clearly fell far short of what could have been/ should have been delivered.
Nevertheless, U.S. dollars flowed without oversight into Iran. The effects of this carried forward to the present with unresolved issues as to how American tax dollars wound up being used, among them:
1) to enable Iran’s long range ballistic missile technology development or
2) to subsidize its destabilizing proxies: Hamas and Hezbollah or
3) to install militias operating in Judea, Samaria, Iraq and Syria;
4) Potential subsidies to the egregious Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority President’s terror campaign against Israel; termed “Pay to Slay." Although this was subsequently embargoed by the U.S. Congressional Taylor Force Act- it still appears tactically ignored by President Biden’s Administration.
5) Lastly, how much U.S. Tax dollars funded, at the end of the day, UNRWA’s Palestinian refugee children’s’ hate instigating school programs allegedly prompting martyrdom; or were diverted to anti-Israel organizations pervasive on college campuses across the United States?
The incredible vastness of the continuing potential for sinister use of our American money against us continues to boggle the mind of those that care to do what’s right.
In the face of all this, Secretary of State, Antony Blinken continues to face-off Iranian counterparts, who with little doubt view President Biden and his kowtowing to Iran’s intentions as opportunistic signals to further the latter’s frightening agenda. To this I say, “Thank goodness for our American Congress that demonstrates conservative common sense and separates our friends from our existential enemies; thereby serving as effective advocates for 'right.'
America under President Biden still has a sliver of time to line up (Sunni) international friends that fully appreciate risks of alliances with a nuclear and terror ‘weaponized Iran,’ to which must be added a strong transparent message that destabilization agents will no longer be tolerated in any shape or form.
After the debacle surrounding the U.S. seemingly abandoning Afghanistan; Israel, America’s most worthy and long time Middle East ally and friend, should be treasured. Yet, American foreign policy appears to be slowly abandoning it in favor of Palestinian Arab demands. This policy gains no respect and does nothing to dispel the appearance of Biden’s disconnected diplomacy. Why doesn’t he recognize the long term danger to our internal constitutional framework? How does that benefit the current sitting President and our great nation?
America may be setting itself up to function in a new ‘woke’ leftist society; with a contemptuous attitude towards Israel and Jews. That appears permitted to quietly go unchallenged as America’s promises to assure Israel and by extension Jews their formally acknowledged absolute right to life and pursuit of happiness in a safe and welcoming environment fades.
It was and still is most important that our current and future leaders keep in mind that should American Tax dollars ever be linked in any manner to the manufacture and subsequent use of weapons of mass destruction by Iran or one of its proxies, a potential for civil and/or criminal liability may come to be. Too many detractors would like nothing better than to see America knocked down to size before the International Criminal Court. That could open floodgates of limitless, baseless grievances that would serve to weaken our American defenses and American way of life from which it could take generations to recover.
The U.S. must re-prove itself to be a ‘land of exquisite democracy’ that does not use hate to further any agenda geared at sustaining power.
President Biden, are you listening?
Bruce Portnoy is an op-ed contributor to Israel National News/ Arutz Sheva; Jerusalem Post; Miami Herald; Washington Examiner; American Thinker; as well as author of the Geo-political thriller First, the 'Saturday People’, and then the..
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Biden should be impeached beginning now because he has not protected the borders and has allowed cartels to brazenly invade our nation, spread deathly drugs and criminals engaged in sex trafficking. He has lied to "we the people" and been the beneficiary of pay offs , ie. sold his office for personal enrichment, etc.
He has engaged in questionable manners with our adversaries allowing them to gain the upper hand against our allies as well as brought dishonor both to our nation as well as The Oval Office.
Since Democrats control the Senate the impeachment may not be successful but that should not deter GOP House members from their obligation.
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