Israeli MK Boaz Bismuth statement comes after pro-democracy protest leader tweeted that efforts to limit court oversight of government decisions could lead to religious coercion
Israeli lawmaker Boaz Bismuth accused an anti-judicial overhaul protest leader of antisemitism on Wednesday, after she tweeted that efforts to limit the court’s oversight of government decisions could lead to religious coercion.
“One of the leaders of the protest tweets against putting on tefillin,” Likud MK Bismuth complained to Army Radio, referring to the phylacteries worn by Jewish men during prayer. “Have we gone crazy in the Jewish state? This protest is antisemitic.”
His comments came after Shikma Bressler, a leader in the protests against Netanyahu’s government, tweeted that the coalition’s efforts to eliminate the so-called reasonableness doctrine, which allows the High Court to block government decisions it finds to be unreasonable.
“Without a reasonableness standard [Education Minister] Yoav Kisch will oblige our children to put on tefillin every morning at school,” Bressler tweeted, calling the current government one of “Sodom.”
Bismuth, a former journalist, said that “as a reporter abroad, if they did that, I would say ‘antisemitic.’ I’m usually moderate, but here we crossed a red line. I have zero respect for her, I won’t even mention her name.”
After several months of negotiations with the opposition, the coalition has announced that it will again begin pushing through elements of its overhaul plan through the Knesset, starting with efforts to do away with the reasonableness standard and limit the power of governmental legal advisers.
Opposition to these and other measures being pursued by the coalition have brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets over months of anti-government protests and have sparked warnings of damage to Israel’s democratic nature and economic prosperity by experts and foreign governments.
The use of the reasonableness standard as grounds for nullifying a government decision has a long history in British law and has been part of the Israeli legal system since the establishment of the state.
The standard, which only applies to administrative decisions and not legislation, was rarely used during the first decades of Israel’s history but became much more common in the 1980s and 90s. It was never legislated but instead became part of Israel’s common law.
It was most recently used to disqualify Shas party chairman Arye Dery from serving as health and interior minister on the basis that his appointment was “unreasonable in the extreme” as he has been convicted three times of criminal offenses and failed in his previous public positions to “serve the public loyally and lawfully.”
And while some legal scholars in favor of the standard have said that it has been applied in an “arbitrary way” in the past and “gives a lot of discretion and power to the beliefs of the court,” many consider it an important legal tool in the hands of the judiciary.