Any sober analysis of the perhaps-unprecedented civil strife now afflicting the Jewish state leads to one conclusion: The vitriolic pushback has nothing to do with substantive separation-of-powers concerns or the particulars of constitutional theory, and everything to do with the Left's insatiable personal loathing of Prime Minister Netanyahu and its deep-set cultural anxiety over the more nationalist and religious direction Israel is now heading.
Israel lacks a written constitution to this day, but things began to change in the early 1990s, when former Supreme Court of Israel President Aharon Barak self-pronounced a so-called "Constitutional revolution."
By snapping his fingers, Barak - absent any statutory basis for doing so - arrogated to the Supreme Court of Israel powers that no other judicial tribunal in the world possesses.
Judge Robert H. Bork, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 before having his nomination derailed by a loathsome Sen. Ted Kennedy-led character assassination, wrote in his 2003 book Coercing Virtue: "Pride of place in the international judicial deformation of democratic government goes not to the United States, nor to Canada, but to the State of Israel. The Israeli Supreme Court is making itself the dominant institution in the nation, an authority no other court in the world has achieved." And the situation has actually gotten markedly worse in the two decades since Bork made that observation.
More recently, in an attempt to save face and demonstrate that a conservative parliamentary coalition representing an increasingly conservative nation could pass something to denude Barak's judicial Frankenstein, the government passed a very narrow bill codifying that the Supreme Court of Israel cannot nullify a law, policy, or cabinet/ministerial appointment on the extraordinarily subjective grounds that the law/policy/appointment is somehow "Unreasonable." Appalling media misinformation aside, that is the only thing the Knesset passed on this front, earlier this week.
Judicial review in the American constitutional context, for example, necessitates proper jurisdiction, legitimate plaintiff "Standing" and judicial recourse to written law, be it the Constitution, a federal or state statute, or a regulation.
The new, modern Israel is more nationalist, more religious and more traditionalist.
https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/28/what-israels-protests-are-really-about/
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