Born in London, the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, Fleur Hassan-Nahoumlived in Gibraltar during his childhood, so he speaks almost perfect Spanish with which he receives us in Jerusalemexplaining to us the vision of his party, the ruling Likudon the highly controversial reform of Israel’s judicial system, which has led to weekly demonstrations that, Saturday after Saturday, are filling the Israeli streets with protesters: the latest protest in Tel Aviv gathered about 150,000 people.
Hassan-Nahoum admits how “controversial” the issue is, but is convinced that “the judicial system needs some reform”. In his opinion, “in the last 30 years, judges have turned themselves into legislators,” something he calls “judicial activism.”
The deputy mayor explains that “in most democracies the judicial system has the power to decide which laws are in line or not with the Constitution” and it is a good system, “but Israel has no Constitutionwe have what are called the basic laws” and that creates certain problems.
“The first is that judges have given themselves the power to make administrative decisions“, he tells us, giving an example that is certainly shocking: “What does it have to do with the constitutionality that we find gas in Israel and want to exploit it, but that’s what the judges got into to debate why it had to be removed.”
For Hassan-Nahoum it is clear that “this is an administrative decision of the Government”, but the judges “have given themselves that power”, something that he tells us happened in the year 95 when the president of the Supreme Court Aharon Barak defined how far this court could go. “So there is no clear definition of the power they have” beyond what they themselves decide.
The second thing you point to as a problem will be far less of a problem for many readers of digital freedom: “In most of the world’s democracies the government selects the judges, here it is a committee that has a majority of judges and they select themselves,” he explains, describing something that seems to be an essential requirement for judicial independence. However, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem points out that with this method “there is no diversity of judges: they all look the same and think the same“.
Why such massive mobilizations?
According to Hassan-Nahoum, with all these issues, a situation has been reached in which “the government has to begin to define the limits of the judiciary and the opposition, which have lost the last elections, is politicizing the reform”. The deputy mayor, who is from the same party as Prime Minister Netanyahu, assumes that “of course” it is a law “that is going to be controversial”, but in her opinion “they are politicizing it because they have not accepted the electoral result”.
The success of the mobilizations may be due, in his opinion, to the “combination” of this politicization with “the hatred there is for Netanyahu”Because, as he recalls, he is the longest-serving prime minister in Israel and that causes “a dislike for him.” The result is, he acknowledges, “a protest that it gets bigger every week“.
Hassan-Nahoum acknowledges that “we have to see how we can sit down and talk about it”, but also remember that “in no country in the world if a government wants to make a reform does it ask the opposition for permission, I believe that what the opposition asks for is not normal”. Even so, he admits that “you have to see how to deal with what happens on the street.”
In what is more emphatic is in criticizing those army officers who are making public their rejection of the reform and refusing to comply with orders or showing insubordination: “It’s a very bad thingmany controversial things have happened here and with governments that did not have a huge majority,” he says, “for example, the Oslo Accords were approved with 61 votes out of 120 and the right did not say ‘I am not going to the army'”.
In his opinion, it is a phenomenon “similar to what happened in the US when Trump won and there were people who took to the streets and said that Trump was not their president.” There is something of that here.
Hassan-Nahoum also recalled that one of the opposition leaders, Benny Gantzhas already publicly called on officers to back off their boycotts because “one in the military can’t decide what to do.”
“We are seeing a brutal exaggeration, we have to find how to live with each other”he concludes.