former legal advisor, Avichai Mandelblitspoke today (Tuesday) at a conference for national security studies – INSS, strongly attacked the reform of the judicial system and said that “it is a coup d’état”.
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“All of the founding fathers, regardless of party affiliation, believed in the values embodied in the Declaration of Independence and on the basis of which the State of Israel was established,” Mandelblit said at the beginning of his remarks, “values that we never imagined could be disputed, a Jewish and democratic state – so that’s it – as the children say – no We are fooling ourselves. We are experiencing a regime coup, not really a so-called ‘legal reform’.”
“They talked about ‘liberal nationalism’, as opposed to integral nationalism. ‘Nationalism’ – the nation state of the Jewish people – is the ‘Jewish’ habit of the Declaration of Independence. ‘Liberal’ – this is the “democratic” habit of the Declaration of Independence, because clearly there is no such thing An illiberal democracy,” he added, “in other words, the rule of the majority in a democracy is certainly important, there is no disputing it, it is a formal democracy. But that is not enough, there is also a need for a substantive democracy, which preserves the basic rights of every person, his freedom, the basic rights of the minorities, on the principle of equality before the law”.
Mandelblit then quoted the late Prime Minister Begin: “There are rights, which freedom thinkers called ‘rights that cannot be denied, these human rights precede the state… three foundations of a view of life, and they are: the freedom of the individual, Reforming society, the rule of law’. What they want now is for the Houses of Representatives to become instruments in the hands of the governments instead of being the supervisors of the governments. The independent trial is actually the last bastion of human freedom nowadays.”
“There are two gatekeepers to whom the task of preserving democracy in the State of Israel has been assigned. The first is the institution of the Attorney General, which must be independent in all its parts, that is, independent attorneys, legal advisors in the government offices, a state attorney and a legal advisor to the government. In the fall of this first line of defense, there is A second line of defense, aka the judiciary led by the Supreme Court. He, too, must of course be independent and act fearlessly to preserve human freedom and a reformed society,” he noted.
Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo: Noam Rivkin Fenton, Flash 90)“The initiators of the regime revolution say to us, ‘What do you want?’ “Subordinating the legal advisors in the government ministries, who until now were independent, to the ministers in charge of them and by authorizing the ministers to disavow legal advice. Israel’s international standing will be harmed because it will be considered that its Supreme Court is actually an arm of party politics.”
In conclusion, Mandelblit asked: “Is this the way the founding fathers founded the State of Israel, a Jewish and democratic state in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence? Is this the way of Beitar chief and his successor Menachem Begin?” Is this liberal nationalism? Is this the rule of law? How can we protect individual freedom, which is sacred in the eyes of the Baytarim, without the supremacy of the law? This is all the opposite of Begin’s way. Without the independence of the judicial system, there is no ‘supremacy of the law’. Without the supremacy of the law, the fortress has collapsed.”