No Invitation for Netanyahu to White House

Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) March 28, 2023

As Breitbart News noted in early January, the reforms would make Israel’s judiciary more like that of the U.S.:

The reforms, unveiled by Israel’s justice minister, Yariv Levin, consist of four basic legislative components:

1. Restricting the power of judicial review by requiring a full panel of Israel’s 15-member Supreme Court to strike down legislation passed by the elected legislature, or Knesset;
2. Allowing the Knesset to override a decision by the Supreme Court to strike down legislation by letting it pass the same legislation again;
3. Removing the power to select judges from an independent commission and giving it to the government;
4. Allowing government agencies to appoint their own legal advisers instead of relying on the justice ministry to do so.

Many of these reforms already exist under the U.S. Constitution. Judicial review of congressional legislation, for example, is not an unlimited power, and Congress can “override” Supreme Court decisions by amending the Constitution. (Israel does not have a formal constitution; instead, it relies on a set of “Basic Laws.”)

Likewise, judicial appointments in the U.S. are entirely controlled by the government — the president and the Senate.

Netanyahu’s conservative government supports these judicial reforms after decades in which Israel’s judiciary has struck down Knesset legislation on religious matters and micromanaged national security decisions.

The Biden administration openly criticized Netanyahu’s proposed reforms, even though Biden himself has considered “packing” the Supreme Court with liberal justices — a far more radical idea than Israel is debating.

The State Department was also found to be funding one of the left-wing Israeli groups that supported the unruly protests that brought the country to a halt and forced Netanyahu to pause reforms before they passed.

On Sunday, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, who had given an unauthorized speech calling for a stop to the reforms, in reaction to left-wing military reservists refusing to show up for their scheduled duty in protest.